Overview
The 1950s saw waves of Freudian disciples set up practices. In The Last Good Freudian, Brenda Webster describes what it was like to grow up in an intellectual and artistic Jewish family at that time. 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 protegee of Arshile Gorky, his first biographer, and herself a well-known abstract impressionist painter.In her memoir, Webster evokes the social milieu of her childhood -- her summers at the farm that were shared with free-thinking psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner; the progressive school on the Upper East Side where students learned biology by watching live animals mate and reproduce; and the attitude of sexual liberation in which her mother presented her with a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover on her thirteenth birthday.
Growing up within a society that 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 that 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.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In this forthright memoir, Webster (president of PEN West and author of Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study) looks back with painful honesty at her privileged but emotionally troubled Manhattan childhood and her life in analysis. Citing a maternal family history of mental illness, she explains, "I was born and brought up to be in psychoanalysis. As a result, much of my adult life was spent on the couch." Capably narrating her voyage of self-discovery, she offers a personal perspective on the uses and misuses of Freudian theory. Webster blames her emotionally unstable mother--abstract expressionist painter Ethel Schwabacher--for her unhappy childhood and for her own mistakes as a parent. Schwabacher, who relied on a circle of psychoanalysts steeped in Freudian orthodoxy, attempted suicide more than once (most traumatically just after her husband died; Webster, then 10 years old, found her comatose mother). Surrounded by the children of a tight group of early Freudians at the progressive Dalton School, Webster started seeing a therapist before she was out of high school. It wasn't until midlife that she broke free from her therapists' advice to submit to a higher male authority in her duties as student, wife and mother, and finally found her true voice, which resonates powerfully in this absorbing tale of discovery and pain. Photos. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|Booknews
Webster (freelance writer, translator and critic) describes what it was like to grow up in an intellectual and artistic Jewish family in the 1950s, when waves of Freudian disciples set up practices. She evokes the social milieu of her childhood<-->summers at the farm that were shared with free-thinking psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner, the progressive Upper East Side school, and the attitude of sexual liberation in which her mother presented her with a copy of on her 13th birthday. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Bonnie Johnston
Webster's memoir affords a fascinating glimpse into the heyday of American psychotherapy. Webster describes her childhood, growing up with a mother, the painter Ethel Schwabacher, who was so obsessed with Freudian psychoanalysis, that she could not make a decision without consulting her therapist. As Webster grew older and unhappier, she submitted to years of fruitless analysis before rejecting Freudian dogma and finding her own path to sanity.Looking back she identifies the problems in her own life that were caused bu her mother's application of Freudian theory to their family, and she discusses her own analysts' inability to help her cope with the death of her father and the disintegration of her first marriage. Her book is a heart-wrenching and ultimately inspiring remembrance of an era in which Freud's theories reigned supreme-one that reveals the darker side of psychoan alysis.
—Booklist