Quote Detail

Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one__ problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of __ormalcy_?The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease__he universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that __omething is not right,_ elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of __xperts,_ who can never be proved wrong.It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous __alaise_ of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde__ Pea Soup Fogs, didn__ exist __il someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one__ life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the __ife coach,_ the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable __emedies_ to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called __he worried well,_ and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt__ New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.