TS's session, X and a Spengler ?

[Edward M. Pilszak]

At 08:42 AM 6/20/99 EDT, you wrote:
>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
>
Maybe I'm wrong here, but I see the infighting amongst the various factions
in here as keeping them from getting any productive work done.  In GR, it is
frequently difficult, I have noticed, to seperate the fictional from what
really happened, as Pynchon intertwines both so much. Thus, we bring in what
we know about the events described in GR from other sources,  and I'm not
sure that that's a productive way of reading GR. Who knows? It might be just
what Pynchon wants. I suppose my point is that GR seems to be open to a
number of different readings, is there a way to determine if there is a
correct way?
Ed