An interesting disquisition on a small moment that would loom large in Freud’s imagination.
A thoughtful riff on Sigmund Freud’s brief 1915 essay “On Transience,” in which he considers death and mourning.
Von Unwerth, director of the Abraham A. Brill Library of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute & Society, takes us back to 1913 when Freud began a brief relationship with poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a meeting that occasioned “On Transience” (text appears in appendix). After a brief account of the meeting with Rilke, von Unwerth traces the careers of both men—and of their mutual friendship with Lou Andreas-Salomé, who met Rilke in 1897 and who became his lover and confidant in the ensuing years. Fifteen years older than Rilke, Andreas-Salomé broke with him in 1900 but remained a potent figure in his life and imagination. Rilke came to resist a friendship with Freud—and with psychoanalysis. Andreas-Salomé, in fact, dissuaded Rilke from therapy, fearing that treatment might exorcise the very demons that animated his art. Von Unwerth is an unabashed fan of Freud, so seldom is heard a discouraging word in this exploration of Freud’s ideas. We learn that the famed psychoanalyst was an “Oxfordian” who believed that Edward de Vere, the 16th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays, and that he was influenced greatly by philosopher Friedrich Schiller. Writes von Unwerth: “For Freud, as for Schiller, poetry and life were bound together inescapably in time. It is eternity, and the “eternal” nature of art, that is illusory. What gives both meaning, sense, and vitality is the certainty of death.” Concerned throughout with issues of mortality, the author offers details of the deaths of his principals and reminds us that Freud had 31 painful surgeries on his face to retard the cancer that would have killed him had not his physician administered, near the end, a merciful overdose of morphine.
An interesting disquisition on a small moment that would loom large in Freud’s imagination.Pub Date: July 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-57322-247-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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