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Done well, satire can change a political, social, or cultural climate. Classically, Jonathan Swift's “A Modest Proposal,” a brutal diatribe against English domination of the Irish in the eighteenth century, exposed the cannibalistic effects of oppressive economic policies and helped reverse these policies while securing Swift a dubious immortality in undergraduate English anthologies for such lines as, “I rather recommend buying the [Irish] children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife as we do roasting pigs” (1729, 2177).
Phillip Freeman's Adaptations, a collection of after-dinner, graduation speeches for the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, proffers no such disincentive to his listeners' appetites, nor does his modest satire of American psychoanalytic institutions aspire to Swift's political and moral outrage. Yet Freeman's in-house publication, like his in-house jokes about the current state of psychoanalysis in America, certainly smacks, at times, of a tragicomic despair. Consider, for instance, his “straight-faced” rendering of the dwindling and decaying membership of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the promise offered to this organization by an innovative marketing of its product, and, in counterpoint, the seductive allure emanated by its one-time sister, the American Psychiatric Association, now held tightly in the bosom of Big Pharma.
Nationally the number of psychoanalysts reportedly dropped another 1 percent and the average age of the membership rose to 63. Marketers have encouraged us to approach new audiences with a less forbidding product such as occurred when teenage “popera” sensation Charlotte Church topped the Billboard charts with a selection of crossover hits that sold in the millions and reversed a malaise caused by the downward spiral of classical music sales. Paul Burger, president of Sony Music Entertainment Europe, said that only the “classical cognoscenti… a small … but regrettably, closed community,” felt the
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