Word: freud
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Midsummer is radical chiefly in its frivolousness. Where during the past two decades Peter Brook and other directors found dark depths of class and sexual conflict, Branagh rediscovers airy-fairy folly and anything-for-a-laugh delight. Freud has nothing to do with this version. Its inspiration is more on the order of Me and My Girl, and the song-and-dance finale was actually staged by that show's choreographer, Gillian Gregory...
...droop, and grading habits relax. Try to get on the bottom of the pile.) Again, it is not that A.E.'s are vicious or ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough. But by the dozen? This, the quantitative aspect of grading--we are, after all, getting $5 a head for you dolts and therefore pile...
...books. Even if this may be a correct explanation of the "causes" of nerdiness in some people, Berger's normative assertion is surely ridiculous, if not dangerous. By the same token, he would claim that European Jews should be grateful to anti-Semitism for having helped to produce Einstein, Freud, or Marx...
Psychoanalysts tend to believe that nothing happens by accident, so Bruno Bettelheim has a theory about why psychoanalysis, and indeed "all modern methods of treatment for mental disturbances," first emerged in Vienna. The fact that Sigmund Freud lived there is too easy. More fundamental was the half-hidden disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, defeated on the battlefield by Prussia, torn apart by Balkan nationalism and devastated by the bank crash...
This engaging book is not really about Freud's Vienna, however, so much as Bettelheim's Vienna. The two men shared the same city for more than a third of a century. Freud had recently published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, when Bettelheim was born in 1903. He became interested in psychoanalysis because another schoolboy was impressing Bettelheim's girlfriend with prattle about the new theories of Dr. Freud. As a young man, Bettelheim liked to walk past Freud's establishment at Berggasse 19. "Looking up at his quarters, I always wondered why this great man chose...