Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/Introduction: Difference between revisions

In the late 1970s my father invited me to have a discussion about Freud and psychoanalysis. I had just begun my psychoanalytic studies and we both thought something interesting might come of it. But it was close to a disaster. He was off and running with a plethora of ideas before I was able to sit down, and then took the discussion to a level for which I wasn’t prepared. During his two-hour monologue, I had the sensation he was after something that I could not provide. When I read “Lipton’s” and the Mailer-Lindner correspondence, I wondered if on that occasion with me Mailer was trying to resurrect his old friend, Robert Lindner, and experience once again those intense and stimulating conversations. It was, of course, a failed exercise, doomed from the start, because I was his daughter and not his trusted friend. And by that time he was no longer the young rebel he had been in the mid-1950s.