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lrb on freud
The London Review of Books has an article by Michael Wood on Freud I want to recommend, here. It's on the occasion of the publication of The Penguin Freud Reader. I'll have a few things to say about the essay in a bit, and wanted to give anyone interested a heads up on the original essay.
By Swifty | July 21, 2006 in Psychoanalysis | Permalink
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re: 'ego'/self/the I/etc
"They were his dogs snapping at him, but, tragic figure though he had become, he scarcely heeded them. Against such fearful evidence it was not their belief in him that he needed, it was his own. He felt his ego slipping from him. "Don't desert me, bully," he whispered hoarsely to it.
In his dark nature there was a touch of the feminine, as in all the great pirates, and it sometimes gave him intuitions."
'he' is Captain Hook. The 'dogs' are his pirates. The book is 'Peter Pan' 1911.
Posted by: isakofsky | Jul 22, 2006 12:35:39 AM
Very interesting indeed on Peter Pan. I imagine that's a frequently psychoanalyzed work, though I've never read a full fledged treatment. My favorite work of fiction as exemplar of Freud's theories is the short story "Lieutenant Gustl" by Arthur Schnitzler.
Posted by: John Ransom | Jul 22, 2006 1:36:36 AM
For the record, myself and some of your fellow contributors have been discussing the Wood review (and the relation of Freud to fiction) for the past week or two here, here, here, and especially here.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Jul 22, 2006 5:51:40 PM
Re: Freud on the Acropolis
According to Freud, the guilt which sabatoged his pleasure on the Acropolis was the guilt of a son who had broken the taboo of surpassing his father:
It must be that a sense of guilt was attached to the satisfaction in having gone such a long way: there was something about it that was wrong, that from earliest times had been forbidden. . . . It seems as though the essence of success was to
have got further than one's father, and as though to excel one's father was still something forbidden . . . The very theme of Athens and the Acropolis in itself contained evidence of the son's superiority. Our father had been in business,he had had no secondary education, and Athens could not have meant much to him. Thus what interfered with our enjoyment of the journey to Athens was a feeling of filial piety . . . (pp. 247-8; Freud's italics.)
Posted by: robert lippman | Oct 17, 2006 2:47:53 PM
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