You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Carlo Bonomi writes: Maria Torok, a clinical and training analyst in Paris from 1956 to 1996, died on 25 March 1998 in New York City. Obituaries in The New York Times, The Independent of London, and Le Monde, among others, called attention to the ever-increasing influence of her works, for the most part written in collaboration with the late Nicolas Abraham. In the summer of 1998 I interviewed Nicholas Rand, Professor of French Literature and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and most recently author, with Maria Torok, of Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis. Nicholas Rand is also consultant-at-large for the Ferenczi estate controlled by Judith Dupont, as well as executor of the intellectual and artistic estate of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.
Carlo Bonomi: For the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about the crisis of psychoanalysis, yet what is happening in the USA is paradoxical, to say the least. True, psychoanalysis has tended to disappear from the very departments of psychiatry that had been overwhelmed by medical psychoanalysis in the 1960s; it is also a fact that humanities departments and literary critics in particular continue to speak a Freudian language. A clear indication of this seachange is that Frederick Crews, the self-proclaimed head of the Freud-bashers, is himself an erstwhile literary critic. Thus, even the battlefield seems to have shifted as the ‘war’ over Freud has taken on new characteristics. Books written by Freud's
detractors are bestsellers, so one may wonder whether this is all that damaging to Freud after all. Maybe, rather than a simple crisis of psychoanalysis, we are witnessing a major change in the Freudian landscape. One of the most intriguing aspects in this new American landscape has been the interaction between deconstructive literary criticism and psychoanalysis itself. Since you, Nicholas Rand, completed your PhD at Yale University at the time that this institutio