was meant to mean. I can still remember my puzzled interest in what
seemed to me a mix of solicitude and barely concealed condescen-
sion. While stifling the urge to pursue the matter, I also put aside the
impulse to say goodbye, go study chemistry rather than listen to Miss
Freud's lecture. I realized that such a decision, whatever its basis,
would be seen only as a confirmation that I was, indeed, a bit fright-
ened. In self-defense, I showed a heightened interest in both Freuds
while we made haste to get to the lecture hall early.

We sat fairly close to the front. While we were waiting, we
looked around at the others, and noticed that many, indeed most of
them, weren't our age, weren't students at all. In the 1950s, the "New
Lecture Hall" was much used (it is now in great need of repair). In
those days, attendance was taken at the beginning of each class, so I
would ordinarily have sat in an assigned seat. It seemed doubly
strange, then, to be sitting where I wished, and to be among so many
" adults." Quite a few spoke in accents, and I was not always able to
fathom the meaning of many words used by those who did speak
excellent English. My friend observed my perplexity, hastened to
help me out: we were in the midst of the psychoanalytic commu-
nity." Again I didn't ask him what he meant for fear of being thought
stupid; but I was not at all reassured. I knew next to nothing then
about psychiatry or psychoanalysis, only that Sigmund Freud was
someone important in twentieth-century cultural or intellectual his-
tory, someone who had figured out how the mind works, what
dreams meant, and a way of helping people who had gotten into
psychological trouble. The phrase "psychoanalytic community," for
an instant, at least, conjured in my mind the thought of a somewhat
disturbed group of people--maybe "patients" who lived in Cam-
bridge and had been treated by this or that psychiatrist and who now
wanted to hear a prominent one speak. Years later, of course, lying on
the couch and letting all things come to mind, into words, I would
recall my ignorance that afternoon--a twenty-year-old brought up
by a devoutly religious mother from an Iowa farm and an English-
born scientist father with little interest in or patience for the social
sciences, never mind, to use Freud's word, matters "metapsychologi-
cal." I would also recall the nature of that historical moment--the

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