Nature Heals: Psychological Essays

by Paul Goodman, Taylor Stoehr (Editor)

Book by Goodman, Paul

Genres: Psychology

259 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Paul Goodman was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. His radicalism was rooted in psychological theory. He co-wrote the theory behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich's radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.
His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream, antiestablishment cultural theorist. Goodman became known as "the philosopher of the New Left" and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life. Goodman is remembered for his utopian proposals and principled belief in human potential.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is how Goodreads is introjecting Paul Goodman:

Paul Goodman (9/9/11–8/2/72) was an American sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist, public intellectual & gay-rights activist.

Note that almost every part of this is wrong; parts of it are, in fact, inaccurate. Yes, Goodman was a public intellectual, and a poet. Trained at the University of Chicago in Aristotle and literary criticism, his sociology was strictly amateur. Why a poet should need a separate designation as a "writer" is anyone's guess. Goodman was an anarchist, though his anarchism was of a sexual kind that in our period would get described the way the Rolling Stones were in his -- "those Charming Deviationists!" I defy any Paul Goodman scholar to show me how Goodman's social behavior fit within what is described as a "gay-rights," or post-Stonewall activism. In short, the above biography lacks a quality Goodman highly values in this volume: "contact."

This book came out five years after Goodman's death. Goodman's publication record was spotty: he published a lot, but only in the last twelve years of his life was it with a major publisher -- much of his book-publication before Growing Up Absurd (1960) was with small publishers. Yet periodical publication was a constant of his life, and much of it remained uncollected at his death. His literary executor, (the Hawthorne scholar-poet) Taylor Stoehr, collected his published psychological essays, on Freud, on Reich, on racism, on "being queer" (Goodman was a straight white male but with a penchant for black young men), and on writing, in Nature Heals, the title a credo borrowed from the hero of Goodman's novel, Empire City.

There are finds: the first essay, "The Father of the Psychoanalytic Movement," is a stunning hybrid-type essay, with Goodman reading, parabolically, six years after Freud's death, as Adam Phillips will, later, the life psychoanalytically.

In "Eros, or the Drawing of the Bow," Goodman translates a poem from a follower of Anacreon, that retells the tale from the point of view of one smitten by Eros' wet bow. The passage seems related, for Goodman, to Odyssey xxi. The whole thing seems a highly coded parable on penis envy and homosexuality.

A third essay, "The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud," from 1945, places Goodman as central to the cultural left in the pastoral period of anarchism after the War. I know this judgment will disappoint those who, cowed by the critique of it laid on by that most corrupt of thinkers, George Orwell, in his "Politics and the English Language," used Goodman to piss on scholarly efforts to summarize a point of view before attacking it; a scruple to which Orwell himself, as he readily admits, will not stoop. Goodman writes about Reich here in the context of a consensus "revision" of Freud reflected in Karen Horney and Erich Fromm. In the section Orwell quotes, Goodman summarizes especially Fromm. As Orwell remarks, if you read the essay it would make sense, but why should that matter to Orwell? Exactly.

Goodman's essay, meantime, identifies the Freudian countercultural seam the Left Freudians, like Reich, "carry into social action" through their readings of Freud. The consensus psychoanalysts like Horney and Fromm misrepresent "the original instinct theory," by failing to perceive "the beautiful intuitive centrality among the sciences" in which Freud places the organism. "The energy of anxiety is the energy of repressed sexuality" (italics in the original), an early position of Freud's he later revised, such that children build a "character armor" around their sexuality. The insight is on behalf of Fleiss' premise of universal bi-sexuality.

[Bruno Lopes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uma leitura muito enriquecedora. É possível entrar no mundo do que Goodman pensava, aqui ele trata sobre uma diversidade de temas e nunca se estabelece num único pensamento ou visão de mundo. Sua escrita muitas vezes me confunde, muitas vezes não adota uma escrita muito linear. Esperava que ele escreveria mais sobre psicologia nesse livro, em alguns momentos se confunde com sua leitura social. Porém, há momentos em que há grandes insights sobre a psicologia, apenas gostaria que fosse uma exploração mais profunda.

[Jerome · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent, though mixed bag of essays by someone once considered the most famous anarchist in the United States. While insightful, Goodman's writing tends to meander. The first half of the book is comprised of essays on Freud and Reich, the rest on sundry other topics. IMO, the essays "Reflections on Racism," "The Psychology of Being Powerless," and "The Politics of Being Queer" are the best in the book.

[Jesse Cohn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, though troublesome to me -- I have difficulty connecting the psychoanalytic Paul Goodman to the much more level-headed social thinker Paul Goodman.