The Best American Poetry

What Made Freud Think of That? [by David Lehman]

A definitive example of the spontaneous aphorism:
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One is irresistibly reminded of an incident in the French Chamber when capital punishment was being debated. A member had been passionately supporting its abolition and his speech was being received with tumultuous applause, when a voice from the hall called out: 'Que messieurs les assassins commencent!' [Let the murderers make the first move.]

-- Freud.Civilization and Its Discontents
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OK, everyone. In the course of writing, Civilization and Its Discontents, what argument or quotation "irresistibly reminded" Freud of this incident?

I wonder whether others will concur when I say that Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the most irresistible titles of the twentieth century. -- DL

Jacques Lacan: Imaginary Philosopher (by Jenny Factor)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my son's favorite people is Jacques Lacan. "He's dead," you say? Well, you have a right to your opinion.

I can tell you that Lacan has been riding in the backseat of my Toyota Prius, keeping my teen and me company as we cross town between school and our small house, whose front yard is set in a great school district and whose backyard answers to a not-so-fine one. My son does not always agree with Lacan, but he knows him like a brother. As the wheels turn, we rattle on about current events, the unknowable Big Other, the Register of the Real, the Lack, and other Lacanisms made popular by a man we refer to as Jacques or just "Jack". 

My son never had an imaginary friend, but I now live with my son and his Imaginary Philosopher.

And truly, if you ask him, my kid can tell you what Jacques thinks about everything...

The Imaginary, The Symbolic, and the Real: Three types of experience, all bound up in signfication (and signifiers)

Freud Quiz # 30

A Freudian slip is

(a) A courteous form letter from the New Yorker declining to print your latest effort “despite its obvious merit.”
(b) A patch of a woman’s white slip strategically exposed beneath her skirt or dress.
(c) The inability to keep a secret, usually but not always sexual.
(d) The laughter aroused when a rotund man slips on a banana peel and flies spectacularly to a hard landing.on the pavement
(e) A mistake attributable to deep subconscious elements in the human psyche.
(f) Such stuff as dreams are made of.
(g) An error, as in the joke Jung told Freud about the man, the woman, and the duck entering a bar, which resulted in Jung’s expulsion from the movement on the grounds that either woman or duck was code for Jew in that joke.
(h) A pyrrhic victory, or deja-vu in French.

Freud Quiz # 29

Freud was seen leaving the theater after a showing of Terence Malick's new movie "The Tree of Life." Our intrepid reporter caught up with the great man and what do you think happened?
(1) Freud introduced the reporter and his significant other to Jean Piaget, with whom he had witnessed the picture. He called it "a picture."
(2) Freud said the technique was impressive and that the content was at bottom the "same old same old" complex that afflicted Oedipus, though in this case the murderous impulse was repressed, with lingering emotions of rage and guilt.
(3) Freud smiled in possible agreement when his female companion said that "Brad Pitt was excellent but who needs Sean Penn?"
(4) Freud said the picture was the best depiction of evolution since 2001 (the movie, not the year)
(5) The bearded man in the three-piece suit with the chain of his pocketwatch stylishly in view, holding a lighted cigar between the index and middle finger of his rigth hand, denied being Freud despite being a dead ringer for him. "You're not the first person to make that mistake," he said.

Freud Quiz #28

y

If you went “beyond the pleasure principle,” where would you be going, and with whom?
(a) the Italian Renaissance with Vasari
(b) the Spanish Inquisition with Loyola
(c) the French Revolution with Saint-Just
(d) the Trojan War with Ares or Poseidon
(e) the American century with Henry Ford

Extra credit:

1. Name the dudes above. Who is the third who sits always by their side?  
II. Although the question just asked has no correct answer, Freud liked to ask it because
(1) By these means he would be able to tell the sheep from the wolf
(2) He felt that the only one thing that was inevitable besides death and taxes was history
(3) He felt that those who didn't know their history were doomed to repeat it.
(4) He believed that history to the defated may say Alas but cannot help or pardon.
(5) He and Wittgentstein spent hours analyzing the remark they overheard from a disgruntled student: "History is a waste of time." -- DL

Freud Quiz # 27

In addition to John Huston's movie Freud, starring Montgomery Clift, which of these movies deals with the papa of psychoanalysis:

(1) Orson Welles''s "The Trial" in which Joseph K. (Anthony Perkins) -- and by extension Kafka himself -- is understood to be Freud's anti-type and thus, by Freudian logic, Freud himself.

(2) Orson Welles's "Chimes at Midnight" in which Freud (Orson Welles) cavorts after hours with tippling cronies and good-natured prostitutes.

(3) Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" in which Freud is depicted as a version of Macbeth, with Mrs. Freud (Lady MacBeth) providing the brains and the drive of the operation.

(4) Hitchcock's "Spellbound" in which Gregory Peck is an amnesiac, Ingrid Bergman is his analyst, and Freud is Ingrid Bergman's father in upstate New York

(5) Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," an allegory about the triumph of Freud's ego psychology (William Holden) over rival theories of the universe such as those of Karl Marx (the Mexicans), Lenin (the machine gun), and Jacques Derrida (the scorpions). Ernest Borgnine plays Freud's wife and Robert Ryan is Jung. Also starring Ben Joihnson as Ben Jonson and Warren Oates as himself. For extra credit, what is the last thing William Holden says in the movie? .

Freud Quiz # 26

If Freud and Dante held a summit meeting, where would it be?

(a) The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, 1962.
(b) Greenwich Village
(c) With Ulysses and Diomedes in the Eighth Circle of The Inferno
(d) Stanza 14 of Auden’s elegy for Freud.
(e) AA
(f) In New York City’s war on crime
(g) Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944

and what would they discuss?

(a) penis envy
(b) castration complexes
(c) Oedipal complexes
(d) Beatrice's health
(e) syphilis
(f) why they both hate Derrida
(g) the food

Kudos to Kenyon

The new issue of Kenyon Review is here and once again editor David Lynn and poetry editor David Baker have given us much to savor. Franz Wright has a wondeful prose poem from the point of view of a girl who has had "a particularly arduous day in eighth grade," and Jane Hirshfield gets under the skin of a vestment: "A sweater takes on the shape of its wearer." A third impressive poem is Paisley Rekdal's "Happiness," surely a more challenging subject than its opposite. The biographer Jeffrey Meyers is prolific and knowledgable and quirky in the best sense, and here he weighs in with an essay about John Huston's movie Freud: The Secret Passion starring Montgeomery Clift and Susannah York. Meyers has great material to work with and does it justice. Even the groanworthy puns ("Cecil's father likes to go driving, but puts the whores before the cart") are enjoyable. Evidently no one liked the movie but it is a fascinating piece of work if only for the dream sequences (in one of which "protestant" turns out to be dream shorthand for "prostitute") and the weirdness of Monty as Freud. -- DL

Freud Quiz #25

Freud visited the United States in 1929

(1) To investigate the spate of suicides following the stock market crash in October

(2) To meet with his American editor, Maxwell Perkins.

(3) To give the celebrated Kramden lectures at Princeton.

(4) Freud never visited the United States

(5) Do you mean Lucien Freud?

Who Killed Tragedy?

 

I) According to Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, who killed tragedy?

(1) Euripides, because The Bacchae lacks the Dionysiac element.
(2) Socrates, because reason is the enemy of tragedy.
(3) Jesus, because Christianity is the enemy of tragedy.
(4) Aristophanes, because comedy is the enemy of tragedy.
(5) #2 or #3, but not for the reason given.

II) Which of these two statements is correct?

a. "Nietzsche was like a man who throws himself from a tower in order to put an end to the unbearable sensation of vertigo."

b. Nietzsche threw himself
from a tower to end his
lifelong vertigo.

III) Which of these two statements comes closest to stating Freud's position?

a. "From the rationalist's point of view, which I feel confident that history will vindicate, Nietzsche backed the wrong side in civilization's death-struggle between the voice of reason, strong in its persistence though prosaic in its form, and the sopranos and tenors of Wagnerian passion that prepared the masses for the dictator's voice on the radio."

b. History will say
Nietzsche backed the wrong side but
History is wrong.

IV) "The Aryans assigned crime to the male sex, the Semites assigned sin to the female." This is a proposition advanced by whom for what purpose?

1) Nietzsche, in an effort to exalt the myth of Prometheus
2) Nietzsche or Freud, because he was a misogynist
3) Nietzsche, because he felt that hubris is a virtue
4) The chorus of wizards in Goethe's Faust, to demonstrate the fallacy of global dichotomies.
5) Aeschylus, in a spontaneous display of joy upon witnessing a luminous cloud on a lake of sorrow.

-- DL