Sigmund freud

Thursday

Lucy Beresford

Brian Aldiss unpicks the Jocasta complex

What if the gods of Greek myth had parallels with Freud’s notion of the unconscious? This is just one idea explored in Brian Aldiss’s sassy retelling of the stories of two prominent women of Thebes. In two novellas, Jocasta, Wife and Mother and Antigone, Aldiss puts both women and their emotional lives centre-stage, as they grapple with events familiar to us from mythology and the plays of Sophocles. Jocasta in particular is presented to us as on the cusp of two worlds, embedded in a lusty and violent culture governed by animal instincts, yet deeply thoughtful and curious about her own feelings. Her bawdy grandmother Semele hobnobs with the spirit

Thursday

Charlotte Moore

Sabina Spielrein: from psychiatric patient to psychoanalyst

Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology and the link between Darwinism and psychoanalytic theory. She was a pioneer of play therapy for children, and the first hospitalised psychiatric patient to progress to practising psycho-analysis. She worked with, among others, Freud, Jung and Piaget; she was regarded as Freud’s standard-bearer. Yet she is remembered, if at all, as Jung’s mistress, a hysteric with a taste for spanking; David Cronenburg’s film A Dangerous Method, with Keira Knightley as Spielrein, has provided the only readily available version of her. John Launer’s aim is ‘to promote her recognition as one

Thursday

Toby Young

The lesson of the young men fighting for Isis: evil is in all of us

I had an interesting discussion with my friend Aidan Hartley earlier this week about whether the young men fighting for the so-called Islamic State are psychopaths. (This was before the news broke of Steven Sotloff’s beheading.) Aidan is better placed than most to answer this question, having worked as a war correspondent for many years and written a classic book on the subject called The Zanzibar Chest. His view is that the Islamic radicals attracted to IS are not run-of-the-mill jihadis, but a particularly nasty sub-species. Without in any way trying to defend the activities of terrorist groups like al-Shabaab, whose handiwork he’s witnessed close up, he thinks of them

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Two narcissists trapped in one static caravan

I was two days alone in the caravan and no signal or reception of any sort. It was like a Buddhist silent retreat, where you have to listen in horrified amazement to your own thoughts. During the day I walked the cliff path; in the evenings I sat on the caravan steps wishing I had a rook rifle. On my walks, I did acquire a book, however: Sigmund Freud’s essay On Narcissism. It was on a community book-swap shelf in a disused telephone box. I’ve been picking up Freud and putting him down again perplexed and defeated for most of my adult life. But when I opened this one and

Friday

Cosmo Landesman

It’s a stupid lie to say we’re all bisexual

It was lust at first sight and love after the third martini. Over a get-to-know-you-dinner I discovered all I needed to know: I had found the Perfect Woman. All the boxes were ticked and the taxi was winding its way to my bedroom when she said: ‘You should know that I’m bisexual.’ She must have seen the frown on my face because she quickly added, ‘But everyone is bisexual.’ ‘No. I’m not,’ I said gently. ‘Yes you are,’ she insisted. ‘No, I’m a heterosexual,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘No, we’re all bisexual,’ she said with muffled exasperation. There followed an infantile exchange of Yes you are!/No I’m not! that

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Do women want what they say they want?

What do women want? You might have thought the Wife of Bath had got this one sorted, but Daniel Bergner has brought science to bear on the perennial question. And the answer from this book is that what women want is not just sex but sex outside the confines of monogamy. You know the received wisdom about women needing relationship security and emotional commitment before they feel right about having intercourse? It’s all hokum, apparently. What women want when it comes to sex is, it seems, at odds not just with societal expectations but with what they — we — say they want. Actually, do you mind if I talk

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Hysteria is a pile-up of unmotivated absurdities

Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by a beautiful maniac named Jessica, who forces him to analyse her, and then hides in his closet and strips naked. Along comes Freud’s old chum Yahuda, a bumbling twerp who doubles as the farce’s authority figure. His presence forces Freud to improvise countless daft wheezes in order to prevent Jessica from being discovered. You may wonder if Freud is the best candidate to star in this kind of sex caper. And you’d be right. He is, in fact, the worst candidate. Having spent 40 years treating mental illness, Freud has