Word: freudianly
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...first half of the play, Leontes unjustly accuses his queen, Hermione, of adultery with his boyhood friend, King Polixenes. He denounces them both, brushes aside the oracle of Apollo, loses his wife and both children, realizes his folly and vows repentance. A number of Freudian commentators have diagnosed Leontes, in the words of W.H. Auden, as "a classical case of paranoid sexual jealousy due to repressed homosexual feelings." The diagnosis is accurate, but the causation I find unconvincing. In the context of the entire play it seems a distortion to claim that Leontes is projecting his own childhood guilt...
Nothing in the Freudian canon, however, outrages feminists more than the notion of penis envy-that female identity hinges on the crippling discovery that boys have penises and girls do not. Thus the latest psychoanalytic research on the question, due in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, is bound to incur feminist wrath. Says Co-Author Dr. Eleanor Galenson of New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine: "Some women's lib people have felt that penis envy is a dirty word, but there is no doubt that it occurs, and much earlier...
...SUCCESS STORY has always held a cherished place in American literature. American readers cheered along as an excusably impoverished hero strove for the big business deal, the big money, and the big time. The hosts of explanations suggested for this popularity run from the Freudian (a need for vicarious gratification and fulfillment, experienced by armchair moneymakers) to the conspiratorial (sedatives written by a malevolent ruling class to substitute for the real thing) to the jingoistic (pride in the American inventions of Individual Initiative and the free market...
...sexual Frankenstein's monster of the modern age--a libidinal beast repressed by Victorian morality, then let loose and finally destroyed by post-World War I decadence. These accounts have reveled in the sordid side of the Lawrence myth, and there are certainly enough seedy details to make any Freudian's mouth water...
...legacy deserving a much more intricate and subtle approach than this. In his exhaustive study, A Prince of Our Disorder, Dr. John E. Mack has brought his psycho-historical skills to all that is known about Lawrence in an effort to set the record straight. Not content with simplistic Freudian digs at Lawrence, Mack has gathered every (but every) shred of evidence he could find--friends' recollections, letters, unpublished commentaries to Lawrence's books and, of course, Lawrence's massive opus which almost no one has read, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom." The project took Mack, who also serves...