Word: holmeses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Oliver Wendell Holmes (Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table) wrote three novels which have been widely unread. They reflected the scientific interests of their author, a physician, teacher of anatomy at Harvard, dean of its Medical School. Recently a psychoanalyst made the suggestion that Holmes's novels were perhaps the...
The Holmes novels, Elsie Venner, The Guardian Angel and A Mortal Antipathy, seem morbid, sententious, very unlike his other writings. All three deal with characters on the borderline of insanity. Contemporary critics called them "medicated novels." This description is favorably endorsed by Clarence P. Oberndorf of Columbia University, past president...
"The more we examine the mechanism of thought," wrote Holmes, "the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes." No modern psychiatrist has improved on Holmes's pithy analysis of insanity as self-defense: "It may be that the...
Psychic Suicide. Elsie Venner is Holmes's most interesting and hardest case. Holmes's analysis of her "psychic suicide" is a model of modern psychiatric thinking. His account of her symptoms (a stiff, frozen demeanor, withdrawal into herself, occasional wild behavior) was a precise description of schizophrenia-though...
Oberndorf's interpretations of Holmes's words sometimes seem farfetched. But in the light of Freudian psychiatry many of Holmes's aphorisms assume striking new meanings: e.g., "The woman a man loves is always his own daughter." The autocrat of the breakfast table, says Oberndorf, well understood...