Comment on Wynne Godley and psychoanalysis

A comment on Wynne Godley’s story of a nightmare, LRB Feb 22 2001
(London Review of Books, 27 March 2001)

Wynne Godley tells us a fantastic story about his analysis. He ends it with saying that "what I have written is not an attack on psychoanalysis, for which as a discipline I have the utmost respect". This is clear also from the interpretations which permeate the text and which are wholly based on a belief in an "intelligent" unconscious and the "laws" of interaction between the analyst and the analysand.
It is for me unbelievable how every sad story about analysis is seen as exceptional and succesful analyses are seen as the rule. Yet most of what Godley tells as, is closely related to the structure of the situation: secret, uncontrolled, unbalanced situation where helpless and slightly disturbed people let themselves be manipulated by somewhat deranged self-declared geniuses. Freud himself, Jung, Reich, Klein, Lacan and now Winnicott and Khan! To read Godley reminds me of Masson's Last Analysis: there is more than one strange coincidence here.
When do people come around to see that a "skillful, patient and selfless analyst" is the exception not favored by the "discipline" and that even these exceptions will in time lose touch with reality, as there is so much pure hype and make-believe in the theory?

J.P.Roos

University of Helsinki

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