If we had to name the one cultural current that most characterizes America in the twentieth century, it might be the work of Freud and the disciplines that grew out of it. There is no one who remains unexposed to his vision of human life,, whether through courses in it ( “psych”); through personal therapy, a common cultural experience for children of the middle class; or generally, through its pervasion of popular culture. The new vocabulary has crept into our - everyday speech, so that the ordinary man thinks in terms of being “sick,” “neurotic,” or “psycho”; he checks his “id” periodically for a “death wish,” and his “ego” for “weakness”; people who reject him are “egocentric” ; he takes for granted that he has a “castration complex,” that he has “repressed” a desire to sleep with his mother, that he was and maybe still is engaged in “sibling rivalry,” that women “envy” his penis; he is likely to see every banana or hotdog as a “phallic symbol.” His marital arguments and divorce-court proceedings are conducted in this psychoanalese. Most of the time he is unclear about what these terms mean, but if he doesn’t know, at least he is certain that his “shrink” does. The spectacled and goateed little Viennese dozing in his armchair is a cliche of (nervous) modern humor. It would take some time to tabulate the number of cartoons that refer to psychoanalysis. We have built a whole new symbology around the couch alone.

Freudianism has become, with its confessionals and penance, its proselytes and converts, with the millions spent on its upkeep, our modern Church. We attack it only uneasily, for you never know, on the day of final judgment, whether they might be right. Who can be sure that he is as healthy as he can get? Who is functioning at his highest capacity? And who not scared out of his wits? Who doesn’t hate his mother and father? Who doesn’t compete with his brother? What girl at some time did not wish she were a boy? And for those hardy souls who persist in their skepticism, there is always that dreadful word resistance. They are the ones who are sickest: it’s obvious, they fight it so much.

Women and children are always mentioned in the same breath (“Women and children to the forts!”) The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression. And that moreover this oppression is intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that we will be unable to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children, and vice versa. The heart of woman’s oppression is her childbearing and child-rearing roles. And in turn children are defined in relation to this role and are psychologically formed by it; what they become as adults
and the sorts of relationships they are able to form determine the society they will ultimately build.

But the rhetoric of the sexual revolution, if it brought no improvements for women, proved to have great value for men. By convincing women that the usual female games and demands were despicable, unfair, prudish, old-fashioned, puritanical, and self-destructive, a new reservoir of available females was created to expand the tight supply of goods available for traditional sexual exploitation, disarming women of even the little protection they had so painfully acquired.

Because of the cult surrounding it he can barely remember even his own childhood, often blocking it entirely. Even as a child he may have attempted to mold himself to the myth, believing that all other children were happier than he; later, as a teenager, he may have indulged in a desperate joyousness, flinging himself into “fun”— when really adolescence is a horror to live through — in the spirit of “you’re only young once.” (But true youth is unaware of age— “youth is wasted on the young” — and is marked by real spontaneity, the absence of precisely this self-consciousness. The storing up of happiness in this manner to think of when you no longer have it is an idea only old age could have produced.) Such an absence of contact with the reality of childhood makes every young adult ripe for the same sentimentalization of children that he himself probably despised as a child.