Word: person
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...candidate himself if he had not been so close to the Vice President. Bush is the friend Baker turned to after his first wife died, the one he goes fishing with, the godfather to one of his children. Baker, 58, managed Bush's 1980 presidential campaign; he is the person most involved in Bush's vice-presidential choice...
...Orleans Mardi Gras was started by Protestant businessmen. The traditional New Orleans neighborhood guy, sometimes known as a yat -- that character who greets people with "Where y'at?" -- is likely to be of the same Irish or German descent as the Brooklyn dockworker he sometimes sounds like. The person I have known who most naturally fit into the pace of New Orleans -- a person whose normal and astonishingly effective way of keeping appointments was to stroll around the French Quarter, assuming he'd run into the appropriate person by and by -- was born and raised in Pottsville...
...absence of buildings in New Orleans done in the grand American scale was ordained partly by the sponginess of its ground. Anyone tempted to build a huge building had only to think of Charity Hospital, whose first floor had gradually become its basement. There is a theory that the person responsible for the greatest change in the city was the engineer who finally figured out how to build massive skyscrapers on river effluent. The result was a row of huge oil-company office buildings and, on the edge of the French Quarter, a gaggle of high-rise hotels -- hotels large...
Masson harks back to this accusation fairly often in Against Therapy, but Freud is not specifically his target this time. Instead, the author is gunning for everyone who has ever had the gall to offer any sort of psychological treatment or aid to another person. His subtitle accurately indicates just how hyperventilating his argument is going to be: "Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing." Readers looking for nuance or subtlety should probably go elsewhere. But Masson raises some intriguing points, even if he insists on doing so at the top of his voice. Psychotherapy...
Actually, Masson goes much further than this. "The therapeutic relationship," he writes, "always involves an imbalance of power. One person pays; the other receives. Vacations, time, duration of the sessions are all in the hands of one party. Only one person is thought to be an 'expert' in human relations and feelings. Only one person is thought to be in trouble." Well, one is tempted to say, yes indeed, that is the way it happens. Masson, however, is an absolutist; he is of the persuasion that if something is not perfect it is terrible. This point of view rarely works...