FOLEY: One of the things your mother wrote in her journal--which you prepared for publication, incidentally: Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher, edited by Brenda S. Webster and Judith Emlyn Johnson (Indiana University Press, 1993). Your mother was really quite a prominent painter. She was an Abstract Expressionist at a time when being an Abstract Expressionist meant you drank a lot and you were macho and you were a guy-- and she was none of those things. She writes of Orpheus--and the Orpheus myth is quite a prominent myth in her consciousness--

Orpheus is not simply bereaved, he actively abandons Eurydice to her death because she interferes with his survival as an artist. ("To become the artist he felt unconsciously he had to leave her...he killed her that he might live.")

WEBSTER: Yes. It was in her late life that she wrote that. I believe that it refers to the fact that, after my father died--though she loved him very much and mourned him by trying to kill herself all the time--she felt in some way that he had released her to be more of an artist: her best work came after his death.

FOLEY: It's interesting that she's identifying here with Orpheus.

WEBSTER: Yes.

FOLEY: Her suicide attempts are in a certain sense identifications with Eurydice. Eurydice is something like the seed, something which gets buried, almost resurrected, and then not. It's like the Kore myth. These attempts at suicide are attempts--maybe, she always survives these things-- to find an Orpheus who will rescue her. She's identifying perhaps on both levels of the myth.

WEBSTER: She did. As she painted this painting over a number of years she actually changed from identifying with Orpheus to identifying with Eurydice. Eurydice had been just a pale shade in her early paintings. In her later paintings Eurydice became a more defined figure and Orpheus became more blurry.

FOLEY: You've been interested, as of course Freud was, in androgeny. This is something you're concerned with at the moment as you're writing a book about an androgynous person.

WEBSTER: That's right.

FOLEY: I think people naturally feel themselves to be androgynous. But you get situations in which people are telling you, "You're a man, you have to do this," "Be a man," "You're a woman, you have to do this, this is your role." "Only men are geniuses," but, as a woman, you can do something about that. What you can do is to marry one, marry a genius. This is a problem which is very much within your mother and perhaps within your own writing, your own consciousness, too. You feel like a person who is doubled, or multiple--more than one, both male and female--but you're in a situation in which you're being told that you can only behave in certain ways.

WEBSTER: I think psychoanalysis was very harmful in that way, for me personally, stressing only the Female--capital F--characteristics and saying that anything else was penis envy. Even if you wanted to work and write: that was all just compensation for not having a penis.

FOLEY: You say that even writing was--or thinking, really--was an indication of not having a penis, trying to be a man. It follows from that very simple identification: if men are the only ones who think, then if a woman thinks she must be partly male or trying to be male or something along those lines. It's total nonsense!

WEBSTER: But the early analysts really believed this. People have done studies of some of the early women analysts around Freud. Nancy Choderow was doing one on the way women had influenced the field of Psychoanalysis. I think she gave it up because she found that in fact they had very little Feminist consciousness. They didn't think of themselves as women. They were sort of honorary men! There were a lot of women in the early movement. So, if you were an analyst, the only way to avoid the prejudice against women was to think of yourself as a man.

FOLEY: Again, like Gertrude Stein. Not seeing yourself as female at all. You didn't, however. You did in fact see yourself as extremely feminine.

WEBSTER: I wasn't conscious of the male side--until recently. In fact, writing this book I became more and more conscious of it, and now, in the new novel I'm working on, it's actually about an androgynous person, a drag queen.

FOLEY: Tell us a little bit about that.

WEBSTER: I'm just about halfway through a first draft. The main thing is that it's a love story. It shows a person who, my daughter says, is more like a woman in the body of a man--which is just what my mother said she was!

FOLEY: Which daughter was that?

WEBSTER: My older daughter said said that real drag queens are mainly interested in big breasts. They are actually frightened by messy female processes like menstruation. They wouldn't want to sit and talk with you about that. My drag queen is extremely compassionate, loving--he has all the qualities I associate, well, with a good mother. But he also can be quite masculine. In his fantasy particularly. He wants to be a knight. A knight who saves damsels in distress, and so on. He has both male and female qualities. Both sides.

FOLEY: Saving damsels in distress is like being Orpheus. It's interesting because knights-- particularly fantasy knights--kind of dressed up.

WEBSTER: He likes to dress up! He will do dance routines in which on the outside he's armored and then he takes off his breast-plate and he has breasts and lingerie. So he's both.

FOLEY: It's like filmmaker Ed Wood fighting in World War II and fighting "just like a man" but wearing female underwear all the way through. Do you have anybody in particular in mind as a model for this book?

WEBSTER: No. I think it comes out of myself! I think I'm the model and I never understood this. I only saw it when I started to write it and I showed it to my husband and he said, "How can you write this man so wonderfully, this is the best thing you've ever done!" I don't know if it is, but the voice is very uninhibited. I never know what the character is going to say next. Sometimes when I'm at a party I'm talking to someone and I think, my drag queen would say--he says quite outrageous things--and I'm tempted to say them for him

FOLEY: A friend of mine, Jake Berry, puts certain lines in his poetry in quotation marks because he would certainly never say such things! Someone's saying them, but it isn't him! I should have asked you: as you're turning yourself into your drag queen, do you feel you're developing a penis? Doesn't an imaginary character have an "imaginary penis"?

WEBSTER: No! My imaginary character has a real one. He's a man.

FOLEY: Your methods of analysis--all those things that are in the book--are both extremely rational and rather psychoanalytical. That is, you're using the tools of psychoanalysis to expose psychoanalysis. You feel that the therapy that you were given by classic Freudians-- "good" Freudians--was devastating and disastrous. But the tools by which you're actually exposing this remain rather psychoanalytical.

WEBSTER: Various people have said that. I have spoken to some of the more eminent Freud bashers and they loved the book, but they wished I had gone further in theorizing my discontent with analysis. I said no, it's experiential, it's my story and I'm not going to theorize it.

FOLEY: You've also written books which are based in psychoanalytical understanding.

WEBSTER: Well, my concluding view is that, as an intellectual tool and as a method of introspection and understanding motivation and so on, psychoanalysis does sensitize you to those issues, and I still continue to do that, to see people in terms of their motivation. I try to analyze them, I do it without meaning to even, and I suppose I use it in building my characters. But I think as a therapy, analysis didn't work for me and doesn't work a lot of the time. It's just not a good method of cure. And I think that most of the therapies--analytic therapy as opposed to analysis, maybe along with Jungian therapy, along with control/mastery, along with a lot of other things--they probably all work if they have a very good, empathetic practitioner. It's more an art than a science, and it works well when you have someone good doing it.

FOLEY: It may be, too: the whole idea that you can have a "cure"--logotherapy, curing by the word--is postulated on the idea that there is a "sickness." It's all a kind of metaphor based in medical "doctoring." If you have paranoia, that's like having influenza. It's a sickness. But if it's not a sickness, if in fact it's something other than a sickness, then you can't have a "cure."

WEBSTER: The psychoanalysts had grandiose ideas that they could restructure your personality. Usually there was the idea of the early trauma. In my mother's case, for thirty years her analyst was looking for her early trauma. Supposedly, if you unroot that, then the person will thrive. That was nonsense. Thirty years later she'd gotten back to eighteen months old and she still hadn't improved.

FOLEY: Isn't this book about how you change your personality?

WEBSTER: I think you change it through your own efforts, maybe through what Alan Wheelis used to say was the will. You had to have the will to change and also perhaps some fortunate external circumstances--or maybe you had to make the first step to have the external circumstances.

FOLEY: Read us a little bit more from the book. That early image of your father.

WEBSTER: (reading):

Here is an early image: It's my third birthday. My father comes into my room with a big package. "For you, Bonnie," he says, crouching down next to me, so he can enjoy my happiness when I open it. "For you, princess." I lean against him for a moment smelling his skin, which has the odor of spice cookies. Then I pull off the shiny gold paper. The doll is thin and stiff with black wavy hair and has a suitcase full of beautiful dresses. I take one look and burst into tears. "But Daddy, she's too old" is all I can manage to say.

The next doll he gave me was better. She looked like a real baby and had a newly invented, rubbery skin that you could wash, and if you put water in her mouth she peed out of a small hole in her behind. A photo shows me happily naked, trying to give her a ride on the back of our Great Dane, Sero. Later, I'm told, I approached my father more directly and asked him straight out to deposit a seed somewhere--the bathroom struck me as an appropriate place--where I could gather it up and grow it. I even pointed to the exact place on the white tiled floor where I wanted him to put it. I didn't want it too near the toilet because it might slip in and be flushed away.

"Here," I said, "right here. See."

"He only laughed," my mother told me years later, "and I had to smile myself. It was so classic."

There are things that Freud was dead right about and one of them is the Family Romance.

FOLEY: Like many little girls, you wanted to have your father's baby. Who had the baby?

WEBSTER: My mother--unfortunately! (Laughter)

FOLEY: Not only was there a question of sibling rivalry when the boy comes. How terrible! You were the one who wanted to do this, to produce the baby. Were you talked to by your parents about sex and gender and how babies were conceived?

WEBSTER: I probably was. I don't have a clear memory of it, though. I'm sure they did, being the way they were. Totally liberated.

FOLEY: Well, not so totally liberated, which was a problem. And, who are you? Orpheus? Eurydice?

WEBSTER: Both.

FOLEY: But at certain times you're one and at certain times you're the other, and this is problematical. You're sort of creating a world around you--as we do: our psychic contents tend to spill over into the world we live in, our houses reflect our psychic content, our friendships do. Often, in fact, people are friends because they support each other's fantasies.

WEBSTER: That's true.

FOLEY: That's a very important aspect in certain instances of being a friend. And if you actually tell somebody the truth about himself, they may very well leave you completely, they don't want to hear that.

WEBSTER: Well, in my later life, when I changed so much from being a docile wimp, as I call myself, for so many years, I began to be afraid that people would read my books or hear me reading and be horrified and not want to be friends any more. And then I thought, Well, if they don't like the real me, that's fine, then I'll find some new friends. I actually had to think that.

FOLEY: You had that same kind of problem with family as you were writing some of this book. That's something we should talk about in the next show. This isn't an autobiographical novel, where you can fictionalize. A memoir has to be reasonably true--your version of what the facts are. It's like Thomas Wolfe with his problems with Look Homeward, Angel. He wrote everything about his home town, but he was at a distance from it when he did it. Then he came back to the home town expecting to be welcomed as a hero, and they were horrified.

WEBSTER: They stoned him, probably!

FOLEY: Exactly! (To the radio audience:) I've been talking to Brenda Webster--W-E-B-S-T- E-R, like the dictionary--and we've been talking about her book, The Last Good Freudian. In this book Brenda is able to recreate not only aspects of her own life--which are important, it's a memoir--but also aspects of the history of psychoanalysis, which she experienced very intimately and at close range. She was a rich person, the child of rich parents who believed passionately in psychoanalysis as a religion. We need to talk about that and about whether you've found a new faith.

WEBSTER: Hmmmm.

(Continued)

Jack Foley