A Witch Doctor’s Tale
Loathsome Women.
by Leopold Stein, M.D., with Martha Alexander.
McGraw Hill. 243 pp. $4.50.
Written by a Jungian psychoanalyst, Loathsome Women is a book about four witches. That the author, Dr. Leopold Stein (former chairman of the British Society of Analytical Psychology, and assistant editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology) found the time and interest for research into witchcraft and witchlore is admirable enough. But when he merges his professional skills with his hobby—“I was [ILLEGIBLE] earnestly pursuing my study of the possible relationship between witches and these four patients”—a book is horn. (A collaborator, Martha Alexander, presumably did the actual writing.)
As Dr. Stein points out, each generation had its witches, and each its method of dealing with them. We now scoff at such obsolete apparatus as cauldrons, stakes, and vulgar fireworks. The modern witch, sensitive and intellectual as she is, requires more refined treatment. Today her exorcisement is known as psychoanalysis.
The four women who come to Dr. Stein’s sanctum represent different species of “witches.” Sybil is the “enchantress” type, beautiful and seductive. Her chief difficulty is sleeplessness. By her wiles she has driven her husband to drink. Daphne is sweet, but has “pointed white teeth.” She is a “spider,” who renders her married lover weak and helpess. Judith is concerned about her husband, who refuses to see her. He is in a sanitorium suffering a nervous breakdown, and a functional blindness. Can Judith’s husband be helped? Only through her analysis, answers Dr. Stein, and the “hag” type witch becomes patient number three. Dora is a vegetarian (a defense against her desire to chop people up). She is the whimpering “crone.” She can stay only within a circumscribed area of her home, and is afraid to venture forth. Some time ago her husband d ed, like a child, in her arms.
Having met his patients, Dr. Stein sets about describing how he cured them—a truly herculean task, as he seems to have experienced it. “These women led me on many dark and devious paths before my association with them ended, and the same forces which threatened them came to threaten me.”
Sigmund Freud might have been appalled at the prospect of treating such horrendous women, but Dr. Stein is undaunted. At times his witches (a word he reiterates ad nauseam) very nearly get the better of him. “She reminded me of the Sphinx, that enigmatic creature, who posed baffling questions, the lion with the head of a woman. I remembered that those who could not answer this creature’s riddle died. I took this as a warning.” The story proceeds like an old-fashioned movie, with the analyst appearing to be in constant danger, but remaining, nevertheless, the master of his emotions. “I had been in similar situations before, and I was sure that as long as I remained aware of what was going on, my patient was unlikely to strike me. Yet I was assailed by a fear so strong, that for a moment I was literally frozen with horror.”
Finally, Dr. Stein enters the realm of the supernatural. As he strains the reader’s credulity, one almost hopes, for the analyst’s sake, that he is writing with tongue in cheek: “the smeared mouth and the stained teeth . . . reminded me of blood—of a vampire bloated with blood after a feast.” In his inexorable witchhunt, he cites such symptoms as an inability on the part of his distressed women to shed tears, or their propensity to perform magic. One of his ladies, for example, who had wished that her lover’s wife might die, “had, it seemed, almost destroyed the wife of her lover.” By using the same methods, and in fact, the same patients, Dr. Stein could just as well have proved that there are fairies or angels.
It is interesting, if not surprising, to note that the husbands and lovers of Loathsome Women cannot be accounted responsible in their relationships. Seemingly nothing more than innocent victims of the “witches,” they are always under their evil influences or “spells.” Hence, as the analyst’s patients achieve a cure, the men with whom they are allied, responding like parasites, gain full maturity. Sybil’s husband stops drinking as she gains insight into her problems. Their relationship grows stronger. As Daphne gets ready to relinquish her lover, he returns to his wife, a better man for all of that. Through her analysis, Judith learns that “left” represents her unconscious, and “right” her full consciousness. Her husband slowly recovers some use of his right eye. Later he asks to see her, and there is a touching reunion. Dora comes to understand her cannibalistic guilt and fears of death. She knows too, that she once enjoyed the sexual power she had over her dying husband. At last she is able to walk about freely. “‘I can pass the butcher now,’ she informed me, ‘and I can go in too. I’ve even become quite friendly with the butcher’s boy.’”
In surveying the recent spate of case histories, written to titillate if not edify its readers, it would seem that the biggest troublemakers are women—Ashley Montagu notwithstanding. Now Dr. Stein puts his contribution on the market, pandering to the popular taste for such literature with a hard sell that goes far beyond the bounds of scientific truth. His book is a mockery of the entire psychoanalytic movement.
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