Word: myth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...study analyzes the myth of the Master...
Synthesizing ideas already in the air is hardly disreputable-Darwin and Marx did much the same thing-but Sulloway thinks that Freud went a bit far to create a myth about his absolute originality. Freud once accused Sexologist Albert Moll of stealing his concept of infant sexuality, though Moll had published his ideas on the subject nearly a decade before. When many observers spotted some of Freud's ideas in the work of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Freud vehemently denied ever having read the two philosophers before inventing psychoanalysis. Sulloway thinks it unlikely: as a student in Vienna...
Freud always considered himself a "bold oppositionist," at his best warding off attackers. Around this notion, says Sulloway, grew the myth that Freud was beset on all sides for his shocking new ideas. In truth, much of the medical Establishment was on the same track as Freud, and his books were generally well received. In his three-volume biography, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones insists that The Interpretation of Dreams "had been hailed as fantastic and ridiculous." Comments Sulloway: "Actually the book was widely and favorably reviewed in popular and scientific periodicals and it was recognized...
Sulloway finds that many of Freud's accounts of his battles were colored by another part of the myth: that the world was out to squelch psychoanalysis right from the start. In fact, says the author, Freud's teachings were greeted respectfully. Only later did strong opposition arise, much of it in response to the arrogance and slashing attacks of Freud's group...
...sitcom The Munsters and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. As this collection of twelve essays suggests, though, Mary Shelley's novel is a surprisingly open-ended source of disturbing, even terrifying implications. Its awkwardness and philo sophical uncertainties mark Frankenstein as the first and most powerful modern myth, not a pure Jungian river flowing through the collective unconscious but a polluted industrial spillway...