An intriguing excavation that reveals Freud’s deep interest in archaeology, his distaste for modern art and his acquisitive...
On the 150th anniversary of his birth comes a fresh look at the founder of psychoanalysis as a dedicated collector of antiquities.
Australian art historian and biographer Burke tackles her subject chronologically, introducing Freud (1856–1939) as a three-year-old acquiring the childhood memories on which, she says, he “built the entire edifice of psychoanalysis” and concluding with his funeral in London. Exposed to the glories of art in Paris during the 1880s, when he studied under neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, he did not become a collector until he was 40, inspired by a visit to Florence in 1896. Over the next four decades, Freud acquired more than 2,000 statues, vases, reliefs, busts, fragments of papyrus, rings, precious stones and prints, which he arranged in a crowded display in his study. He also collected Greek and Roman works, but he had a special passion for the Egyptians. Burke contends that Freud began acquiring Egyptian tomb art while mourning the death of his father and that psychoanalysis and art-collecting developed together, each nourishing the other. Writing during an era of great archaeological discoveries, Freud compared the work of the archaeologist to that of the psychoanalyst, who must uncover layer after layer of dreams and memories before reaching the deepest, most valuable treasures. The author pays particular attention to Oedipus, with whom, she says, Freud identified as a man of destiny, and to the Sphinx, that symbol of troublesome femininity. Burke recounts how Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex eliminated the Sphinx (present in the original myth) and argues that his creativity was not scientific but was inspired by the myths and heroic legends of his childhood. Whatever one makes of this analysis, the author has created a rich portrait of Freud’s life in Vienna and his purchasing travels to Italy and Greece.
An intriguing excavation that reveals Freud’s deep interest in archaeology, his distaste for modern art and his acquisitive nature.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8027-1503-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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