Contributions
A couple of amusing items sent by readers – by readers who are the creators of said amusing items.
John Emerson has a little rumination on Freud – possibly scurrilous, he says, but surely that’s a good thing.
Read Civilization and its Discontents lately? Remember the part about men peeing on fires to put them out? And why women like to weave? (Hint: it has to do with pubic hairs. Funny old women.)
So John pondered.
I imagined a band of cave men gathered around a fire like the one I saw, incontinently and ecstatically squirting their tiny streams of urine in the futile effort to extinguish the raging fire, while at the same time their resentful, feminist wives tried furiously to weave themselves little fake penises even more useless than the men’s real penises. And became convinced that the human race, deluded as it was, wasn’t going to make it. We are, as a species, like Lewis Carroll’s “bread-and-butterfly”, incapable of survival.
The other item, from Dan Green, is a nice new guru with a happy message for us all. I feel more hopeful already.
Being familiar with this kind of stuff, what stood out for me in the Freud quotes was his statement leading up to the “fire” conjecture:
“Psycho-analytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless admits of a conjecture.”
This sentence epitomizes why so many people have (historically) taken Freud to be a careful, conscientious, researcher. The above sentence is both modest and moderate in tone. However it carries the implication that (i) there is psychoanalytic material that at least points to the correctness of his conjecture (ii) generally his ‘insights’ *are* based on complete material and are susceptible to clear interpretation (iii) he only presents an explanation unequivocably if he has sufficient evidence. None of these is the case.
Freud’s contentions and clinical claims may frequently have been dodgy, but his self-presentation was superb in its subtlety.
Yes. It’s all in the implication. Artful, artful.