Thursday, October 11, 2007

Freud and Edmundson

Mark Edmundson is so smart, and I've been quite loving his pieces on Freud in the NY Times, and this Bookslut interview is just great. I wish I could say I was looking forward to reading his book, but the fact is I know I won't have the stamina for it, so I'm not even going to try.

[I like the intro to the interview almost as much as the interview. One of my problems with Freud has always been the idea that our psychic structures are formed by early childhood experience. For me this is very not true: I slightly dated a guy when I was about 19 who turned out to be a pathological liar, and ever since then I have basically doubted every single person I encounter, which is to say I am ready to believe that anyone is a liar, and I don't think there is anything in my early childhood that this doubt reaches back to, but it has become a fundamental part of how I see the world. But I see now that I have been misunderstanding Freud, who actually holds that our psychic structures evolve as we develop, and now I can happily say that I learned something today.]

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