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Rating: 
Summary: best intro to the thought of a great humanist
Review: Here you can witness Freud not as the straw man stereotype that so many despise but as a warm, humorous man with a great deal of vision. The man you encounter in this book is so different from what you would expect that I warmly recommend this to anyone with an inquiring mind.He was a genius.
Rating:
Summary: best intro to the thought of a great humanist
Review: Here you can witness Freud not as the straw man stereotype that so many despise but as a warm, humorous man with a great deal of vision. The man you encounter in this book is so different from what you would expect that I warmly recommend this to anyone with an inquiring mind. He was a genius.
Rating: 
Summary: That Nation's Saving Grace
Review: In the postwar US, Freudianism was an art of those concerned with the temporary suspension of unpleasant "realities": artists and intellectuals, persons intent on the maintenance of certain standards in the face of certain social leitmotifs. But "ego psychology" and the Lacanianism which challenged it in the name of scientific ethics were not the only Freud booms to occur, and the most poorly-remembered influence of Freud is perhaps that of James Strachey's Standard Translation on 20th-century Britain. Strachey's choices for translation of Freud's German are almost downright misleading from the standpoint of Freud's own concerns as a steward of Austro-Hungarian culture, but it is to be remembered that Freud's early work was read intensively by European intellectuals; and the group of British intellectuals centered around the Independent Labour Party was no exception, as the tendency of Freud's thought corresponded nicely to the ILP's already-existing concern with the "delinking" of moralism from the politics of everyday life. In other words, it would perhaps be a good idea to consider Strachey's Freud not as anticipating further developments in the line of positivistic decomposition of social mores but as a response to Shavian refusals of certain arrangements (such as enfranchised Britons were offered in lieu of the rapidly expanding social services of their Continental contemporaries): perhaps Bloomsbury can be taken to have codified the rules of this form of *epater*, rather than reinvented it with any "singlemindedness", and perhaps this work deserves to be taken as exemplary of this succor rather than scientifically "exceptionable" in its conjecture -- no matter how much we scruple to rigorize, no "research program" can be attributed to those whose assays produce no viable counterexamples.
Rating:
Summary: That Nation's Saving Grace
Review: In the postwar US, Freudianism was an art of those concerned with the temporary suspension of unpleasant "realities": artists and intellectuals, persons intent on the maintenance of certain standards in the face of certain social leitmotifs. But "ego psychology" and the Lacanianism which challenged it in the name of scientific ethics were not the only Freud booms to occur, and the most poorly-remembered influence of Freud is perhaps that of James Strachey's Standard Translation on 20th-century Britain. Strachey's choices for translation of Freud's German are almost downright misleading from the standpoint of Freud's own concerns as a steward of Austro-Hungarian culture, but it is to be remembered that Freud's early work was read intensively by European intellectuals; and the group of British intellectuals centered around the Independent Labour Party was no exception, as the tendency of Freud's thought corresponded nicely to the ILP's already-existing concern with the "delinking" of moralism from the politics of everyday life. In other words, it would perhaps be a good idea to consider Strachey's Freud not as anticipating further developments in the line of positivistic decomposition of social mores but as a response to Shavian refusals of certain arrangements (such as enfranchised Britons were offered in lieu of the rapidly expanding social services of their Continental contemporaries): perhaps Bloomsbury can be taken to have codified the rules of this form of *epater*, rather than reinvented it with any "singlemindedness", and perhaps this work deserves to be taken as exemplary of this succor rather than scientifically "exceptionable" in its conjecture -- no matter how much we scruple to rigorize, no "research program" can be attributed to those whose assays produce no viable counterexamples.
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