Philip Roth - The Continuing Presence: New Essays on Psychological Themes

This volume, edited by renown Roth scholar, Jane Statlander-Slote, also from Newark, New Jersey and a graduate of Weequahic High School, as was Roth, is a ground-breaking collection that explores a topic inimicable to the subject of the book, Philip Roth himself.

Ever since Roth's psychoanalyst, Dr. Hans Kleinschmidt, rather unethically published an essay in American Imago,"The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity", purportedly about another artist, but, in fact, about Roth in its descriptions of strikingly identical neurotic, dysfunctional manifestations and psychoanalytical self-narratives: in short, Herr Doctor unmasked his analyse's narcissistic, oedipal and incestuous emotional dysfunctions.

Up until that time, Roth had been having a love affair with psychoanalytic explanations for everyone and everything and used the therapeutic techniques of free association, dream analysis and Freudian psychology in general as the foundational lynchpin of his books. In the words of Jeffrey Berman: Roth's "...characters are the most thoroughly psychoanalyzed in literature".

Starting with Libby Herz's drama-filled connection with Dr. Lumin in Letting Go, Roth has consistently employed the world of psychoanalytical themes, rhetoric and style beginning with Portnoy's Complaint's Alexander Portnoy's monogolous self-confessions to his totally silent psychoanalyst, Dr. Otto Spielvogel, through My Life as a Man, The Breast's David Kepesh's psychoanalysis with Dr. Klinger and The Professor of Desire. Book figures' motives are explored and exploited. If his figures are not undergoing "the talking cure", they are exploring motives and psycho-dramatizing their returns to the primal scene.

Roth pays homage to psychoanalysis at every turn and, as Berman, asserts, "...pays tribute to psychoanalysis by demystifying the patient-analyst relationship and by refusing to render therapists into caricatures or mythic figures."

Portnoy's Complaint (1969) is Roth's and America's most adulated psychoanalytic monologue. Alex Portnoy's reading consists of the set of Freud's Collected Papers. In this way Portnoy converts Freudian thinking into imaginatively and playfully rendered "self-play" in a prose form that is decidedly psychoanalytical.

Kleinschmidt's essay was not well enough disguised (perhaps the analyst ironically and Freudianly wanted to get caught in his act of betrayal). The analyst, Dr. Spielvogel's psychoanalytical diagnosis of Tarnopol in My Life as a Man was Roth's bitter response to Kleinschmidt's perfidity against him. Dr. Spielvogel's account of Tarnopol psychological dysfunction is identical to Dr. Kleinschmidt's description of the artist he discusses in his own essay.

This then is the heart and the meat of this volume of never-before-published essays and interviews on analyzing Roth in psychological Roth's work and sometimes Roth in psychological terms. 

Key Points