Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/November 18, 1952

::::::::::::::::::::To Robert Lindner
::::::::::::::::::::November 18, 1952
Dear Dr. Lindner,
I wish I had been able to write you a long letter on your book at the time I finished it a month ago (unfortunately I was pretty much caught up in the business of finishing a first draft of my own) for the ideas and criticisms I had about Prescription for Rebellion were far more sharp and for that matter passionate than they are now. But the thing which is most important is to write to you, because I think you’ve written a bad book, and I think it’s a thundering pity when so much of what you have to say has not been said, and should be said in the very best way.
First of all, I think I’m very angry at you. I read the first fifty pages or so with quite a bit of excitement, and I had the feeling that here at last was an analyst who had the courage to attack everything that I have found most dispiriting in psychoanalysis: to wit, almost exactly as you say, that this most radical body of new information has been perverted into a kind of sophisticated pater-familias, and that the body of therapy moved in exactly the wrong direction. I suppose what I hoped for among other things, was a detailed analysis of all the problems of therapy, and how they would be treated concretely in an analysis which was concerned with rebellion rather than adjustment. Instead I think you deserted what was the bedrock of your book and went off on a series of rather fantastic excursions, so at the end one has found in three hundred pages, a summation of psychoanalytical schools, a theory of history (in twenty pages) a prescription for the world’s ills, a singularly bombastic attack on Marxism, a call to action which must apologize for its penury, and pages and pages of—to be brutally frank—the sort of exhortative prose that one associates with such books as Peace of Mind. The worst of all is that when you are done, I for one had no idea at all of what one is supposed to rebel against. It’s all very well to talk about the limiting triangle, but rebellion as a way of life consists of choosing a thousand courses, each for something specific. How one can speak of rebellion without speaking of society is utterly beyond my comprehension. For example, one must finally believe that American society is either capable or not capable of continuing to function, or think that the optimum society for man must be equalitarian and libertarian (my conception of socialism) or that such distinctions and such goals are ill-founded. One must feel that a society which warps, corrupts and ‘adjusts’ its members must either be destroyed, or to the contrary modified. 
To be a rebel without ever posing these problems, is like being an analyst without studying Freud. I was a little aghast that a book which calls itself Prescription for Rebellion and fulminates against adjustment, never attempts to give more than a few passing epithets to the society which demands adjustment. It seems to me that you come out by the same door as all the adjustment analysts. “Arise ye wretched of the earth—you have nothing to lose but your toilet training.” Let me make this clearer. What is your rebel’s view toward marriage? Toward sex? Toward family? Toward capitalism? Toward society? Toward war? Toward all the terrible and very definite problems of such things as Korea, the defense of the West, etc. etc. I don’t ask that you write a political or a sexual treatise, but I wonder why there is no window in your view which includes such matters. I don’t even know how you can differentiate yourself from so many of the analysts I know, intelligent liberal men, whom you would claim promulgate the adjustment fallacy. It seems to me they would be quite justified in saying, “So far as I can make out what Lindner is saying, his idea of rebellion is the same as our idea of adjustment. We, too, want people to be spontaneous, healthy, constructive, tense, critical, etc. etc.”
There’s no getting around it. If you are really a rebel, and you really preach rebellion you’ve got to end up with something a little more startling and unpalatable than “let’s try to improve the level of school teachers.”
Moreover, I resented the ambitiousness of your book. A theory of history if it is to be something other than cocktail party talk must be more than grandiloquent and confined to twenty pages; an attack on Marxism if it is to be other than fashionable has to be a little bit more precise than (I quote approximately) “his economic theories have long been disproved.” How have they been disproved? By whom? By what economic data? If you’re going to be truly serious and truly ambitious, you owe it to yourself to study economics, and to be able to disprove a book like Das Kapital concretely and not condescendingly.
I consider myself to be a rebel and a radical, an anti-communist radical who believes that both the Soviet Union and the United States are both driven by insoluble economic problems toward war, a war which may destroy civilization—I tried to express those ideas in my last book, Barbary Shore. Since I consider myself neither a True Believer, “proletarianized” nor “adjusted,” I must say that you alienate a very large part of your small audience when you make attacks so clumsily on Marx and company, that I really wonder whether you have read Das Kapital, whether you’re familiar with the tragic history of the Russian Revolution, have grappled with the kind of things Reich engaged in The Sexual Revolution, or if your ideas on revolution as opposed to rebellion come from no higher source than Philip Wylie or someone like him. I will add in case you may think that this is only in response to my Marxist fanaticism that I was terribly disappointed in your book long before you got around to disposing of Father Karl.
I don’t pretend to know all the answers, or to be less pompous, I’m not asking you to write the kind of book which will accord exactly with every one of my ideas as they exist at this moment. What I do ask is that you be truly serious, and that you keep to what you know, and that when you attack, you know what you are talking about because it comes from your experience and your study. Many years ago I worked in a mental hospital for about a week—I could stand it no longer—and I was very excited about what you had to say about methods of treating the insane, for at the time I was horrified by the callousness of the doctors, and the roaring brutality of such therapy as the hydro baths. I assumed that my reactions of disgust and horror were perhaps misplaced for I knew so little about the subject and was so inadequate for the job of an attendant. In your chapter on how psychotics are treated, I was able to learn something, and something well worth-while—you gave an important confirmation and extension to my experience, you taught me something. And the reason was there you knew what you were talking about both by experience and study. [. . .]
Most of all, what I would like to do, is argue and discuss with you sometime. Do you ever get to New York? My phone number is SP 7-3572, and my address is 41 First Avenue. Perhaps we can get together, and perhaps we can learn something from each other. There are very few of us, and therefore we must be very critical of one another, and more than good in our actions and words.
::::::::::::::::::::Yours warmly,
::::::::::::::::::::Norman Mailer