Word: freuds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Those indefatigable human detergents, the censor and the prude, have utterly failed to launder, much less expunge, man's lowest literary form: the dirty joke. What accounts for its lusty and unabashed survival? Freud suggested that the smutty story verbalizes male aggressive instincts against the highly disturbing opposite sex. Somewhat embellished, this theory lies at the heart of Gershon Legman's Rationale of the Dirty Joke (Grove Press; $15), which beyond all doubt qualifies as the most bizarre book of research in recent years. Legman's study is an 811-page anthology of dirty jokes, complete with...
...People do not joke about what makes them happy or what is sacred to them," Legman says. "They joke only about what frightens or disturbs them." He agrees with Freud that "it is not our hatred of our enemies that harms us: it is our hatred for the people we really love that destroys us." By giving vent to this ambivalence, unacceptable at the level of consciousness, the dirty joke plays a small but necessary part in preserving man's emotional balance...
Pope's genius is finally inexplicable. Quennell contents himself with saying that though the poet himself thought that he was possessed by a high moral passion, his ferocious energies sprang from psychological sources that were "dark and turbid" (even Freud conceded that genius contained mysteries inca pable of exploration). Pope's own great predecessor and model John Dryden (at the age of twelve, Pope visited Will's Coffee House to gaze at him) summed the matter up: "Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide." Pope was only 14 when...
...Theater was to Stanislavsky, these performers are to Bergman-ensemble members who function like fingers on a hand. Liv Ullman, newest member of the troupe, is, astonishingly, the best, portraying a whole range of feminine response, from molten eroticism to glacial hate. At the end of his life, Freud wrote: "The great question, which I have not been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" Ullman supplies no answer, but no other actress could have rephrased the question so well...
...weaker man might never have come to fruition. In the long run, isolation proved a blessing. For Cary had to sweat over his craft far from the corrupting literary ambience that often sustains but modishly distorts young talent. London was full of Weltschmerz and fashionable reliance on canned Freud and Frazer. Cary was unaffected. Literary myth seekers and archetype spotters will look in vain through Cary's fiction. "My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions," he wrote. Persistently, he saw the world as a struggle between creative man and organized authority, with no quarter given...