Quickly (29 February 1956)
The Village Voice, 29 February 1956; transcription provided by Jerry Lucas; proofread against the source 2026-06-01.
Column Eight
I see an interesting contest. No doubt a large portion of the readers of The Voice have been psychoanalyzed, or are reasonably familiar with the subject—at the very least there must be hardly a reader of this paper who does not use psychoanalytical jargon in one way or another.
In turn, I would like to write about some aspects of the subject.
(To keep the record from the beginning, I will say that I have never been analyzed, but that I have spent the last year in analyzing myself, and not in ways which have much to do with Karen Horney. As a hint, I will add that if I were ever to look for an analyst I would be inclined to get me to a Reichian.)
At any rate, I issue a challenge—call it an invitation—to have a debate back and forth in this column with any young or old analyst in or out of the Village who is willing to step forth out of confidence, frustrated polemical vigor, or the open desire to teach and to learn in public argument. And the subject may be anything we agree might be mutually stimulating.
The offer is open. I doubt, frankly, if any analyst will come forward.
Legitimately, work occupies much of their energy, and less openly—and from my point of view, less honorably—there is a certain tendency among all too many of them to avoid psychoanalytical discussion with laymen on the theory that the mysteries of the new religion might suffer, not to mention the snobbery of medical decorum.
But if we do not have the debate, what a shame! For it is a natural contest.
The novelist, like the analyst, spends his life absorbed with the nuances of human nature—yet each approach their vocation diametrically opposed.
The novelist trusts his “vision,” the analyst distrusts it; the novelist, romantically, is more concerned with what a man or a woman might become in a situation which would bring out the extreme of his or her character (an idea expressed by Georges Simenon); the analyst, realistically, must be concerned with what is the most likely and practical choice available to his patient.
Intellectively, the analyst must usually ascribe more power to society than to man, and though he works with individuals, he thinks socially, he is always aware of the world which surrounds his patient, while the novelist, who begins by addressing the world with some part of the world as his subject, becomes truly interesting only if he can present some solitary human possibility of choice which goes a little further, a little deeper, into the mysteries of the self than the last writer before him.
Concerned with the same subject, the analyst and the novelist are antithetical in their view, their method, and conceivably in their aims, for despite the vast confusion of contradictory declarations by artist and analyst alike, I wonder if their ends are not essentially different: the artist a rebel concerned with Becoming, the analyst a regulator concerned with Being.
Can we have this debate? I invite those readers of The Voice who are in analysis to bring my proposed literary joust to the attention of their analyst.
If for once a novelist finds himself in a mood of genial public service, the psychoanalysts, who are, after all, at the mercy of the public service, should be able to respond.