Word: superego
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...writers have tried--and mostly failed--Pynchon, with the wondrous Gravity's Rainbow, a critical mass of incendiary pages, and McGuane, with his taut vision of love and death in the Florida Keys, 92 in the Shade. No wonder there is so much yearning for that time of the superego run rampant, the 1960s. Where is Norman Mailer '43, who many felt understood that time better than any American writer? Feiffer strikes a universal key: Don't you wish we still had Nixon to hate? Meanwhile, he and Mailer probably voted for Carter, just the same...
...correspondingly good to be aggressive, intolerant, even murderous. Of course, certain inhibitions remain that move us to justify our atavistic urges in terms of myths or ideologies−Bakuninian anarchy, neo-Maoism, Palestinian liberation, what we will: they mostly add up to a mere vague blessing from the superego on the acts of the ego. We just want to have things our own way, and to hell with oppression, suppression, repression...
...Land of Superego. Motherwell creates a world of remarkably exact feeling, into which one can move without strain, while knowing at each moment that the precision of his sensuousness is there to correct the randomness of ours. This mixture of joyousness and didacticism pervades the best of French modernism, but Motherwell is the one American artist who can make it work...
...page of Joyce. Motherwell was not the only Wasp among the New Yorkers who created abstract expressionism, but he was certainly the most conscious of his puritan background. The son of a California banker, he perceived America as a land of constraint-the abode, so to speak, of the superego. Pictorial sensuousness was something one escaped toward-across the Atlantic, to an imagined Paris, home town of the Cartesian odalisque...
...what might happen if certain current trends go unchecked? All of that is true enough, but the real problem is that Chayefsky has betrayed his own truest instinct about the medium. At one point he has William Holden, the news executive who functions as the movie's superego, inform Faye Dunaway, the ratings-mad exec who is its id, that the trouble with TV is that it reduces everything to banality. That may well be true. But at every turn Chayefsky's plot invests television with a sinister power to cloud men's minds, not through stupefying...