SOURCE: "Salinger's 'Franny': Homoerotic Imagery," in American Imago, Vol. 22, Nos. 1-2, Spring-Summer, 1965, pp. 57-76.

[In the following essay, Seitzman provides a psychoanalytic reading of "Franny. "]

Among current American writers of fiction, no other writer has exerted so deep an influence as J. D. Salinger on college students of the past decade. His novel Catcher in the Rye is possibly the most widely read book among the college set. His writings have also received serious study by critics. His recent Franny and Zooey is particularly rich in psychoanalytic import.

"Franny" is the story of a brief intellectual encounter between two young college students, Lane Coutell and his "date," Franny Glass. Both had been looking forward to the exciting weekend of the big Yale-Princeton game. A studied nonchalance covers Lane's excited anticipation as he waits for the train. He receives a warm kiss from his "date" when she meets him. An hour later, they are having lunch in a French restaurant. Immediately, the beautiful weekend with its promise of love begins to disintegrate. By the time Lane has finished his meal, Franny is having a "nervous breakdown," and the hope of a glorious time together has vanished. How did this happen?

The beginning of the debacle is apparent from the first word Lane utters after he has monopolized the conversation at the table for fifteen minutes. Someone—it turns out to be Flaubert—lacked "testicularity." Lane had expected his paper on Flaubert to go over like a "goddam lead balloon, and when I got it back with this goddam 'A' on it in letters about six feet high, I swear I nearly keeled over."

This need to impress his girl with his achievement and his masculinity is received in a manner that contrasts with the warmth of her welcome and the adolescent intoxication of the letter Lane had read for the nth time on the station platform. She refuses Lane's bid to be admired, and wants to know why Lane had expected the paper to go over like a lead balloon. This abrupt confrontation instantly arouses his anger, which he then represses—temporarily. He explains that his instructor is "a big Flaubert man." Now Franny backs down temporarily.

Lane then explains his thesis in a few sentences that include a seeming attack on psychoanalysis. In reality, it is a defense of it. Though "no Freudian man," he had tried to explain "why he (Flaubert) was so neurotically attracted to the mot juste . . . that none of the really good boys—Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Shakespeare . . . were such goddam word-squeezers." Franny's only response is, "You going to eat your olive, or what?"

From Lane's cold answer, she knows she has asked the wrong question. "What was worse, she suddenly didn't want the olive at all and wondered why she had even asked for it."

After her collapse at the end of the story, Franny resorts to a ritualistic mumbling of the "Jesus prayer," consisting of a single sentence, repeated over and over again, asking Jesus to have mercy on her. The prayer and the method of reciting it are the central part of the mystique set forth in a little book which she carries with her at all times and which she attempts at first to hide from Lane. In the light of the importance to her of this compulsive, ritualistic prayer, we can see that any criticism of the mot juste would be interpreted by her as an attack on herself—specifically, on her defensive armor, the unconscious fantasy of the magical power of the word. The close connection between religious ritual and compulsion has been pointed out by Freud and by Reik, who showed how ritual—religious or non-religious—serves to repress the forbidden, and is a powerful device to allay anxiety. In Franny's case, the compulsive ritual takes the form of the prayerful word.

An added provocation is Lane's use of the term "word-squeezer." After Franny's tremendous hostility has become apparent, her anal eroticism is disclosed in a speech in which she responds to Lane's challenge to tell him what a real poet is. The meaning is apparent in the choice of the words "do something," "leave something," "after you get off," "droppings." Italics are in the original.

" . . . If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem, for heaven's sake. It may be just some kind of terrible fascinating, syntaxy droppings—excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poormen."

Analysis of patients who are interested in writing reveals that frequently words are equated in the unconscious with feces, and that the love of words goes back to a time when the child values his feces as part of himself. In this sense, the unconscious hostility surrounding her anality is apparently switched on by Lane's equally unconscious signals.

Franny's hostility, her intense rivalary, and her scarcely-concealed wish to emasculate all men are the root of her problem. After she has eaten his olive, Lane makes another attempt to show that his instructor thought he ought to publish the "goddam paper." Still trying to prove his masculinity, he hopes to accomplish this now by other means—cutting down the size of both Flaubert and his own rivals. "As a matter of fact, I don't think there've been any really incisive jobs done on him in the last—." The italics reveal that unconsciously he too is engaged in the business of "cutting."

This maneuver succeeds only in releasing the attack Franny has been suppressing till now. She employs at this point two characteristic mechanisms of defense—denial and projection. She attempts to deny the hostility boiling within her and to project it on to Lane by telling him that he sounds like a "section man,"—someone who is not as "big" as a professor, someone who is constantly criticizing. She launches a devastating attack on the ways in which the "little" section men try to destroy the reputations of the literary great in their college classes. She tries to conceal her own hostility, which seeps through anyway, by criticizing the critics. (Incidentally, she engages in a cutting-down to size of her own through the use of the adjective "little.")

Now her hostility is out in the open and Lane can no longer ignore it. By destroying all section men, she has destroyed Lane's admirer together with Lane himself. He proceeds to expose her hostility in open counterattack. He tells her she has a "goddam bug today." She retreats under the assault and admits she has felt "destructive" all week. The waiter's fortuitous interruption brings about a temporary reduction of tension which enables Franny to recognize once again her own hostility. And again there is a characteristic defense against feelings of detachment, hostility, and guilt: pseudo-affection.

She covers Lane's hand with her own and promises to "snap out of it."

Before we go on to Lane's counterattack, let us return to the beginning of the story, for in the first six pages the author foreshadows with sharp insight all that is to happen, and renders it inevitable.

When we first meet Lane, he is waiting on an open cold railroad platform. Lane is excited about Franny's imminent arrival, but he makes every effort to conceal his feelings. He takes from his pocket a letter she has sent him that week and rereads it.

After Franny has greeted him with a kiss, her first remarks are, "Did you get my letter, . . . You look almost frozen, you poor man. Why didn't you wait inside. Did you get my letter?" Yet he asks, "Which letter?" Why does he feign ignorance?

Reviewing the remarks bracketed between her questions, we note that they consist of a form of sympathy that does not accord with an adolescent's masculine self-image. Lane had braved the cold partly from a need to prove his masculinity. The author shows this in a subtle way. The hand that was about to adjust the muffler against the cold reached for her letter instead. The change of mind and the use of the same hand are details introduced for one purpose only—to show that he is tough and manly. And what does Franny do immediately upon meeting him? She reduces him to a "poor" frozen man. In reprisal, when he admits he has received the letter, a love letter, he does so in a very curt manner, abruptly changing the subject.

The letter itself merits attention, for while it is adolescent in its lavish expression of love, its wild exuberance of spirit, and its inconsistencies, it gives us important clues to Franny's personality. Above all, we are able to see the alternating cycles of love and hate, compliance and rebellion.

One purpose of the letter is to "build up" Lane. She accomplishes this by telling him she is taking his advice about using the dictionary more often to improve her spelling, and then proceeds to prove that she is really disregarding his advice: "retiscent (sp?)." But the hostility can't be contained—"so if it cramps my style your (sic!) to blame." This is followed by defensive protestations of love which reveal the wish to destroy: "I love you to pieces." Again, she compliments his intellect: "I absolutely adore your letter, especially the part about Eliot." But in the next sentence, the highly intellectual Franny rejects Eliot (and with him Lane) and lauds instead Sappho, the poetess of passion: "I think I'm beginning to look down on all poets except Sappho." On one level, she hints at being in love with Lane through her appreciation of Sappho. But there is another level: She will write a term paper on Sappho "if I can get the moron they assigned me as advisor to let me." Is it accidental that Franny counterposes to the male that female poet of ancient Lesbos whose very name is synonymous with rejection of men?

The close association between love and hate, the need to use love to neutralize and conceal hate, the hatred of Lane's maleness, the resort to denial as a means of coping with her emotions, and the failure of this mechanism as the forces from the id threaten to overwhelm the ego are well illustrated in a few sentences:

"Do you love me? You didn't say once in your horrible letter. I hate you when your being hopelessly super-male and retiscent (sp?). Not really hate you but am constitutionally against strong, silent men. Not that you aren't strong but you know what I mean. It's getting so noisy here I can hardly hear myself think. Anyway I love you . . ."

The noises supervene just when she can no longer deny her true feelings.

She makes a final effort in her second postscript to deny the rivalry and resultant hostility with a spurious admission of inferiority and a counterfeit passivity which she immediately retracts because everything is too close to the surface:

"P.P.S. I sound so unintelligent and dimwitted when I write to you. Why? I give you my permission to analyze it. Let's just have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible, especially me. I love you."

Evidently the young "psychologist" who had investigated Flaubert's literary composition also has played the role of amateur psychoanalyst with Franny. If so, he may have contributed to her present mental state. Franny's violent reaction to Lane's interpretation of Flaubert is in part a negative reaction to the kind of therapy she has been receiving.

To an adolescent with problems of establishing his masculinity, the letter must have been a disturbing experience. His conflict over his maleness leads to a need to prove he is a man. Her conflict over her feminine role leads to a need to castrate men. And the more Lane tries to prove that he truly possesses the male organ the more Franny tries to prove that he is just as deficient as she.

Though hidden at first, the dynamics of the conflict operate inexorably. The station platform kiss is followed directly by her comment about how frozen the poor man looks. Similarly, Lane's explanation that he has been unable to get her superior accommodations leads to thoughts of three girls in one room, of male ineptness in general and Lane's in particular, and a recollection of a rainy night when Lane let a man take a taxi away from him:

"She hadn't especially minded that—that is, God it would be awful to have to be a man and have to get taxis in the rain—but she remembered Lane's really horrible hostile look at her as he reported back to the curb. Now, feeling oddly guilty as she thought about that and other things, she gave Lane's arm a special little pressure of simulated affection."

The free associations here are a clear delineation of the emotional pattern—anger over rivalry with men, contempt for the loser, denial of the contempt, anger, and hostility, followed by projection of these emotions, guilt over the anger, and finally pseudo-love to conceal the hostility and guilt.

In the taxi, the expression of pseudo-love shows that the next phase of the cycle has already started. At the restaurant, Lane sampled his martini, "then sat back and then briefly looked around the room with an almost palpable sense of well-being at finding himself. . . in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl . . ." Franny observes this "momentary little exposure." Instead of a feeling of inner pleasure, hers is one of guilt. The guilt is a reaction to her own anger.

Why the anger? It may be argued that Franny is here reacting against being valued for what she appears to be rather than for what she really is. It is true that Lane is much concerned with appearances. He showed that in his demeanor at the station. It reveals itself again when Franny is first experiencing collapse and Lane is left alone at the table: When he sees someone he knows across the room, he "adjusts his expression . . . [to] look attractively bored." However, this view overlooks an essential question: Why consciousness of inner worth versus pride in feminine attractiveness? Why not both?

No, Franny is angry because she does not want to see herself as a woman. The guilt is the superego's response to the anger at her being cast in a feminine role. Feeling guilty, she "sentenced herself to listen to Lane's ensuing conversation with a special semblance of absorption," which hides a preoccupation in another direction. It is the stillness that presages the tornado. Her seeming absorption is the right atmosphere for the emergence of Lane's need to prove his masculinity. It mimics the attentive neutrality of the psychoanalyst. Lane is emboldened by Franny's apparent passivity and holds forth for a quarter of an hour. What this discourse does to her competitiveness is easily imagined. It takes only Lane's comment about "testicularity" to supply the psychic spark for the explosion that has already been described and analyzed.

There are several points at which recognition of the effects of her behavior give Franny pause. She knows that she has been destructive all week, that she is ruining the weekend. But unaware of the underlying dynamics of her behavior and of the nature of Lane's problems, she is doomed to repetitions of her mechanisms of defense—denial, projection, and reaction formation. Only the arguments change: If she hadn't decided like a fool to go out for honors, she'd drop English. She's sick of conceited little "tearer-downers."

Now Lane goes over to the counteroffensive. He has caught her in a sweeping generalization about all members of English departments. When he protests that two of the best men in the country, poets, are in her department, she denies that they are "real" poets. He responds with a preconscious recognition of her need to emasculate by demanding to know whether by "real" she means "some bastard with wavy hair." He reminds her that only a month before she had said she liked Manlius. Franny answers: "I do like him. I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."

Franny is unable to respect men. She likes them only when she can feel sorry for them or look down on them, when they are not completely male. By castrating all men, she denies her own "deficiency."

Throughout the debate, Franny becomes increasingly disturbed. Anxiety symptoms appear. But it is precisely at the point at which she admits to not respecting anyone that something begins to break through. Later in the story she confirms the dawning recognition of her tremendous competitiveness and her hostility toward men. At the present moment, the indirect insult to Lane, the discomfiting recognition of her compulsive need to hurt him again and again, and the danger that some knowledge relating to her need to depreciate all men will break into consciousness combine to make her ill. She rushes out to the ladies' room, enters an enclosure, sits down, assumes an "almost fetal position," then breaks down. When the outburst subsides, she takes from her handbag a small book which she presses to her chest. It is a religious book, The Way of the Pilgrim. In "Zooey," we learn that it was once the property of her brother Seymour, the suicide.

The intermission in the ladies' room in this two-act drama is a convenient time to fill in the background of "Franny." Most of this material is drawn from "Zooey."

There had been seven children in the Glass family, products of a Jewish-Irish intermarriage. Five of the seven were boys. All of the children had been heard regularly on a children's quiz show, over a period of sixteen years. The family still treasured scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings about the child prodigies. There was an age difference of almost eighteen years between Seymour, the eldest, and Franny, the youngest. When the story opens, Seymour has been dead seven years, a suicide at the age of thirty-one, after having been in analysis.

But we need to fill in the emotional background ourselves. In children's quiz programs the outer facade of "cuteness," erudition, wit, and joviality that is presented to the public conceals a savage competition among the panel members to retain their places and to win money prizes. Added to this form of competition was another—that within the Glass family itself. It is probable that every child except Seymour competed with the siblings who preceded him. The burden on each succeeding child to preserve the "honor" of the family must have become heavy. The conflict in the identification with the older "heroes"—the love and admiration versus the jealousy and feelings of inadequacy—probably filled each child with neurotic guilt.

We can draw two other inferences: Through the years of growth, the family climate was dominated by a spirit of aggressive competition sponsored by the parents themselves. There must have been acute, deep-rooted resentment against the driving ambition of the parents.

Franny's attack on Lane has an immediate as well as an early history. The former is told to her brother in "Zooey." Shortly before the present incident, Franny had gone through a period of incessant carping:

"I actually reached a point where I said to myself, right out loud, like a lunatic, If I hear just one more picky, cavilling, unconstructive word out of you, Franny Glass, you and I are finished—but finished. And for a while I wasn't too bad."

The split of the self into superego and ego is clear. The former patently is criticizing the latter for loosening its defenses to permit the hostile forces in the id to break through. In the threat there is a recognition of the seriousness of the situation.

The ego obeyed the command of the sadistic superego in a fashion that accorded with the personality—through recourse to compulsive busywork. For a month the injunction worked. Then the defenses began to crumble. Franny arose early one morning after a sleepless night, went to a classroom, and "started writing things from Epictetus all over the blackboard." (Epictetus was the Greek Stoic philosopher who taught acceptance of all that life brought.) But this second attempt to use the superego and the ego-ideal to alleviate the intrapsychic struggle failed, and she resumed her uncontrollable "picking"—on her male professors, on Lane, on her roommate. Immediately afterward there came the worst symptom of all, the onset in class of an idea she could not get out of her head: "that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth." Money, property, knowledge all seemed the same to her. Perhaps knowledge was worst of all. And nowhere was there the "implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom."

The obsessive idea was regarded as the worst of all because a representation in the conscious mind of the unconscious conflict. Jones and Freud showed that the obsessional neurosis is a result of such a conflict, involving love and hate, pressing toward regression to the analsadistic stage of libidinal organization, followed by efforts to prevent the regression, and reaction formations against it. Franny's remarks reveal clearly the unconscious connection between the first treasure that is piled up—feces—and money.

The conflict over her studies and the acquisition of knowledge has another source: Franny makes no mention of the fact that the obsessive idea was not originally hers but Seymour's. Early in "Zooey" one of the points made in Buddy's letter so often reread by Zooey relates to Franny's early education. Seymour had persuaded Buddy, second eldest, that education is better "if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all, but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge." They therefore decided to teach the two youngest, Zooey and Franny, about the great religious figures of all faiths before they learned anything else. Presumably, this training would lead to the ultimate wisdom, a state of pure consciousness—satori—which "is to be with God before he said, Let there be light," that is, an unconscious form of enlightenment.

Franny's passionate advocacy of this teaching and her involvement with the little green book suggest acceptance of Seymour and identification with him. Satori is exactly what Franny is trying to achieve in the Jesus prayer, and this attempt has the flavor of a superego command. However, we know the ambivalent nature of identification. The ambivalence becomes clearer when we learn from Buddy's letter that in pursuance of their educational theory, Seymour and Buddy thought it a good idea to hold back from the youngsters earthly wisdom, including "the arts, sciences, classics, languages."

That this tampering with their education had been resented was acknowledged by Buddy. Perhaps he did not fully appreciate the reasons. While his brother and he were trying to insulate the youngest against mere knowledge, Zooey and Franny were engaged in just the opposite for the highly competitive radio quiz show. The latter were being hindered by the very persons they were trying to emulate and to rival. In effect, they had two sets of parents, with conflicting commands and prohibitions. The conflicts between the forces of compliance and defiance, between identification with parents and a pair of parent surrogates, could not help but generate powerful disturbances within.

We now begin to suspect that what was concealed in the obsessive idea that attacked knowledge and threatened Franny's continuance at school under the guise of a passionate espousal of the ideas of Seymour, her idol, was precisely the opposite,—a terrible rage against him and his ideas. On one level, knowledge, which was associated with her brothers, was the penis they possessed. To acquire the forbidden knowledge would mean to castrate them. It would also mean to defy one part of the superego which reserved acquisition of knowledge as the prerogative of the parent surrogates.

But knowledge has a meaning on an earlier level: The obsessive idea is a reaction formation against the rage, which is experienced unconsciously on the anal level, and the management of which goes back to a time when feces are withheld and "piled up." To deny the piled up anger against Seymour, Franny must refrain from piling up intrapsychic, representation of feces—knowledge. Freud has pointed out that the desire for knowledge can take the place of sadism and that "its rejection in the form of doubt bulks large in the picture of obsessional neurosis."

To complicate the situation, the superego, which is partly Seymour, reinforces the process of repression by means of one of the Four Great Vows of Zen Buddhism taught to her in childhood by Seymour: "However inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them." Efforts to extinguish id impulses can lead to breakdown.

When Franny returns to the luncheon table, the opening events of Act II are merely repetitions with variations of Act I. Lane reviews the plans for the afternoon. They include stopping at Wally Campbell's for a drink before all go to the stadium. Lane concludes with an obiter dictum on how she ought to feel: "You like Wally Campbell." This sensitization of her hostility precipitates disaster. She doesn't even remember who he is. Lane becomes furious. He claims she has met him about twenty times. Franny grows extremely defensive, and starts a long, involved tirade that spreads out in ever widening circles of tenuous logic until, in a kind of wild stereotypy, it includes everyone in its final circle of hostility. But there is no redemption from the hostility: even bohemianism is a kind of conformity. Her face is pale again; other symptoms of distress return. "'I feel so funny . . . I think maybe I'm going crazy.'"

The rivalry and hostility are shown in another way when Franny discloses she has quit the play in which she had a leading part. She could not stand her fellow actors: "all those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm." She had liked the role of Pegeen Mike (a girl who is more aggressive than most of the males in the play) in Synge's comedy, Playboy of the Western World, but "the goon that played the Playboy spoiled any fun it might have been. He was so lyrical—God, was he lyrical!" It was his lovemaking that she could not stand.

Franny insists that the role of the Playboy required genius, while the actor who played the part possessed mere talent. Once again the male is found to be deficient. Lane's retort is savage. Now it is his turn to castrate: "You think you're a genius?" Exposed as lacking something herself, she pleads for mercy: "Aw, Lane. Please don't do that to me." Her defense—a denial that her main drive is for the organ that will make her complete, as well as the emergence of disgust as this defense crumbles, and the unconscious equation of penis and achievement—is expressed in her tortured reply:

"All I know is I'm losing my mind," Franny said. "I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It's disgusting—it is, it is . . ."

Franny's last remarks raise a question in Lane's mind that permits him to get closer to the problem: (But as we have come to expect, it takes the form of a premature interpretation.) "You sure you're just not afraid of competing? . . ." Her reply is that she is afraid of the opposite, that she will compete.

Though they disagree, both are right. She is aware of the wish to compete, he of the fear of that wish. Franny's first line of defense was denial that there were any real men. Hence there was no need for competition. When this defense was penetrated, she experienced collapse. Now she retreats to the second line of defense: She admits she has been competitive, but won't let herself be so any longer. The repression has been lightened, and now the ego is under attack by the superego.

"I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash."

Her "sickness" is an implied recognition of the power of her grandiosity and competitiveness—hers and Seymour's—so overriding that nothing can contain them, and the only end is death. But reaction formation is at work here, and we see the beginning of the transformation of somebody into nobody. The character trait of humility is in the service of the ego ideal. By this means, Franny can accept herself as a worthy person. The stage is now set for the revelation of her religious mysticism.

As we might suspect, there is another aspect to her emotional immaturity. In "Zooey," as the story opens, Zooey is reading a four-year-old letter written by Buddy. In this lengthy letter, Buddy finally gets to the real reason for his writing: He tells of meeting a little girl of four while standing at a meat counter. He asks how many boy friends she has. The answer is two. Their names?—Bobby and Dorothy. "I grabbed my lamb chops and ran. But that's exactly what brought on the letter." And what is that? It takes four more pages to approach the answer.

Seymour taught Buddy and finally the two youngest that "all religious study must lead to unlearning the illusory differences between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold." Franny had learned this lesson only too well. Powerful forces in the unconscious were set to work to modify not only her own sexual nature but also that of all men she met. Her meeting with Lane, with its promise of a resumption of their sexual relationship, at a time when her psyche was already being battered by regressive forces, constituted a powerful threat to the unconscious wishes. So it was that Lane's avowal of "love" tipped the balance of forces and helped precipitate her homosexual panic.

At the luncheon, a new symptom appears: Franny's teeth begin to chatter. She breaks out in a sweat so profuse that Lane calls it to her attention. With characteristic crudity, he tells her she is "sweating" and offers her his folded white handkerchief. Unable to face her anger at his indelicacy, she resorts once again to a combination of her favorite defense mechanisms to decline his offer: "I love that handkerchief."

She empties her handbag looking for Kleenex, and takes out the little pea-green clothbound book Lane had noticed before. The book describes the efforts of a religious Russian peasant of the last century to find out how to pray incessantly, as the Bible commands. The peasant sets out on a pilgrimage and meets a starets, a religious elder, who teaches him how to pray in a special way. The essence of the method is the Jesus Prayer, consisting simply of the words: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me." For Franny, mercy is especially important ("enormous"). If the prayer is said over and over again,

"'something happens after a while . . . and the words get synchronized with the person's heartbeats and then you're actually praying without ceasing. Which has a really tremendous mystical effect on your whole outlook . . .'"

Part of the charm of the book resides in the poverty and the simple life of the pilgrim, in the humility and charity of the people met along the way. A married couple whom Franny loved particularly had at table a number of servants whom the pilgrim mistook for ladies, to Fran's delight. They were all sisters in Christ. The humility with which she identifies is a reacton formation against her grandiosity.

The part of the story which begins with Franny's return from the ladies' room is a startling parallel to that which immediately preceded it. Before Lane pontificated in a way that seemed self-assured; now Franny holds forth, presenting a view that is quite at variance with Lane's. Unlike Franny, however, Lane manages his hostility better, at least in the beginning. At first his only interjections in the long discourse relate to food. One, a reference to the garlic in the snails, suggests the anticipated sexual encounter. But his competitiveness and his wish to be admired are revealed in his next remark, in which he ignores the content of Franny's tale to express pathetically the hope that Franny will find the time over the weekend to glance through his "goddam paper." The verbal slap is a crude admission that he is not impressed and that he is thinking only of himself. Mildly, she tells him he might like the book, a hint that he may borrow it. Brusquely, he rejects the implied offer and at the same time retaliates for her having interrupted him earlier with her request of his olive: "Sounds interesting. You don't want your butter, do you?" It is apparent she is becoming increasingly excited about her discovery, and Lane observes the signs of excitement and temporary disorientation, which he interprets as weakness. He is now the strong male once again.

A brief digression is in order before we consider the meaning of the final events in the story. Salinger's use of orality is a skillful blend of symbols: aggressive and sexual. The setting for the battle between the two young people is a restaurant. Each one appropriates from the other an item of food when repressing anger. Beginning her tale of the pilgrim, "Franny seemed intensely interested in the way Lane was dismembering his frogs' legs." At this point, she relates that all the pilgrim carried with him was his knapsack filled with bread and salt. These references emphasize the contrast between the two types of food, the sophisticatedly sensuous and the ultra-simple. Another example: Lane's association of sex and food and his fear that Franny's lack of appetite forecast disappointment of his hope for sexual gratification are revealed in his annoyance over Franny's order of a chicken sandwich and glass of milk. And at the end of the story, when he refers to the fact that they have had no sexual intercourse for over a month, he refers to the interval as "too goddam long between drinks."

When he has heard her out, Lane goes over to a brutal offensive: He asks her whether she actually believes "that stuff," what the result is of "all this synchronization business and mumbo-jumbo—You get heart trouble?"—and finally he dismisses it all with a destructive interpretation, one in which his orientation, the "psychological," is used to assert his dominance over her. He asks her to accept his superiority along with his interpretation that "all those religious experiences have a very obvious psychological background." All that is needed for the final blow is for him to tell her that he loves her. He does just that in a sudden accession of feeling made possible partly by the liberation of his own hostility and partly by the fact that, like Franny herself, he can "love" only when he sees himself as the stronger, when he can mistake pity for love. By accepting his brand of love, she will be accepting the entire package of love and hate, inferiority and guilt.

To appreciate the pathological effect of Lane's hostile interpretations, we need another piece of information disclosed in Buddy's letter. Waker, the brother who became a Roman Catholic priest, once told Buddy that Zooey was "the only one who was bitter about Seymour's suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving." Waker's judgment contains a psychological truth that was probably relevant. Assuming its validity, what are the implications?

First, it means that Franny has suffered deep hurt and disappointment. Buddy knew that the statement was true because, as he himself revealed in the letter, he did not come home for a year after the funeral for fear of the questions Franny and Zooey might put to him. "I wasn't afraid that you'd both, in tears, . . . fire the complete set of Max Mueller's Sacred Books of the East at me." Denial to the contrary, this was exactly what he did fear. What is the value of a religious philosophy, the very one they had incorporated, whose end is sudden self-destruction?

Second, it indicates that Franny's grief had not been expressed and the work of mourning not completed. Depressive symptoms are present: loss of capacity for love (which would signify a replacement of the loved one), self-hatred and self-reproaches, and preoccupation with thoughts of the dead. It is well known that depression may occur not only after the death of an object but also after a deep disappointment in an intensely cherished value system. Franny had experienced both the loss and the disappointment. Freud has shown that in melancholia the sadistic self-reproaches are essentially the work of the aggressive drive directed against the object incorporated as a consequence of the identification process that takes place after the loss.

In Franny, the depression occurs in an obsessive compulsive personality. To the heavy burden of guilt already borne by the psyche, there is added the new guilt over the hate involved in the negative aspect of the identification that supervened when Seymour took his life. It should be remembered that an excessively punitive superego had been established in the early years, when a powerful identification with Seymour (and one that was partially incompatible with the parental identifications) was formed. The tremendous repressed rage against Seymour mobilized an equivalent amount of guilt. Some of the rage was discharged in the obsessive self-reproaches; after all, she was like Seymour—full of vanity and grandiose self-love ("ego"). Some of it was directed against anyone who suggested the "ego" she associated with Seymour. Some of it was converted through reaction formation (the favorite defense mechanism in obsessional neurosis) into a religion of love whose communicants, with whom doubtless she identified in fantasy, were humble, loving, and unambitious, while its God, the projected sublimation of her own sadism, was infinitely merciful and loving. This value system, representing a benign ego-ideal, was an important part of her defense structure.

In this structure, the Jesus prayer plays a pre-eminent role: It is a compulsive ritual that is highly compatible with her system of ideals. By incorporating the autonomic system in the defense structure through its medium, the prayer transfers part of the conflict to another locale. The awareness of anxiety is markedly reduced. Intellectual knowledge is bypassed and mystical activity is substituted for intellectual search and rivalry. It is as though a type of cognitive castration is effected, acceptable now under the aegis of an ideal. The ritual prayer is a subterranean road that passes beneath the terrain where the battle between the ego and the superego rages. Through the use of the magical name of the Omnipotent Father, a symbiotic union with Him is achieved, and the harshness of the superego is dissipated. The resulting state is one of grace and joy, and suggests hypomania, in which there is a fusion of ego and superego. There is much to suggest that in Franny's fantasy Jesus is Seymour. At last in Him she can be reunited with her beloved brother without anger and guilt.

Franny's transference to Lane is a repetition of that to her brothers and is marked by the same ambivalence. Through his sneering rejection of her mystical faith, he maximizes the negative transference. A massive negative therapeutic reaction is brought on by the hostile interpretations and by the wild "psychoanalysis" in general that is being conducted. More anger and guilt are mobilized, further disturbing the equilibrium in the already precariously balanced neurotic defense system. The assault on her ideals threatens a release of the anger and guilt bound up in that system. Now, when the hostile remarks are followed by others that are compounded of amusement, condescension, and a declaration of "love," she knows that Lane's declaration means that he sees her as sick, helpless, and no longer a rival. To accept that love would mean to accept his image of her as her own. All the old ambivalences centering around passivity and dependency—the neurotic conflicts about being a woman—are mobilized, and threaten a disclosure of what is hidden in the neurosis, particularly the hurt pride and the rage against Seymour. The consequent panic exceeds the level of tolerance and she faints. When consciousness returns, Lane is there, sympathetic, but in reality concerned only with their sexual meeting, plans for which he announces despite her state of collapse. The crude approach—after committing a brutal psychic assault, he will find a way to her room while she is resting—can be experienced by Franny only as emotional rape, and drives her even closer to a breakdown. When she is left alone for a few minutes, her lips begin to move in the Jesus prayer. It is a compulsive defense, a last-ditch stand against a psychotic break.

The concepts of modern ego psychology also contribute to an appreciation of the psychodynamics of the story. In the light of these concepts, each of the characters has a problem in the area of symbiosis—how to preserve separateness (identity) while achieving gratification. This is the same problem that is faced earlier by the infant. He wants to be gratified by the mother, but he is afraid of being swallowed up in her. Later on, he wants to be autonomous, but fears he will no longer be gratified. In this story, the young lovers meet for the purpose of sexual intercourse, which involves a regression in the service of the ego. Since it is a fusion process, it activates the symbiotic problem in the earlier stages of ego development. To the lovers, fusion means a loss of identity, and must therefore be very frightening. It is much safer for Franny to fuse with Jesus than with a living man.

The same problem exists on the intellectual plane. There can be no true exchange of ideas between them. Each character attacks the other as though a relationship is possible only on the basis of a symbiotic union, in which the other gives up his identity and accepts his "partner's" views. But since there is only one model possible for a relationship, and since symbiosis works in two directions, there is a deep fear that each will lose his difference and his separateness in the other.

In connection with the problem of intellectual identity, the supreme irony is that psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism are not the opposites they may seem to be. According to Fromm [in Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, 1963], both seek well-being, which he defines in a passage so reminiscent of Fanny's aims:

"Wellbeing means, finally, to drop one's Ego, to give up greed, to cease chasing after the preservation and the aggrandizement of the Ego, to be and to experience one's self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using."

While "insight" or enlightenment in Zen is essentially non-cerebral, and while the goal of psychoanalysis—making the unconscious conscious and replacing id by ego—may appear to be a process of intellection, true insights in analysis always involve the "guts." Thus, in their fumbling journey toward enlightenment, Lane and Franny were not as far part as they thought.