Word: freuds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Freud considered himself unshockable, but a trip to Paris in 1885 made him blush. "I don't think they know the meaning of shame or fear; the women no less than the men crowd round nudities." His fiancee plans a tourist jaunt with a girl friend. Freud tut-tuts: "Should that be allowed? Two single girls traveling alone in North Germany!" At the age of 73, the famed silver-cord cutter is still in an Oedipal tangle with his 94-year-old mother: "I somehow could not forgive myself if I were to die before...
...Kisses. All of this is vaguely endearing and even consoling-a little like watching a giant computer hash up some simple arithmetic. Dr. Freud is as lovable as Professor Pnin when he pores hopelessly over a train schedule or asks a stranger the way to a coffee shop while standing in front of a coffee shop. Nowhere is Freud more touchingly fallible than in his love letters to his fiancee Martha Bernays, which occupy half this book...
...Freud's poverty, plus Martha's possessive mother, kept the couple all but separated during a four-year courtship. He was in Vienna, she was in Hamburg, and 19th century epistlemanship demanded a letter a day. Freud gushed anguished longing and Dutch-uncle lectures to his loved one. Martha was "my sweet princess," "highly esteemed princess," "dearest highly esteemed little princess," and "Your Sigmund" sent her "100,000 kisses, all of which are to be cashed." A penniless knight-errant, Freud was quite a gallant: "What can it be that you want ... a tooth out of the Caliph...
...Civil War. Freud had that arrogant, Joycean self-confidence that seems to mark many men of destiny before they make their mark. Before a glimmering of psychoanalysis had entered his mind, he told Martha that he was destroying his papers to make things difficult for his biographers: ''Each one of them will be right in his opinion of 'The Development of the Hero,' and I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray...
Martha was the first to go astray, if she thought Freud was going to cash the full 100,000 kisses. Work came first, she became "beloved old dear," and as his family grew, Freud tooled off on solitary holidays to Italy. He was better at fathering (six children) than at being a father. At 17, Daughter Sophie sprang her surprise engagement on him, and Freud only inquired with middle-class prudence about the young man's financial condition. When this same daughter died of pneumonia eight years later, he bore the tragedy with a typically stoic detachment he himself...