Last Good Freudian

The 1950s saw waves of Freudian disciples set up practices. In The Last Good Freudian, Brenda Webster describes what it was like to grow up in an intellectual and artistic Jewish family at that time. Her father, Wolf Schwabacher, was a prominent entertainment lawyer whose clients included the Marx Brothers, Lillian Hellman, and Erskine Caldwell. Her mother, Ethel Schwabacher, was a protegee of Arshile Gorky, his first biographer, and herself a well-known abstract impressionist painter.
In her memoir, Webster evokes the social milieu of her childhood - her summers at the farm that were shared with free-thinking psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner; the progressive school on the Upper East Side where students learned biology by watching live animals mate and reproduce; and the attitude of sexual liberation in which her mother presented her with a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover on her thirteenth birthday.
Growing up within a society that held Freudian analysis as the new diversion, Webster was given early access to the analyst's couch: The history of mental illness in her mother's family kept her there. As a result, Freudian thought became something that was impossible for Webster to avoid. What unfolds in her narrative is both a personal history of analysis and a critical examination of Freudian practices.

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Chapter One

... No other system of thought in modern times, except the great religions, has been adopted by so many people as a systematic interpretation of individual behavior. Consequently, to those who have no other belief, Freudianism sometimes serves as a philosophy of life. --Alfred Kazin

I was born and brought up to be in psychoanalysis and, as a result, much of my adult life was spent on the couch. My family lived on New York's Upper East Side during the rich yeasty time, filled with new ideas and movements, after World War II. My father, Wolf Schwabacher, was a prominent entertainment lawyer. Dorothy Parker and her circle were social acquaintances, and his clients included playwright Lillian Hellman, said to lie even when she said "and" or "but," and Erskine Caldwell, whose novel sparked an obscenity trial that was pure theater. As a young man, my father had a bohemian side: he was engaged eight times and once popped up naked from under a table at a Marx Brothers party. My mother, Ethel Schwabacher, was a protégée of Arshile Gorky, and after he hanged himself from the rafters of his barn she became his first biographer. Later she was recognized as an important Abstract Expressionist painter in her own right, one of the very few women in the movement. My parents were idealistic, acculturated Jews, and glamorous (so glamorous that it was hard not to feel like an ugly duckling born into a family of swans).

But in addition to her beauty and her passionate love for my father, my mother brought into the marriage a serious history of mental instability in her family. Her brother was psychotic and her mother, while not obviously crazy, was frantic with anxiety and sought analytic help. My grandmother's need to be propped up emotionally was a burden to my mother, who became similarly intrusive and demanding toward me.

By the time I appeared in 1936 my mother had already had two analyses, setting up a family pattern of submission to analytic authority which made me run back to my analyst after every crisis, and kept me there, trying so hard to be "good" that it would be laughable if not for the years of pain and wasted opportunity.

Because I came from such a privileged family, the analysts who surrounded us were only the best. Ruth Mack Brunswick, one of Freud's inner circle, and a family friend, analyzed the Wolfman, Freud's famous patient who was supposedly driven mad by the sight of his parents copulating like dogs; Dr. Marianne Kris, Mother's analyst for thirty unconscionable years, analyzed Marilyn Monroe; and my own analyst, Kurt Eissler, a passionately intellectual German Jew who worshipped Freud, was the founder of the Freud Archives. They were the first wave of Freud's disciples to come to New York--many of them refugees from Hitler. They created a powerful Freudian orthodoxy and represented the cream of the American psychoanalytic elite at the height of its power. In a short time, their beliefs permeated American culture and, for as far back as I can remember, my sense of home.

My earliest memories are filtered through my mother's psychoanalytic lens. She liked to recall her favorite incidents from my childhood and delightedly repeat them to me over the years.

My own first memory, when I am five years old, is of her standing by the window in a pale peach silk kimono, covered with exotic birds. Her stomach is flat. She is thin and beautiful again.

"If Grandma loves the baby so much," I tell her, "let's cut him up and send him to her as a present."

My mother doesn't raise an eyebrow. She doesn't take me in her arms and hug me or say she loves me. She tells me it is natural to be jealous, to hate my new brother, even to want to kill him. He is guarded by a white starched nurse. I am never allowed to be alone with him, to hold him.

My next "memory" is of stealing his nursing bottle and running down the long, thin, hallway of our New York apartment, the nurse in hot pursuit.

By the age of six, I knew myself as a potential murderer and a convicted thief, an envious and jealous child--destined, like the other women in my family, for the analyst's couch.

My parents' friends, their conversation, their whole way of looking at the world, were steeped in the culture of psychoanalysis. My family's involvement spans seventy years and covers the major part of the movement's history, from its beginning after World War I, the heady days when it was associated with revolution and change, to the time when it became rigid and hostile to new ideas. When I went to my first child therapist at the age of fourteen, it was the 1950s, the golden days of psychoanalysis. Everyone in New York was going or had gone. But it was also a reactionary time, particularly for women, and analysis, at least in my case, fed into the middle-class status quo.

Freud came to America in 1909 on a lecture tour, but it wasn't until after World War I that analysis began to catch on. It got a big boost when the "talking cure" was used with shell-shocked soldiers and worked better than the previous brutal methods in getting them back to the front. After the war, adventurous bohemians and intellectuals began to try it out. For them, analysis meant sexual liberation, free love, freedom from constraints. At that time, a typical analysis could be over in a matter of months, your fixation located --mother fixation was especially popular--and your psychic energy freed. Men left their wives and went to live in the Village; the first novels about analysis (Lewisohn's The Island Within and Floyd Dell's Moon Calf ) were written. It was a unique moment for a unique group of people.

My mother's family was ripe for a new faith. My maternal grandmother was an Oppenheimer, a member of an old German-Jewish banking family. Mother's family tree stretched back to the seventeenth century when an ancestor financed the Kaisers' wars. In more recent incarnations, the Oppenheimers were diamond merchants and theater owners. They were completely assimilated, leaving their children with an ideological vacuum. In succeeding generations family members divided between an attraction to Marxist-Leninism and a belief in psychoanalysis, with a hard core keeping their faith in the sanctity of money.

My mother grew up in Pelham, an exclusive suburb outside New York. The household included nine servants and the banquets her parents gave were so lavish that she remembered sometimes being sick after them. My grandfather Eugene ate steak and ale for breakfast and took my grandmother to German spas. It was a world of prosperity and seeming well-being. But in the early 1920s, my mother's brother James, a brilliant mathematician, became mentally ill.

I didn't learn of my Uncle James's existence until I was in college. For years, Mother kept silent about her brother. When I was a child, photo albums with his picture were hidden away. My grandmother wasn't allowed to speak his name. His psychosis was a dark secret at the center of our family. Mother was terrified that madness and genius went together, that she was crazy too, that bad blood would be communicated to her family.

James's early symptoms were largely denied by my grandparents. When Mother was in her seventies she told me that when they were children James had climbed in her bed to molest her. When she ran to her parents for help, she said, she was told to go back to bed and stop making such a silly fuss. They simply didn't believe her.

Ignoring what James did with outsiders was more difficult. He got into trouble--family stories differ as to whether he hurt a fellow student or simply acted increasingly bizarre--and was asked to leave school. By the time James had his first breakdown, my grandfather was dead. The task of getting her brother help fell to my mother, then in her early twenties.

Though James went on to get a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT, married, and had a child, subsequent breakdowns led to his being permanently hospitalized. In the meantime, Mother found an analyst for herself, Dr. Bernard Gluck, who worked as a criminologist at Sing Sing in addition to maintaining a private practice. By 1925, he was treating Grandma as well.

Grandfather would have been appalled by this development. I can't imagine him taking to newfangled ideas. He was a Southern Jew, an archetypal Victorian gentleman, a lawyer by profession, a scholar by inclination. His letters to my grandmother show him tenderly protective of her. As Grandma said later, he felt himself the guardian of the honor of any woman entrusted to him. At the same time, he felt entitled to make the most of his own freedom. For years he had fooled around with the nursemaids, even--according to Mother's reconstruction in her own analysis--getting my mother's nurse pregnant.

After his death, my grandmother was ready for liberation. She had suffered during her husband's long bout with stomach cancer and had resented his philandering. Maybe Grandma thought she could experiment and live a little. Her aging parents and her authoritarian brother, George, might have restrained her, but she had already distanced herself from her family by marrying a scholar/lawyer and by letting my mother study art. After my grandfather's death she threw herself into a variety of beliefs and practices: mesmerism, spiritualism, Christian Science, and psychoanalysis.

I suspect my grandmother saw the psychoanalyst somewhat as an ultrapermissive "Dear Abby." In her library, stuck between a French romance and a biography of Mary Baker Eddy, is a book titled Psychoanalysis and Love by André Tridon, one of Freud's first popularizers. A Frenchman who was captivated by the liberating aspect of Freud's ideas, Tridon gilded his toenails and gave talks in salons on topics like "Is Free Love Possible?" At one particularly shocking "psychic tea," the ladies were urged by their chairwoman to throw off their corsets "so they could learn wonderful things." Even in those revolutionary days, Tridon worried the more serious medical analysts with his amoral descriptions of men as "rutting animals" and his assertion that plentiful sex was absolutely necessary to health. Grandma marked the page in his book subtitled "getting even": affairs as a means of restoring self-confidence.

All her enthusiasms were antidotes to her pain, as well as attempts to find some authority to supersede her husband's. In the late 1920s, Grandma was remarried to a seductive German named Willy and, when the marriage ended soon after, she settled for Christian Science. Perhaps it best suited her inclination to deny reality.

By the time I began to visit her as a little girl, Grandma was an old lady in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down by a stroke, living with a companion in a drab New York hotel, banished there by my mother for deeds I was only to learn about many years later. As I leaf through letters she wrote to her analyst, Dr. Gluck, in 1925 when she was middle-aged, I find her vibrantly alive--a woman who was highly interested in sex and intensely worried about it. Her manner to the doctor is slightly reticent but at the same time daring--the meeting place of Victorian Woman and something totally new that is going to push her off her pedestal.

"Dear Doctor, what would you have me do?" she writes after he has urged her to be calm about the possible loss of her lover. "It isn't easy for a sentimentalist to lose a lover at fortyfive. The pangs aren't as great as at twentyfive, but there is less hope of a successor."

Since Grandpa's death, Grandma had been hanging around with bohemians and intellectuals. The young lover referred to in the letter was a Scot named John McKay. Grandma undoubtedly imagined that John McKay, being young, would be suitably dependent and grateful to her for her largesse. But it didn't work out that way. He was socially ambitious, and while Grandma was helping him out with money and bestowing her favors, he was looking for a well-connected--and undoubtedly virginal--bride. Grandma was desperate for advice on how to hold on to him.

She thought her problem was sexual--the inhibition she'd been reading about in Tridon: "Am I one of those rare freaks, a frigid woman, or am I merely unfortunate?" she asked the doctor. "John has repeatedly asked me why I am so cold and unresponsive, then called me insatiable and said it would take a Hercules to satisfy me."

Reading over her letters, I discover something besides a remarkable openness. There is a propensity for drama, an ear for the arresting phrase, a liking for questions, an ironic humor--qualities that in other circumstances might have made a novelist. Not only my connection with analysis but my future as a writer clearly starts with her.

My grandmother used her relationship to the doctor as a spur to making at least part of her life into a story, a sort of epistolary romance. Excited by male attention, Grandma played games of withholding and teasing. Looking back, I have to admit that Grandma's dependency on the feminine arts to secure love was handed down to mother and me--all of us employed these arts, but not always to our advantage. In Grandma's case, she wanted the doctor's help, but she didn't want to ask for an interview because she was afraid to tell him exactly what she was up to sexually. I wonder how many times she actually saw him: whether in fact much of her "treatment" took place by letter.

"John asked me down to the little studio he rented from me," she writes Dr. Gluck:

Was I a fool not to have seen he was drunk? I went with a hastily assembled supper and he was so grateful--like a child, heartily not greedily--and I couldn't resist making much of him ... and when it was time to go, I put out the light for him and then it seemed so nice to sit there with him a moment in the dark and he asked if I loved him and I asked ... and oh, Dear Doctor, it is so hard and I thought of the girl on the bureau top [photos a girlfriend sent John] and was alive with jealousy, and, because of that wanted to prove that he desired me.

He said it wasn't fair of me to start things and then say I was going home and I asked what he wanted and he said, I must talk to you about that, there's more than one way of helping me. His way was not a nice way. I can't tell you. (I once heard of an Italian pervert who so mistreated an innocent girl. Queer what stories nice women tell other women.) I felt base, vile, and abused. That's the clue. I want to be abused and John wants revenge on his mother. His last words were, "Oh my god," and he hid his face under the blankets. I realized that I make it impossible for him not to insult me. That I love him most when he treats me worst. If I could make him respect me I could cancel that old score which since my baby days has made me court disgrace and punishment as my due.

Later, she enlarged on the theme of punishment, asked why she loved pain more than pleasure. It is a major question for the women of my family. Grandma probably felt unworthy of love very early. Her mother, Grandma Op, a great beauty with arched dark brows and a voluptuous figure, was cold and imperious. Photos show her looking down as if from a great height. Grandma Op treated her daughter Agnes, with her flat chest and curly hair ("kinky," Grandma Op called it), as an ugly duckling. Later, when my mother was a child and already clearly a beauty, Grandma Op would openly prefer her to Agnes, giving her special family jewels. In fact, however, Grandma was beautiful. Her portrait on her wedding day at the Gotham Hotel shows her in a silk and lace dress cut to display her attractively round neck and full shoulders and unbelievably small waist. Her face is oval, and nicely shaped. Short hair curling out from her head balances the tapering lower part of her face. She has lovely eyes set off by arched dark brows and a generous mouth. Perhaps her nose is a trifle too large for the taste of the day, but to me it gives her face strength. She is holding a bouquet of violets and looking at the camera with a questioning expression. Perhaps handsome is a better word than beautiful. Handsome but uneasy. Unsure of herself. Unaware of her power.

Grandma wasn't raised to think of herself seriously--she was only a girl and not considered a beauty besides--but she was talented. She was an amateur photographer and the portraits she took, especially of my mother, are wonderfully expressive. They are also extremely sensual, aware of the shock value of white skin against dark velvet or the enticement of a languid pose. I remember seeing her old bellows camera when I went to visit as a child, but I thought nothing of it. By that time, Grandma had given up portraits and spent her time crocheting afghans. These, too, showed a strong aesthetic sense--richly textured velvet yarns, daring color combinations: deep red and purple, red and brilliant orange, magenta and pale green, not old lady colors.

Mother never was explicit about her reasons for going into therapy with Dr. Gluck--her therapy began before Grandma's--but there are plenty of clues. In her journal, Mother describes at length her jealous possessiveness as a child and adolescent and her desire to be her mother's only love. Grandma's letters to their shared therapist show her, on her part, closely watching Mother's moods, alternately affectionate and critical, as when she notes that "Ethel had a crying spell. And induced me to comfort her with lavish praise. Lollipops! I suppose it's hard to teach a child brought up on superlatives, as Ethel has been, to accept sincerity."

Just as my mother later worried about the consequences of my sexuality, Grandma confided to the doctor her fears that Mother's freedom and boldness with men, though admirably sincere, would cost her her reputation. Most striking, however, is Grandma's actual meddling. She wrote to one of Mother's beaus, rebuking him for not calling her daughter when his boat docked: "No time? Piffle!" and ending, "Telephone her but don't mention me ! Or write me fully and truthfully." Ignoring all reasonable boundaries, she even went so far as to tell Mother graphic details of her affair with John McKay. To Dr. Gluck, she reported: "Oh, I know you will reproach me ... but have you ever cared enough for me to know what I feel?" My grandmother combined manipulation, coyness, and genuine distress into a lethal cocktail.

It was perhaps inevitable that Mother would think of Dr. Gluck as a sort of savior and fall desperately in love with him--it was the first example of the addictive dependency that marked her later frantic clinging to Dr. Marianne Kris during my own therapy-ridden adolescence. Dr. Gluck, Mother said, reminded her overpoweringly of her lost father. He had her father's square jaw and smoked a pipe. Just the smell of his tobacco was enough to make her feel faint.

My mother loved her father passionately. She was sickly as a child, and he coddled her, keeping her out of school until she was eight because of stomachaches. (In her later analysis, she wondered if this was the first of her neurotic attempts to get attention through illness.) Surviving letters show my grandfather, when away on business, writing to his "delicate child" with the same protective tenderness he showed to his wife Agnes. After he died, Mother sculpted a monument for him. He had been extremely patriotic, but despite his eagerness had been too old to serve in the war. Interestingly, Mother's monument to him, a series of powerful bas-reliefs, has a feminist antiwar cast. There is a woman holding a dead child, a group of women waiting, workers--all people behind the scenes. A photo shows Mother smoking a cigarette and studying this work, her velvet blouse showing between the open folds of her smock.

Mother wanted Gluck to become her lover. Given the weight of emotional baggage she brought to the request, his refusal was devastating, and she made the first of a long series of suicide attempts. Sketchbooks from late in her life contain melodramatic cartoons of herself lying on a couch in Gluck's office. Balloons over her head show that she is thinking of murdering his wife and two children. Other cartoon bubbles show bottles marked CYANIDE, or show him escaping on a plane while she is lying helpless on the floor. In one of her rare efforts to make humor out of pain, Mother nicknamed herself not Oedipus but Oedipet.

During her therapy, Mother expressed her love for Dr. Gluck by sculpting a bust of him. A photo taken by Grandma shows him as a good-looking middle-aged man, with a serious but kindly expression. Mother tried to keep on with the bust even after Gluck left the country, but couldn't stand the grief caused by contact with his image. Eventually, even modeling the clay reminded her of how she wanted to touch his skin. If her drive to be an artist hadn't been so strong she might have given up altogether at this point, but she didn't--she switched to painting. Love and loss became the major subjects of her work, and suicide her way of coping with the distress of separation.

Dr. Gluck's treatment of both mother and daughter would be unthinkable today. It certainly inflamed their rivalry, and probably exacerbated Mother's instability. When Dr. Gluck took flight to Vienna for some reanalysis, his final advice to my grandmother was to put Mother in a sanitarium.

When my mother died, I found a small notebook, which I call the rage notebook. In it there is a fantasy of cutting off John McKay's penis and shoving it down her mother's throat--choking her with her own lust. (To me this is a perfect example of how classical Freudian analysis failed to help, probably even made things worse for my mother.) She was writing this when she was nearly eighty years old, after thirty years of treatment, five days a week, still trying without success to recover some original childhood trauma, cranking out fantasies like this to oblige her analyst, stubbornly dwelling on the past.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Last Good Freudian by Brenda Webster. Copyright © 2000 by Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc.. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.