From Freud’s letter to his fiancée, 1885, describing the scene on the Champs-Elysées:
Die nobeln Damen gehen dort mit einer Miene spazieren, als wollten sie die Existenz der Welt, ausser sich und ihren Männern, leugnen oder doch gütigst übersehen.
~
(This will probably get me disinvited to high tea at Bryn Mawr, but c'est la vie. As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.)
Meet the world’s richest woman!
 |
| Gina Rinehart, the world's richest woman |
Just in case you were beginning to think rich people were deeply misunderstood and that they feel the pain of those who are less fortunate, here's the world's wealthiest woman, Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, with some helpful advice.
"If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain," she said in a magazine piece. "Do something to make more money yourself -- spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."Myess ... , let them eat cake.
 |
| Cake is for our kind. Let them eat Twinkies. |
Aloft she bears her towering head,
filled with conceit of her own pre-eminence
-- Fielding, Tom Jones
(1749)
Rinehart made her money the old-fashioned way: She inherited it. Her family iron ore prospecting fortune of $30.1 billion makes her Australia's wealthiest person and the richest woman on the planet.
"There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire," she said by way of encouragement.
Just in case you were beginning to think rich people were deeply misunderstood and that they feel the pain of those who are less fortunate, here's the world's wealthiest woman, Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, with some helpful advice.
"If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain," she said in a magazine piece. "Do something to make more money yourself -- spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."
You… can’t … make…. this… stuff … up ………….
You… can’t … make…. this… stuff … up ………….
For her plebeian soulmate, click here:
Can't make this stuff up, folks, so I won't even try.
She's back: World's richest woman makes case for $2-a-day pay
[Update 11 Sept] Further Antoinettery:
Ann Romney doesn’t understand poverty
Someone who appreciated the plight
of the poor would not have trivialized it with campy stories from her
let’s-pretend past.
~
As background to one of his dreams, Sigmund Freud recounts
(in Traumdeutung) a railway journey he once endured;
appropriate, that, since literary depictions of
Strangers-on-a-Train invariably partake
of the oneiric.
Anyhow, the train was packed, and he was obliged (with appropriate
excuses) to insert himself into a cabin already occupied by a married
couple. They frostily
snubbed him; and the wife placed
her umbrella on the window-seat across from her, so as to bar it to the
intruder.
So far so good (bad);
but then Freud offers a
curious general psychosociological observation, of the sort that is rare in his
writings:
Nach meinen Reiseerfahrungen kennzeichnet ein so rücksichtslos
übergreifendes Benehmen Leute, die
ihre Karte nicht oder nur halb
bezahlt haben. Als der Konducteur
kam, und ich mein teurer erkauftes Billet vorzeigte, tönte es aus dem Munde der
Dame unnahbar und wie
drohend: Mein Mann hat
Legitimation.
(One of the symbols of sociopolitical corruption in America
around a hundred years ago, was the railroad pass, handed out to curry favor
with the influential. Apparently
Austro-Hungary had rather the same thing.)
With her, as with Gina Rinehart: The men who, by their own efforts and sweat, make their
first million, are often ornery enough; but their widows and heiresses are insufferable.
~
We had thought to have done; yet, unexpectedly,
some pages later, Freud recurs to this dream: and this, in a very strange way. The context is the unearthing of what is concealed in
dreams -- more precisely, how the analyst may be led to the nub, when the
patient
(a) upon being bidden to repeat the
account of the dream, recounts a certain passage with transmogrified wording,
(b) suddenly recalls a passage of
the dream previously unrelated.
(In this case, the patient is himself.)
First, the not-so-strange part (apart from the
strangeness of recurring to it at
all):
Es ist dies ein Reisetraum, der Rache nimmt
an zwei unliebenswürdigen Reisegefährten, den ich wegen seines zum Teil
grobunflätigen Inhaltes
fast ungedeutet gelassen habe.
So: This
roughly corresponds to condition (b).
He goes on:
Das ausgelassene Stück lautet: Ich sage auf ein Buch
von Schiller: It is from …
Korrigiere mich aber, den Irrtum selbst bemarkend, It is by … Der Mann bemarket
hieraut zu seiner Schwester: “Er hat es ja richtig gesagt.”
So much is straightforward: The dream-judgment jibes with that of any experienced
translator; and, for reasons that
Freud outlines, the slight initial mistranslation is quite understandable.
-- At this point, we should, on the face of it, remove the
discussion to some other post, unconnected with the (ostensibly) political
business with which we began. But in the Freudian spirit of things connected to other things, we shall leave the thread
lie.
Freud then recounts an incident from the vacation in
England, connected with that train-ride, as, at the seaside,
ein reizendes kleines Mädchen zu mir trat und mich fragte:
Is that a starfish? Is it alive? Ich antwortete: Yes
he is alive; schämte mich aber
dann der Inkorrektheit, und wiederholte der Satz richtig.
(I.e., changing “he” to “it”.) Followers of this blog
will readily understand,
that in our estimation, Freud, als
Dolmetscher, was right the first time; but that is probably (not necessarily, but probably) nothing
to the point.
What is to the
point … well, must be left to our death-bed; some things are simply ‘compartmented’, so to speak.
Freud’s writings go deep, or at least they try to. And generally, you can follow his
thought, though the reasoning may fall short of compelling assent. But at this point, he loses me
completely (le miel sur les lèvres). After an obvious remark about the two meanings of ‘gender’
(das Geschlechtswort / das Geschlechtliche), he states:
Dies ist allerdings einer der Schlüssel zur Lösung
des Traumes.
and then (to my bafflement) appends cases of Mo
~ Ma, as in “Matter and Motion”. The Spanish values of the respective
vowels would be masculine ~ feminine; but there he loses me; I find no such key syllable in the
dream which, suitably switched-out, yields the Traumgedanke. (Other ideas suggest themselves, yet
these too proved fruitless.)
Uniquely, he leaves the solution as ‘an exercise for the reader’ (“der
wird sich das Fehlende leicht ergänzen
können”).
No comments:
Post a Comment