Word: freude
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What Is Chastity? Originally planned as part of Comfort Me with Apples (TIME, April 30, 1953). the new book almost seems like a double take of the earlier novel. The hero is again Chick Swallow, the poor man's Freud, who writes a lonelyhearts column called "The Lamplighter." His chief anxiety is still his sophomoric brother-in-law Nickie Sherman, a fool in bon motley. In Comfort, Nickie salvaged his ego by catching a crook; in Tents, Nickie becomes a crook, at odd hours, and ends up chasing his own split personality. In Comfort, the happily married Chick found...
They joked about father and Freud, about mother and masochism, about sister and sadism. They delightedly told of airline pilots' throwing out a few passengers to lighten the load, of a graduate school for dope addicts, of parents so loving that they always "got upset if anyone else made me cry." They attacked motherhood, childhood, adulthood, sainthood. And in perhaps a dozen nightclubs across the country-from Manhattan's Den to Chicago's Mr. Kelly's to San Francisco's hungry i-audiences paid stiff prices to soak it up. For the "sick" comedians, life...
Self-interest, in La Rochefoucauld's view, was clearly the carrot that made men trot, as money was later singled out by Balzac, and sex by Freud. Yet, in obsessively concentrating on one human trait, as Author-Critic Louis Kronenberger points out in his new translation of the Maxims (Random House; $3.50), La Rochefoucauld narrowed his vision. Indeed, some of the maxims are strangely naive and platitudinous, suggesting once again that cynicism is sentimentality in reverse-and that, perhaps, the sheltered courtier could have learned from the crude common sense of the peasant. Yet at his best, as Kronenberger...
Like a good liberal nineteenth-century free thinker, he doodles with arguments about an entity named God as if this merely happened to be a nondescript question that struck his fancy. Instead of being made more complacent by Hume and Freud, he needs to be jarred by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche into the realization that the religious question is the questions of questions, that the problem of God is not whether an entity exists or does not exist--about which a cautious skepticism might make sense--but whether the spiritual dynamo of an entire civilization is still running or not, whether...
...Phil 1 with Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Theology is certainly one of the most severe; many a small town has lost its most promising Methodist in those ordeals--and for one reason or another, Anglicans defect at the rate of one out of every four. Freud's Moses and Monotheism or The Future of an Illusion must provoke nearly equal distress: one atheist passes up all alternatives listed on the questionnaire and writes, "God is man's interpretation of what dissatisfies him.... A rejection of God comes through progress towards understanding one's emotional condition." Another similarly explains, "psychological...