AT HOME Essays 1982-1988 by Gore...

AT HOME Essays 1982-1988 by Gore Vidal (Random House: $18.95)

Gore Vidal is an enigma to many, writing about American political power as if he were a consummate insider, even though his attempts to win congressional office have been unsuccessful, and creating novels full of oblique patriotism, even though his essays relentlessly excoriate America. Vidal seems unperturbed by these contradictions, however, in this collection of previously published essays on subjects ranging from Henry James to Nancy Reagan. Managing to harmoniously blend patriotic fervor with irreverence, Vidal believes, with some reason, that while his prose is outside the mainstream of American public opinion, it is provocative enough to capture attention on Capitol Hill, and while his disdain of present realities is pronounced, it is compensated by his pride in our nation’s early ideals.

Readers are likely to feel jarred nevertheless, for these pieces contain some of the most biting sentences Vidal has written. On President Eisenhower’s denunciation of the press at the 1964 Republican Convention: “At last Ike was giving it to those commie-wierdo(s) . . . who did not believe in the real America of humming electrical chairs, well-packed prisons, and kitchens filled with every electrical device that a small brown person of extra-national provenance might successfully operate at a fraction of the legal minimum wage.”

When not on the attack, Vidal devotes considerable space in these essays to defending himself against charges of hubris (valid, for here he proclaims himself “(America’s) current historian”) and of prejudice against Jews and Asians (invalid, for he is not so much criticizing these groups as warning about the dangers of Israeli militarism and the decline of American competitiveness). Vidal’s hubris sometimes has led to exhibitionism: While escorting his grandfather, a congressman, to the Senate floor one day, Vidal wore nothing but bathing trunks. But even it is an asset in a sense, for America is lacking, as Vidal writes, in “traditional explainers, examiners, prophets,” and so Vidal’s self-appointed role as a leading American man of letters does indeed fill a gap.

THE BOY WHO COULDN’T STOP WASHING The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Judith Rapoport (E.P. Dutton: $18.95)

One young woman awakens at 6 every Sunday morning to spend three hours washing the walls of her room. A psychologist cannot drive without believing he has hit someone and spending hours looking for a body on the roadside. A spinster regularly sprinkles symmetrical piles of confectioners’ sugar over her floors, furniture and beds.

What these people have in common is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), a disease that disables from 4 to 6 million Americans, convincing them that “something terrible will happen” unless they repeatedly carry out strange chores that usually involve washing, checking or counting. Once thought to be a psychological problem, OCD is now believed to have a biological basis. New technology such as Positron Emission Tomography scanning has shown that production of serotonin, a chemical substance that carries messages between brain cells, is abnormal in OCD sufferers.

Judith Rapoport, chief of child psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health, offers theories that are mostly speculative, for the serotonin abnormality is the only biological factor yet associated with OCD. Her explanations, nevertheless, are the most plausible offered in the popular press to date. OCD could be caused, she suggests, when a virus infects the basal ganglia, a portion of the lower brain. As one of the oldest, and thus most primitive parts of the brain, the basal ganglia help us carry out basic survival functions such as monitoring the environment for danger; OCD might prevent this usual checking function from being shut off, causing what the author terms “tics of the mind” or “hiccups in the brain.”

What’s most fascinating about current OCD research is that it calls into question our pat divisions between the higher brain (associated with reasoning) and the lower brain (associated with instinct). In OCD, primitive brain functions, such as surveying the environment for danger, are given complex emotional depth; Rapoport’s patients, for instance, insist that their psyche convinces them to take bizarre actions. This suggests that our identity, our conscious “I,” which we like to think is based on higher reasoning, might be more affected by the lower brain than we have previously believed.

Unfortunately, while Rapoport notes that OCD might eventually point toward “a biology of knowing,” she doesn’t examine these deeper implications of OCD. Rather than systematically studying the biology of OCD, the behavior of its victims and the issues of free will raised by the disease, Rapoport offers a collection of stories about OCD sufferers, with a few paragraphs about biology in each section. Rapoport thus skirts over many interesting issues, such as whether OCD research lends any scientific credence to Jung’s theory of the collective unconsciousness, which holds that the human mind is less an individual creation than an inherited set of assumptions and instincts. This book is well worth reading despite its lack of scientific depth, though, both for its clear writing and absorbing subject.

BELONGING IN AMERICA Reading Between the Lines by Constance Perin (University of Wisconsin: $24.50)

The author’s goal--to create an anthropology of culture in the developed world--might sound weighty and abstruse, but the inspiration behind her project is simple: dogs. Disturbed that her alarm clocks--the neighbor’s cocker spaniels--were sounding at 6 instead of 7:30 in the morning, Constance Perin wrote a note to her neighbor, whom, she realized, she had not yet met. Her neighbor replied enthusiastically, mentioning that all of the other neighbors who complained did so anonymously. Perin, an independent scholar now researching information technology for MIT’s Sloan School of Management, became “preoccupied” by the notion that Americans are increasingly alienated from their neighbors. Her concern grew into a broader inquiry into sociology (she studies how neighborhoods have become “depleted . . . of social trust”) and law (the courts allow American society some measure of “community,” she writes, enabling us to collectively negotiate meanings). As an anthropologist in the unusual position of examining her own culture, Perin is sometimes overly self-conscious, enigmatic and prolix. At its best, however, “Belonging in America” is a free-spirited and far-sighted inquiry into how culture helps Americans find “meanings” by which to live.

FREUD AND JUNG Years of Friendship, Years of Loss by Linda Lewis Donn (Scribner’s: $19.95)

The author’s decision to profile the personal lives of Freud and Jung is compelling, for as with most pioneering social thinkers, the psychiatrists first looked inward before generalizing about others. Their close friendship between 1907 and 1913 is also of interest because it served as a sounding board for their ideas and, in fact, as a vital component of their sanity, which became precarious, as Linda Donn puts it, when they probed “the terrible beauty of the psyche.”

Jung often has been depicted as the renegade who rejected the role of heir that Freud had cast for him. He questioned, for example, whether Freud’s belief that all human behavior is based on early childhood experiences was adequate to explain such things as the rise of fascism in Germany. Donn’s original research shows, however, that after his break with Freud, Jung sank into deep despair, telling a friend, “there is nothing to believe in.” Freud, in contrast, became angry and defensive after the falling out, Donn reports, at one point calling Jung “crassly stupid.”

Unfortunately, excepting the above, Donn’s research fails to capture the two men’s feelings and ideas with much intimacy. In a style that sometimes afflicts American journalism, Donn emphasizes color for the sake of color, detail for the sake of detail, losing her focus in the process. Donn devotes excessive space to tertiary characters, for instance, at one point digressing from a grim account of Freud’s persecution by the Nazis to write about the “pink cheeks and blue eyes” of an American ambassador, which “called up a lighthearted image. . . .”

Donn’s account is often vivid, however, as an overview of how the two men responded to pressures in European society. To the end, Freud seemed unintimidated by the Nazis, Donn reports. When forced to sign a testament that he had been treated fairly by the Nazis, for example, Freud added, “I can recommend the Gestapo very much to everyone.”