The Best American Poetry

Freud Quiz -- Bonus Round (on the Great Man's Birthday)

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 Agamemnon

(e) the American century with Henry Ford

Extra credit:

Although this question has no correct answer, the question mattered to Freud because

(1) The patient’s answer would indicate whether she was an Alice or a Mabel.
(2) When the tide ebbs you can see which bathers are naked.
(3) He had set out to refute Henry Ford’s line that “history is bunk”
(4) He knew that “the present is a future that came through” (Frank O’Hara”)
(5) He was certain that the Great War would have been prevented had they heeded his counsel.

Freud: "Sooner or later God, death, and Hitler turn up in so-called intellectual conversation. I have noticed this in Vienna, in London. It happens with such frequency that one wonders whether ideas, and even a personage emblematic of an idea, exist as words without substance -- a kind of currency that will not buy you a cup of coffee.  "

Happy birthday, Sigi! and you too, Willie Mays! Stellar brothers, sons of May 6. And Robespierre was born today, too!

Freud Quiz #24

Where and when did Freud die, and of what cause?

(1) At Freiberg (then part of Moravia) of a gunshot wound said to be self-inflicted on 6 May 1856

(2) In London of throat cancer on 23 September 1939

(3) Brokenhearted in North London of so-called natural causes on March 14, 1883

(4) In Paris, executed by guillotine, 28 July 1794

(5) In the saddle on January 26, 1979

(6) Of food poisoning a week after the publication of Traumdeutung in Vienna on November 1899

Extra credit:

What were his last words?
(1) Mehr licht! Mehr licht!
(2) More beer!
(3) Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.
(3) Friends, applaud! The comedy is finished.
(4) Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
(5) Am I dying, or is it my birthday?

Freud Quiz #23

April 26, 2009
Freud Quiz # 23
One August day in 1909 Freud fainted in Jung's company because
(1) He was eating lunch with Jung and the schnitzel disagreed with him
(2) He felt a sexual attraction to Jung
(3) Freud had slept with his wife’s younger sister and Jung threatened to blackmail him after hearing him talk about it in his sleep on the trip the two men took to America
(4) They were having an argument about something trivial when Jung revealed himself to be a virulent anti-Semite. “You’re next,” he said with an evil laugh. He kept repeating, Jude Jude Jude.
(5) Freud said the father of monotheism must have hated his own father and Jung gave him a dirty look
(6) Jung said the spring weather made him feel like a young man. From this innocuous remark, Freud knew that Jung was an impostor. “You were never Jung!” Freud cried.

 

Freud's fainting couch in Vienna, where he practiced his famous fainting spell.

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 22

Freud Quiz # 22
The secret agenda of Moses and Monotheism is
(a) Moses was an Egyptian
(b) Monotheism was an advance on polytheism because the concentration of divinity in a single individual meant that man could restore the intimacy of the child’s relation to his father
(c) Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
(d) Peace in the Middle East
(e) If you tell an animal joke, your chances of getting a laugh will improve if you make the animal a duck.

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 21

Freud Quiz # 21
This is the first sentence of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents:
(a) “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement – that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
(b) “Two scenes from Shakespeare, one from a comedy and the other from a tragedy, have lately given me occasion for setting and solving a little problem.”
(c) “In my Traumdeutung I made a statement concerning one of the findings of my analytic work which I did not then understand.”
(d) “The word ‘No’ does not seem to exist for a dream.”
(e) “Anyone who has at any time had occasion to enquire from the literature of aesthetics and psychology what light can be thrown on the nature of jokes  and on the position they occupy will probably have to admit that jokes have not received nearly as much philosophical consideration as they deserve in view of the part they play in our mental life.”

Note: The opening lines of three other essays by Freud are also given here.

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 20

Freud Quiz # 20
What is the difference between a repressed wish and its disguised fulfillment?
(a) The difference between a dream’s manifest content and its latent thought.
(b) The ego versus the id when the lights are low
(c) The difference between a reality TV show and a 1940s movie.
(d)  The difference between Marilyn Monroe and Lindsay Lohan
(e) The difference between sublimation and the sublime.

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 19

Freud Quiz # 19
Where did Freud and Dante hold the first of their summit meetings?
(a) The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, 1962.
(b) The Minetta Tavern on MacDougal Street
(c) With Ulysses and Diomedes in the Eighth Circle of The Inferno
(d) Stanza 14 of Auden’s elegy for Freud.
(e) Riker’s Island
(f) AA
(g) In New York City’s war on crime
(f) the other side of a wall in Berlin
(h) Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 18

In what movie does an amnesiac tell a bearded, benevolent, psychoanalyst and father figure, "Freud is hooey"? 

Clues:
"Women make the best analysts until they get married. Then they make the best patients."
The seven of clubs.
She is glad he didn't dream of her as an egg beater, as another of her patients had done.
"Any husband of Constance is a husband of mine."
The proprietor had a small wheel in his hand.
He registered as John Brown in the hotel.

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 17

Freud Quiz # 17
The most significant event to take place during Freud's lifetime was

(a) e=mc squared
(b) the Russian Revolution
(c) the rise of the Nazi party in Germany
(d) the first talking picture
(e) Cubism
(f) the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in the summer of 1914
(g) the stock market crash in October 1929
(h) the death of Queen Victoria
(i) the failure of the League of Nations
(j) the day in 1910 when, according to Virginia Woolf, human nature changed
(k) the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris
(l) the Treaty of Versailles
(m) Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
(n) Keynesian economics
(o) the emergence of the United States as a dominant player on the world scene
(p) the failure of Prohibition
(q) Jesse Owens’s gold medals at the Berlin Olympics in 1936
(r) the burning of the Reichstag in 1933
(s) the Great Depression
(t) James Joyce’s Ulysses
(u) the Second Law of Thermodynamics
(v) the invention of the radio
(w) the concentration camp
(x) Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
(y) universal female suffrage
(z) Henry Ford’s Model-T

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 16 [by David Lehman]

Freud Quiz # 16

The reason you never see Freud smiling in a photograph is
a) A joke had to be very funny to make Freud laugh.
b) He was a very serious man
c) Men didn’t smile in the nineteenth century
d) The secret he kept to the grave is that psychoanalysis was a practical joke that succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
e) His mistrust of the medium of photography antedates Marshall McLuhan’s theories of the mediated nature of reality.

Freud Quiz # 15

When John Huston made a movie of Freud’s life, whom did he cast in the part of the Viennese father of psychoanalysis?

a) John Huston’s own father Walter.

b) Montgomery Ward
c) Montogmery Clift

d) George Montgomery

e) Huston never made a movie of Freud’s life

f) Anthony Perkins in fright wig

g) Marlene Dietrich

Freud Quiz # 14

Freud Quiz # 14

Freud's discovery of "drives" came about because

(a) some dreams cannot be ascribed to wish-fulfillment

(b) when Freud played golf in Scotland, he favored drivers over putters
(c) he was inspired by the Walter Donaldson song “You’re Driving Me Crazy”

(d) there were more things in heaven and hell than are dreamed of in your philosophy
(e) there was no other way to explain death

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 13

What do women want?

(a) what they have

(b) what they don't have

(c) a cigar

(d) R-E-S-P-E-C-T

(e) next question

What do men want?

(a) food

(b) sex

(c) beer

(d) food, sex, and watching football drinking beer

(e) a power car

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 12

At which of these jokes did Freud laugh:
(1) Catholic is to wholesale as Protestant is to retail.
(2) “A wife is like an umbrella. Sooner or later you take a cab.”
(3) “This girl is like Dreyfus. The army doesn’t believe in her innocence.”
(4) “Was your mother once in service at the palace?” “No, your Highness, but my father was.”
(5) Blind man: “Wie gehts.” Lame man: “As you see.”

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 11 (with bonus question)

Freud maintained that death was

(a) the best of a bad business

(b) the best of both worlds

(c) the right answer

(d) one of two unknowns in the equation

(e) the greater of two evils

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Bonus points: Auden concludes his elegy for Freud by saying, “Sad is Eros, builder of cities, / And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.” What makes Freud call Eros – the impish god of love, known in Latin as Cupid -- “builder of cities"?

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Below: Caravaggio's Cupid

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DL

Freud Quiz # 10

 

Freud, an avowed agnostic, said that he remained culturally Jewish. The best evidence for this is

(a) the skullcap that he wore when having sexual intercourse with his wife

(b) in no photograph do you ever see Freud smile

(c) Freud compiled a joke book as diligently as he collected dreams and errors

(d) he refused to take a Rorschach Test

(e) he left Vienna for London rather than die at the hands of the Nazis

 

 

-- DL

Bonus Questions

1. Who wrote the Confessions of Rousseau?
2. Who wrote the Confessions of Nat Turner?
3. Who wrote the Confessions of a Justified Sinner?
4. Who wrote the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas?
5. Who played Boswell to Samuel Johnson?

Clues:

1. Rhymes with Robinson Crusoe.
2. Rhymes with Byron.
3. Rhymes with the hero of Around the World in 80 Days starring David Niven.
4. Rhymes with Einstein and is a genius.
5. "Nothing concentrates the mind like a hanging in the morning."

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 9

If Jacques Lacan had written "Beyond the Pleasure principle," death would be

a) A one-way ticket to Palookaville
b) The big sleep
c) A modern office building
d) A seventeenth-century orgasm
e) The mirror

Match wits with the experts:

1) Auden
2) Queen Elizabeth I
3) Terry Malloy
4) Sylvia Plath
5) Philip Marlowe

Freud Quiz is supported by a grant from the tomb.

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 8

In Freud’s view, when the Dalai Lama met Salvador Dali

(a) they discussed a possible merger of Surrealism and Buddhism

(b) it was in his waiting room and they criticized US foreign policy

(c) they were in a Gap commercial for khaki trousers

(d) they sang “Hello, Dolly”

(e) it was like the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on the operating table.

 

-- DL

Freud Quiz # 7

Psychoanalysis became known as the "talking cure" because

(a) it depends on free association

(b) all talk and no action make Jack a dull boy

(c) it was the talk of Viennese café society

(d) he heard a woman’s voice in a dream: “she’ll be riding six white horses when she comes.” and he woke up feeling pretty good.

(e) the shrink with the hearing aid is the single greatest metaphor for the profession since Groucho Marx told a mother of eight that he liked his cigar a lot but took it out of his mouth once in a while

 

-- DL

"The Compulsion to Repeat" by Kathleen Ignatius

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.

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-- Kathleen Ignatius,

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Madrid, Spain

5 marzo