Word: quicksands
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...took an unplanned constitutional during a fishing trip in Newfoundland. "Bogholes in Newfoundland can look like hard ground," says Corporal Les Noble, the Mountie. "All of a sudden the President went into a boghole, and he was in above his waist." Noble, who had one foot in the quicksand-like bog himself, managed after a 10-minute struggle to extricate Bush with the help of Secret Service man Ed Flynn. "It was a hard pull," says Noble, placing blame on the bog, not the slender ex-President. Shaken but undeterred, Bush slipped on new trousers, borrowed socks and pressed...
...just can't be trusted these days. You leave the Harvard men's hockey team with a three-game winning streak, in prime position for a late Beanpot/ECAC/NCAA (take your pick) title run, and a mere three weeks later you're holding a broom out over a vat of quicksand, hoping Harvard can grab hold and drag itself to safety before it's too late...
Having mentioned some of the finer aspects of the dining experience, let me move on to the less glorious parts. The line, which can trap the unlucky first year for 30 minutes, is most comparable to quicksand, or perhaps the traffic in the Callahan tunnel. Going in it may not seem so bad; but after 30 minutes in a warm, noisy knot o people the room begins to spin and the lights flicker...
Frank Sulloway, a visiting scholar of science history at M.I.T. and a longtime critic of Freud's methods, takes a somewhat more apocalyptic view: "Psychoanalysis is built on quicksand. It's like a 10-story hotel sinking into an unsound foundation. And the analysts are in this building. You tell them it's sinking, and they say, 'It's O.K.; we're on the 10th floor...
This image raises anew the quicksand question. If Freud's theories are truly as oozy as his critics maintain, then what is to keep all the therapies indebted to them from slowly sinking into oblivion as well? Hypothetically, nothing, though few expect or want that event to occur. Surprisingly, Peter Kramer, author of the current best seller Listening to Prozac, comes to the defense of talking cures and their founder: "Even Freudian analysts don't hold themselves 100% to Freud. Psychotherapy is like one of those branching trees, where each of the branches legitimately claims a common ancestry, namely Freud...