Word: freudianism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...supreme sobriety where his only pleasure comes from exploring the boundaries of his grief. At times he can be a wickedly brutal father as when he locks his daughters in a cellar. Yet his daughters see their father as a hero making their relationship seem all the more Freudian. One touching moment comes when Sainte Colombe and his two daughters are giving a recital and Madeline, the oldest girl, eagerly tries to make her father smile while he maintains his mask-like grimace. As a patriarch, teacher and companion, Marielle's Sainte Colombe is a stolid and laconic figure...
...name of love, we are willing to make the most unlikely connections, dredge up the most improbable metaphors. Consider Philip Larkin's paen to the act of love: "Love again, wanking at half past three." In Unrequited Love, Freudian Psychology and Other Small Tragedies, Jose Guzman, as both writer and director, takes a relatively conventional approach to the subject. He gives us, as the title of his play suggests, unrequited love and a bit of psychology. Alternately poetic and awkward in its linguistic sensibility...
...times, the play's dialogue threatens to take on the hypnotic, oddly soporific rythmn of psychoanal-ese. Oddly enough, there's little psychology and almost no Freud in "Unrequited Love. Freudian Psychology and Other Small Tragedies," except in the suggestion of the main character's litany of vague neuroses. Save for a strange scene highlighting the Philip-Rothish mother's fixation with ear-cleaning...
...finally accepts that Lisa will never love him, he decides to get on with his life, and everyone kisses and makes up. Certainly, a play is not supposed to mirror reality exactly, but it must retain a level of semblance to the world around us. Too often, Unrequited Love, Freudian Psychology and Other Small Tragedies, fails to maintain this critical distance...
...that is, to produce works worthy of the Canon, must first confront and somehow conquer the power of "strong" writers who preceded them: "Any strong literary work creatively misreads and therefore misinterprets a precursor text or texts." What others simply regard as literary imitation Bloom recasts as Darwinian or Freudian struggles for dominance: "Tradition is not only a handing-down or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion...