Subject: bananafish-digest V1 #286 -Reply
From: Michael Zabel (MPZABEL@holycross.edu)
Date: Thu May 01 1997 - 15:52:58 GMT
Paul Heckel wrote:
"Hello fellow Salinger fans. My name is Paul Heckel and I'm at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I'm writing a 20 page paper
on why Seymour committed suicide, but here's the trick. I have to
analyze his behaviour through the eyes of Sigmund Freud and his
psychoanalytic theories. If any of you has any ideas on how I could
pursue this task, please let me know. Or, just write me on why YOU
think that he killed himself at all"
Paul, here's a passage from Franny and Zooey that I find particularly
relevant to your question. J.D. writes the following, a scene where
Zooey cautions his mother: (Forgive my piracy)
"All right. I'm *very* serious, now. If you - Listen to me, now. If you
can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in
some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some
analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television,
and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the
H-bomb, and the Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times,
and the responsibilities of the Westport and Oyster Bay Parent-Teacher
Association, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal - you just
*do* that, and I swear to you, in not more than a year Franny'll either be
in a *nut* ward or she'll be wandering off into some goddamn desert with
a burning cross in her hands...."
"I don't know," he said. "It seems to me there *must* be a psychoanalyst
holed up somewhere in town who'd be good for Franny - I thought about
it last night." He grimaced slightly. "But I don't happen to know of any.
For a psychoanalyst to be any good with Franny at all, he'd have to be a
pretty peculiar type. I don't know. He'd have to believe that it was
through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study
psychoanalysis in the first place. He'd have to believe that it was
through the grace of God that he wasn't run over by a goddamn truck
before he ever even got his license to practice. He'd have to believe that
it's through the grace of Go that he has the native intelligence to be able
to help his goddamn patients at *all*. i don't know any good analysts
who think along those lines. But that's the only kind of psychoanalyst
who might be able to do Franny any good at all. If she got somebody
terribly Freudian, or terribly eclectic, or just terribly run-of-the-mill -
somebody who didn't have any crazy, mysterious gratitude for his
insight and intelligence - she'd come out of analysis in even worse shape
than Seymour did. It worried *hell* out of me, thinking about it. Let's just
shut the hell up about it, if you don't mind."
Take what you will away from that. I know some bananafish are weary
about aligning oneself so closely with J.D., but please count this as a
formal request to keep Freud as far away from Seymour and Salinger as
possible.
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