New York in the '50s (35 page)

We got the money from our parents, who then felt guilty because they must have done, or failed to do, something or other to their
children to screw them up to such an extent that they needed to see a psychiatrist. Like all good parents, they wanted the best for their children, and this latest new path promised the sort of personal salvation that had somehow eluded them, but perhaps was now available to their sons and daughters.

The word spread from the hot center of psychiatry in New York through the popular press, informing and enlightening the masses, making the name of Freud known in every educated household. “Magazines helped popularize psychiatry,” says Walter Goodman, a veteran journalist who worked on the staff of
Redbook
in the fifties. “This was before television was widespread, and magazines were the main teachers of popular opinion—they made new ideas manageable.
Redbook
was that kind of conduit. Like at the other big magazines in New York, as an editor you could easily get an expert to write an article or be interviewed. We had a lot about sex—we were always for openness, but we were very family-oriented. Adultery was viewed as a serious problem, so we'd bring in a psychiatrist to answer a question like, Why would a married man want to sleep with someone else? It was rather touching, really.”

As more and more people across the country were reading about psychiatry in the fifties, more and more people in New York City were entering psychoanalysis. In fact, if you weren't on the couch, there was a danger of feeling that something was wrong with you. My healthy, happy, bright friend Ted the Horse once confessed that he was ashamed of being one of the only people he knew in New York who wasn't in analysis or some other therapy. Did it mean he was square, or insensitive, or just a dumb jock? I tried to assure him that he might be envied the fact that he didn't need a shrink, since he seemed to be alone in having no complaints about his sex life.

Dawn Cook, Donald's wife, says so many people were in analysis that “there was a component of peer pressure—my boyfriend wanted me to go into therapy, everybody was in therapy, yet no one seemed to be very well or getting better. I had the feeling that to get better was not the program. People talked about it in a certain way that wasn't sincere.”

The jazz musician David Amram is one of those who thinks the whole business was insincere at best: “Freud was in his heyday—he
peaked in the fifties. If you were really a big success, a smash, one of the first things you were supposed to do was psychoanalysis. It was a real sign of success. I felt that people who'd been in it for years became heartless, lost compassion for others. They were taught they had no reason to feel guilty.”

Unlike the literary crowd of the time, “very few musicians I knew did psychoanalysis,” Amram says. “The ones who needed it couldn't afford it. Most of us functioned as each other's therapists. You talked through your problems with your friends, and the older masters made themselves available—people like Varèse, the composer, and, among the painters, Kline and de Kooning. They always reminded us how lucky we were to be around in the fifties—not selling apples, like in the Depression, or making money painting apartments or selling sketches for a dollar.”

Even those people who resisted the lure of the couch, who were skeptical, or who didn't believe in it at all, still talked about it, for it was a pervading part of the talk of the time. “Psychoanalysis was the dominant influence on the fifties,” Norman Mailer says. “I used to feel I was getting caught in plastic wrap talking about it, engaged in the most tiresome arguments about analysis. It was more of a religion then than now, and like all religions it had its way of dealing with all problems and criticisms. When you attacked or questioned its believers, they got pious—there was no argument you could present because they'd give ground here and get around you on both flanks.”

This concept of psychoanalysis as a religion in the fifties was not just a radical notion of Mailer's. An
Atlantic Monthly
special supplement in 1961, “Psychiatry in American Life,” stated in its introduction that “psychoanalysis, by force of circumstance, has in effect become a secular religion.”

Mailer even feels analysis had a
bad
influence on our sex life. “When you went to bed with a girl who was in analysis,” Mailer says, “you'd be in a bloodless argument—the three of you—the girl, the analyst, and you. It was a bad way to make love, and a bad way to live.”

People like myself who were in analysis tended, as I did, to welcome the news that a new lover was also in analysis. It was like meeting up with someone who believed in the same God, followed the
same path to faith, adhered to the same rituals. You felt immediately an ally; there was so much you didn't have to explain, justify, or defend.

It was often possible to determine in advance if a person you were to meet was in analysis. “I imagined then that girls of a certain background were in psychoanalysis,” Calvin Trillin says, “just as in China girls of a certain background bound their feet. I figured eastern college graduate girls who'd gone to Dalton [a private prep school in Manhattan] all saw analysts. I tried to explain it once to Fats Goldberg, the pizza king of Kansas City. He was worried about people doing it—he thought it meant there was something wrong. I said, ‘It's just cultural, Fats.'”

The ongoing, growing debate about psychoanalysis and its effects on our sex life was not just limited to talk but became a subject of controversy in intellectual magazines. What I thought of as the Great Orgasm Debate began with Norman Mailer's bombshell essay “The White Negro,” in the summer 1957 issue of
Dissent
, an independent left-wing quarterly edited by Irving Howe. The piece caused more excited talk among people I knew than anything published in a magazine since Salinger's short story “Franny” came out in
The New Yorker
a few years before. The debate over Salinger's story had involved what seemed then the daring question of whether a sensitive college girl on a date during an Ivy League weekend was having a nervous breakdown because of her resistance to a phony society or because she was pregnant.

How innocent that was compared with the debate over Mailer's impassioned argument that, for the new avant-garde rebel he called a “hipster” or “White Negro” (with whom he obviously identified), the best therapy was not the search for self on the analyst's couch, nor even the search for a mate, but rather the quest for the “apocalyptic orgasm.” The hipster, the new American existentialist (by Mailer's definition a male), needed no psychiatrist at all but only a woman, to serve as what sounded like a sort of sexual receptacle, for “orgasm is his therapy … good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him.”

I got a copy of
Dissent
hot off the press because Irving Howe had asked me to contribute an essay to the same issue, with the overall title “American Notebook.” My own piece, “In Defense of the
Fullback,” was a mild and, in the context of the other articles, even culturally reactionary essay that tried to make a case for the athletes I grew up writing about and befriending (like Ted the Horse) as cultural heroes instead of the dull automatons that intellectuals thought them to be. To make it seem even more gauche, this sentimental treatise about the glories of football had to appear alongside Mailer's breakthrough declaration of freedom to find the best orgasm!

In the psychic revolution Mailer now proclaimed, the interior trail to freedom being blazed by the White Negro or hipster or—and he used this term interchangeably—the psychopath (with his marijuana and his existential action “in the theatre of the present”) was replacing confession of desire “in the safety of a doctor's room.” While evidently timid souls like myself were content to lie on the analyst's couch, Mailer was exploring far out on the fringes of experience, speaking on behalf of those who shared “a disbelief in the socially monolithic ideas of the single mate, the solid family and the respectable love life.” Mailer was like some intrepid sexual Columbus looking for the “apocalyptic orgasm,” while I was just trying to have any kind of orgasm at all.

I was frankly relieved and pleased when Mailer's anti-psychoanalytic orgasm theory was challenged in a subsequent issue of
Dissent
by Ned Polsky, a Village writer I knew from the White Horse Tavern who was certainly no square. Polsky admitted that psychoanalysis, which was once the property of the European rebels who had pioneered it, had now fallen into the hands of bourgeois American M.D.s, and this posed the danger of bringing a patient “adjustment” to “the present social structure”—that monolith symbolized by the organization man and the lonely crowd.

Nevertheless, Polsky maintained that “it is equally undeniable that psychoanalysis—whatever the brand—still provides greater sexual benefits than does the dreary alternative that Mailer glorifies.” Polsky even charged that many hipsters “are so narcissistic that inevitably their orgasms are premature and puny.” Was he accusing Mailer, who had grabbed the macho torch from the aging Hemingway, of having “premature” and “puny” orgasms? Was he questioning the virility of the very Mailer who, in his
Advertisements for Myself
, had written with convincing authority of a man who gave
a woman “the time of her time” by bringing her to the best orgasm of her entire experience? Those were fighting words, and Mailer was not known to shirk a fight, whether with fists or phrases.

Polsky remembers that after his rebuttal appeared he got a call from Mailer. “I thought maybe he wanted to fight, but he just wanted to talk. We had lunch, and he was very friendly.” Instead of challenging Polsky to a duel or a boxing match (as he did on another occasion to Harold Hayes, the editor of
Esquire
), Mailer defended the honor of his own orgasms in a printed reply in
Dissent
(this was now the third installment of the Great Orgasm Debate), arguing that ultimately “one cannot enter another being's orgasm and measure its scope.”

Mailer got in another dig at psychoanalysis in his reply to Polsky when he coined the term “ball shrinker” to describe the analyst. Nothing so annoyed my dedicated brother and sister analysands and me as the common designation of the analyst as a “head shrinker,” for we believed the job of the doctor was to expand our consciousness. It was also to increase our sexual performance and pleasure, so Mailer's term of genital shrinkage was especially offensive—he knew where to hit you where it hurt!

Whatever the final judgment on whether hipsters or analysands had the best orgasms, the debate was a manifestation of the mood of the time, in its serious fascination with both sex and psychoanalysis. Most of my friends and I who took the couch route naturally agreed with Polsky that psychoanalysis offered the best means of achieving what he called “sexual benefits.”

Looking back on the overall benefits of psychoanalysis, Mailer says now, “There are always people who desperately-need-help—that's always said as one word, you know—and for them analysis serves a function, and people can be helped. But others are in it ten, twelve, fourteen years and are exactly the same as when they started. And then they realize that all that time they had to pay someone to be their friend—they hadn't been in a nice relationship.”

Of course, many people who tried the couch decided to rise from it early. “After being in psychoanalysis for a year I picked myself up and left,” Mary Perot Nichols says. “That's why I'm normal now. It
was straight Freudian. I lay on the couch and all he said was ‘Yes, go on.'

“A friend of mine went to the same analyst. We used to leave notes for each other on the pillow on the couch. She went for ten years trying to cure her anxiety, then later found out she had undulant fever, which she got from drinking unpasteurized milk as a child, and it caused extreme anxiety. When she was cured of the undulant fever, she was cured of the anxiety.”

Others who were dissatisfied with their original analysts switched and found better results. “My first two analysts were terrible,” Helen Weaver recalls. “The one I had when I was with Kerouac never opened his mouth. He even fell asleep during sessions. How are you supposed to choose a good one anyway? It's a Catch-22 situation. You're neurotic, you haven't learned to trust your instincts, and yet you're supposed to find someone to make you healthy.

“Nothing worked until '62, when I went to Europe and hit bottom. I had always picked neurotic boyfriends. The one I met in Italy was physically violent, and yet I stayed with him. When I came back to the city, I knew it was a problem and I really wanted to get to the bottom of it. I was ready to change and found a great analyst. He was human, he laughed at my jokes, and actually talked—in fact, nowadays he even goes on TV talk shows.”

One of the most prevalent criticisms of psychiatry in the fifties was that it somehow led to conformity, that its goal was to “shrink” the patient to fit the mold of middle-class society. I knew several writers who feared they would lose their creative powers, that the muse would be analyzed right out of them, along with their hang-ups. Donald Cook says he knew a man in the late forties, a Communist, who was afraid that if he went into psychoanalysis he would lose his political beliefs. Some homosexuals who saw psychiatrists feared becoming heterosexual as a result, and many went into analysis—or were sent by disapproving parents—to be “cured” of their homosexuality.

All the more surprising, then, that one of the most positive evaluations of psychiatry and its effects on the life and career of a creative person comes from Allen Ginsberg: “In 1950 I got out of a psychiatric institution and I started going to a lady psychiatrist,” he
explains now. “She called up my father and told him my parents must accept the fact that I like men, they should accept it if I was having a man over for supper, or to stay the night. Later, in San Francisco, I told a psychiatrist I wanted to quit my job and write poetry, and he said, ‘Why don't you?' I was dubious, so I said, ‘What would the American Psychiatric Association say about that?' and he said, ‘There's no party line.'