Andrew Schwartz's Response

October 4, 1988

Addressing first Dr. Harrison's criticism of my phrase, "shame intense enough to," I would like very respectfully to suggest that in using the words, "with some chagrin," Dr. Harrison also implies that Freud came to view the Project with an affect belonging basically to a general class which one might label "embarrassment/shame." I, in addition, would want to say that I had wished in the passage cited merely to propose that Freud's feeling of "shame" (over, I implicitly agree, the Project's uncertain scientific viability and/or ambitiousness) was "intense enough" to lead him ultimately to abandon the work—and, incidentally, to regard it with considerable ambivalence even during its gestation. In his "Editor's Introduction" to the Project, Strachey (1966; S.E. 1, p. 285) observes, "And on November 29 (Letter 36), he [Freud] wrote: 'I can no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched out the "Psychology"; I cannot make out how I came to inflict it on you.'" Even allowing for a possibly facetious tone in Freud's letter to Fliess, one can infer that Freud's words do convey a flavor of self-directed scorn which, in turn, arguably reflects the "shame"/"chagrin"-imbued attitude which both Dr. Harrison and I, with different terms, note. In any event, I wish sincerely to add that I did not intend a "gratuitous insult" to Freud: I feel that there is no "shame" in feeling "shame" over the—partial—failure of a very ambitious, complex, if premature synthetic effort. Moreover, as my paper conveys, I believe that there are reasons to regard the Project and its author as having been strikingly prescient.

Turning now to the issue of my implying "Freud's intention that the Project be published after his death," I want only to say that in this case, unfortunately, my less than felicitously selected words, for which I apologize, suggested an idea that I had not at all thought of,