Last Good Freudian

In this forthright memoir, Webster (president of PEN West and author of Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study) looks back with painful honesty at her privileged but emotionally troubled Manhattan childhood and her life in analysis. Citing a maternal family history of mental illness, she explains, ""I was born and brought up to be in psychoanalysis. As a result, much of my adult life was spent on the couch."" Capably narrating her voyage of self-discovery, she offers a personal perspective on the uses and misuses of Freudian theory. Webster blames her emotionally unstable mother--abstract expressionist painter Ethel Schwabacher--for her unhappy childhood and for her own mistakes as a parent. Schwabacher, who relied on a circle of psychoanalysts steeped in Freudian orthodoxy, attempted suicide more than once (most traumatically just after her husband died; Webster, then 10 years old, found her comatose mother). Surrounded by the children of a tight group of early Freudians at the progressive Dalton School, Webster started seeing a therapist before she was out of high school. It wasn't until midlife that she broke free from her therapists' advice to submit to a higher male authority in her duties as student, wife and mother, and finally found her true voice, which resonates powerfully in this absorbing tale of discovery and pain. Photos. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.]