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The man bent over his guitar …They said, “You have a blue guitar,You do not play things as they are.”The man replied, “Things as they areAre changed upon the blue guitar.”And they said then, “But play, you must,A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,A tune upon the blue guitarOf things exactly as they are.
In her searching 1998 study The Repeal of Reticence, Rochelle Gurstein asks what happened to the sacred value of privacy. The present essay, inspired by Jeffrey Berman’s recent book on Norman Holland (Norman N. Holland: The Dean of American Psychoanalytic Literary Critics, ), grapples implicitly with Gurstein’s question. I read Berman to ponder, implicitly, time-honored themes of subjectivity and objectivity in the context of a 21st-century American culture that places ever increasing emphasis on self-revelation and, pari passu, on relational, transactional versions of psychoanalysis that have all but replaced a former ideal of the psychoanalyst as remote, silent, and reserved.