The Last Good Freudian

The environment of New York City in the post-World War II era was one filled with new ideas and movements. 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 during this 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 protege of Arshile Gorky, his first biographer, and herself a well-known abstract expressionist painter. In her memoir, Webster vividly evokes the social milieu of her childhood--her summers at the farm that was shared with free-thinking psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner; the progressive school on the Upper East Side where students learned biology by caring for real babies; and the atmosphere of sexual liberation in which her mother presented her with a copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover on her thirteenth birthday. Growing up within a society which 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 which 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.