Yet there was a time when psychoanalysis flourished in this country when elsewhere it just managed to hang on. In Europe psychoanalysis was the pet of the intelligentsia, where it became existentialized, while in America it became medicalized and its doctors got rich with grand promises and unrealistic expectations. In America psychoanalysis has rarely been concerned, as it is in Europe, with the problem of human existence — la condition humain — that speaks to the enduring fact of our suffering and the elusive promise of deliverance. Instead, its goal has become one of relieving that old saw, mental illness, diagnosable, to be sure, whose anticipated cure holds the hope that one eventually will recover, if you are lucky. Following this model, debates have accrued around the collective myth that one can separate the good analysts from the bad, the well trained from the incompetent, the well suited from the incorrigible. By what criteria is one expected to distinguish the one from the other? Who is to serve as the judge?
The battle-lines on which these distinctions are drawn can be located on the pages of every psychoanalytic journal, and the idolatry in our culture for what is currently fashionable has no rival anywhere else on earth. Conventional wisdom has dismissed Freud as a brilliant innovator but a lousy therapist, not because we can demonstrate that Freud's clinical work was inferior but because his views are alleged to be woefully out of fashion. Yet, in Europe Freud has not suffered the bad press he has endured over here. Why the difference in perspective? Perhaps because Europe, the birthplace of existentialist philosophy, phenomenology, skepticism, and the avante garde, remains an existential culture to this day, the one in which Freud was born and out of which his views were derived. There, Freud is still perceived, a hundred years hence, as a radical, the first in a long line of subversives including Ferenczi, Reich, Groddeck, Klein, Fromm-Reichmann, Laing, Lacan, and others, who collectively cut against the grain of America's penchant for the pragmatic and — God save us — the efficient. Yet, all of them, no matter how original, old-fashioned, or contemporary their views appear today, acknowledged their lineage to Freud, paid him tribute, and shared with him a view of human nature that is unremittingly disturbing. Like Freud, I believe you must swallow the poison and pay the price if you seriously expect to change.
It seems to me — I know this is heresy — that all the progress psychoanalysis has made since Freud's death has amounted to little, if any, improvement in our understanding of the human condition. In the last half-century, or so, we have cultivated, developed, and perfected the life out of it. Its edge has dulled, a consequence of what is left of a social acceptance that fuels what remains of its diminishing popularity. There is an irony here, an anomaly between talk about its "improved" methods on the one hand and the repression of its edge on the other. Many seem to have forgot that it was Freud who introduced us to our dark side, which is just as authentic as the face we perceive in the mirror. Is it more ethical to conceal our dark side and, hence, "protect" others from ourselves, or to be what we authentically are and go to sleep with a clear conscience? This is an admittedly ethical question, not a psychological one. It was Freud who introduced the principles of morality, character, ethics, into the fabric of psychoanalysis and inaugurated in its wake a novel conception of honesty, becoming the greatest moral essayist since Montaigne (Harold Bloom).