My Brushes with The Party

For a decade or so starting in my late teens I fancied myself a leftist – perhaps even a revolutionary. I might’ve been brought up in a bourgeois home, but I could transcend it, I believed. I would be tough, and unsentimental. I would be loyal to an idea. I would disown my Jewish family. I would go to the newly revolutionised Cuba and be assigned manual work. I even bought a “Teach Yourself” book and started learning Spanish.

Now, 60 years later, I wonder why this was such an attractive proposition for me. Recently reading “Shashenka” by Simon Sebag Montefiore, I found that the main character seems to have been similarly attracted, albeit 40 years earlier and on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution.  

One of the issues Montefiore addresses in the novel is one that has puzzled me for years: during all those purges of the Stalin era, why did loyal Party members confess their guilt? Ok, you could’ve put it down to the unbearable pain and humiliation of torture, the desperate need to escape it, the threats to loved ones and having no place or person to turn to. But why did the secret police and the dictators who ruled the Party want this particular script? It wasn’t as if the prisoners would be saving themselves – they knew they would be executed as traitors. Why did the state need them to confess?

A Slice of New York before it became the Big Apple

Gabriel Byrne as Paul Weston in In Treatment

Did you know that even middle and upper-class New Yorkers no longer pay to lie on the couch and bare their souls several times a week?  Psychoanalysis is on the wane. Paul Weston's once a week therapy sessions as shown in consecutive episodes of "In Treatment" is much more the name of the game these days. But it wasn't always like this. According to Lewis Aron and Karen Starr, the authors of a new book exploring the history of psychoanalysis, there was a time in the US, post-World War II when psychoanalysis enjoyed a golden age. Celebrities - most famously Marilyn Monroe and Woody Allen were patients, and the whole field of advertising and public relations was being transformed by Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, using psychoanalytic thinking. Movies - the first medium which had the potential to manifest our dream scenarios, were similarly influenced.

I lived in New York at the end of that so-called Golden Age - just before the Women's Movement and Gay Liberation started questioning all those seemingly incontrovertible psychoanalytic interpretations about us. In the space of a few years, the vaginal orgasm was declared a myth, the lived experiences of childhood were reasserted i.e. incest was not always a fantasy, homosexuals were not necessarily latent paranoiacs, nor lesbians castrating females and the designation of homosexuality as a perversion, was also eventually forced to bite the dust.

 The New Left gets old! SDS veterans starting "New SDS" in 2006

I was a member of an "affinity group" - Crazy Horse. We were young professionals of the New Left - part of an umbrella organization (MDS) set up by members of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Our theoretical heroes were Ernest Mandel, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse. I had arrived in New York on the eve of 1968 influenced by the Old Left - the Congress Movement and Trotskyists in Cape Town. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the Jewish members of this group travelled from their apartments in New York to their parents on Long Island for the Jewish holidays. Or even more surprising, someone couldn't make a meeting because they had an appointment with their analyst! This was probably happening more than I knew.