In yesterday’s post I had quoted W. H. Auden‘s review of David Luke‘s translation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories in responding to his acid assessment of a reductionist impulse in art criticism. Today, I quote him again, on a topic that is of similarly perennial interest, the problem of conformism as a hallmark of non-conformity:Continue reading “The Conformist Non-Conformist”
Tag Archives: psychoanalysis
Edward Mendelson on Anthony Hecht and the Palliations of Poetry
In writing on Anthony Hecht‘s poetry in (‘Seeing is Not Believing‘, The New York Review of Books, 20 June 2013), Edward Mendelson remarks: In a familiar paradox of art, Hecht’s poems got their structure and strength from his irrational judgments and defensive vulnerability. But Hecht did something deeper and more complex than finding compensations in theContinue reading “Edward Mendelson on Anthony Hecht and the Palliations of Poetry”
The Revealing Game of Time Machine Travel
For some time now my favorite ‘after-dinner game’ has been to ask my respondents the following questions: If you had a time-machine, where and when in the past would you go? And when you arrived, would you rather be a fly on the wall that merely observes the action or would you want to jumpContinue reading “The Revealing Game of Time Machine Travel”
Adam Phillips on Self-Knowledge and the Unconscious
Adam Phillips, psychotherapist and essayist, can be a frustratingly elliptical writer. There are allusions, suggestions, shadings and hints in every passage. (I seem to dimly remember a frustrated reviewer in the New York or London Review of Books complaining about this characteristic slipperiness.) From these though, the diligent reader can often find a perspicuous insight,Continue reading “Adam Phillips on Self-Knowledge and the Unconscious”
Freud, Pointing to Poets
Some distinctive features of Sigmund Freud‘s writings are: a clarity of exposition–at least in works intended for more general audiences–which offset the density and novelty of the subject matter; a tendency to philosophize while simultaneously disdaining philosophical speculation; an unswerving overt commitment to science, scientific probity, virtue, and methodology; and lastly, and most entertainingly, a keenContinue reading “Freud, Pointing to Poets”
Karl Popper’s Undistinguished Take on Existentialism
In Chapter 18 ‘Utopia and Violence’, of Conjectures and Refutations, Karl Popper writes: We can see here that the problem of the true and the false rationalisms [Utopianism] is part of a larger problem. Ultimately it is the problem of a sane attitude towards our own existence and its limitations–that very problem of which so muchContinue reading “Karl Popper’s Undistinguished Take on Existentialism”
Corporal Punishment and the Arrested Development of the ‘Adult’
In the past couple of weeks, I have quoted at length from Erik Erikson‘s Young Man Luther. First, to draw an analogy between the development stages of humans and nations via the notion of an identity crisis, and then, to point to perhaps a similarly analogical relationship between indoctrination and addiction recovery. Today, I wantContinue reading “Corporal Punishment and the Arrested Development of the ‘Adult’”
A Nation in Identity Crisis?
Just for kicks, I thought it might be interesting, on the day after the 2012 election, to think of the US as a nation undergoing an adolescent identity crisis. I do this in response to some post-election commentary that seems to suggest the demographic shift in the US has engendered one, forcing political parties acrossContinue reading “A Nation in Identity Crisis?”
‘The Master’: Coming Undone And Putting It Back Together
One way to ‘read’ Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master is as an enormously ambitious, technically brilliant cinematic riff on Ron Hubbard and Scientology, on a time fertile for cults and messianic healing: post-WWII America, when broken men–post-traumatic stress disorder is as old as war–drifted back home, and were, just as many other Americans, looking forContinue reading “‘The Master’: Coming Undone And Putting It Back Together”
Oakeshott, the ‘Practical Past’, Ancestors, and Psychoanalysis
For Michael Oakeshott ( ‘Present, Future, and Past’, from ‘Three Essays on History’ in On History, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1999), the ‘practical past’ is: [A]n accumulation of symbolic persons, actions, utterances, situations and artefacts, the products of practical imagination, and their only significant relationship to past is not to the past to which they ambiguouslyContinue reading “Oakeshott, the ‘Practical Past’, Ancestors, and Psychoanalysis”
Samir Chopra 