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TRUTH GAMES: Lies, Money and Psychoanalysis, by John Forrester, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, xiii + 204 pp., $22.95
In Dante's medieval world, everything was seen on four different levels: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical or spiritual. Whether one was a professed believer in this system or not, one inherited this view and lived in it. Something similar might be said about psychoanalysis today. The world of the conscious and the unconscious is the world we inhabit, whether we want to or not. But at the same time that it has entered the culture, indeed has shaped it, psychoanalysis is being increasingly attacked.
This is partly because at the same time that Freud gave us a new way of looking at the world, he also gave us the tools to debunk him—and everyone else, for that matter—through such concepts as repression, denial, resistance, and projection. Although he analyzed the reasons for scapegoating, he could not prevent himself from becoming a scapegoat, a case of the punishment fitting his crime of viewing us as more goatlike than godlike in apprehension—of our motives, anyway.