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

[Mark Kohut]

No aesthetic argument from me but I will say: I experienced, because Psycho
went so wide in its appeal, many less educated, lower working class folks
(and relatives) who would use that scene in talking about the
movie--explaining Norman. To them, it made him 'understandable', not simply
inexplicably "crazy' or just a weird murderer. A horror movie next door, so
to speak.
When I was coming of age
as freudianism was moving on culturally (In America), but still strong. I,
personally, carried the freudianism I tried to pick up young around in my
head explanatorily, narrowly, for a long time, fyi.
I was led to Life Against Death thereby and Fromm, Marcuse, Reiff, Norman
Holland as one of my lit crit explainers (due to an earnest prof, female;
boy has he disappeared as a critic worth reading) and others simultaneously
with learning how to try to read the best writers of my time.




On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 10:17 AM, kelber at mindspring.com <
kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Wow, I didn't know about the story behind that utterly crappy shrink scene
> in Psycho. Makes one wish that Freud had ended up in The Bates Motel pond.
>
> Laura
>
> *Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID*
>
>
> Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  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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