Word: notion
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...theories he would give the name of psychoanalysis. His fundamental idea--that all humans are endowed with an unconscious in which potent sexual and aggressive drives, and defenses against them, struggle for supremacy, as it were, behind a person's back--has struck many as a romantic, scientifically unprovable notion. His contention that the catalog of neurotic ailments to which humans are susceptible is nearly always the work of sexual maladjustments, and that erotic desire starts not in puberty but in infancy, seemed to the respectable nothing less than obscene. His dramatic evocation of a universal Oedipus complex, in which...
...mind. By the early 1890s, he was specializing in "neurasthenics" (mainly severe hysterics); they taught him much, including the art of patient listening. At the same time he was beginning to write down his dreams, increasingly convinced that they might offer clues to the workings of the unconscious, a notion he borrowed from the Romantics. He saw himself as a scientist taking material both from his patients and from himself, through introspection. By the mid-1890s, he was launched on a full-blown self-analysis, an enterprise for which he had no guidelines and no predecessors...
...part dream analysis, part autobiography, part theory of the mind, part history of contemporary Vienna. The principle that underlay this work was that mental experiences and entities, like physical ones, are part of nature. This meant that Freud could admit no mere accidents in mental procedures. The most nonsensical notion, the most casual slip of the tongue, the most fantastic dream, must have a meaning and can be used to unriddle the often incomprehensible maneuvers we call thinking...
...notion that government deficits are good has an odd ring these days. For most of the past two decades, America's biggest worry has been inflation brought on by excessive demand. Inflation soared into double digits in the 1970s, budget deficits ballooned in the '80s, and now a Democratic President congratulates himself for a budget surplus that he wants to use to pay down the debt. But some 60 years ago, when 1 out of 4 adults couldn't find work, the problem was lack of demand...
...French physicist Louis de Broglie describes his theory that all matter behaves as both a particle and a wave, just as light does; this notion will lead to the electron microscope...