Word: freudianly
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...Freudian Simples. In Hansel and Gretel the gingerbread house stands for "oral greediness." An analysis of Snow White descends to pure jargon: "The queen, who is fixated to a primitive narcissism and arrested in the oral incorporative stage, is a person who cannot positively relate ..." The doctor's narrow Freudian couch allows no room to turn around. Versions that do not accord with orthodox analysis are jettisoned; Disney's version of Snow White, for example, is psychologically useless to the child because each dwarf has a separate name and a distinctive personality. This "seriously interferes with the unconscious...
Such dogma tends to remind the reader of a remark attributed to the father of analysis: that while a cigar was a phallus it was also a cigar. The humor of Sneezy, Dopey and Doc, the excursions of Hansel cannot be reduced to Freudian simples. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is more than the "potentially destructive tendencies of the id"; he is a wolf as well. Of course a child walks in a giant's world. Of course boys and girls dream of transformations into wondrous and powerful creatures, i.e., adults. Of course the tears and truths...
...good. The problem with "The Mystery of Perry Clews" is that, from his initial idea of turning a romantic comedy into an existential tragedy, Cromwell goes on to throw in a little of every modern dramatic technique available. We get flashbacks, fantasies, and changing perspectives. He gives us satire, Freudian complexes, and some theater of the absurd for good measure. Shakespeare's plot is hard enough to follow; Cromwell's is almost impenetrable...
Simultaneously, Marcus supplements the conventional analytical tools of the critic--close attention to the language and internal structure of texts--with methods drawn from other disciplines, particularly Marxian social theory and Freudian psychoanalysis. Marcus employs all of these methods to interpret each text he reads--whether by Engels, Freud, Dickens or Dashiell Hammett. And in each case, these different levels of analysis are neither entirely separable nor reducible one to the other. For Marcus, the tropes and ambiguities of a writer's language furnish keys to the underlying meaning of his work, to the way his vision of society...
After merciless stripping-away, the people who were once easily identified as rebels or imperialists are lost. Jimmy Ahmed, the ostensible leader of the black guerrillas, has the mongrel hue of Oriental-black parentage, and his thoughts are a hopeless Freudian melange of perverse lusts and aristocratic tendencies. The revolutionary persona is one that whites fear and Jimmy clings to; "He is carrying the burden of all the suffering people in the world," he writes of himself. But Jimmy's true concerns are homosexual encounters with poor boys, miscegenation and sodomy with upper-class women, and a book...