Original States
Eyal Press, in his piece explaining how progressives are turning to state constitutions to protect rights being rolled back by the federal judiciary, highlights the potential for creative arguments (“States of Play,” June 10th). State constitutions have their own unique histories, which can often lead to surprising conclusions, particularly in state courts that place great emphasis on originalism. Take Arizona, one of the harshest places in the country when it comes to punishing criminals. Its first governor, George W. P. Hunt, who also served as president of the state’s constitutional convention, believed that rehabilitation was the overriding purpose of state power. Early decisions interpreting the Arizona constitution bear this out, curtailing the use of confinement and reducing sentences because of inhumane conditions. Hunt even passed a popular referendum abolishing the death penalty, but right-wing interests succeeded in bringing it back shortly thereafter. Although Arizona’s constitutional convention was dominated by progressive politics, the tide soon turned—but the faithful application of originalism in the state might take its courts to a profoundly different jurisprudential place than where they are now.
John Mills
Berkeley, Calif.
Freudian Slip
Merve Emre, in her review of several Sigmund Freud biographies, mentions Freud’s account, from “Screen Memories,” of a patient named “Mr. Y,” who has a childhood memory of snatching a bouquet of flowers from a young girl—before noting that this patient “did not really exist” (Books, June 10th). Such dishonesty was unfortunately typical of Freud. In “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” for example, he claimed to have successfully treated eighteen cases of neurosis, but admitted to Wilhelm Fliess in a letter that he had not completed a single analysis (“eine Analyse”) to support his seduction theory as an explanation for them. Even though Freud later rejected the theory, these instances of scientific fraud would have looked bad, so when the letter was published, in 1950, “eine” was emended to “meine” by the editors, creating the impression that he simply had not completed his own analysis. Nor did his early patients volunteer, unprompted, the information about sexual molestation that he said they did. As Fliess noted in 1901, “the reader of thoughts merely reads his own thoughts into other people.”
Edward Lobb
Toronto, Ont.
Feline Friends
Rebecca Mead’s review of Kathryn Hughes’s “Catland,” on the life of Louis Wain, made me look forward to reading the book (Books, June 10th). The process whereby, in Hughes’s words, “cats transformed from anonymous background furniture into individual actors” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, might in fact be traced further back, to the eighteenth, as the late veterinary historian John D. Blaisdell shows in his 1993 article “A Most Convenient Relationship: The Rise of the Cat as a Valued Companion Animal.” Blaisdell’s evidence includes two anonymous poems published in The London Magazine (from 1733 and 1775), and another from the Gentleman’s Magazine (1769), lamenting the loss of cherished cats, two of whom are named: “Tom, a favorite cat” and “poor honest Blewet . . . a lovely, loving creature” with “gooseberry eyes,” “velvet fur,” and a “melodious pur.” He goes on to argue that “middle class merchants and professionals” from this time on did much to establish the cat as a companion animal, albeit one whose value was still closely linked to its mousing capabilities.
Valerie Pennanen
Hammond, Ind.
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