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Dear Camille, As one who grew up listening to Knicks (and occasionally Rangers) broadcasts in the 1960s and 1970s, Marv Albert was always a unique part of New York for me, with the trademark "Yessss" and later the bad hairpiece. Following the initial reports of the hotel incident I assumed that this was another case of a woman attempting to settle up with Marv after he had announced that his true interests lay elsewhere. But the arrival of another witness who testified that Marv, attired in womanly undergarments, bit her too diminished Marv's credibility considerably. I am curious as to your opinion in this matter. Marveling at Marv's Manias Dear Marveling, The brothel episodes in Luis Buñuel's "Belle de Jour" (1967), starring the gorgeously luminous Catherine Deneuve, introduced me to the now widely publicized fact that men of wealth and power often frequent prostitutes for lavish role-reversal scenarios, where the male is abased and enslaved. It's a Babylonian version of penance and absolution. It's hard to tell what was going on with Marv and his playmates. I suspect the following: Marv Albert, a short, balding man in the macho world of sports, felt like the runt of the litter. What part sibling rivalry may have played in his early family romance is unclear, but he seems to have symbolically blamed his mother for stunting his growth, for stealing from him in the womb. All that biting of women (especially on the fleshy, undefended back) is infantile. Mama was evidently the Bad Breast who never gave full suck and is getting nipped back by the naughty, petulant puppy. After giving a capsule version of this in my stand-up improv at a fund-raiser for Feminists for Free Expression at New York's Club Mother on Sept. 27, I was gratified to find confirmation of my Marv Theory on last week's "Hard Copy," which interviewed Vanessa Perhach, a middle-aged brunet and filer of the original assault complaint against the sportscaster. Guess what: Up close and personal, she looks exactly like Marv in drag. There's the same long nose; the same florid, horsy face; the same sleepy eyes and impassive smirk, with a hint of the Near Eastern bazaar. This is why "Mona Lisa" echoes Leonardo da Vinci's facial proportions and why Anthony Perkins ends up in a moppy wig in "Psycho": because the Great Mother's inky shadow forever falls on the pallid, desolate male map! Dear Camille, Throughout your work you have written admiringly of Freud and acknowledged his influence on your ideas. I would therefore be interested to know what you think of the harsh criticism that has recently been directed against Freud by, among others, Frederick Crews. Why do you think Freud has now become so unpopular? Curious Dear Curious, Virulent attacks on Freud range from the provincial (Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem) to the intellectually frustrated (Frederick Crews, whose original scholarly achievements dwindled after he renounced his early Freudianism; and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who compared his then-fiancée, Catharine MacKinnon, to "God" and has now written a book on dogs -- any connection there?). It's largely not Freud per se but the first, second and third generations of his slavish followers who gave Freudianism a black eye. Freud's contributions to 20th century culture were immense and revolutionary. He intricately explored the metaphors and metamorphoses of the dream process; he demonstrated our daily, comic self-sabotage through slips of the tongue and accidents; he charted the fierce, subliminal conflicts of love and family life; he argued for the full sexuality of women, which the Victorian 19th century censored out; he shockingly established that sexuality does not begin at puberty but in childhood and even infancy. The list of Freud's epochal ideas goes on. The very language that Freud's critics use to attack him was invented by him. As I said in the preface to "Sexual Personae," my aim as a critic is to fuse Freud with Sir James George Frazer, the Cambridge classical anthropologist who influenced Carl Jung. (Jung's work has been grossly sentimentalized by feminists and New Age therapists; I've tried to restore his fangs.) Crews actually sent me a complimentary letter after "Sexual Personae" was released by Yale University Press in 1990. Unfortunately, he inserted some cheap shots at Freud (a "fraud") and Jung (a "charlatan") and presumed to tell me to get over my respect for them. You can imagine how I, as an Italian-American Amazon, responded to this. The irony is that at Yale in 1969, I marched into the office of the director of graduate studies and formally protested the way that "psychoanalytic" and "Freudian" were constantly used as dirty words by the professors in our seminars (that there was an anti-Semitic edge to this seems obvious). The last-straw incident: an insulting reference to Crews, who had written a superb psychoanlytic study of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Whatever spiritual funk Crews is now in (dare one suggest that abrupt mid-career alienations replay ambivalence toward one's own father?), no minor academic will ever topple a giant like Freud, who has been profoundly absorbed into the modern arts from surrealism to Alfred Hitchcock's films, Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" and Madonna's classic video for "Open Your Heart." Anti-Freudians have cut themselves off from art and from their own psyches. SALON | Oct. 14, 1997 Unburden yourself. Ask Camille

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