I’m sure you’re getting sick of me posting things that I read – but they grab my attention so much and keep me thinking on them for days at a time, I think it would be silly of me to try to explain where I am without giving you the source of it.
I just finished Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. It’s a good book – and makes you think. It will also, more than likely, drive you crazy – but it makes you think. I love books with neurotic characters. They’re usually my favorite characters, although I don’t think I’d ever be friends with such people in real life. I’d love to work with them in therapy – but I don’t think I could be friends with them. The difference is huge.
Anyway, in a moment of clarity, Zooey says, “For a psychoanalyst to be any good with Franny at all, he’d have to be a pretty peculiar type. He’d have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he’d been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place. He’d have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he wasn’t overrun by a (replacing the real word here with a different) *dadgum* truck before he ever even got his license to practice. He’d have to believe that it’s through the grace of God that he has the native intelligence to be able to help his *dadgum* patients at all. I don’t know any good analysts who think along those lines. But that’s the only kind of psychoanalyst who might be able to do Franny any good at all. If she got somebody terribly Freudian, or terribly eclectic, or just terribly run-of-the-mill – somebody who didn’t even have any crazy, mysterious gratitude for his insight and intelligence – she’d come out of analysis in even worse shape than Seymour did. It worried the hell out of me, thinking about it. Let’s just shut up about it, if you don’t mind.”
Sobering words. And a really good book.
For those of you who are interested: 