Jack Foley

This interview with Brenda Webster was broadcast on KPFA-FM on April 19 and April 26, 2000 on my Cover to Cover show.

I was the perfect Freudian child; I worshipped my father.

He was coming along well, she told me, taking care of lab animals. He had learned not to introduce himself by saying, "Hello, I'm John; I killed my mother with an ax." --Brenda Webster, The Last Good Freudian

JACK FOLEY: This is Jack Foley with Cover to Cover, KPFA's show about books. My guest today is Brenda Webster. Brenda's new book is called The Last Good Freudian (Holmes & Meier, 2000). It's always a pleasure to have Brenda on the show. The last time she was on, it was because of her novel, Paradise Farm (State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999). That book was semi-autobiographical; there were autobiographical elements to it, and part of the interest of the book was the connection between fiction and autobiography. In the case of The Last Good Freudian--that's a great title--we have straight autobiography. There are of number of people in the book who are candidates for being "the last good Freudian," including, of course, Brenda herself. Brenda, welcome to the show.

BRENDA WEBSTER: Thank you, Jack. It's really a pleasure to be back here.

FOLEY: We'll explain later why I'm asking it, but I told you earlier that I was going to ask you something as a first question: Are you a genius?

WEBSTER: Absolutely not. As far as I can tell. I think it's quite clear that I'm not. FOLEY: And what about your mother? Was she a genius?

WEBSTER: I sometimes think she was.

FOLEY: Did she think she was?

WEBSTER: Yes. She knew she was.

FOLEY: And what about the concept of genius? That concept was something you've lived with your whole life long. As a young woman, you were encouraged to believe that women couldn'tbe geniuses. Your mother describes herself as "a genius trapped in a woman's body." Not a woman genius but "a genius trapped in a woman's body."

WEBSTER: Yes, well that's what she thought. From the time I was very small, she always talked about genius being the highest value.

FOLEY: And how did you get to be a genius? First of all, you had to have what?

WEBSTER: A penis.

FOLEY: You had to be male.

WEBSTER: Except that she thought she was a genius anyway.

FOLEY: But trapped in a female body. In some sense or another she had maleness--because she was a genius.

WEBSTER: I guess that's true.

FOLEY: It's one of the things one finds with Gertrude Stein as well. Thinking of herself as a genius--which she did--she also thinks of herself as male.

WEBSTER: Later, when I did research in the psychoanalytic field, Phyllis Greenacre, whom I was writing about, felt that in order to actually write or be a painter, you had to have an imaginary penis.

FOLEY: Really!

WEBSTER: Yes. Which horrified me. That was the thing that turned me away from psychoanalysis.

FOLEY: I wonder what constitutes an imaginary penis!

WEBSTER: "You just imagine yourself having one secretly. It's a little like having an imaginary companion."

FOLEY: Isn't there some sense of a kind of replacement of penis by breast, a sense that breasts are in some sense phallic. Freud writes about the "phallic mother."

WEBSTER: That was an imaginary phallus. The breast wasn't replacing it. A boy would imagine the mother actually having one. That was the phallic mother. The breast hadn't--

FOLEY: --hadn't developed to that extent, to make a bad joke. That's an issue of your book. You write that, as men worry about the small size of penis, you worry about the small size of breast.

WEBSTER: That's right.

FOLEY: And you're rather encouraged by a pregnancy.

WEBSTER: Very. Then I finally had a great figure.

FOLEY: (Laughter): You've got a great figure as it is!

WEBSTER: (Laughter): Thank you.

FOLEY: Why don't we begin with the opening section of the book. The book has a marvelous photo of Brenda on the cover. What were you--eleven or twelve?

WEBSTER: Eleven.

FOLEY: You're looking very uneasy.

WEBSTER: I think it's a little like the Lewis Carroll photos of young girls. It reminds me of that.

FOLEY: Yes, yes. You look very analyzable.

WEBSTER: I certainly look as though I have some problems.

(Reads)

I was born and brought up to be in psychoanalysis and, as a result, much of my adult life was spent on the couch. My family lived on New York's Upper East Side during the rich yeasty time, filled with new ideas and movements, after World War II. My father, Wolf Schwabacher, was a prominent entertainment lawyer. Dorothy Parker and her circle were social acquaintances, and his clients included playwright Lillian Hellman, said to lie even when she said "and" or "but," and Erskine Caldwell, whose novel sparked an obscenity trial that was pure theater. As a young man, my father had a bohemian side: he was engaged eight times and once popped up naked from under a table at a Marx Brothers party. My mother, Ethel Schwabacher, was a protegee of Arshile Gorky, and after he hanged himself from the rafters of his barn she became his first biographer. Later she was recognized as an important Abstract Expressionist painter in her own right, one of the very few women in the movement. My parents were idealistic, acculturated Jews, and glamorous (so glamorous that it was hard not to feel like an ugly duckling born into a family of swans).

But in addition to her beauty and her passionate love for my father, my mother brought into the marriage a serious history of mental instability in her family. Her brother was psychotic and her mother, while not obviously crazy, was frantic with anxiety and sought analytic help. My grandmother's need to be propped up emotionally was a burden to my mother, who became similarly intrusive and demanding toward me.

By the time I appeared in 1936 my mother had already had two analyses, setting up a family pattern of submission to analytic authority which made me run back to my analyst after every crisis, and kept me there, trying so hard to be "good" that it would be laughable if not for the years of pain and wasted opportunity.

Because I came from such a privileged family, the analysts who surrounded us were only the best. Ruth Mack Brunswick, one of Freud's inner circle, and a family friend, analyzed the Wolfman, Freud's famous patient who was supposedly driven mad by the sight of his parents copulating like dogs; Dr. Marianne Kris, Mother's analyst for thirty unconscionable years, analyzed Marilyn Monroe; and my own analyst, Kurt Eissler, a passionately intellectual German Jew who worshipped Freud, was the founder of the Freud Archives. They were the first wave of Freud's disciples to come to New York--many of them refugees from Hitler. They created a powerful Freudian orthodoxy and represented the cream of the American psychoanalytic elite at the height of its power. In a short time, their beliefs permeated American culture and, for as far back as I can remember, my sense of home.

My earliest memories are filtered through my mother's psychoanalytic lens. She liked to recall her favorite incidents from my childhood and delightedly repeat them to me over the years.

My own first memory, when I am five years old, is of her standing by the window in a pale peach silk kimono, covered with exotic birds. Her stomach is flat. She is thin and beautiful again.

"If Grandma loves the baby so much," I tell her, "let's cut him up and send him to her as a present."

My mother doesn't raise an eyebrow. She doesn't take me in her arms and hug me or say she loves me. She tells me it is natural to be jealous, to hate my new brother, even to want to kill him. He is guarded by a white starched nurse. I am never allowed to be alone with him, to hold him.

My next "memory" is of stealing his nursing bottle and running down the long, thin, [sic] hallway of our New York apartment, the nurse in hot pursuit.

By the age of six, I knew myself as a potential murderer and a convicted thief, an envious and jealous child--destined, like the other women in my family, for the analyst's couch.

FOLEY: Though it's also true that it's the analyst's couch that gives you the awareness of yourself as a "murderer." It's not just that you have these murderous impulses and so you have to be analyzed. It's the analysis itself that creates them.

WEBSTER: Definitely! The fact that my mother was always pointing out murderous impulses, stressed them, whereas I noticed with my grandchildren, who are brought up in exactly the opposite way--you're going to love your brother--that though they probably have murderous impulses. the positive ones are more in their consciousness.

FOLEY: Murder is in fact a big deal in this book. There are a number of ways in which people murder: though no people are murdered, animals are murdered, and it's an important theme that runs through the book. Your mother has many murderous impulses. In fact, she's probably projecting some of them on you when you're a little girl. It's natural that you want to murder your brother: I wanted to murder my brother! Of course it's natural. It's interesting that your mother is trying to do the right thing, making an effort to explain things to you, but she is herself so uncomfortable with the concept that she explains it to you in a way that makes it worse!

WEBSTER: Well, if she'd seen me being very jealous, I think she could have mentioned it. It's ok if you feel jealous, you'll get over it, you'll get to love him, or something. But the fact was that she herself had felt like killing her own brother--a brother who was psychotic--

FOLEY: Speaking of murderous impulses!

WEBSTER: Yes, he was apparently very violent. And then she had horrible anger back at him--and at all men. So she was not in good shape to tell me the positive.

(to be continued)

Jack Foley