THE AGE OF DESIRE: Case Histories of a Radical Psychoanalyst

by Joel Kovel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 1981

Kovel (White Racism) is both a Marxist and a psychoanalyst (an ""intractably bourgeois pursuit""), so this rambling, knotty book is an exploration of the contradictions involved--an inquiry which is strongest (though jargon-encrusted) when addressing the epic theoretical mesh, weakest when trying to apply Marx-enlightened psychology to real patients and practice. Following Marcuse and others, Kovel (after a tedious dramatization of the ""smugness, the academicism, the pedantry"" of today's analytic establishment) laments psychology's failure to become conscious of ""history""--the socioeconomic forces that have created the alienated, neurotic, self-centered turf for psychoanalysis: the ""inability of the nuclear family to perform the socializing tasks it has been handed by capitalist society""; the estrangement caused by the split between production and consumption, etc. Yes, ""desire"" and a sense of ""the Other"" are truly ""transhistorical""--inborn, intrinsic to the human condition--but ""the objects to which they relate are made and named according to history."" Thus, everything from aggression to the Oedipus complex is less than innate--and though Kovel is short on evidence (most noticeably lacking are comparisons with pre-capitalist and non-capitalist psychologies), he sees both sides passionately enough to make for provocative chicken-or-egg ruminations. He's less persuasive, however, when intertwining ""composite"" (and admittedly fictionalized) case histories from his practice. There's workaholic banker Curtis, whose fantasies of anal rape are tenuously linked to the ""System."" There's food-binging Jane, who's seen as ""the model consumer"" desired by ""monopoly capital."" There's wife-beater Frank--""an occasion in which political economy and desire intersect at a historical conjuncture."" And there's numb rich-girl Sarah, who ""suffers not 'narcissism' but from a life led in late-capitalist society."" (It's also Sarah who shares in what Kovel comes to see, near-ludicrously, as ""historical"" moments in the analytic process itself.) To his credit, Kovel admits that ""all my social theory. . .is of no use"" in therapy; instead, on essentially familiar terms, he attacks the mental-health Bureaucracy (a psychotic case-history) and proposes a ""transcendent therapy. . . built on the dialectic of care and not on any particular eternal praxis of liberation."" A strained meditation, then, both self-torturing and self-congratulatory, often bogged down in rhetoric and doubly dense, Freud/Marx terminology--but often alive, too, with polemical fire and genuine intellectual wrestling.

Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1981

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1981

Categories: NONFICTION