Donald Levy on ‘Freud among the Philosophers’

Dear Sir,

I write not so much in defense of Levy's book as in dismay at the tone of Michael Trupp's review of it. Trupp is contemptuous and dismissive, not only of Levy but of philosophy generally. Trupp writes: ‘[such passages] serve …. to justify Freud's well-known derogations of both philosophy and academic psychology as legitimate disciplines for the study of mental life' (p. 618). ‘In this and related discussions Levy repeatedly voices the oddly Procrustean lingo of his discipline’ (p. 618). Trupp speaks of ‘the intellectual cordon sanitaire within whose (conscious) precincts Levy and his philosopher colleagues … most comfortably ply their trade’ (p. 619). It is also simply not the case that Levy, nor even the average philosopher these days, let alone those of us who write about psycho-analysis, identifies the mental with conscious life. Not to know this reveals a hasty reading of Levy's book and unfamiliarity with what is going on in philosophy more generally. As many other psychoanalysts have themselves been saying, psychoanalysis should be reaching out to its neighboring disciplines, not isolating itself from them in the manner of this review.

Sincerly

September 1998