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.
At the title page of this brochure we expect a feast. What Dr. Green-acre has provided in this expansion of her Freud Anniversary Lecture given in May 1962 for the New York Psychoanalytic Institute is, alas, only an appetizer.
The reader would do well to skip the Introduction, dealing with the method of psychoanalytic biography, because, while presenting us with old familiar admonitions on scholarship, it waves a promise that the remaining four chapters fail to keep. They simply will not serve for an example of psychoanalytic method in biography or historical criticism.
The chapter called “The Thesis” appears to me to contain the sole interest of the booklet, although it crams one with more promises than meat for thought. Summarizing earlier papers of the author, it offers some illumination of the problem of ecstasy (creative or not); it pays nearly exclusive attention to the ego's response to these irradiations of the id rather than their unconscious springs.
To define the path of the unconscious in such “fine frenzies,” Dr. Greenacre repeats with approval the phrase, made fashionable by the late Ernst Kris, “regression in the service of the ego.” This paradox would never have become a favorite in “Free World” psychopathology if it had not fed the bourgeois appetite for uplift and optimism, for its moment liberating the plutocratic narcissism from dismay in the face of Freudian or id psychology. The material testimony of Dr. Green-acre's book Swift and Carroll and her glimpses of the maladies and deformations of the ego in Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler tell us a good deal about regression but scarcely anything at all about its assistance of the id's motor secretary and gallery of protective hues and cries.
There is no mistaking the id convulsion called “creative ecstasy” or inspiration, which is experienced, as our author remarks, “as an actual visitation [she means a delusion of visitation] from a strength-giving supernatural source,” and compared with “impregnatio