Free Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik

psychoanalysis that couldn't also be said in defense of magic or astrology. (“She is very well defended, your sister,” Grosskurth said.)
    On behalf of his belief, Grosskurth would have said—did say, though over time, and not in these precise words—that while Freud may have been wrong in all the details, his central insight was right. His insight was that human life is shaped by a series of selfish, ineradicable urges, particularly sexual ones, and that all the other things that happen in life are ways of toning down these urges and giving them an “acceptable” outlet. An actual, undramatic but perilous world of real things existed, whose essential character was its indifference to human feelings: This world of real things included pain, death, and disease, but also many things unthreatening to our welfare. His project—the Freudian project, properly understood—was not to tell the story of our psyche, the curious drawing-room comedy of Id and Ego and Libido, but just the opposite: to drain the drama from all our stories. He believed that the only thing to do with the knowledge of the murderousrage within your breast was not to mythologize it but to put a necktie on it and heavy shoes and a dark blue woolen suit. Only a man who knew that, given the choice, he would rape his mother and kill his father could order his spaghetti vongole in anything like peace.
    There was, however, a catch in this argument, or so I insisted in the third year of my analysis, over several sessions and at great length. Weren't the well-defended people he admired really the ones at the furthest imaginable remove from the real things, the reality, whose worth he praised so highly? Did Susan Sontag actually have a better grasp of things-as-they-are than anyone else? Would anybody point to Harold Brodkey as a model of calm appraisal of the scale of the world and the appropriate place of his ego in it? Wasn't the “enormous narcissistic overestimation” of which he accused me inseparable from the “well-defended, internalized self-esteem” he wanted me to cultivate? The people who seemed best defended—well, the single most striking thing about them was how breathtakingly out of touch they were with the world, with other people's feelings, with the general opinion of their work. You didn't just have to be armored by your narcissism; you could be practically entombed in it, so that people came knocking, like Carter at King Tut's tomb, and you'd still get by. Wasn't that a problem for his system, or, anyway, for his therapy?
    “Yes,” he said coldly.
    “Oh,” I said, and we changed the subject.
    M y friends were all in therapy, too, of course—this was New York—and late at night, over a bottle of red wine, they would offer one “insight” or another that struck me as revelatory: “My analyst helped me face the recurring pattern in my life of an overprotective-ness that derives from my mother's hidden alcoholism,” or “Mine helped me see more clearly how early my father's depression shaped my fears,” or “Mine helped me see that my reluctance to publish my personal work is part of my reluctance to have a child.” What could I say? “Mine keeps falling asleep, except when we discuss Hannah Arendt's sex life, about which he knows quite a lot?”
    His falling asleep was a problem. The first few years I saw him, hestill had a reasonably full schedule, and our sessions were usually late in the day; the strain told on him. As I settled insistently (I had decided that if I was going to be analyzed, I was going to be analyzed) into yet one more tiresome recital of grievances, injustices, anxieties, childhood memories, I could see his long, big, partly bald head nodding down toward the knot of his tie. His eyes would flutter shut, and he would begin to breathe deeply. I would drone on—“And so I think that it was my mother, really, who first gave me a sense of the grandiose. There was this birthday, I think my sixth, when I first