Word: mythical
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Sigmund Freud idolized Hannibal. So much so that for years he was psychologically unable to enter Rome because Hannibal had never set foot in the city. In fact, Freud's ideas about himself were heavily tinged with mythic and military overtones. "I am actually not a man of science," he once told his friend Wilhelm Fliess, "not an experimenter, not a thinker... but a conquistador...
...months before he should have because he hated being an invalid. In more recent years, they saw him posed proudly with one or another of his grandchildren (he married three times and had seven children). They saw that even though one could no longer live the life of a mythic Western hero, one could sometimes approximate his simplifying virtues. "I stay away from nuances," he was heard to say. From excesses of psychology too. "Couches are good for one thing only," he was wont to grouse. Reflection, introspection -these activities interfered with the truly important things in life. Like work...
There were ironies in the matching of man and mythic background. John Wayne entered the world on May 26, 1907, as Marion Michael Morrison, the son of an Iowa druggist who migrated to the San Fernando Valley, just east of Los Angeles. Young Michael played football for U.S.C. but retained many more intellectual interests than he liked to admit...
...began calling her Ursula Undress after she posed nude for Playboy no fewer than seven times, but for her latest film Actress Ursula Andress dresses up at least a bit. Perhaps she wore clothes out of respect for her distinguished co-stars in Clash of Titans, a $10 million mythic fantasy with Sir Laurence Olivier playing Zeus, Claire Bloom as his wife Hera, and Maggie Smith as Thetis, mother of Achilles. She certainly didn't need to dress because of her role: she plays the goddess of love, Aphrodite, a fitting part for the woman who once said...
...black man had two pressing tasks before him: a white woman in every bed and a black woman under every heel." In response, she says, black women became more submissive and, despite the image of some social scientists of black society as a matriarchy, no longer behaved like the mythic black superwoman...