SECRETS OF THE SOUL : A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis.
By Eli Zaretsky. Illustrated. 429 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
Almost from the moment of its inception in the opening decades of the 20th century, when its cigar-addicted founder -- the son of a wool salesman from Galicia in Poland -- published his preposterous-sounding, sex-fixated theories about the baroque motives that lie behind observable human behavior, the mongrel of a discipline known as psychoanalysis was in a struggle for its life. A mixture of science, angst and imaginative reconstruction based on the often exotic symptomatology (including inexplicable paralyses and arcane fetishes) that plagued the patients who presented themselves at Sigmund Freud's gemütlich office at 19 Berggasse in Vienna, ''the talking cure'' was always the object of derision as much as of excitement. Karl Kraus, the scathing Viennese wit, was early to the name-calling, describing psychoanalysis as the disease it purports to cure. Sartre consigned to the dustbin of bad faith Freud's ''double-dealing'' division of the psychic whole into the ego and id. And Nabokov wrote off the whole business -- especially its erotic reductionism -- as ''mumbo-jumbo''; we must remember, Humbert Humbert sardonically points out, ''that a pistol is the Freudian symbol for the Ur-father's central forelimb.''
