Freud visited the United States in December 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?
This one didn't make it into the published version of "Freud Quiz." But the following one did -- and triggered a response from Kathleen Heil in 2008:
February 23, 2008
Freud Quiz #5
What is the "compulsion to repeat"?
(a) the impulse to keep doing the thing that scares you -- in an effort to master the fear
(b) the wish to make the same mistake twice, and be forgiven
(c) the reason why Hitler copied Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia
(d) the need to repeat the same futile action and the madness of expecting a different result
(e) the rhetorical strategy of using the same word (or an anagram of it) in every sentence of a paragraph
-- DL
The Compulsion to Repeat
(after reading David Lehman's Freud Quiz #5)
I'm going to begin by repeating a phrase
oft repeated
and despised by those like me who dislike
repetition for impression
a friend of mine
a poet
made a quiz about Freud:
what is the compulsion to repeat
to do the thing that scares you
over again and be
forgiven
or should we ask Hitler about Napoleon
and Russians about the madness of repeating the same futile action in hopes of expecting a different
result repeat it
in repeating your quiz, David
I pretend to make a poem
because
pretender
in Spanish is a lovely way to say
you tried, didn't you
implied, the failure being the outcome of your compulsion,
also to woo, court,
pretender
try it is better than our word to be
repeated repeat try
in a rhetorical strategy
to be better than pretending
to repeat what almost was
yet another attempt
to try and get
that Spaniard to pretend.
Kathleen Ignatius [i.e. Kathleen Heil]
Madrid, Spain
5 marzo
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