Word: freud
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1980
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...because he believes them to be gods who have witnessed his sinful transgressions. He duels with a psychoanalyst. Decrying his own dried-up rationality, the analyst envies the boy his pagan faith and passion. Sharing D.H. Lawrence's ideality of the "blood consciousness," Shaffer seems to agree with Freud that man's discontents are the high price of civilization...
...pages, also long enough to display Burgess at his best and second best: the penetrating dramatist of culture clash and the clever animater of received wisdom. His new novel stretches from the Edwardian Age through the 1970s. At the halfway mark, the reader has already had brushes with Freud, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Havelock Ellis, Mussolini and Heinrich Himmler...
...Nietzsche really belongs with Freud," Kaufmann insists, "because he offered far more than the scattered insights that we find in Shakespeare or even Dostoevsky, and he was a psychologist in a sense in which even Goethe could not be called one ... Except for Freud, professional psychologists have contributed far less than have Goethe, Hegel and Nietzsche [to the discovery of the mind...
Heady stuff this, argued intelligently, understandably, with only a bit of scholarly overquotation to slow down the brisk pace. Freud himself said Nietzsche, much maligned for his supposed "Nazi" affinities, "had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live." Surely Freud's concept of the superego was inspired by Nietzsche's ubermensch or superman. Further, argues Kaufmann the petty iconoclast, Nietzsche's will to power provoked Freud to posit the "death instinct" as a second principle motivating human behavior...
Kaufmann deals out persuasive arguments, though one suspects volume three, which will cope with Freud, Adler and Jung, is to be the grand synthesis of Kaufmann's philosophy for a new age. (He never says that's what he is about, perhaps for fear of shocking those of us who still cling to such dishonored idols as Hume, Bentham, Locke and Mill, howling about desecrations by infidels from 19th Century Germany...