Searching the bookshelf of a friend much better read than me for some holiday reading, I more or less randomly pulled down Assays, a 1961 prose anthology by Kenneth Rexroth. The pieces are wide-ranging and generally well done, though Rexroth is rather showoffy about his knowledge (as self-educated writers tend to be) and often gets caught up in the intellectual currents of his time. In his discussion of the American historian Francis Parkman (1823–93), for instance, I encountered the following:

In college days he took several long trips in the New England and New York backwoods; then a walking trip across Sicily and much of Italy as the beginning of a year on the Grand Tour; then a trip far out on the Oregon Trail, where he traveled as a guest with the Sioux.
In later years Parkman was to attribute his variously described incapacitating illness to incidents on all three of these excursions. One way or another he always blamed his poor health on the strenuous life of his youth. What seems to have happened is that, first casually in Sicily and Naples, and then in all its glory at the headwaters of the Missouri, he met his Id, and it was too much for him. The memory of the abandoned, dark-eyed signorine by the Porta Capuana and the naked Sioux belles disporting themselves in the waters of the Missouri prostrated him for the rest of his life. For forty years he devoted himself to justifying the triumph of anal over oral sexuality — or, in the words of another great Puritan, the ways of God to man.

It’s sobering to remember that passages like the last two sentences here — in which Rexroth attributes an illness that left Parkman blind and immobile for long stretches to the sight of a naked girl, then uses competing bedroom preferences as a metaphor not just for the settlement of the American West but for the will of the Almighty Himself — were not long ago considered the epitome of sophistication.

Freudianism, like Marxism, sought to replace the primitive relic of religion with modern science, logic, and reason. Nowadays the absurdities of both these movements — the tragedy of Communism and the farce of psychoanalysis — are becoming clear even to the most highly educated, and are being widely jettisoned (a bit more slowly in Marx’s case due to the dead hands of tyranny and tenure), or else clung to as “useful tools” or noble efforts containing scattered bits of wisdom. Religious faith, meanwhile, endures virtually undiminished. It all goes to show that if you’re proposing a belief system to take the place of God, it should at least be a bit more plausible.

P.S. In Rexroth’s defense, he half realized all this himself. In a 1958 review of the letters of Van Gogh, collected in the same volume, he wrote:

There is a bit by a psychiatrist in the documents appended to these letters. It is amusing because it is in the jabberwocky of an only recently abandoned school of psychiatry and makes you realize what jabberwocky our own psychiatry will be in another fifty years.