"In the Freud Archives"

[fiefoe]

'I am acutely aware when preparing my works that some of them tend to read like folies a trois involving Freud, Swale, and the reader.' So says Swale at one point. In this case, it's between Malcolm, me, and a previous reader who occasionally indulged in marginalia.
That person didn't think much of the author's idea of psychoanalytic theory. Offending statements:

• To fully accept the idea of unconscious motivation is to cease to be human.
• To "make the unconscious conscious" - the program of psychoanalytic therapy - is to pour water into a sieve. The moisture that remains on the surface of the mesh is the benefit of analysis.
• ... their view that we are ruled by external reality rather than by our inner demons ('it is _not either/or' was his/her comment.)

Malcolm is a pretty keen student of human nature.

• relationships that begin and flourish in the benign, self-inventing atmosphere of letters and then wither in the rugged errain of actuality
• ... blessed or cursed with a strange imperviousness to the unpleasantness of self-knowledge
• When, occasionally... we are forced to see things as they are, we are like naked people in a storm.
• The melodramatist... views human conduct as a mechanical response to the inexorable pressure of events set in motion by the malign motives of others.
• Human nature is such that when we are suddenly taken up by someone whom we consider superior and admirable, we accept his attentions calmly, whereas when we are dropped we cannot rest until we feel we have got to the bottom of the person's profound irrationality.

<<