Read Online Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Adam Gopnik
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usual—he was raised in a time when long distance meant long distance—he began to speak in Italian.
“Sì, sono Dottore
Grosskurth.” He waited for a moment—genuinely apprehensive, I thought, for the first time in my acquaintance with him—and then a huge smile, almost a big-lug smile, broke across his face. They knew him.
“Sì, sì,”
he said, and then, his voice lowering, said, “No,” and something I didn't understand; obviously, he was explaining that Mrs. Grosskurth had died.
“Pronto!”
he began, and then came a long sentence beginning with my name and various dates in
giugno. “Sì, sì.”
He put his hand over the receiver. “You wish for a bath or a shower?” he demanded.
“Bath,” I said.
“Good choice,” he said. It was the nearest thing to praise he had ever given me. Finally, he hung up the phone. He looked at the paper in his hand and gave it to me.
“There,” he said. “You are reserved for five nights, the room has no view of the canal, but actually, this is better, since the gondola station can be extremely disturbing. You will eat breakfast on the terrace, and there you will enjoy the view of the Salute. Do not eat dinner there, however. I will give you a list of places.” And, on an “Ask Your Doctor About Prozac” pad, he wrote out a list of restaurants in Venice for me. (They were mostly, I realized later, after I got to know Venice a bit, the big, old, fiftiesish places that a New York analyst would love: Harry's Bar, Da Fiore, the Madonna.)
“You will go to these places, order the spaghetti
vongole,
and then …”
“And then?”
“And then at last you will be happy,” he said flatly.
H e was so far from being an orthodox Freudian, or an orthodox anything, that I was startled when I discovered how deep and passionate his attachment to psychoanalytic dogma was. One day about three years in, I came into his office and saw that he had a copy of
The New York Review of Books
open. “It is very sad,” he began. “It is very sad indeed to see a journal which was once respected by many people descend into a condition where it has lost the good opinion of all reasonable people.” After a few moments, I figured out that he was referring to one of several much discussed pieces that the literary critic Frederick Crews had written attacking Freud and Freudianism.
I read the pieces later myself and thought them incontrovertible. Then I sat down to read Freud for the first time—
Civilization and Its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, The Interpretation of Dreams
—and was struck at once by the absurdity of the arguments as arguments and the impressive weight of humane culture marshaled in their support. One sensed that one was in the presence of a kind of showman, a brilliant essayist, leaping from fragmentary evidence to unsupported conclusion,and summoning up a whole body of psychological myth—the Id, the Libido, the Ego—with the confidence of a Disney cartoonist drawing bunnies and squirrels. I found myself, therefore, in the unusual position of being increasingly skeptical of the therapeutic approach to which I fled twice a week for comfort. I finally got up the courage to tell Grosskurth this.
“You therefore find a conflict between your strongest intellectual convictions and your deepest emotional gratification needs?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “Apparently, you are a Freudian.”
This seemed to me a first-rate exchange, honors to him, but I couldn't let it go. My older sister, a professor of developmental psychology at Berkeley, regarded Freud as a comic relic (I had told her about my adventures in psychoanalysis), and in the midst of the
New York Review
debate, she wrote one of the most devastating of the anti-Freud letters to the editor. She even made a passing, dismissive reference to the appeal of “figures of great personal charisma”—I knew what that was about—and then stated conclusively that there was nothing to be said in defense of
“Sì, sono Dottore
Grosskurth.” He waited for a moment—genuinely apprehensive, I thought, for the first time in my acquaintance with him—and then a huge smile, almost a big-lug smile, broke across his face. They knew him.
“Sì, sì,”
he said, and then, his voice lowering, said, “No,” and something I didn't understand; obviously, he was explaining that Mrs. Grosskurth had died.
“Pronto!”
he began, and then came a long sentence beginning with my name and various dates in
giugno. “Sì, sì.”
He put his hand over the receiver. “You wish for a bath or a shower?” he demanded.
“Bath,” I said.
“Good choice,” he said. It was the nearest thing to praise he had ever given me. Finally, he hung up the phone. He looked at the paper in his hand and gave it to me.
“There,” he said. “You are reserved for five nights, the room has no view of the canal, but actually, this is better, since the gondola station can be extremely disturbing. You will eat breakfast on the terrace, and there you will enjoy the view of the Salute. Do not eat dinner there, however. I will give you a list of places.” And, on an “Ask Your Doctor About Prozac” pad, he wrote out a list of restaurants in Venice for me. (They were mostly, I realized later, after I got to know Venice a bit, the big, old, fiftiesish places that a New York analyst would love: Harry's Bar, Da Fiore, the Madonna.)
“You will go to these places, order the spaghetti
vongole,
and then …”
“And then?”
“And then at last you will be happy,” he said flatly.
H e was so far from being an orthodox Freudian, or an orthodox anything, that I was startled when I discovered how deep and passionate his attachment to psychoanalytic dogma was. One day about three years in, I came into his office and saw that he had a copy of
The New York Review of Books
open. “It is very sad,” he began. “It is very sad indeed to see a journal which was once respected by many people descend into a condition where it has lost the good opinion of all reasonable people.” After a few moments, I figured out that he was referring to one of several much discussed pieces that the literary critic Frederick Crews had written attacking Freud and Freudianism.
I read the pieces later myself and thought them incontrovertible. Then I sat down to read Freud for the first time—
Civilization and Its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, The Interpretation of Dreams
—and was struck at once by the absurdity of the arguments as arguments and the impressive weight of humane culture marshaled in their support. One sensed that one was in the presence of a kind of showman, a brilliant essayist, leaping from fragmentary evidence to unsupported conclusion,and summoning up a whole body of psychological myth—the Id, the Libido, the Ego—with the confidence of a Disney cartoonist drawing bunnies and squirrels. I found myself, therefore, in the unusual position of being increasingly skeptical of the therapeutic approach to which I fled twice a week for comfort. I finally got up the courage to tell Grosskurth this.
“You therefore find a conflict between your strongest intellectual convictions and your deepest emotional gratification needs?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “Apparently, you are a Freudian.”
This seemed to me a first-rate exchange, honors to him, but I couldn't let it go. My older sister, a professor of developmental psychology at Berkeley, regarded Freud as a comic relic (I had told her about my adventures in psychoanalysis), and in the midst of the
New York Review
debate, she wrote one of the most devastating of the anti-Freud letters to the editor. She even made a passing, dismissive reference to the appeal of “figures of great personal charisma”—I knew what that was about—and then stated conclusively that there was nothing to be said in defense of
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