In an imaginative, insightful, learned collaboration, novelist Appignanesi (Memory and Desire, 1991) and historian of science Forrester (Cambridge Univ.) present Freud's female relatives, patients, friends, disciples, and colleagues; their contributions to his work; and their actual and symbolic roles in his life. Although little is known of Freud's family life (the information still carefully guarded in the Freud Archives), the psychoanalytic ``family,'' tied by powerful ``transferential bonds,'' is well documented but often misunderstood. It is in dispelling some of the myths about Freud's work (particularly about castration anxiety and penis envy), about the women he encountered and his attitude toward them and toward the feminine in general (e.g., his reputed misogyny) that this book is most successful. In spite of the patronizing title, the women themselves are represented with their own character and integrity intact. All of them—patients such as ``Dora,'' disciples such as daughter Anna Freud, friends such as Lou Andreas-SalomÇ—were creative allies in Freud's work, guides and mediators carrying his ideas, theories, even his mistakes into new territories with their writings and their organizations: Marie Bonaparte in France, Alix Strachey in England, Ruth Mack Brunswick and Muriel Gardner in America. As for Freud himself, the ``demonized'' and the ``idealized'' psychiatrist are replaced here with a humanized male figure, with all his insecurity revealed—especially through the King Lear analogy that appears throughout the text. To those familiar with Freud: a fresh and perhaps controversial interpretation, as well as a tribute to the women who helped create him. For others: an absorbing if somewhat biased introduction to the canon and archetypes that helped shape modern ideas about human development and sexuality.
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1993
ISBN: 0-465-02563-3
Page Count: 588
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
