Word: freud
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...literary critic of broad erudition that Trilling achieved his greatest renown. (Notable essay collections: The Liberal Imagination, 1950; The Opposing Self, 1955.) In studies ranging from Jane Austen to Tolstoy to Orwell to Freud, he sketched a view of man struggling to assert himself against the forces of his society. In Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (1965), Trilling argued that "the primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment...
...Gold is an unusually stimulating novel of ideas-and something more. It is rare entertainment, shuttling brilliantly between sandy African wastes and tidy English villages. Perhaps as well as any one now writing, Drabble can weave metaphysics into the homespun of daily life. Her characters may casually discuss Freud or chat about the latest research on the effects of heredity and environment. They also throw crockery at each other when angry, drink too much and wish that they could behave more sensibly than they do. At a time when most "adult" entertainment is a series of reductive immorality plays...
Leonard Michaels's task is not so difficult. Writing for a minute market--liberal intellectuals, largely Eastern--he can begin each of his perhaps fifty stories with a literary world presupposed. Marx, Freud, Byron, a Jewish boyhood (familiar to gentile literati from reading Mailer and Roth), and the inertia of the 1950s all loom in the book's background, the author only has to select which allusions to use for each story's point of departure...
...stories are compelling, almost without exception, because they cover familiar ground; and also because they contain a prophetic mixture of anger and sentiment that only a Jewish leftist can cultivate, this "son of Marx enemy of Freud" having lived through the terrorist double-think of the McCarthy and Rosenberg red-hate days. Yet the real horror for Michaels is always inward--he is less concerned with the world than with the hammerlock it holds on the individual, the tortured march that the instincts are forced to undergo in the service of civilization...
...nightmare as literature, so to speak) in paintings by the Italian Valerio Adami. But the difference especially comes out in "domestic" figurative painting, which seems more complex and problematical - more difficult of approach - in Europe than in America. Hence the extraordinary flavor of the nudes and portraits by Lucien Freud, the 52-year-old grandson of Sigmund: more psychic territory is crossed in Freud's scrutiny of a few square inches of worn flesh than one might find in a whole roomful of recent American realism. A similar process happens in Avigdor Arikha's tenacious and diffident still...