“Portnoy’s Complaint” was the fourth of 31 books. In writing it, I wasn’t looking for my freedom from anything other than the writer I had started out to be in my first three books. I was looking not for my catharsis as a neurotic or as a son, as some suggested, but rather for emancipation from traditional approaches to storytelling. While the protagonist may be straining to escape his moral conscience, I was attempting to break free from a literary conscience that had been constructed by my reading, my schooling and my fastidiousness — from a habitual sense of prose decorum. Impatient with the virtues of logical progression, I wanted to renounce the orderly, coherent development of an imagined world and to advance helter-skelter, in a frenzy, as the classic analytic patient ideally proceeds in the throes of associative freedom.

I portrayed a man who is the repository of every unacceptable thought, a 33-year-old man possessed by dangerous sensations, nasty opinions, savage grievances, sinister feelings and, of course, one stalked by the implacable presence of lust. In short, I wrote about the quotient of the unsocialized that is rooted in almost everyone and addressed by each with varying degrees of success. Here we get to overhear Portnoy at the analytic patient’s extemporizing task of managing (or mismanaging) his disorder.

Portnoy is as rich with ire as with lust. Who isn’t? Look at Robert Fagles’s translation of “The Iliad.” What’s the first word? “Rage.” That is how the whole of European literature begins: singing the virile rage of Achilles.

One writes a repellent book (and “Portnoy’s Complaint” was taken by many to be solely that) not to be repellent but to represent the repellent, to air the repellent, to expose it, to reveal how it looks and what it is. Chekhov wisely advised that the writer’s task lies not in solving problems but in properly presenting the problem.

Inasmuch as the Freudian ground rule is that nothing in a personal history is too petty or vulgar to speak about and nothing, likewise, too monstrous or grand, the psychoanalytic session provided me with the appropriate vessel to contain everything. The analyst’s office, the locale of the book, is that place where one need censor nothing. The rule is there is no rule, and that was the rule that I followed to depict a son’s satiric mockery of his Jewish family, wherein the most comical object of mockery proves to be the satirizing son himself. The ugly aggression of satire combined with satire’s hyperrealism — the portraiture verging on caricature, the comic appetite for the outlandish — was not, of course, to everyone’s taste. I, on the other hand, was carried on the wings of mirth far from my respectable first three books.