Word: vienna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bill Clinton deprecated the Balkans' reputation for blood feud. But sanctified outrage passes down from generation to generation. The Battle of Kosovo--when the Turks, advancing west toward Vienna in 1389, defeated the Serbs and left their bodies to the crows--might have been the day before yesterday...
...driven by ambition from his earliest days and encouraged by his doting parents to think highly of himself. Born in 1856 to an impecunious Jewish family in the Moravian hamlet of Freiberg (now Pribor in the Czech Republic), he moved with the rest of a rapidly increasing brood to Vienna. He was his mother's firstborn, her "golden Siggie." In recognition of his brilliance, his parents privileged him over his siblings by giving him a room to himself, to study in peace. He did not disappoint them. After an impressive career in school, he matriculated in 1873 in the University...
...book that made his reputation in the profession--although it sold poorly--was The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), an indefinable masterpiece--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...
Although the second pillar of Freud's psychoanalytic structure, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), further alienated him from the mainstream of contemporary psychiatry, he soon found loyal recruits. They met weekly to hash out interesting case histories, converting themselves into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908. Working on the frontiers of mental science, these often eccentric pioneers had their quarrels. The two best known "defectors" were Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Adler, a Viennese physician and socialist, developed his own psychology, which stressed the aggression with which those people lacking in some quality they desire--say, manliness...
...family into which Wittgenstein was born in 1889 was one of the wealthiest in Vienna, and young Ludwig grew up in a hothouse atmosphere of high culture and privilege. Brahms and Mahler were frequent visitors to the palatial family home, and Ludwig's brother Paul, a concert pianist who lost an arm in World War I, commissioned works for the left hand by Richard Strauss, Ravel and Prokofiev. It was during the war that Ludwig, a volunteer in the Austrian artillery, completed the Tractatus shortly before he was captured and taken prisoner. Always an ascetic, he gave away his inheritance...