Slow Learner again. I find THIS very interesting. Young P on Freudianism

[Monte Davis]

 MK> Freud was the mother's milk of a certain social and esp intellectual
class for postwar America
and, of course, TRP would know and have absorbed that

​It's my guess that the fading context of Freud and of Pavlov -> Watson
behaviorism is already, and will be more in the future, one of the most
dated aspects of GR. That is, it will be something that ambitious readers
will have to "study up" as they do much of Bloom's 1904-vintage
pop-intellectual mental furniture in Ulysses, or as we do all of Dante's
late-medieval theo-psychology .

I thought again of this recently while bingeing on Hitchcock, especially
re-watching 'Spellbound' and 'Psycho.' In the penultimate scene of the
latter -- otherwise a superbly taut, economical narrative --, a
psychiatrist who has just interviewed Norman Bates in his cell comes into
the sheriff's office and delivers a painfully long, pedantic, flat-footed
explanation of Bates' mental state and history (almost all of which we
could infer for ourselves). For decades I'd wondered how Hitchcock could
have made that mistake. This time I watched a 1997 "making of Psycho"
extra, incorporating an interview with screenwriter Joe Stefano. He had
been in psychoanalysis himself at the time of writing the script, and said
that Hitchcock had initially opposed that scene as a "hat-grabber" -- i.e.,
the audience would start getting ready to leave. Thd Master should have
stuck to his guns on that.

At least Pynchon didn't succumb with Tyrone to the trope that annoys me
most in a lot of the strongly Freud-influenced storytelling of the
1930s-1960s: that explicitly remembering and "talking out" an early trauma
(Mommy did X, Daddy didn't do Y, I witnessed and repressed Z) produces an
irreversible, even rapid "let the sunshine in" breakthrough to psychic
health. Some of that cropped up in the Satanic-child-abuse mania c. 1990,
and you can still see traces of it in various "recovery" psychologies
today.


On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 7:49 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Flange is not as concerned with the greedy cost of his analysis with Diaz
> "than with the dim suspicion he was somehow being cheated: it may have
> been that he considered himself a legitimate child of his generation, and,
> Freud having been mother's milk for
> that generation, he felt he was learning nothing new."
>
> Freud was the mother's milk of a certain social and esp intellectual class
> for postwar America
> and, of course, TRP would know and have absorbed that. And learned its
> attitude to
> self-understanding and its psychic discoveries.
>  And soon would want to go much beyond that 'nothing newness' by
> reading and being influenced deeply by Life Against Death, Brown's Beyond
> Freudianism
> to the max as seen in GR.
>
> GR p. 411: follows seance words:
> ...[They] pick up the reflexes of Intent to Gawk; self-criticism is an
> amazing technique, it shouldn't work but it does"..
> ...
>
>
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