Word: freude
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...poetic and artistic movement known as symbolism, which flourished in France and flickered briefly in Belgium at the end of the 19th century. It had enough in common with surrealism, which it predated by 30 years, to be regarded as its precursor. For though the surrealists took Freud for their patron saint, whereas the symbolists resorted to the cabala and the mystical gobbledygook of the Rosicrucians, both wanted to make painting abandon what Magritte called "that dreary part people would have the real world play." Both were fascinated by dream and ambiguity, the duality of sex and death, perversity...
...review, Octavio Paz described Los Olvidados as "implacable as the silent march of lava." I can't imagine a more apt metaphor to convey its impact. Famous scenes: the gang of young boys tormenting a blind man; Pedro's dream (more powerful and more complex than any described by Freud); the "second chance" offered by the liberal reformatory...
...prompts one to propose that the cult of a free press with "objective" reporting of "all the news that's fit to print" can become just as dogmatic as the dogma of papal infallibility in Roman Catholicism, or finding the "correct" party line in Marxism-Leninism. Marx and Freud have virtually destroyed the doctrine of detached objectivity and have instead shown how people think or react according to their social class or emotional needs...
Nabokov's abhorrence of Freud, "the Viennese witch doctor," is famous. Freud's vocabulary is simply too crude--maybe because it's too useful. His words are ones we use and over-use--"ego," "repression"--for want of better ones. This is not good enough for someone whose whole business is the delicate shading of every sense and tone. Such horrors as the scene in The Magic Mountain when Thomas Mann has his heroine ask to borrow the hero's pencil are ample warning that novels ought to be sources for the psychologist and not vice versa. For Nabokov...
Even Sigmund Freud often relived botany, zoology and chemistry finals in his sleep. But in The Interpretation of Dreams, he noted a comforting aspect of the nagging nightmares: they seem to be experienced only by people who pass their exams, never by those who fail. If Freud was right, one consolation for college students who flunk today is that they will be spared recurring dreams of their failure tomorrow...