Content area
Full Text
Social Amnesia was written amid the dying embers of the New Left. Those fires have not reignited, and perhaps the book's polemical heat recalls a period irrevocably past. At the time-the early 1970sI was part of a Boston bookstore "collective" that interminably discussed everything from the titles the store should stock to the details of our lives.
Anti-psychoanalytic sentiment flourished, typified by Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, which denounced Sigmund 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. The bookstore carried the books of Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist, who was billed as a materialist and revolutionary, but not of Freud, who was attacked as an idealist and reactionary.
In Social Amnesia the issue was less the Viennese doctor than the larger entanglement of psychology and history. What bothered me was not the sheer ignorance about psychoanalytic thinking but the cheap criticism that Freud was "nineteenth century." To point out when someone was born did not seem especially insightful. For the revolutionary numerologists, to be nineteenth century meant to be hopelessly backward. The criticism implied that those who came later-the critics and their friends-are smarter.
This outlook had a great future. We increasingly judge a thinker by situating him or her on a grid of race, gender, and time, an easier proposition than thinking. With these plotted, we have a person figured out. Moreover, we are convinced that today we know much more about sexuality, the family, and the individual than did previous generations. Perhaps we do. Yet the wholesale rejection of the past as past bespeaks the marketing mentality, the assumption that today is necessarily better than yesterday. Even if newer cars, telephones, and X-ray machines are superior to older ones, newer philosophers, psychologists, or literary critics may not be.
Very simply, the widespread assumption of progress in the humanities and social sciences cannot be accepted in toto. In fact, I suggested in Social Amnesia and developed elsewhere the opposite proposition: Perhaps intelligence is dwindling in advanced industrial society. Undoubtedly we have more information and data, but we may understand less and less. Society may be losing its mind, a notion Freud occasionally entertained. Social Amnesia...