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\refoot{Herman Wouk's \emph{Marjorie Morningstar}}
\lofoot{Chapter 42 [on psychoanalysis]}
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\begin{document}

\title{On psychoanalysis}
\subtitle{From \emph{Marjorie Morningstar,}\\
Chapter 42,\\
``A Game of Ping-pong''}
\author{Herman Wouk}
\date{Novel first published 1955}
\publishers{Excerpt edited and annotated by\\
David Pierce\\
Mathematics Department\\
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University\\
\url{mat.msgsu.edu.tr/~dpierce/}\\
\url{polytropy.com}\\
November 27, 2018}
\maketitle
%\newpage
%\begin{multicols}{2}

\section*{Editor's Foreword}

\begin{editorial}

%  \minisec{Why I have prepared this text}

  I have prepared the text below for two of its features:
\begin{inparaenum}[(1)]
  \item
a criticism of Freudianism and
\item
the observation
that a young woman benefits from meeting more than one man who can say interesting things.
\end{inparaenum}

While Freudianism seems to absolve us of guilt for certain things we do,
still, if the Unconscious is responsible,
this means we can have a monster inside us.
I have thought this an important criticism.
However, see my Afterword.

\minisec{How I have prepared this text}

I have underlined the passages containing the key ideas.

I first read \emph{Marjorie Morningstar}
in the winter of 1990 or '91.
I had the third printing, from November 1957,
of the Signet Books paperback edition of Herman Wouk's novel.
I had taken this
from a box of my parents' old paperbacks
in Alexandria, Virginia.
I was then in graduate school in College Park, Maryland.
I did some of my ensuing reading during a visit to New York,
where the novel itself was mostly set.

Some years later, in the aughts of the new century,
when I wondered whether my memory of the novel was correct,
I found it online,
in the archive of an Australian women's magazine 
where the novel had been serialized.
However, I could not find the passages I was looking for.

Later, I obtained the copy of the novel that I had read originally.
In the summer of 2014, I read it again.
The old glue of the spine gave way, freeing the pages.
I scanned the pages containing the excerpt below.
By means of \url{onlineocr.net},
I converted the scans into text files,
which I then edited into the underlying \url{tex} file of the present document.

Original page numbers are bold and in brackets
at the places where the pages begin.

I have not compared the transcription line by line with the original,
though I have combed the original for its uses of italics,
to see that these are reproduced here.
Otherwise I have just read the transcription, looking for errors.

One error---which might read as a Freudian slip---is from the original;
I have indicated it with ``\emph{sic}'' in the transcription.  
It is on page \pageref{oral} here,
page 488 of the original,
where the word ``oral''
appears in place of what was presumably intended to be ``moral.''

Two subtle errors that I have neither corrected nor indicated
are three-dot ellipses that should have four dots
(as shown by comparable instances where four dots \emph{are} used).

Lines are just slightly longer in the transcription 
than in the original.

\minisec{The scene}

The scene below is set during a voyage from New York to Europe
on the \emph{Queen Mary.} The time is the late 1930s,
and Marjorie Morgenstern, age 23, is on her way to find the older Noel Airman,
whom she wants to marry, although he has fled from her.
Marjorie has met Michael Eden, age 39,
who accompanies her to her room during a rainstorm.

\end{editorial}

%\end{multicols}

%\noindent\hrulefill

%\mbox{}

\section*{Herman Wouk on psychoanalysis}

She handed him the drink and staggered back to the bed.
The rolling seemed worse.  She said, ``Did you really study in
Vienna?''

``Why, sure.''

``I find that hard to believe.  All you seem to say about Freud
is old Broadway jokes.''

Eden chuckled.  ``You sound like my old analyst friends.  I'll
admit I make stale jokes, Marjorie.  I've fallen into the habit,
from arguing with them.  I think I believed in it all too
strongly too young.  Sooner or later \uline{you're almost bound to}
[\textbf{484}]
\uline{rebel against your boyhood faith. My folks didn't have any}, 
you see, and \uline{psychoanalysis rushed into the vacuum}, once I 
came upon the first book when I was sixteen\lips Anyway, it's 
pointless to argue this subject seriously, with real Freudians. 
You can't win. \uline{Any position you take against Freud isn't an 
intellectual comment, it's a symptom of nervous disorder}. Try 
to lick that! `You disagree with us, therefore you're sick.' 
They all concur that I'm hostile to Freud because I'm in flight 
from some terrible subconscious secret. Unnatural urge for 
an affair with a kangaroo, no doubt.''

Though he said it in a light tone, there was an odd quaver 
in his voice. Marjorie looked at him keenly. He met the look, 
his eyes expressionless, and said, ``Like to take a chance on 
the dancing? You reel around and try to keep from crashing 
into pillars and other couples. It's fun, in a wild way.''

``I'd just as soon skip it,'' Marjorie said. ``Thanks.''

Eden said, swirling the whiskey and looking into the glass 
as he talked, ``I'm in flight all right, you know. But not from 
anything secret. I can date my break with psychoanalysis as 
exactly as you probably can your meeting with Noel.\lips In 
fact, I'll tell you about it. Then maybe I'll seem a little less 
weird to you. When I was twenty-three, Marjorie, just start\-%
ing to teach, I fell for the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen, 
and married her in two weeks. Gradually it turned out that 
she was a dreadful phony. Told me she'd dropped out of col\-%
lege to help support her family, when actually she'd flunked 
out in freshman year. Told me she was taking French lessons 
and studying sculpture---complete wild lies. She was just re\-%
peating things she'd heard from other girls. Boned up on 
book-review sections in newspapers and talked about all the 
new books very impressively. I was so blinded at the moment 
that she got away with it. Feminine wiles, pardonable enough 
maybe, because God knows she was in love too---but a mis\-%
take. It's one thing to try to seem a little better than you are. 
It's another thing, and a dangerous one, to pretend you're an 
entirely different person. 

``It was bad almost from the start. I left Emily twice, and 
went back each time. She would come on her hands and 
knees, crying, beautiful, swearing she'd do anything I wanted, 
\emph{anything,} go back to college, study nights. Once we were back 
together it was all forgotten. She just didn't have it in her to 
change. She'd sit at home and look mournfully at me because 
I was so bored and out of love. I met a marvelous girl at 
school, a student in one of my courses, brilliant, sweet, good%
---she's married to someone else, she's a doctor now---and \uline{I 
begged Emily for a divorce}. This went on for two hideous 
years. At last she actually went to Reno. She came back after 
staying there three months and consuming all our savings---%
[\textbf{485}]
and she hadn't done a thing about the divorce. Not a thing, 
simply sat there in Reno. She had an absolutely unbelievable 
capacity for doing nothing and hoping dumbly for the best.''
His voice was becoming hoarse and shaky. ``Well, this can 
either take two days or two minutes. In two minutes, I was 
driving with Emily along a highway late at night. This was 
shortly after she'd returned from Reno. We'd had some fright\-%
ful quarrels, and then a miserable half-reconciliation. \uline{I fell 
asleep at the wheel}. We smashed into a railroad overpass. My 
skull was fractured and \uline{Emily was killed instantly}. Her neck 
was broken.''

He looked at Marjorie in a peculiarly embarrassed way, 
with a half-apologetic smile. No words came to her dry lips 
and dry throat. After a while he went on, ``There was quite a 
bit of trouble with the police, of course. It takes a lot of red 
tape even to die accidentally. But what with me nearly dead 
myself, and no insurance money, and no other woman---this 
other girl had married long ago---the books were soon closed. 
It was an accident, and that was that, for the record. 

``But not for me. For me it was only the beginning. \uline{From 
a Freudian viewpoint} there are no accidents, you see. Or 
rather, \uline{accidents, mistakes, oversights, slips of the tongue, are 
ice\-bergs poking above the water and showing colossal masses 
of motivation underneath}. I fell asleep at the wheel, sure I did. 
But \uline{falling asleep is something the unconscious mind can bring 
about}. Drowsiness in special situations can be a hell of a clue 
in unravelling a neurosis. That's all too true. I had felt myself 
getting drowsy, had even thought of asking Emily to take the 
wheel. What's more, I actually remember seeing the railroad 
overpass far down the highway just before I dozed off. \uline{From 
the analytic point of view}---in which I then believed, with 
religious intensity---\uline{there isn't the slightest doubt that I mur\-%
dered my wife}, getting rid of an intolerable burden in the 
only sure way I could, and revenging myself for years of 
misery and a crippled life.''

The bed heaved and rolled under Marjorie. She clung to 
the headboard with one hand. Eden's face had gone quite 
ashy, though his expression was calm and even unpleasantly 
humorous. She said, ``I don't know enough about analysis to 
argue---but \uline{even if it were true you wouldn't be responsible}, 
not in any real sense------''

He walked to the whiskey and poured his glass half full. 
``Exactly what my analyst friends say---or almost exactly, 
Marjorie. I can give you the patter word for word, I've heard 
it so often. `You have unconscious death wishes, but you don't 
commit unconscious murders. It's a silly attitude. \uline{Your wife's 
death isn't really what's troubling you}. You're covering your 
unsolved neurosis by harping on the accident. \uline{Find out what's}
[\textbf{486}] 
\uline{\emph{really} bothering you, and you'll stop worrying about having 
murdered your wife}.''

``Can you tie that, Marjorie, for obsessed mumbo-jumbo? 
I killed my wife, sure. But that's not what's really bothering 
me. Hell, no. I was taken off the breast too early in infancy, 
\emph{that's} what's bothering me. And when I've gotten furious at
 this silly obduracy and started raving at them---I could rave 
now, just remembering these arguments---why, they've sat 
back and nodded wisely. More symptoms. 

``Whenever I do manage to corner them completely with 
chapter and verse from Freud, they say I'm the typical psy\-%
chology teacher, all book-theory, no clinical experience. All 
I know is what Freud \emph{said} about these things. I don't under\-%
stand the scientific facts of human nature that emerge from 
analytic practice to verify the theories, a little knowledge is a 
dangerous thing and so on, with a hey nonny no\lips

``You see, these dogma-blinded bastards have never been in\-%
volved in a fatal accident. They can't imagine what it's like. 
They go blandly on spinning the old palaver, not realizing that 
the packaged comfort they dispense is sheer poison to a man 
in my spot. 

``\uline{Ordinarily}, Marjorie, you understand, \uline{the wonderful thing 
about psychoanalysis is that it \emph{frees} you from responsibility 
and guilt}. You walk into the doctor's office an adulterer, a 
liar, a drunk, a phony, a failure, a pervert. In due time, after 
lying around on a couch and babbling for a year or so, it 
turns out you're none of these things at all. Shucks, no, it was 
your Unconscious all the time. An entirely different person, a 
guy named Joe, so to speak. Some occurrence in your 
childhood sex life has festered into a sort of demon inside 
you. Well, you track this demon down, recognize it, name it, 
exorcise it. You pay your bill and go your way absolved. 

``That's all perfectly fine. \uline{Unless you happen to have been 
in a fatal accident and killed somebody}. Then this whole 
scheme turns upon you. It can absolutely destroy you men\-%
tally. Because don't you see---this is what my benighted friends 
will \emph{never} see---\uline{it's just as horrible to believe that a demon 
under the surface of your brain took charge and caused you 
to kill, as it is to believe that you killed in cold blood}. More so, 
possibly. Because if you think about it, the implication is that 
subsurface devils possess you and can cause you to commit 
any number of shocking crimes. 

``Well, I went through agonies I won't bore you with, but 
the end of it all was a terrific nerve crisis, out of which I 
emerged unable to teach. I gave up psychology, and I've never 
gone back to it. It's seven years since I've glanced into a pro\-%
fessional journal, let alone a book in the field. In fact I have 
a kind of horror of the subject. I got interested in making 
[\textbf{487}]
money. Making money is fun, you know, and very absorbing, 
I'm good at it. I started out by getting a job, and eventually 
went into business for myself. I play a lot of cards, and read 
a lot of books, and that brings you up to date.'' 

There was a marked contrast between these casual last\linebreak 
words and the low strained tone in which Eden said them. He 
was standing by the porthole, holding on to one of the metal 
dogs, and as the ship rolled, black water crashed against the 
glass, and purple lightning showed in the turbulent sky. The 
scar across his white forehead looked like another streak of 
lightning. Marjorie, greatly disturbed, said to break the si\-%
lence, ``It seems like a terrible waste. You must have been an 
excellent teacher.'' 

``I was. Freud had been my ruling passion for about fifteen 
years. What an awful emptiness it left behind---and this on 
top of the loss of Emily! Believe me, having a sudden silent 
vacuum of death in my life, instead of a problem, was shock 
enough. Giving up teaching really did me in. For two years 
I was so close to suicide that---and I swear this to you---I 
didn't do it simply because I didn't want to give strangers the 
trouble of cleaning up a mess that used to be me. 

``Marjorie, I've sat in hotel rooms for weeks, reading\linebreak 
straight through Scott, Trollope, Zola, Balzac, Richardson, 
Reade, Lever, all the talky old novelists, just to keep from 
thinking. Because if I thought, the only thing I could think 
about was killing myself. Not for any dramatic reason, mind 
you. Not out of guilt or despair or anything. Simply because 
it was too much pointless effort to live. It was an effort to 
suck in air, when I thought about it. Seeing colors was a nui\-%
sance. Just to see a red and green neon sign and distinguish 
the letters was work, stupid work. And panic, I lived in torpor 
or panic, I knew nothing else, nothing, for two years.\lips

``Well, I guess I pulled out of this schizoid state, which was 
what it was, because I was meant to live, and not die. I don't 
know what else did it. And I emerged with this jeering atti\-%
tude about analysis, which you call making Broadway jokes. 
It's second nature by now. 

Once you lose faith in all that, believe me, you really lose 
it. An unbelieving Catholic is nothing to an unbelieving Freud\-%
ian. Where's their id and their libido, anyway? In the brain? 
In the kidneys? When I was a kid arguing religion we used to 
say nobody ever saw a soul in a test tube. Well, who ever 
caught an id in a test tube? It's all a lot of metaphors---and 
when you take metaphors for facts, what you have is a 
mythology. Mind you, \uline{the old man was a Homer or a Dante, 
in his way, quite up to writing out a mythology that would 
span the entire range of moral judgments}. That's what his 
work has become. \uline{The Freudians say they make no moral}
[\textbf{488}]
\uline{judgments}---I used to say so myself with great assurance---but 
the fact is, they do absolutely nothing else. \uline{They \emph{can't} do any\-%
thing else, because their business is evaluating and guiding be\-%
havior}. That's morality. What they mean is they don't make 
\emph{conventional} oral\label{oral} [\emph{sic}] judgments. They sure don't.\lips

``All right, now I'll shut up about this, obviously it's my 
King Charles' head. I haven't gotten going this way in ages. 
In sum, \uline{Freud says I'm a murderer, and I say the hell with 
him}, and that's my little story, Marjorie.'' He was pacing 
again. He stopped at the armchair, picked up Noel's letter, 
and flourished the pages at her. ``Our friend Mr.\ Noel Airman 
really touched off this outburst, if you want to know. Noel's 
quite an iconoclast, isn't he? Probably impressed you deeply. 
Rightly so. He's a wonderful talker. Still, Noel is very much 
a creature of his time, so he takes the current myths for solid 
facts.'' He tossed the letter on the bed at Marjorie's feet in 
an openly contemptuous gesture. ``The one thing in all those 
twenty pages that Noel takes seriously is the analytic explana\-%
tion of his own conduct. He's right proud of it. It never occurs 
to him that the Oedipus complex really doesn't exist, that it's 
a piece of moralistic literature. He's as orthodox as your own 
father, Marjorie, in his fashion, but he doesn't know it. Judas 
priest, how well I know the type! Sweeping the dust of ortho\-%
doxy out the front door, and never seeing it drift in again at 
the back door, settling down in somewhat different patterns. 
The vilest insult you can hurl at them is to tell them they be\-%
lieve in something. Yet all Noel Airman really is, Margie, is a 
displaced clergyman. You have no idea, till you've read the 
literature of neurosis, how full the woods are of these dis\-%
placed creatures. Brave skeptics all, making a life's work out 
of being dogmatic, clever, supercilious---and inwardly totally 
confused and wretched.'' 

Marjorie said, startled, ``Noel once talked about becoming 
a rabbi. He wasn't serious, really. But he worked himself up 
terrifically over it.'' 

Mike Eden grinned. ``It's just as well Noel didn't become 
a rabbi. It would have been hard on the husbands in the con\-%
gregation.'' He walked to the whiskey bottle, picked it up, then 
set it down again without pouring. ``I believe I have half emp\-%
tied this bottle in less than an hour. Also more than half 
emptied my brain. I feel remarkably good. I feel like the An\-%
cient Mariner after spinning his yarn for the Wedding Guest.'' 
He came to the bed and stood beside her. ``I'm thirty-nine. 
How old are you?'' 

``Twenty-three. Twenty-four in November,'' Marjorie said 
uneasily, looking up at him. ``Why?'' 

``When I got out of college,'' Eden said, ``you were five 
years old.'' [\textbf{489}] 

``I guess that's right,'' Marjorie said. ``I'm not thinking\linebreak
clearly.'' 

``Of course you're not. I've stupefied you with words.'' He 
took her hand. ``Well, maybe I've demonstrated one thing to 
you that may prove useful in time. \uline{Noel Airman isn't the only 
man in the world who can talk}. As a matter of fact, Margie, 
it's a completely negligible accomplishment.'' He pulled her to 
her feet, and kissed her once on the mouth, a real kiss. She 
leaned back in his arms, astonished, unprotesting, and more 
than a little stirred. She said softly, ``Yes? What's this?'' 

Mike Eden's look was tender, shrewd, and extremely mel\-%
ancholy.

``Plain self-indulgence, I guess. I've always liked blue eyes 
and brown hair, and girls about as tall as you. Good night, 
Margie.''

He went out, leaving her rather stunned. 
\begin{comment}
  
\newpage
{\Large\mbox{}

\textbf{43.} The Premonition\\

\mbox{}}

``Let me have a cigarette, darling.'' Marjorie said it without 
thinking, but then the endearing word rang strange in her ears. 
They were sitting side by side on deck chairs in morning sun\-%
light, wrapped in blankets, reading. It was the fourth day of 
the crossing. 

He passed the cigarettes and matches from his lap to hers 
without looking up. He was reading \emph{The Private Papers of 
Henry Ryecroft;} Marjorie had glanced at it and thought it a 
very dull book, but he was absorbed in it. He had the ability 
to go into a virtual trance over a printed page. He read swiftly 
and his taste was queer; the first day he had been finishing a 
fat tome, \emph{The Theory of Money and Credit,} and he had 
since gone through a couple of mysteries, a long paperback 
novel in French, and a book by Wodehouse over which he 
had laughed like a fool. 

She liked to look at his face when he read. His brows, the 
lines of his mouth and cheekbones, even the scar, seemed to 
converge to the middle of his forehead. She admired and en\-%
vied the visible concentration. 

Lighting her cigarette, she studied him, wondering how 
``darling'' had happened to slip out. Marjorie had been think\-%
ing a great deal about Mike Eden in the past few days. She 
was quite sure she wasn't in love with him. His occasional 
kisses were pleasant, and she liked to dance with him; his
\end{comment}

%\noindent\hrulefill

%\begin{multicols}{2}

\section*{Editor's Afterword}

\begin{editorial}
  There the chapter ends.

As I understand him,
Mike Eden wishes accidents like his wife's death 
could be accepted as such.
By the Freudian account, which he tries not to believe,
everything you do is on purpose.
However, it may not be \emph{your} purpose; 
it may the purpose of your Unconscious.
If this bothers you,
that is \emph{your} problem.
It is your responsibility to resolve the problem by further analysis.
Presumably this analysis would reveal additional purposes of your Unconscious.

Freudianism seems deterministic.
This becomes unacceptable when what is determined is something horrible.
Wouk's whole novel is deterministic though.
Like Oedipus, Marjorie tries to change her fate, but cannot:
she still ends up a Long Island housewife.

A psychologist and a novelist cannot be \emph{simply} deterministic,
because Mike Eden's words about Freudians apply to novelists too:
``their business is evaluating and guiding be\-%
havior.''
Wouk may wish to guide his readers towards accepting a traditional faith,
although he probably fails in this.
In any case, I do not know how this would have helped Mike.

Freudianism is the faith of Eden's youth.
According to this faith, by any reasonable interpretation,
and at any rate by \emph{his} interpretation,
he has killed his wife.
Could another faith have told him the death was an accident,
in such a way that he could accept this and be content?

Parents forget that they have babies asleep in the back seats of their cars.
The parents may leave the cars in the sun,
and the babies may die.
Such deaths are accidents;
but how can the parents be content to know this?
Their babies are still dead.

The faith of Mike Eden teaches him that, \emph{if} he is disturbed,
he ought to undergo psychoanalysis.
It is hard to see any objection to this,
if ``undergoing''
analysis is really \emph{engaging}
in the activity of pursuing one's own thoughts.

If you are involved in something terrible,
you probably don't want some know-it-all explaining to you why it happened;
you will work things out for yourself.
This is just what analysis is supposed to let you do.

When I reread Wouk's novel, more than twenty years after the first time,
there were few surprises.
Though there were plenty of scenes that I had not remembered,
the general feeling was more or less the same.

An incident that I had remembered from the beginning,
an ill-fated excursion to Long Island,
turned out to be not so near the beginning.

I had not remembered that, at the very beginning of his novel,
Wouk put the reader in Marjorie's bedroom
as she got up, admired herself in the mirror, and went into the shower.
In a story written at about the same time,
another male writer put the reader in a toilet stall
with a young woman not much older than Marjorie.
That story was ``Franny''; the writer, J. D. Salinger.

\end{editorial}

%\end{multicols}

\end{document}