Are You a Psychopath? Take the Test (And, If You Fail, It’s Not All Bad News)

We’ve all heard the old philo­soph­i­cal sce­nario known as the trol­ley prob­lem: as the run­away vehi­cle of the name careens out of con­trol toward the edge of a cliff, you must choose whether to pull the lever to switch it to anoth­er track. The catch: while the trol­ley would then no longer plunge off that cliff, bring­ing about the cer­tain deaths of the five peo­ple aboard, it would instead kill some­one stand­ing on the oth­er track, who will sur­vive if you don’t pull the lever. In a more fraught ver­sion of the prob­lem, you must choose not whether to pull a lever, but whether to shove a per­son of con­sid­er­able bulk onto the (sin­gle) track, stop­ping the trol­ley but killing the bulky indi­vid­ual.

In the Big Think video above, Oxford psy­chol­o­gist Kevin Dut­ton, author of The Wis­dom of Psy­chopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Ser­i­al Killers Can Teach Us About Suc­cess, uses the trol­ley prob­lem to illu­mi­nate the con­di­tion of psy­chopa­thy. While non-psy­chopaths may dither about the first ver­sion of the sce­nario, they even­tu­al­ly come to the con­clu­sion that they pre­fer one death to five. They have much more of a strug­gle with the sec­ond ver­sion, which requires them to actu­al­ly push the lone stranger to head off those five deaths. Psy­chopaths, by con­trast, expe­ri­ence no such dif­fi­cul­ty: the trol­ley prob­lem, for them, hard­ly amounts to a prob­lem at all, and Dut­ton explains, neu­ro­sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, why: “Imag­ine that I were to hook you up to a brain scan­ner and present you with those two dilem­mas. I would see the emo­tion cen­ter of your brain, your amyg­dala and relat­ed brain cir­cuits, the medi­al orbital frontal cor­tex for exam­ple, light up like a pin­ball machine.”

And if he’d scanned a psy­chopath? “Pre­cise­ly noth­ing.” All this assumes, of course, that you do not your­self suf­fer from psy­chopa­thy. If you don’t know whether you do, Dut­ton offers a handy mul­ti­ple-choice “psy­chopath chal­lenge” on his site that can give you an idea of the direc­tion your brain may lean. If you’ve got a touch of the old psy­chopa­thy, don’t lock your­self away; as Dut­ton explains in this Time inter­view, “you don’t need to be vio­lent,” and you can even attain greater suc­cess in cer­tain fields than non-psy­cho­pathics — espe­cial­ly if you con­sid­er vig­i­lant­ly and unhesi­tat­ing­ly min­i­miz­ing the death tolls at divert­ed cliff­side trol­ley tracks a field.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This is Your Brain on Sex and Reli­gion: Exper­i­ments in Neu­ro­science

What Hap­pens When Your Brain is on Alfred Hitch­cock: The Neu­ro­science of Film

The Dalai Lama on the Neu­ro­science of Com­pas­sion

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

How To Think Like a Psy­chol­o­gist: A Free Online Course from Stan­ford

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Sigmund Freud Writes to Concerned Mother: “Homosexuality is Nothing to Be Ashamed Of” (1935)

Freud Letter

Hank Green, host­ing his Crash Course on Psy­chol­o­gy, put it best: when we think of the study of the mind, we think of an old, bespec­ta­cled beard­ed man puff­ing on a pipe. We think, in oth­er words, of Sig­mund Freud, whether we know any­thing about him or not. Despite pub­lish­ing such very real and still rea­son­ably well-known works as The Inter­pre­ta­tion of DreamsBeyond the Plea­sure Prin­ci­ple, and Civ­i­liza­tion and its Dis­con­tents, the man has some­how passed par­tial­ly into the realm of pop­u­lar myth: we think of him at once as an influ­en­tial pio­neer in a lit­tle-explored intel­lec­tu­al field, and as some­thing of an idée fixe-hob­bled char­la­tan as well. Per­haps, like many uni­ver­sal­ly rec­og­nized 20th-cen­tu­ry fig­ures, he com­bined right­ness and wrong­ness in some kind of irre­sistible pro­por­tion. But the let­ter above, fea­tured at Let­ters of Note, demon­strates that, at least on the issue of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, he had indeed drawn a cor­rect con­clu­sion well before most any­one else.

In 1935, says that post, Freud “was con­tact­ed by a wor­ried moth­er who was seek­ing treat­ment for her son’s appar­ent homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. Freud, who believed that all humans are attract­ed to both sex­es in some capac­i­ty, respond­ed with the fol­low­ing let­ter of advice.”

Dear Mrs [Erased],

I gath­er from your let­ter that your son is a homo­sex­u­al. I am most impressed by the fact that you do not men­tion this term your­self in your infor­ma­tion about him. May I ques­tion you why you avoid it? Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is assured­ly no advan­tage, but it is noth­ing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degra­da­tion; it can­not be clas­si­fied as an ill­ness; we con­sid­er it to be a vari­a­tion of the sex­u­al func­tion, pro­duced by a cer­tain arrest of sex­u­al devel­op­ment. Many high­ly respectable indi­vid­u­als of ancient and mod­ern times have been homo­sex­u­als, sev­er­al of the great­est men among them. (Pla­to, Michelan­ge­lo, Leonar­do da Vin­ci, etc). It is a great injus­tice to per­se­cute homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as a crime – and a cru­el­ty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Have­lock Ellis.

By ask­ing me if I can help, you mean, I sup­pose, if I can abol­ish homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and make nor­mal het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty take its place. The answer is, in a gen­er­al way we can­not promise to achieve it. In a cer­tain num­ber of cas­es we suc­ceed in devel­op­ing the blight­ed germs of het­ero­sex­u­al ten­den­cies, which are present in every homo­sex­u­al in the major­i­ty of cas­es it is no more pos­si­ble. It is a ques­tion of the qual­i­ty and the age of the indi­vid­ual. The result of treat­ment can­not be pre­dict­ed.

What analy­sis can do for your son runs on a dif­fer­ent line. If he is unhap­py, neu­rot­ic, torn by con­flicts, inhib­it­ed in his social life, analy­sis may bring him har­mo­ny, peace of mind, full effi­cien­cy, whether he remains a homo­sex­u­al or gets changed. If you make up your mind he should have analy­sis with me — I don’t expect you will — he has to come over to Vien­na. I have no inten­tion of leav­ing here. How­ev­er, don’t neglect to give me your answer.

Sin­cere­ly yours with best wish­es,

Freud

While main­stream west­ern thought no longer expects that homo­sex­u­als might, under any cir­cum­stances, “get changed,” it has aligned to Freud’s view in the sense of regard­ing their ori­en­ta­tion as “noth­ing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degra­da­tion.” And from what I can see, human­i­ty now enjoys the pres­ence of more such “high­ly respectable indi­vid­u­als” who pub­licly acknowl­edge their own non-het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty than ever before. Freud’s let­ter to this con­cerned Amer­i­can moth­er of the 1930s, in any case, brings nuance to the car­toon image we all have of him — the obses­sion with dreams, the insis­tence on diag­nos­ing repres­sion, the whole deal with cig­ar sym­bol­ism — just as his view of homo­sex­u­als would have brought nuance to the car­toon image this and oth­er con­cerned Amer­i­can moth­ers of the 1930s might have had of them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Famous Let­ter Where Freud Breaks His Rela­tion­ship with Jung (1913)

How a Young Sig­mund Freud Researched & Got Addict­ed to Cocaine, the New “Mir­a­cle Drug,” in 1894

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A Crash Course on Psychology: A 30-Part Video Series from Hank Green

Nov­el­ist, edu­ca­tor, and vlog­ger John Green has drawn a lot of press late­ly, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to New York­er pro­file by Mar­garet Tal­bot, in the wake of the film ver­sion of his pop­u­lar young-adult nov­el The Fault in Our Stars. But we here at Open Cul­ture can say we fea­tured him before that mag­a­zine of cul­tur­al record did: in 2012 we post­ed his Crash Course in World His­to­ry, and last Octo­ber, his Crash Course on Lit­er­a­ture. If you keep up with this site, you prob­a­bly know Green less as a com­ing-of-age-tragedy-writ­ing “teen whis­per­er” (in the words of the New York­er) than as the mile-a-minute, con­stant­ly wise­crack­ing, but nev­er­the­less whole­some teacher you nev­er had. You may not know that he has an equal­ly edu­ca­tion­al broth­er named Hank, who first came to inter­net promi­nence in a back-and-forth video series of John’s devis­ing called Vlog­broth­ers, which Tal­bot describes as “less a con­ver­sa­tion than an extend­ed form of par­al­lel play.”

Now you can find Hank, pos­sessed of a sim­i­lar­ly fast and fun­ny deliv­ery style, pre­pared to inform you on a whole range of oth­er sub­jects, teach­ing crash cours­es just like John does. At the top of the post, we have his 30-part Crash Course in Psy­chol­o­gy, in which he cov­ers every­thing about the study of the human mind from sen­sa­tion and per­cep­tion to the the­o­ry of the homuncu­lus to remem­ber­ing and for­get­ting to lan­guage to depres­sion. (You can watch the series from start to fin­ish above.) Psy­chol­o­gy has long ranked among the most pop­u­lar under­grad­u­ate majors in Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties, and giv­en human­i­ty’s ever-increas­ing curios­i­ty (and grad­u­al­ly accu­mu­lat­ing knowl­edge) about the work­ings of its brains, that should­n’t come as a sur­prise. But those of us who felt com­pelled to pick a more “prac­ti­cal” course of study back in col­lege, can now turn to Hank Green, who offers us a sur­pris­ing­ly thor­ough psy­cho­log­i­cal ground­ing with only about five hours of “lec­tur­ing” — much less than the major would have tak­en us, and with many more corny jokes. Per­haps the course will help you under­stand why we laugh at them any­way.

via Devour

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

Crash Course on Lit­er­a­ture: Watch John Green’s Fun Intro­duc­tions to Gats­by, Catch­er in the Rye & Oth­er Clas­sics

How To Think Like a Psy­chol­o­gist: A Free Online Course from Stan­ford

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Art of Structured Procrastination

Proverb "procrastination Is The Thief Of Time" Written On A Blac
If you’re one of our philo­soph­i­cal­ly-mind­ed read­ers, you’re per­haps already famil­iar with Stan­ford pro­fes­sor John Per­ry. He’s one of the two hosts of the Phi­los­o­phy Talk radio show that airs on dozens of pub­lic radio sta­tions across the US. (Lis­ten to a recent show here.) Per­ry has the rare abil­i­ty to bring phi­los­o­phy down to earth. He also, it turns out, can help you work through some world­ly prob­lems, like man­ag­ing your ten­den­cy to pro­cras­ti­nate. In a short essay called “Struc­tured Pro­cras­ti­na­tion” — which Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape, Opsware, Ning, and Andreessen Horowitz) read and called “one of the sin­gle most pro­found moments of my entire life” – Per­ry gives some tips for moti­vat­ing pro­cras­ti­na­tors to take care of dif­fi­cult, time­ly and impor­tant tasks. Per­ry’s approach is unortho­dox. It involves cre­at­ing a to-do list with the­o­ret­i­cal­ly impor­tant tasks at the top, and less impor­tant tasks at the bot­tom. The trick is to pro­cras­ti­nate by avoid­ing the the­o­ret­i­cal­ly impor­tant tasks (that’s what pro­cras­ti­na­tors do) but at least knock off many sec­ondary and ter­tiary tasks in the process. The approach involves “con­stant­ly per­pe­trat­ing a pyra­mid scheme on one­self” and essen­tial­ly “using one char­ac­ter flaw to off­set the bad effects of anoth­er.” It’s uncon­ven­tion­al, to be sure. But Andreesen seems to think it’s a great way to get things done. You can read “Struc­tured Pro­cras­ti­na­tion” here. 

Have your pro­cras­ti­na­tion tips? Add them to the com­ments sec­tion below. Would love to get your insights.

via LinkedIn

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sci­ence of Willpow­er: 15 Tips for Mak­ing Your New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions Last from Dr. Kel­ly McGo­ni­gal

The Art of Liv­ing: A Free Stan­ford Course Explores Time­less Ques­tions

The Mod­ern-Day Philoso­phers Pod­cast: Where Come­di­ans Like Carl Rein­er & Artie Lange Dis­cuss Schopen­hauer & Mai­monides

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

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Steven Pinker Uses Theories from Evolutionary Biology to Explain Why Academic Writing is So Bad

I don’t know about oth­er dis­ci­plines, but aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing in the human­i­ties has become noto­ri­ous for its jar­gon-laden wordi­ness, tan­gled con­struc­tions, and seem­ing­ly delib­er­ate vagary and obscu­ri­ty. A pop­u­lar demon­stra­tion of this comes via the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chicago’s aca­d­e­m­ic sen­tence gen­er­a­tor, which allows one to plug in a num­ber of stock phras­es, verbs, and “-tion” words to pro­duce cork­ers like “The reifi­ca­tion of post-cap­i­tal­ist hege­mo­ny is always already par­tic­i­pat­ing in the engen­der­ing of print cul­ture” or “The dis­course of the gaze ges­tures toward the lin­guis­tic con­struc­tion of the gen­dered body”—the point, of course, being that the lan­guage of acad­e­mia has become so mean­ing­less that ran­dom­ly gen­er­at­ed sen­tences close­ly resem­ble and make as much sense as those pulled from the aver­age jour­nal arti­cle (a point well made by the so-called “Sokal hoax”).

There are many the­o­ries as to why this is so. Some say it’s sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions of schol­ars poor­ly imi­tat­ing famous­ly dif­fi­cult writ­ers like Hegel and Hei­deg­ger, Lacan and Der­ri­da; oth­ers blame a host of post­mod­ern ‑isms, with their politi­cized lan­guage games and sec­tar­i­an schisms. A recent dis­cus­sion cit­ed schol­ar­ly van­i­ty as the cause of incom­pre­hen­si­ble aca­d­e­m­ic prose. A more prac­ti­cal expla­na­tion holds that the pub­lish or per­ish grind forces schol­ars to turn out deriv­a­tive work at an unrea­son­able pace sim­ply to keep their jobs, hence stuff­ing jour­nals with rehashed argu­ments and fan­cy-sound­ing puffery that sig­ni­fies lit­tle. In the above video, Har­vard cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist and lin­guist Steven Pinker offers his own the­o­ry, work­ing with exam­ples drawn from aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing in psy­chol­o­gy.

For Pinker, the ten­den­cy of aca­d­e­mics to use “pas­sives, abstrac­tions, and ‘zom­bie nouns’” stems not pri­mar­i­ly from “nefar­i­ous motives” or the desire to “sound sophis­ti­cat­ed and recher­ché and try to bam­boo­zle their read­ers with high-falutin’ ver­biage.” He doesn’t deny that this takes place on occa­sion, but con­tra George Orwell’s claim in “Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage” that bad writ­ing gen­er­al­ly hopes to dis­guise bad polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic motives, Pinker defers to evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, and refers to “men­tal habits” and the “mis­match between ordi­nary think­ing and speak­ing and what we have to do as aca­d­e­mics.” He goes on to explain, in some fair­ly aca­d­e­m­ic terms, his the­o­ry of how our pri­mate mind, which did not evolve to think thoughts about soci­ol­o­gy or lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, strug­gles to schema­tize “learned abstrac­tions” that are not a part of every­day expe­ri­ence. It’s a plau­si­ble the­o­ry that doesn’t rule out oth­er rea­son­able alter­na­tives (like the per­fect­ly straight­for­ward claim that clear, con­cise writ­ing pos­es a for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge for aca­d­e­mics as much as any­one else.)

Pinker’s talk was part of a larg­er Har­vard con­fer­ence called “Styl­ish Aca­d­e­m­ic Writ­ing” and spon­sored by the Office of Fac­ul­ty Devel­op­ment & Diver­si­ty. The full con­fer­ence seems designed pri­mar­i­ly as pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment for oth­er aca­d­e­mics, but lay­folks may find much here of inter­est as well. See more talks from the con­fer­ence, as well as a num­ber of unre­lat­ed videos on good aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing here. Or, for more amuse­ment at the expense of clunky aca­d­e­m­ic prose, see the results of the Phi­los­o­phy and Lit­er­a­ture bad writ­ing con­test, which ran from 1995–98 and turned up some almost shock­ing­ly unread­able sen­tences from a vari­ety of schol­ar­ly texts.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steven Pinker Explains the Neu­ro­science of Swear­ing (NSFW)

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

“Lol My The­sis” Show­cas­es Painful­ly Hilar­i­ous Attempts to Sum up Years of Aca­d­e­m­ic Work in One Sen­tence

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Carl Jung Writes a Review of Joyce’s Ulysses and Mails It To The Author (1932)

jung joyce 2

Feel­ings about James Joyce’s Ulysses tend to fall rough­ly into one of two camps: the reli­gious­ly rev­er­ent or the exasperated/bored/overwhelmed. As pop­u­lar exam­ples of the for­mer, we have the many thou­sand cel­e­brants of Blooms­day—June 16th, the date on which the nov­el is set in 1904. These rev­el­ries approach the lev­el of saints’ days, with re-enact­ments and pil­grim­ages to impor­tant Dublin sites. On the oth­er side, we have the reac­tions of Vir­ginia Woolf, say, or cer­tain friends of mine who left wry com­ments on Blooms­day posts about pick­ing up some­thing more “read­able” to cel­e­brate. (A third cat­e­go­ry, the scan­dal­ized, has more or less died off, as scat­ol­ogy, blas­phe­my, and cuck­oldry have become the stuff of sit­coms.) Anoth­er famous read­er, Carl Jung, seems at first to damn the nov­el with some faint praise and much scathing crit­i­cism in a 1932 essay for Europäis­che Revue, but ends up, despite him­self, writ­ing about the book in the lan­guage of a true believ­er.

A great many read­ers of Jung’s essay may per­haps nod their heads at sen­tences like “Yes, I admit I feel I have been made a fool of” and “one should nev­er rub the reader’s nose into his own stu­pid­i­ty, but that is just what Ulysses does.” To illus­trate his bore­dom with the nov­el, he quotes “an old uncle,” who says “’Do you know how the dev­il tor­tures souls in hell? […] He keeps them wait­ing.’” This remark, Jung writes, “occurred to me when I was plow­ing through Ulysses for the first time. Every sen­tence rais­es an expec­ta­tion which is not ful­filled; final­ly, out of sheer res­ig­na­tion, you come to expect noth­ing any longer.” But while Jung’s cri­tique may val­i­date cer­tain hasty read­ers’ hatred of Joyce’s near­ly unavoid­able 20th cen­tu­ry mas­ter­work, it also probes deeply into why the nov­el res­onates.

For all of his frus­tra­tion with the book—his sense that it “always gives the read­er an irri­tat­ing sense of inferiority”—Jung nonethe­less bestows upon it the high­est praise, com­par­ing Joyce to oth­er prophet­ic Euro­pean writ­ers of ear­li­er ages like Goethe and Niet­zsche. “It seems to me now,” he writes, “that all that is neg­a­tive in Joyce’s work, all that is cold-blood­ed, bizarre and banal, grotesque and dev­il­ish, is a pos­i­tive virtue for which it deserves praise.” Ulysses is “a devo­tion­al book for the object-besot­ted white man,” a “spir­i­tu­al exer­cise, an aes­thet­ic dis­ci­pline, an ago­niz­ing rit­u­al, an arcane pro­ce­dure, eigh­teen alchem­i­cal alem­bics piled on top of one anoth­er […] a world has passed away, and is made new.” He ends the essay by quot­ing the novel’s entire final para­graph. (Find longer excerpts of Jung’s essay here and here.)

Jung not only wrote what may be the most crit­i­cal­ly hon­est yet also glow­ing response to the nov­el, but he also took it upon him­self in Sep­tem­ber of 1932 to send a copy of the essay to the author along with the let­ter below. Let­ters of Note tells us that Joyce “was both annoyed and proud,” a fit­ting­ly divid­ed response to such an ambiva­lent review.

Dear Sir,

Your Ulysses has pre­sent­ed the world such an upset­ting psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lem that repeat­ed­ly I have been called in as a sup­posed author­i­ty on psy­cho­log­i­cal mat­ters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceed­ing­ly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusu­al efforts, but also to rather extrav­a­gant pere­gri­na­tions (speak­ing from the stand­point of a sci­en­tist). Your book as a whole has giv­en me no end of trou­ble and I was brood­ing over it for about three years until I suc­ceed­ed to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m pro­found­ly grate­ful to your­self as well as to your gigan­tic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall prob­a­bly nev­er be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grind­ing of nerves and of grey mat­ter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have writ­ten about Ulysses because I could­n’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grum­bled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of ver­i­ta­ble psy­cho­log­i­cal peach­es. I sup­pose the dev­il’s grand­moth­er knows so much about the real psy­chol­o­gy of a woman, I did­n’t.

Well, I just try to rec­om­mend my lit­tle essay to you, as an amus­ing attempt of a per­fect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and hap­pened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gath­er from my arti­cle what Ulysses has done to a sup­pos­ed­ly bal­anced psy­chol­o­gist.

With the expres­sion of my deep­est appre­ci­a­tion, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faith­ful­ly,

C. G. Jung

With this let­ter of intro­duc­tion, Jung was “a per­fect stranger” to Joyce no longer. In fact, two years lat­er, Joyce would call on the psy­chol­o­gist to treat his daugh­ter Lucia, who suf­fered from schiz­o­phre­nia, a trag­ic sto­ry told in Car­ol Loeb Schloss’s biog­ra­phy of the novelist’s famous­ly trou­bled child. For his care of Lucia and his care­ful atten­tion to Ulysses, Joyce would inscribe Jung’s copy of the book: “To Dr. C.G. Jung, with grate­ful appre­ci­a­tion of his aid and coun­sel. James Joyce. Xmas 1934, Zurich.”

via Let­ters of Note

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing You Need to Enjoy Read­ing James Joyce’s Ulysses on Blooms­day

The Very First Reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “A Work of High Genius” (1922)

Vir­ginia Woolf Writes About Joyce’s Ulysses, “Nev­er Did Any Book So Bore Me,” and Quits at Page 200

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Famous Letter Where Freud Breaks His Relationship with Jung (1913)

FreudJung

Freud and Jung. Jung and Freud. His­to­ry has close­ly asso­ci­at­ed these two who did so much exam­i­na­tion of the mind in ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Europe, but the sim­ple con­nec­tion of their names belies a much more com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship between the men them­selves. At the top of the post, you can see the let­ter that Sig­mund Freud, father of psy­cho­analy­sis, wrote to Carl Gus­tav Jung, founder of ana­lyt­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy, in order to end that rela­tion­ship entire­ly. “At first Freud saw in Jung a suc­ces­sor who might lead the psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic move­ment into the future,” say the cura­tor’s com­ments at the Library of Con­gress’ web site, “but by 1913 rela­tions between the two men had soured.

While Freud claims in his let­ter that it is ‘demon­stra­bly untrue’ that he treats his fol­low­ers as patients, in the very same let­ter we find him allud­ing to Jung’s ‘ill­ness.’ ” Freud calls it “a con­ven­tion among us ana­lysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own neu­ro­sis. But one [mean­ing Jung] who while behav­ing abnor­mal­ly keeps shout­ing that he is nor­mal gives ground for the sus­pi­cion that he lacks insight into his ill­ness. Accord­ing­ly, I pro­pose that we aban­don our per­son­al rela­tions entire­ly.”

“I shall lose noth­ing by it,” he con­tin­ues, “for my only emo­tion­al tie with you has been a long thin thread — the lin­ger­ing effect of past dis­ap­point­ments — and you have every­thing to gain, in view of the remark you recent­ly made to the effect that an inti­mate rela­tion­ship with a man inhib­it­ed your sci­en­tif­ic free­dom.” This rela­tion­ship, writes Lionel Trilling in a review of The Cor­re­spon­dence Between Sig­mund Freud and C.G. Jung, “had its bright begin­ning in 1906 and came to its embit­tered end in 1913,” when Freud wrote this let­ter.  “Freud and Jung were not good for one anoth­er; their con­nec­tion made them sus­cep­ti­ble to false atti­tudes and ambigu­ous tones. [ … ] The intel­lec­tu­al and pro­fes­sion­al dif­fer­ences between the two men, pro­found as these even­tu­al­ly became, would per­haps not of them­selves have brought about a break so dras­tic as did take place had not their alien­at­ing ten­den­cy been rein­forced by per­son­al con­flicts.” Only a com­par­a­tive study of Freud and Jung’s meth­ods would yield a com­plete under­stand­ing of their roles in the strug­gle for the soul of psy­cho­analy­sis. But on a more basic lev­el, this hard­ly counts as the first nor the last col­lapse, in any field of human endeav­or, of a per­haps overde­ter­mined suc­ces­sion between an emi­nence and his would-be pro­tege — though it may count as one of the most elo­quent­ly doc­u­ment­ed ones.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’

Carl Gus­tav Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in Rare Inter­view (1957)

Carl Gus­tav Jung Pon­ders Death

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Sigmund Freud Appears in Rare, Surviving Video & Audio Recorded During the 1930s

Sigmund Freud

What, I won­der, would Sig­mund Freud have made of Han­ni­bal Lec­tor? The fic­tion­al psy­cho­an­a­lyst, so sophis­ti­cat­ed and in con­trol, moon­light­ing as a blood­thirsty can­ni­bal… a per­fect­ly grim rejoin­der to Freud’s ideas about humankind’s per­pet­u­al dis­con­tent with the painful repres­sion of our dark­est, most anti­so­cial dri­ves. While Freud’s pri­ma­ry taboo was incest, not can­ni­bal­ism, I’m sure he would have appre­ci­at­ed the irony of an ultra-civ­i­lized psy­chi­a­trist who gives full steam to his most pri­mal urges.

Freud—who was born on this day in 1856, in the small town of Freiberg—also had a care­ful­ly con­trolled image, though his pas­sion­ate avo­ca­tion was not for the macabre, sala­cious, or pruri­ent, but for the archae­o­log­i­cal. He once remarked that he read more on that sub­ject than on his own, an exag­ger­a­tion, most like­ly, but an indi­ca­tion of just how much his inter­est in cul­tur­al arti­facts and rit­u­al con­tributed to his the­o­ret­i­cal expli­ca­tion of indi­vid­ual and social psy­chol­o­gy.

In the film above, we see Freud in con­ver­sa­tion with a friend, a pro­fes­sor of archae­ol­o­gy, whom the psy­chi­a­trist con­sult­ed on his exten­sive col­lec­tion of antiq­ui­ties. Lat­er, we see Freud with his dog, then reclin­ing out­doors with a book. Over this footage we hear the nar­ra­tion of Freud’s daugh­ter Anna, who only allowed this film to be viewed by a small cir­cle until her death in 1982.

Though Freud lived many decades into the era of record­ing tech­nol­o­gy, pre­cious lit­tle film and audio of the founder of psy­cho­analy­sis exists. While the home movies at the top may be the only mov­ing image of him, per­haps the only audio record­ing of his voice, above, was made in 1938, the year before his death. At 81 years old, Freud’s advanced jaw can­cer left him in con­sid­er­able tor­ment. Nonethe­less, he agreed to record this brief mes­sage for the BBC from his Lon­don home in Mares­field Gar­dens. Read a tran­script of the speech, and see Freud’s hand­writ­ten copy, below.

I start­ed my pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ty as a neu­rol­o­gist try­ing to bring relief to my neu­rot­ic patients. Under the influ­ence of an old­er friend and by my own efforts, I dis­cov­ered some impor­tant new facts about the uncon­scious in psy­chic life, the role of instinc­tu­al urges, and so on. Out of these find­ings grew a new sci­ence, psy­cho­analy­sis, a part of psy­chol­o­gy, and a new method of treat­ment of the neu­roses. I had to pay heav­i­ly for this bit of good luck. Peo­ple did not believe in my facts and thought my the­o­ries unsa­vory. Resis­tance was strong and unre­lent­ing. In the end I suc­ceed­ed in acquir­ing pupils and build­ing up an Inter­na­tion­al Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic Asso­ci­a­tion. But the strug­gle is not yet over.  –Sig­mund Freud.

Freud-BBC-Manuscript-1

Freud-Manuscript-2

The Library of Con­gress online exhib­it Sig­mund Freud: Con­flict & Cul­ture has many more pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments includ­ing a holo­graph page from Freud’s man­u­script of Civ­i­liza­tion and its Dis­con­tents, in which he the­o­rized the bedrock impulse of ser­i­al killers, fic­tion­al and real: the so-called “Death Dri­ve,” our “human instinct of aggres­sion and self-destruc­tion.”

Many impor­tant texts by Freud can be found in our col­lec­tion, 600 Free eBooks for the iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices. And you’ll inevitably find a few cours­es cov­er­ing Freud’s thought in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, part of our list of 950 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Young Sig­mund Freud Researched & Got Addict­ed to Cocaine, the New “Mir­a­cle Drug,” in 1894

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Down­load Sig­mund Freud’s Great Works as Free eBooks & Free Audio Books: A Dig­i­tal Cel­e­bra­tion on His 160th Birth­day

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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