Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...their stride were sufficient to bowl neurotics over. The foundations of neuroses, Freud discovered, were laid in the sex experiences of early childhood. Upon this astonishing fact, which Freud painstakingly confirmed in hundreds of cases, he built his famous theories of the libido (Latin for lust) and the Oedipus complex...
Driven by libido, all children fall in love with their mothers, hate and fear their fathers as rivals. Sometimes they may love their fathers too (ambivalence), but the fundamental hostility remains throughout childhood. (Later on girls often fall in love with their fathers.) This Oedipus complex-sets the pattern for a child's response to other persons throughout the rest of his life. Normal persons outgrow the Oedipus situation by the time they reach maturity. But weaker characters cannot tear themselves away from their parents, hence, "fall into neuroses...
Contrary to popular opinion, said Dr. Goldstein to his colleagues last week, the brain does not grasp simple, single objects first, but understands things only as parts of larger patterns. Many patients suffering from injuries of the cortex (most highly complex section of the brain) cannot use or understand any isolated words, symbols or objects. For example, certain patients who have brain injuries, but who appear normal in their behavior, when handed a knife, are unable to give it a name. But when handed a knife with a potato, they promptly cry: "That's a potato peeler...
...engineers had proved, in telecasting the six-day bike race at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, that television could be transmitted over ordinary telephone wire. Engineers had considered coaxial cable, a copper wire threaded through separators inside a copper tube, the only practical ground conductor for the complex television signal. Since coaxial cable costs $5,000 a mile, prospects of a television network had seemed dim and distant...
...depressing, and almost everyone has a touch of sadism or masochism in him. At any rate, John Tunis' classic debunk of things at Harvard several years ago was able to provide Harvard men with something of a thrill. In addition, it was enough to give them an acute inferiority complex enough to convince them that they went out with clay pipes instead of silver spoons. Most Harvard graduates, infers Mr. Tunis, must have the fate of Broadway's current Harvard man-the spectacular specimen in "The Priterose Path...