More on “the Eternal Feminine”

(1)

Das Unbeschreibliche

hier ist getan.

Das Ewig-Weibliche

zieht uns hinan.

[-- Goethe, Faust]

A late-Elizabethan version:

Nó wórds fór it --

Yet ‘tis done.

A woman’s Forever

beckons us on.

[ -- Anon.  The “B” manuscript substitutes “Whatever” for “Forever”:

scholars are divided upon which is the valid reading.]

cf:  http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/04/west-easterly-divan.html

(2)

To the psychologist, the emotional differences between the sexes  appear small in a laboratory,  but enormous during a quarrel with his wife.

-- Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust (1949/1957), p.412

Psychological Epigrams (weiter erweitert)

From random reading, things worth noting -- things worth quoting.

(Plus some of them I made up myself.)

(0)

If analysis worked, the Japanese would long ago have adapted it, and flooded the market …

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 205

(1)

The self-betrayal of another  is sucked in through all our pores.

-- Theodor Reik, The Search Within (1956)

(2)

In localities where people belch at meals,

it is unwise to ask after the womenfolk;

and in localities where people are asking after the womenfolk,

it is unwise to belch at meals.

-- Eric Berne, Games People Play (1964)

(3)

Fat people  are more inclined to eat their object  than to bite it.

-- Theodor Reik, The Search Within (1956)

To appreciate the epigrammatic force of this,  you need to know that, in psychoanalytic parlance, “object” refers, not to an object,   but to a human being.  -- The basic idea behind the epigram, is that of Caesar:  “Let me have men about me that are fat / bald-headed men, such as sleep o’ nights …”

(4)

The dream is not prophetic of ill  but is ill itself.  It is bad to dream certain things.

-- Jonathan Towers, characterizing shamanism; in Io viii (1971)

(5) Re joining the “Magic Mountain” sanatarium for consumptives, Hans Castorp (etwa the naïf of the novel) observes:

Manche gewöhnen sich nie, sagte mein Vetter mir gleich, als ich ankam.  Aber man gewöhnt sich daran, daß man sich nicht gewöhnt.

-- Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924)

 (6)

The quicker  second childhood kicks in,

the happier U will B.

-- Bozo the Button Buster

(7)

Prostitution ist ja eine Angelegentheit,  bei der

es einen grossen Unterschied macht,

ob man sie

von oben sieht ….

od-er    von ….

un-ten  betrachtet …

-- Robert Musil, Der Mann ohneEigenschaften (vol. I: 1930)

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(8)

Observe the curious working of history:  Archimedes’ death is familiar  because of Plutarch’s interest in Marcellus;  of Marcellus  it is generally remembered  only that  one of his soldiers  murdered Archimedes.

--  James R. Newman, ed. World of Mathematics (1956), p. 179

(9)  Freud on Nacktheitsträume and the origins of Paradise:

Diese  der Scham entbehrende  Kindheit 

erscheint unserer Rückschau später  als ein Paradies,

und das Paradies  selbst

ist nichts anderes

als die Massenphantasie  von der Kindheit des einzelnen.

-- Die Traumdeutung (1899)

Actually, if that were true, you would expect an individual’s conception of Heaven to correlate strongly with his personal experiences in early childhood;  but seemingly they do not. 

I myself, for example, had quite a nice childhood, with storytime and Pooh-bear and my very own coonskin cap.   But my idea of the Afterlife  is purely that of doing math, with the insight of angels.

~

Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

Schauen Sie mal!

Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

~

(10)  

Civilization consists in progressive renunciation;

 contrariwise  the superman.

-- Sigmund Freud, letter to Wm Fliess, 1897.

(Note:  Very early in his career;  don't call him on this.)

(11) Finally, one perhaps pardonable autocitation:

Every normal male must repeatedly withstand the beckonings of his testes, and is the better for having learned to do so.  Yet some of those who do not share his natural inclinations,  are proceeding extraordinarily far in punishing and repressing that inborn bloom, on the strength of which -- and without which, not -- civilization has managed to survive and thrive, through wind and wars and pestilence.

-- Dr J, Looking at Someone Up and Down

Of Crime and Sin -- and Mercy

Here is how the Pope spent Maundy Thursday:

Le pape François a lavé jeudi les pieds de douze détenus, dont deux jeunes filles, dans une prison de Rome. Un geste sans précédent.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2013/03/28/01016-20130328ARTFIG00781-le-pape-francois-lave-les-pieds-de-prisonniers-en-italie.php?m_i=fSgfH0c9z5Z5iwNgDjybIwnS1%2BrMquj2avRmKRCWTccshP1L8

The press made a big deal out of how some of the prisoners whose feet the Holy Father washed, were women -- as though everyone involved were Salafi.

In the section of readers’ comments, Christians ‘got it’, whereas a couple of baffled agnostics worried whether, by this action the Pope were being “soft on crime”.  (The fingers twitch, itching to add an editorial “[sic!]”:  but in fact, on reflection, there is a kind of truth in this view.   But it is not a truth of the marketplace, nor indeed of this world.)

The foot-washing ceremony is not really doctrinal:  it is exemplary and physical.  When Jesus did it, it prefigured that final physical act of grace, the sharing of the bread and wine, commemorated in Communion.

Crime, like war and pestilence, and all the other woes of this vale, are concerning;  yet Christ and his church are after bigger game :  Sin.   This distinction is signally illustrated that supreme scene of all our literature, in which Jean Valjean, having been hosted to dinner by the Bishop, makes off with the silver tableware;  is caught, and hauled back to the Bishop’s dwelling in custody.  “Ah, so glad to see you again, my friend!” cries the Bishop, to the amazement of the constables.  “You forgot the candletsticks!”

Only in the shallowest view  was the Bishop being ‘soft on crime’:  He had spotted in Jean Valjean something much worse than any crime:  a soul in peril.   On the usurer’s balance-pan, the Bishop’s act makes no sense;  but it had a transcendent sense -- it gave sense to a life that erst had lacked it.

~

All this leads us to the mystery of Mercy -- and thence, to the Merchant of Venice.

Some choice passages of Theodore Reik would here be in point, but the volume lies not to hand.  The upshot, if memory serves, was that, although Shakespeare wore very lightly  whatever religion he may have had, he grew up in an England steeped with Christian legend if not theology, and may have been influenced by it here;  and that we are to take the play (whether Shakespeare himself so intended it or not) as a serious confrontation between Judaism and Christianity.   Our only point in raising this here, is to angle back in on the mystical import of the Pope’s gesture (so strange to the unchurched).   In light of this, we are not really practicing textual criticism here, so much as suggesting a possible staging of the play.
 

The Merchant is of course  a painful puzzle for the modern metteur en scène:  No one wishes to appear anti-Semitic.   Do you downplay Shylock’s Jewishness?  Do you insert apologetic mumblings into the program notes?

The reading (or staging) that I suggest, confronts this question in a way that has nothing whatever to do with political correctness:  that of not playing down, but playing up Shylock’s Jewish faith and ancestry, playing it up to its full and mighty stature, whose long shadow has ever lain across the world.

That Shylock could be a money-lender, followed from well-known sociohistorical reasons;  the status neither shocks a modern audience, inured as we are to the world of promiscuous high finance, nor has it any theological significance:  it simply is perfect for the plot.  That Jews in the Middle Ages were the ones who must finance the follies of the Gentiles, is historically amusing, but does not go to the heart of Moses, nor of Abraham.   The covenant of Abraham, and the laws brought down by Moses, are the rock upon which all that was later solid  rests.   Shylock, as such, should not be edulcorated, and he needs no excuses.   He is (or, let us depict him as) a pillar of Old Testament rectitude.   In insisting upon the force and vigor of his bond with Antonio (for the Jews well know about bonds, as well as bondage), he is as righteous in his way, as the cadi ordering the amputation of thieving hands.   Basanio -- the feckless debtor whose follies set the whole thing in motion -- is callow by comparison.  (Were I to stage the play, he would be played by one of the Monty Pythons.) 

Shylock movingly depicts  the plight and trials of his long-oppressed people;  but when it comes to the case in point, he needs no lawyer’s rhetoric or tricks:  he has the law on his side.    Portia herself admits the literal justice of Shylock’s claim, by all the judicial reasonings of this world.

Word of the Day: “pre-commitment” (latest update)

Freud was now getting tired, and also found it hard to steal an hour for the work;  so to force himself on, he announced a paper at the Society.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 352

In my youth, there were a handful of incidents, not especially dramatic on the face of it (for the children of that time  led a largely placid life, in the bosom of Eisenhower) but of which I was long ashamed, and mentioned to no-one.  Yet with the passage of years -- now decades -- these shrink in perspective, and fade to a uniform sepia hue.  They become …. almost picturesque.  And I shall share one with you now.

It was the summer of 1963.  I was visiting a Norwegian boy who had been my best friend for a time, while his family lived in our village in New Jersey.  In 1963 the father -- a shipping executive -- was recalled to Norway, and the family moved back permanently.  But before young Peter (we were both 13 at the time) had quite settled in to his new home -- new customs, new language -- nor quite said good-bye to his American interlude,  his family invited me to stay with them over the summer, first at their pleasant home in Oslo, and later at their even more pleasant fjord-side cottage in Lom.   I fear I did nothing for Peter’s acquisition of the Norwegian language, but it was a fine and memorable shared summer.

[Cue ominous music]

The scene shifts to the countryside around that fjord.  It was dramatically hilly, with challenging terrain for hikers.  Peter and I were energetically out and about, huffing and puffing a bit  since we were neither of us normally all that athletic.   And at one point we came to a sort of ledge, or mini-cliff, that simply defeated our attempts to scale it.  It didn’t look all that imposing -- no vertical rock-face or anything like that  -- and we felt foolish at our impotence before so apparently paltry an obstacle.   Now, I was durned if we were going to simply retreat with our tails between our legs -- surely, with a bit more effort, we would be up and over the top.   And so …  I … (pause) …  (the analyst, who had been writing quietly in the background, is now poised with his pen) …  I, taking my hiking-hat in hand ---------

[… and here I shall take a breather.   There simply is not time to develop all the ideas that are flowering in my head these days, as time’s winged chariot hastens on, and the Reaper nods knowingly.   So I’ll post down-payments, and finish-up those that excite reader interest.   The rest will “remain torsos”, to use a favorite expression of my teacher Yakov Malkiel.]

... To resume]

-- I … hurled the hat up over the lip of the ledge.  “Now we’ll have to climb it,” I said to Pete.

    To make a sad story short:  we tried mightily, but failed.  And withdrew, licking our bruises.  For all we know, the hat may lie there still.  God willing it served as a refuge for voles.

As mentioned, this trivial incident long seemed shameful.  Not so much because we plucky lads were unable to scale the face of Mount Miniature, but because the loss of the hat seemed so foolhardy.

Yet now, it would appear, I am in good company.  For in an excellent essay in this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki (the spelling of whose surname can serve as a sobriety test) reports a burgeoning new trend:   pre-commitment.  Not a very catchy name, but the idea is:  You commit to doing something (losing weight or whatever), and add some backbone to your spineless will  by offering a hostage to fortune:  Should you fail, sanctions will automatically kick in, at the hand of your referee or sponsor.

(By a happy coincidence, The World of Dr Justice  runs just such a public service.  Now, y’all need to lose five pounds by next month, y’hear?   If you fall short, send me a hundred dollars.)

Now, the logic of the thing requires that the sanction be neither too trivial nor too grave.  Sure, I could have motivated us even more by locking one end of a long chain to my ankle, and the other to a ticking bomb (defusible by hand), and tossed the bomb up instead of the hat.   But we still would not have been able to scramble up.

This game-of-Chicken-style logic was classically captured by Stanley Kubrick in “Dr Strangelove”.   The Soviet Union has created a “Doomsday machine”, which could not be defused, and would automatically blow up the planet  if triggered by a nuclear attack of anyone on anyone else;  it is still a secret.   Complications (as you might imagine) ensue.  A rogue element in the U.S. (an increasingly prevalent domestic species) launches such a strike.  The U.S. President plaintively admonishes his Soviet counterpart:  The whole point of such a device is that knowledge of its existence be made public.  “We had wanted to unveil it at the next May Day,” the Soviet leader miserably explains.

Surow… rowo…. (heck, it’s late;  you know whom I mean)  points out that Congress has recently embarked upon a similar pre-commitment:  the fiscal cliff.   If, by midnight on the last day of this year, Congress has not come up with so&so much savings in (carefully considered) budget cuts, then sequestration kicks in with the new year:  automatic massive cuts across the board, without regard to which make sense.   Now, true, I tossed an old hiking-hat irretrievably up a cliff;  but Congress is about to dump a trillion dollars over one.

The author further (for he is a connoisseur of social logic) observes that most House Republicans had already made a pre-commitment -- never to raise taxes -- that clashes with the broader pre-commitment to balance the budget.   In short, folks, we’re f*cked.

~

There’s a strategic, game-theoretical perspective to be taken on this thing.

Right now, the Dems and the Republicans are playing chicken with respect to the fiscal cliff.   And in any game of chicken, whoever is perceived as most reckless, most careless of consequences, wins.

Now, certain character-traits make the freshmen Republican Congressman absolutely unbeatable at that game:  they’re fanatics; they’re bonkers.  Very scary guys to drive towards head-on in your little deuce coupe out on the county-line road.  Their strategy (if we can dignify that stance as a strategy) might be dubbed

The Samson Gambit

“Fiat avaritia  et ruat respublica”

Republican freshmen, fine-tuning their fiscal policy

Thus, if these clowns have their way, we’re double-f*cked.

~

Not everyone in Congress, however, is a freshman House Republican.   So, setting aside the bitter-enders, what game-theoretic considerations will appeal to the rest?

Throughout Obama’s first term, the wrecker strategy appealed to virtually all Republicans, for the simple reason that they figured (quite correctly, the public being clueless) that this would help them in November 2012;  and for that high prize, they were willing to bear the psychic pain of watching other people (the lowly 47%) shuffle miserably along the unemployment line.  This pain they bore with remarkable stoicism.

Now, however, November is upon us.  The strategy splits in twain.

(Case 1)  Romney wins.

Contra-intuitively,  we may actually be more likely to obtain the necessary revenue increases (including raising taxes, and nixing some of the welfare payments that oil companies and agribusiness now enjoy) prior to the fiscal cliff  if Romney wins in November.  For, if they drive off that cliff, the nation goes back into recession, and Romney will look very foolish with the mess he inherits.

(Case 2)  Obama wins.

At first glance, here too the outlook is for a happy compromise in December, the main doubt having been removed.   True, the result, in helping the nation’s economy, would make Obama look good.  But after all, he’s won anyway, it’s too late, there’s no point.  Surely they wouldn’t keep up their wreckers strategy for four whole years? -- Well, thing is, they just did.

All things considered, the only favorable scenario is if one party or the other captures both the Presidency and a whopping majority in both houses of Congress.  Then we can actually have action  on policy and strategy, instead of deadlock.  True, if’s the Republicans, they’ll spend a lot of time catering to gambling magnates, speculators, and miscellaneous fatcats, but at least their goal won’t be to wreck the economy as a whole.  

Ditto the Dems.   True, there might be an upswing in transgender marriages among amputee-wannabes, but hey, to  each his own.

~

With this game-theoretic perspective, it is interesting to take a second look at the more common and less dramatic phenomenon that opens that essay of James Sur-o-wieki (you see, it’s Sunday morning now, and I have had my coffee), the scenario where a dieter locks in future sanctions against herself  should she fail to shed those pounds.   What effectively is going on is, her ego is playing a game of chicken with her own id.

Remarkable.

Personally, I see an id as a risky thing to get in the ring with.

~

At a simpler level, any oath or promise is a kind of pre-commitment, in the sense that, if you break your promise, a sanction does kick in:  namely, you acquire the reputation of a four-flusher, someone whose word is worthless.  (The difference of this everyday example  from the more elaborate ones above, is that you needn’t set up the sanction yourself in advance:  society has done that for you.)

Now, in the case of the competing pre-commitments of the House Republicans -- balance-the-budget BUT no-new-taxes --  the oaths were simply at variance, betraying cognitive disorientation.  But it is possible to stack pre-commitments in a more structured way, such that one trumps the other.  Let a noted psychoanalyst tell it:

Those ancient Jews were afraid of themselves and of the intensity of their passions.  They had a solemn religious formula in which they asked God to consider oaths spoken in moments of rage  as invalid.  They anticipated such outbreaks in themselves, and asked God not to oblige them to keep those  vows … That formula is called Kol Nidre.

-- Theodor Reik, The Search Within (1956)

Reik’s observation occurs in the midst of a long associational analysis, ranging the length of his well-stocked literary larder, one link of which was the name Jephthah, which at first had no resonance for him, until placed in this larger context.  For Jephthah’s daughter was the victim of her father’s ill-considered pre-commitment:  in return for God’s granting him victory over the Ammonites, he had vowed to slaughter in sacrifice  the first creature that he should meet on his return.  And who should rush up to greet him but his blushful daughter?   “Hi, Dad-ddyyyyy!”  (“Oh…. shit.”)

This tale of Jephthah, judge of Israel, illustrates the truth, that not only vows made in blind anger should be excused of fulfilment, but also vows made by complete idiots -- village simpletons and House Republicans.

~

A curious sort of pre-commitment is seen in infant baptism or the bris.   Here the child is covenanted to the faith of his forefathers.   However, only the one baptised or circumcised can develop this vicarious pre-commitment into a genuine commitment of his own;  this occurs via ceremonies like the Bar Mitzvah or First Communion.

Retraction (updated)

Many of you may not realize it, but this site is fully licensed.  Now, some bloggers out there just rant and say whatever comes into their tiny little heads -- not us:  we have an Official Junior Blogger’s License from the FCC.

Such an honor does not come without obligations.   There are certain words you may not say, certain opinions you may not express, certain thoughts you may not entertain.  (Not that we would ever dream of entertaining any!)

Well, we just had a call from the FCC, and apparently we at some point inadvertently offended someone, somewhere, at some time, in violation of paragraph 986b of Addendum D.  Our infraction, it seems, was to have posted a link to the following sexistracist abomination,

Bill Haley sings "Ten Little [ethnonym deleted]"

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oor8fvAMUIE

which we hereby duly abominate.

So in accordance with regulation 544-10-f, we are now required to post something impeccably politically Correct. 

Here you go:

One little, two little, three little Native-Americans;

Four little, five little, six little Native-Americans;

Seven little size-challenged, eight size-challenged Native Americans of unspecified height and weight, nine [modifiers redacted] Native-Americans;

Ten [XXX little Indian boys XXX]  =>
underage Native-Americans,
size unspecified,
equally divided among males, females, hermaphrodites,
and the transgendered.

[Update Oct 2012]   I may have completely misremembered the urtext -- as a count-up, rather than a countdown.  Reading Theodor Reik’s memoir, The Search Within (1956), I was met with different version, which begins  “Ten little” and winds up “Four little, three little, two little Indians / One little Indian boy”.  This last, one of his patients was suffering as an earworm.  Reik comments (in his dirty-uncle psychoanalytic way)

A few minutes before, the patient had spoken of his brothers and sisters.  It was easy to guess that the unconscious desire to remove his siblings and to have the position of an only child  had found its expression in that ditty.

The things one reads …

[Update]  Turns out there is an even less salonfähig urtext-behind-the-urtext, which, after several launderings, appears as And Then There Were None (the best-selling mystery novel of all time).    Wikipedia tells you all about it;  but to this, upon pain of the wrath of the regulators, we dare not even link.

~

~

~ For a theo-philosophical fantasia, try this:

Murphy and the Magic Pawnshop

[Kindle] [Nook]

~

Under the terms of our consent agreement with the FCC, we shall refrain on commenting on the articles in this morning’s newspapers:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html?_r=1&hpw

The article makes a fascinating observation:  In some ways, unwed mothers are just smart shoppers:  “Explanations for marital decline start with home economics.”  With the decline in union jobs, “men are worth less than they used to  be.”

In that perspective, developments like the following may be not unrelated:  as marriage is cheapened, people think  why bother defending it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/same-sex-marriage-bill-passes-maryland-house-of-delegates/2012/02/17/gIQARk7XKR_story.html

(We …  are …  doomed ……..    )

[Update 5 Sept 2015]   George Will -- shooting fish in a barrel, but doing it amusingly:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/cleaning-up-history-one-name-at-a-time/2015/09/04/21ead5d4-525b-11e5-8c19-0b6825aa4a3a_story.html 

.

Quantum-Mechanical feng shui

The Viennese and later Angeleno psychoanalyst, and longtime smoking-buddy of Sigmund Freud, recalls a patient:

When she was a very little girl, she sneaked from her bedroom into the dining room in the dark, because she wanted to know how the furniture, the table, the chairs, and the lamps behaved  when they were alone, without people around.  She was convinced that the room and the furniture would behave differently  when they thought they were not being observed.

-- Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear (1948)

(Compare the levitating tables in the movie "Take Shelter".)

In the inimitable Betty Boop cartoons, this is exactly what furniture does:  it's alive, and full of rhythm and mischief.

From the Freud Archives

[Note:  This post is a light-hearted trifle.
For a more serious discussion, including one of Janet Malcolm's brilliant article "In the Freud Archives", click here:

     Chomsky, Freud, and the problem of acolytes]



(1) Trouble began early for little Hans

Sigmund Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905):

Der kleine Hans zeigt schon seit einiger Zeit  das lebhafteste Interesse für jenes Stück seines Körpers, das er als >Wiwimacher< zu bezeichnen pflegt.  Schon mit drei Jahren  hat er die Mutter gefragt,

»Mama, hast du auch einen Wiwimacher?«

Worauf die Mama geantwortet:

»Natürlich, was hast du denn gedacht !? «

This extraordinary exchange apparently came about because Hansens parents were attempting to be good little Freudians, and supply him with the necessary traumas.  Sometimes they were more successful than others:

When Hans’s mother found the child fondling his penis, she dutifully threatened, “If you do that, I shall send for Dr. A. to cut off your widdler.  And then what’ll you widdle with?”  Hans’s unregenerate reply was:
“With     my     bottom”.

-- Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), p. 92

(2) Wrong Number

Sigmund Freud, Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (1901ff):

“Jetzt habe ich vergessen, den Professor zu fragen, ob ich  in dem Briefe  seinen Namen nennen darf,” eilt zum Telephon,  läßt sich verbinden, und ruft die Frage ins Rohr: 
 “Bitte, ist der Herr Professor schon  nach dem Speisen zu sprechen?”  Als Antwort  tönt ihm ein erstauntes

» Adolf, bist du verrückt geworden? «

entgegen, 

und zwar von der nämlichen Stimme, 
die er  nach meinem Gebote [i.e., that of Adolf’s analyst, S. Freud]  
 nicht mehr hätte hören sollen.   
Er hatte sich bloß » geirrt « und, 
anstatt der Nummer des Arztes, die der Geliebten  angegeben.

Thus far, a run-of-the-mill example of “Verwählen” (misdialing), taking its place in the menagerie of unconsciously motivated errors such as Vergessen, Versprechen, Verlesen, Verschreiben, Vergreifen  and all the rest.  But a dark part of the Archives, recently unsealed, provides us with the rest of the conversation:

Adolf: » Nee, meine Schöne, verrückt bin ich kaum.  Weißt du, dies ist bloß eine Symptomhandlung, wie der Herr Geheimrat Prof. S. Freud sie zu nennen pflegt. «

Die Geliebte: » Naa jaa, wie nett.  Aber  dah du dah bist, möcht' ich dir … Ihnen kündigen, daß es alles zwischen uns  völlig aus und vorbei ist.«

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(3)  Musical Criticism Hits the Bull’s-Eye

Theodor Reik, who spent a good thirty years, 
first as a student, later as a colleague, of Sigmund Freud, 
recounts the following perplexing case:

A patient told me he had felt a very intense impulse  of a most puzzling kind.  During a performance of Parsifal  in the Vienna Staatsopera,  in the middle of the most solemn scene,  he had the most irresistible impulse  to shout at the top of his voice:  “Mazzesknoedel!”  (Matzoth-balls).

Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear (1948)

We reproduce a marginal note upon this passage, found in the Freud Archives:

No mystery about this -- the only appropriate response  to the flatulence of Wagner.

I am likewise reminded of the writer who confided that, when weary of listening to a public lecture by some puffed-up and self-important figure, he could scarce restrain himself from calling out  from the back of the hall,

           

            => “What about the Thirty-Nine Steps ? ! ? !! ?? !!! “ < =

Track that Quote: an exercise in Depth-Philology ®

Theodor Reik, a Viennese collegue of Freud for thirty years, recounts:

Freud once smilingly said to me:  “Moi, je ne suis pas un Freudiste.”

(Why did he say it in French?  It is perhaps a variation of a French quotation that is unknown to me.)

Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear (1948), final chapter

A clue lies in the morphology.  The usual adjective in French is not Freudiste, but freudien.   Freud was quite clearly alluding to an analogous quote -- and in French, yet again  from a native speaker of German:  Karl Marx, who, towards the end of his life, famously stated “Je ne suis pas un marxiste.”

In both cases, these major thinkers were rejecting the excesses of their acolytes.

Naturally the philologer  cannot stop here.  Why the devil would Marx have said the thing in French?   Clearly he must be echoing yet another quotation, one which eventually must be set in a purely francophone context.

With a bit of research and some help from Google, we were able to determine the source:  Napoleon, in exile on Elba, is reported to have said (shaking his head),

            “Je ne suis pas  bonapartiste.”

Here the semantics is rather different:  The deposed emperor was not retrospectively rejecting those who followed him in his prime, but recognizing how far he himself has fallen.

Surprisingly, the trail does not end there.    Although this is the earliest recording such French quotation, it exactly echoes an earlier quotation from King Alfred (Ælfrēd se Grēata),

            “Ech nam Ælfrēdsmann.”

And there the trail goes faint:  yet it winds down through the dark ages, all the way back to Athens, where Plato was once heard to state:

            “Ego ouk eimi Platonistes.”

(We could go further, but suspect that our readers have been neglecting their Hittite.)

For further stemmatological research:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/09/geography-and-journalism.html

~

Another example of this rhetorical move;  the reference to to an influential psychoanalyst:

Kohut published a paper … that caused quite a stir.  It’s called “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z”, the first of which Kohut had done before he made his discoveries -- before he became a Kohutian --  and the other afterward.

-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 118

This is nice -- I like this.  Kohutian.  And let us here declare -- with the awe-inspiring authority bestowed upon me as the former Editor of Pronunciation at Merriam-Webster ® -- that this word rhymes with solution and Aleutian.

Try to work it into your next conversation.