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.
Harold Bloom, the psychoanalytically informed English professor, critic, writer and editor of numerous anthologies of creative works, has described the way in which his graduate students tend to study the works of the great writers in history with awe and reverence—so that they might then demolish them and themselves replace them in the panoply of literary greats.
Psychoanalysts, as my training analyst observed to me one day when I was lamenting the foibles and personal deficiencies of some of my teachers, “are just people—who went to school.” As such, they are no less likely to succumb to their still-active oedipal strivings and inclinations than are Bloom's students. It has always saddened me when I have watched some of my psychoanalytic colleagues deriding, bashing, and lapidating the courageous, hardworking, productive pioneers who established and built the foundations of our still-young and evolving field of endeavor, instead of gratefully celebrating them and thanking them for their generous contributions to our profession. What does it mean that, far more often than not, such attacks are directed against psychoanalytic investigators who are no longer with us and are therefore unable to defend themselves against assault?
We owe a debt of gratitude, do we not, to those who ventured out into dangerous waters and were willing then to share their observations