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Social amnesia impossible theater6/15/2023 Very simply, the widespread assumption of progress in the humanities and social sciences cannot be accepted in toto. Though newer cars, tele- phones, and x-ray machines are superior to older ones, newer philosophers, psychologists, and literary critics may not be. Yet the wholesale rejection of past as past bespeaks the marketing mentality: the assumption today is Moreover, we are convinced that today we know so much more about sexuality, the family, and the individual than previous genera- tions. With these plotted, we have a person figured out. We increasingly judge a thinker by situating him or her on a grid of race, gender, and time, an easier proposition than evaluating someone’s thought. The criticism implied that those who come later are smarter: the critics and their friends. For the revolutionary numerolo- gists to be nineteenth century meant to be hopelessly back- ward. To point out when someone was born did not seem especially insightful. What bothered me was not a sheer ignorance of psychoana- lytic thinking, but the cheap criticism that Freud was nine- teenth century. In Social Amnesia the issue was less the Viennese doc- tor than the larger entanglement of psychology and history. The bookstore carried Pavlov, the Russian physiologist billed as a materialist and revolution- ary, not Freud who was attacked as an idealist and reactionary. At the time-the early 1970s-I was part of a Boston bookstore “collective” that interminably discussed everything from the titles the store should stock to the details of our lives.Īnti-psychoanalytic sentiment flourished, typified by Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, which denounced Freud as the most significant individual in the sexual “counterrevolution.” It was a testimony to my limited powers of persuasion that I never overcame the prevailing attitude. Those fires have not reignited, and perhaps the book’s po- lemical heat recalls a period irrevocably past. Social Amnesia was written amid the dying embers of the new left.
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