TS's session, X and a Spengler ?

[DudiousMax at aol.com]

Yo Terrance,
                   C'est Moi.  Pepe le Pieu, with a question.  Wasn't the 
abreaction stuff done to guys who suffered with "Shell Shock," or some 
variant of battle-fatigue?  Or witnessed their best buddies being blown into 
hamburger?  I mean, TRP not withstanding, you don't think they were testing 
for hyper-sensitives who might anticipate where the next batch of V-2's were 
aimed?  Or do you?  I remember reading some things that were like, "It is a 
credit to psychotherapy's clinical methods that the army has been able to 
help shell-shock victims."  Up to that minute in history, Freud stood in 
limbo, neither accepted nor unaccepted.  I think those "successes" were 
important to the Freudians,  and justified a rash of books, and the 
investment (on a national scale) into training a generation of shrinks (Don't 
forget, there was little or no relief for WWI shell-shock victims who became 
a kind of public health burden in the period between the wars.) who worked a 
generation to mixed reviews (The cliche is, and I don't know if I've seen any 
hard data to back it up: a third get better, a third get worse, a third stay 
the same.).  Though they were well enough thought off at the time by the OSS 
(the pre-CIA), Wild Bill Donovan ordered some shrinks to "analyze" all known 
information on Hitler and come up with a secret psychological profile of that 
unhappy camper, with the anticipation that they might have to negotiate with 
him at the end of hostilities.  I am saying that the therapies of WWII were a 
lot less sinister, and maybe did a lot more good, than what Pynchon (who is, 
I think, an anti-Freudian, seeing the shrinks as a priest caste of those 
interested in social-control) portrays.  Of course, he doesn't think much of 
the Skinnerians and Pavlovians either, for similar reasons.  And to some 
extent he is playing those isms off against each other (in true Menippean 
fashion).  But my main thrust here is,  I think the Psychological guys 
weren't necessarily "evil" or "mad scientists" as Pynchon would have us 
believe.  They were guys who were trained in the disciplines of the time and 
even if their work is questionable by todays standards, maybe they were 
well-intentioned and doing the best they could with what they had, like 
American Civil War surgeons who didn't understand germ theory.  And they did 
leave behind some incredible documents.  See, THE MIND OF ADOLF HITLER: The 
Secret Wartime Report: by Walter C. Langer, Basic Books (1972).  
                                           Max