Word: freude
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...ceiling. It looks both sadistic and as ideal (almost) as Piero della Francesca's suspended egg. The people in the room are also familiar. Sometimes they are anonymous figures, writhing and grappling. The rest are portraits of himself and his friends: George Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne, the artist Lucian Freud. "Who," Bacon once half-jokingly asked, "can I tear to pieces if not my friends?" Triptych, May-June 1973, with its deliquescent knot of white flesh hunched on a toilet, spewing into a basin and casting a melodramatic bat's shadow on the floor, is an elegy for George...
...like a Talmudic exegesis, the book is a learned commentary on "sacred" texts, in this case those of the giants of the Jewish Diaspora. As with a midrash, the argument unfolds from a single overriding principle: in this case the bold if cranky notion that from Marx to Freud to Abbie Hoffman, the Jewish intellectual vanguard has been obsessed by embarrassment at its own Jewishness...
...assumed the countenance and the stature of a prophet, sweeping all objections from his path. A feral magnetism began to animate his face and conversation. Philosopher Martin Buber was later to recall him as "a statue without error or mistake, a countenance lit with the glance of the Messiah." Freud claimed that he had seen Herzl in a dream before they met. Others were less impressed. The Emperor Franz Josef, proud of his nation's liberal airs, fumed: "What would have become of this ungrateful Herzl had there not been equality of rights for Jews?" Bismarck considered Zionism...
...bothered. "My circles have given me a pretty rough time. Some of the reviews [of About Behaviorism] are really vicious. But I don't read most of them... As one of my colleagues said, I've had 'the worst press since Darwin.' I'd have to say Freud would be a near runner-up on that. I get fantastic name-calling. I just don't understand why anyone would do it. A review of my book came out just a couple of weeks ago by a disturbed psychiatrist named Szasz: I'm a 'murderer, a megalomaniac and a liar...
...those who think an optimistic Freudian is like a Swiss admiral, there is always Erik Erikson. Freud's vision, despite his promise of healing, was a dark one, overlaid with personal and cultural pessimism. Erikson, now 72 and in semiretirement in California, is probably the most influential living psychoanalyst and certainly the most optimistic thinker the Freudian tradition has produced. His famous work on religious leaders (Luther, Gandhi) attempts to show how men can use neurotic conflict for constructive social purposes while healing themselves in the process...