Psychoanalysis

Dana Gould first fretted, then got a little cranky when the audience at the Brea Improv Tuesday night seemed unsure about his material. Gould, who looks like fellow comic Rich Hall by way of playwright-actor Wallace Shawn, shook his head and muttered, "All these jokes are really for me," reminding everybody that at least he was trying to enjoy himself. A few beats later, he was stomping between tables, yelling with mock anger, "I'm trying to give, and YOU GIVE BACK!" A few laughs.

A man who police believe has committed five rapes and who has unnerved this quiet beach community might be motivated by a need to exert power and to find a "perfect victim" who will resolve his feelings of inadequacy, say local and national experts in sexual assault. While police have revealed little about the rapist's habits, experts interviewed last week drew a rough psychological profile of the man based on what information has been released and common traits found in serial rapists.

In March, 1938, the Nazis marched into Vienna. By May they were rounding up Jews to scrub sidewalks with toothbrushes or to be packed off to the camps. At Berggasse 19, tension mounted as Sigmund Freud's family prepared to flee Austria. His daughter, Anna, was exercising guile worthy of Metternich to persuade the SS to give her father Unbedenklichkeitserklarung , the official document that would allow him to immigrate to England. The father of psychoanalysis was 82 and ailing.

My analyst phoned the other day; he wanted to talk about Darryl Strawberry. Obviously. Strawberry fascinates my analyst. Has there been a sports figure in New York more analyzed and psychoanalyzed than Strawberry? Why does he? And--more often--why doesn't he? He doesn't even have to be lying down to be on the couch. And now the New York Mets right fielder is hitting like anything, which was just what he wasn't doing. And why didn't he do it before?

You stand forewarned: Once you have been indoctrinated with the theory behind "photo analysis," chances are you will find yourself analyzing every photo in sight. Not likely, you chortle? You've heard of palmistry, after all, yet you deftly quash on a regular basis the temptation to read meaning into every hand you shake. Well, photo analysis is different from such age-old occultisms as numerology and astrology.

What do men want? That's the question Freud would ask today. But if we are to believe the mavens of popular culture, the answers are evasive. The TV talk show guests endlessly discuss the men who can't find themselves. Phil Donahue listens to women describe all the reasons they're "fed up with men," and then to the men the women are fed up with. These men prefer work to women, sex to commitment, hedonism to being husbands. One man who has been seeing the same woman for 14 years isn't sure why.

What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?: Growing Up German by Sabine Reichel (Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $17.95; 214 pages) About halfway through "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" by Sabine Reichel, a short but earnest book about growing up in postwar Germany, we come across something truly and profoundly horrifying--an arithmetic exercise from a textbook that was used in German schools during the Third Reich. "If a mental patient costs 4 Reichsmarks a day in maintenance, a cripple 5.

After 20 fruitful years filled with grading papers, giving lectures and all the chores associated with being a college professor, Richard Grayson is reaching for new directions. He now sees himself performing more and touring around the country. "I admit I've always been a shy person," said the 48-year-old composer-pianist and master improvisationist from his Santa Monica home where he lives with his wife and two cats. "But now I have a manager to take care of all the little things that were never done before and think I might be ready to take my act on the road."

THE BELOVED PRISON by Lucy Freeman (St. Martin's: $18.95; 370 pp.) While psychoanalysis, Freud's school of psychotherapy, certainly had its fair share of detractors when Lucy Freeman first celebrated it in "Fight Against Fears," her 1951 book apparently struck a chord, selling over a million copies. One suspects that "The Beloved Prison," billed as a sequel to that work, arrives in a far less receptive climate, however, for the "cognitive" school of therapy, which has become most popular in the 1980s, couldn't be more different from psychoanalysis.