Quickly (14 March 1956)
The Village Voice, 14 March 1956; transcription provided by Jerry Lucas; proofread against the source 2026-06-01.
Column Ten
Robert Lindner’s death has left me in an ugly mood. I feel a touch edgy as I sit down to write this, and I know from experience that when one feels modestly murderous it is good to vent it for the health of one’s nervous system.
You see, I was hoping for a letter from an analyst which would prove promising, but this has not been the case. The only functional letter I have received so far in answer to my challenge is from an analyst who strikes me as being almost hopelessly minor league. So I will not try to answer him too seriously, but instead will break up his work, sentence by sentence, omitting nothing and obeying his sequence of argument, in order to note my separate replies in a mock-dialogue. Since this is taking a considerable liberty with his letter, I will not print his name unless he requests it after seeing this column. Until such time I will call him Doctor Y. (Incidentally, this gentleman practices in the Village, or at least his address is in Greenwich Village, and so by studying his letter I have come to understand a little better why some of you are the way you are.)
Now, for some off-couch theatre:
Dr. Y.: (His letter indeed began this way.) If you were a true artist, you would not be threatened by psychoanalysts and would not stoop to challenge them.
Norman Mailer: The sad reality, I’m afraid, is that an artist must step up in class these days to challenge an analyst, for the greater part of the public listens far more carefully to a third-rate practitioner than a first-rate novelist.
Dr. Y.: We psychoanalysts derive a good deal of our sustenance from authors and are not in competition with them.
N. M.: It has been my experience that when you derive your sustenance from someone, you are invariably in competition with him.
Dr. Y.: The clue to your dilemma is your stated boredom.
N. M.: As an analyst you should be more cautious about taking remarks at their face value. Just because I stated I was bored by writing this column does not make it so. I refer you to my first column where I indicated that a good newspaperman is as ready to tell a lie as the truth.
Dr. Y.: A true artist is never bored.
N. M.: Freud was more cautious than you in his remarks about artists.
Dr. Y.: I feel sorry for anyone who would be bored with the stimulating challenge of turning out a weekly column at this early stage.
N. M.: Isn’t it being a self-righteous bully to think in such formulas as “stimulating challenge?” Like everything else in life, the intrinsic challenge of this column varies by turns to be amusing, irritating, boring, or stimulating.
Dr. Y.: Boredom is suffering.
N. M.: You said it, doc.
Dr. Y.: It’s a serious business, boredom, because behind it lies felt emptiness, a condescending attitude toward everyone, and enormous self-dissatisfaction.
N. M.: Yes, it must be painful to feel like that.
Dr. Y.: You cannot break through this with self-analysis.
N. M.: I wonder if you have the imagination to begin to guess what my self-analysis is like.
Dr. Y.: Freud could do this (analyze himself) only partially after decades of work, but he was a genius and an expert in helping people, and you are not.
N. M.: Not yet, not yet at all. Still, what would Freud have done if he had had your attitude?
Dr. Y.: Dozens of our greatest literary figures have kept on leading most unhappy personal lives despite their keen introspective talents simply because intellectual insight is not enough.
N. M.: No, it is indeed not enough for self-analysis. But surely your authoritarian bent is not so severe that you would banish all intellectual inquiry which does not take place between analysts. Or would talented but unhappy analysts—of whom there are more than a few—be disqualified as well?
Dr. Y.: Your boredom with your column shields your fear that you could not sustain reader interest in what for you should be a casual and enjoyable experience.
N. M.: You bring out my disappearing modesty. I assure you, doctor, as a practical matter it is relatively easy for a weathered charlatan like myself to sustain interest in so small a carnival as this.
Dr. Y.: Your knowledge of psychoanalysis is faulty.
N. M.: Very faulty. As is everyone else’s, including—one must whisper it—the analysts. Psychoanalysis, after all, is the exploration of a most mysterious part of nature—a human being.
Dr. Y.: I would disagree most emphatically with your assertions that the analyst distrusts his “vision,” is concerned only with practical reality, that he ascribes more power to society than to man, that he thinks only socially, and that he is only a regulator concerned with being.
N. M.: Unless you are interested in dulling the minds of the public, and in presenting yourself precisely as a Regulator, you would exhibit more intellectual grace by trying to disprove what I wrote, rather than declaring it null and void.
Dr. Y.: But if the purpose of your column was to provoke, you certainly succeeded: there your talent is undeniable.
N. M.: I? Provoke? Why I’m never rude to anyone.
Dr. Y.: I would rather not play along further with your challenge.
N. M.: Sleep is wisdom for gladiators like yourself.
Dr. Y.: It could only further serve your narcissism. …
N. M.: Which you will admit is self-confessed. I’m more honest than most, you know.
Dr. Y.: (over-riding the interruption): …with the dice too heavily loaded in your favor according to your prescribed conditions.
N. M.: I wonder if you read very carefully. These were my “prescribed conditions:” As a possible mode of procedure, I propose—although I am not in the least rigid about this—that one of us open the discussion and the other prepare a rebuttal for the same issue, and that we take it from there. But virtually any other ground rules are agreeable to me.
Dr. Y.: You’ll have to write your own column anyhow—eventually.
N. M.: Is this supposed to be a last pointed thrust?
Since it is true that I have the unfair privilege of the final word, I think I will repay the doctor’s kindness for giving me a free session of psychiatric advice by returning the duty-call.
Doctor Y. impresses me as being only mildly neurotic, and in ways which most people consider socially constructive. He suffers from small compulsions and expulsions of guilt, undoubtedly anal-retentive in their seat, but so relatively harmless, given his successful sublimation of sadism, that his conditioned conservatism allocates powerful super-ego energies to control the mildly paranoid element revealed today by his literary style and his obvious (to any clinician) projections upon me of his own conflicts. One may add that Dr. Y. is ambitious beyond his means, but is covertly aware that his power-drives are unrealistic. This expresses itself beneath his general depression by ambivalence and intermittent timidity.
However, he does impress me as a steady worker, perhaps due to the psychic equilibrium maintained exactly by his general depression. He would be suitable for treating weak unfortunate patients whose dependencies he would buttress by his authoritarian nature. Psychopathic, aggressive, or unusual cases would cause him anxiety, however, for they would be ego-threatening, and so the prognosis for such analyses would be poor, since they would be in danger of terminating abruptly with some damage to both parties.