Synopsis:
The environment of New York City in the post-World War II era was one filled with new ideas and movements. The 1950s saw waves of Freudian disciples set up practices. In <em>The Last Good Freudian</em>, Brenda Webster describes what it was like to grow up in an intellectual and artistic Jewish family during this time.<br><br> Her father, Wolf Schwabacher, was a prominent entertainment lawyer whose clients included the Marx Brothers, Lillian Hellman, and Erskine Caldwell; her mother, Ethel Schwabacher, was a protégé of Arshile Gorky, his first biographer, and herself a well-known abstract expressionist painter. <br><br> In her memoir, Webster vividly evokes the social milieu of her childhood—her summers at the farm that was shared with free-thinking psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner; the progressive school on the Upper East Side where students learned biology by caring for real babies; and the atmosphere of sexual liberation in which her mother presented her with a copy of <em>Lady Chatterly's Lover</em> on her thirteenth birthday. <br><br> Growing up within a society which held Freudian analysis as the new diversion, Webster was given early access to the analyst's couch; the history of mental illness in her mother's family kept her there. As a result, Freudian thought became something which was impossible for Webster to avoid. What unfolds in her narrative is both a personal history of analysis and a critical examination of Freudian practices.
About the Author:
<strong>Brenda Webster</strong> is a freelance writer, critic, and translator and is president of PEN West. She is the author of <em>Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study</em> and <em>Blake's Prophetic Psychology</em>, as well as the novels <em>Sins of the Mothers</em> and <em>Paradise Farms</em>.
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