Word: author
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Author Pikul's suggestion that the empress slept with Rasputin, for which there is no basis in fact, seems designed merely to appeal to the prurient interests of the proletariat. So do passages alluding to Rasputin's vast sexual appetite and his zest for orgies-which have been amply documented by historians. But the book seemingly has other and more unsavory functions. One is to encourage the xenophobia that still has a strong hold on the many Russian chauvinists in the elite, who believe that alien forces have caused their homeland's troubles down through the ages...
Titled Freud: Biologist of the Mind (Basic Books), this iconoclastic study does not deny Freud's achievement. Says Author Frank J. Sulloway, 32, a historian of science and a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley: "What remains today of Freud's insights and influence ... provides ample testimony to his greatness." But according to Sulloway, who spent seven years on the book, the historical record has been manipulated by Freud's followers to make him appear more original, isolated and heroic than he really...
...untrue, says Sulloway: the notion that infants possessed sexual stirrings was fashionable during the 1890s, even before Freud wrote about it, and the idea that neurotic conflict had a sexual component was also conventional. Indeed, says the author, many of the ideas that Freud synthesized into psychoanalysis had been around for years: among them, such now familiar concepts as the unconscious, the pleasure principle, regression and sublimation. Fliess, a Berlin physician who was Freud's closest friend for years, convinced Freud that all human beings were bisexual, and also offered ideas on the latency period (low sexuality preceding puberty...
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...
Class Reunion is not the worst of the recent books on Harvard. Unlike Enrique Lopez, author of The Harvard Mystique, Jaffe has no axe to grind with Harvard. She's not wailing about the decay of the institutions of College Life, like Lansing Lamont in Campus Shock. Her stories read more smoothly than The Mem Hall Murders. In the end Harvard fares pretty well, because she uses it only for background: dropping names of buildings and alumni, reminiscing about sneaking a feel in an Eliot House room or necking on the steps of Briggs Hall. The Harvard name may sell...