Significant Moments: Part 2
. . . is rather like explaining the origin of Don Quixote by an appeal to the physical properties of ink and paper.
David Berlinski, Has Darwin Met His Match?
The functional importance of the . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . the presidential office . . .
Ronald C. White, Jr., Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural.
. . . in this field . . .
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus.
. . . is manifested in the fact that normally control over . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . .domestic-intelligence-gathering activities by the FBI, the CIA and military intelligence units. . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
. . . devolves upon it. Thus in . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . the President’s . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . relation to . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . covert operations . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . he is . . .
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset.
. . . like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . President of the United States . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . the President . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . is in the habit of transforming the . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . intelligence community’s . . .
James Risen, Probe Faults CIA on 9/11 Terrorist.
. . . will into action as if it were . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . his own.
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset.
But then . . .
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . as the saying goes, . . .
H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds.
. . . the President . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . is not master in . . .
Sigmund Freud, A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis.
. . . his . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (editor’s note).
. . . own house.
Sigmund Freud, A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis.
Chief’s orders . . .
John Le Carre, The Night Manager.
. . . were to . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent.
. . . use undercover operatives with no White House ties, . . .
William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream.
. . . to break into . . .
Jack London, The People of the Abyss.
. . . the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist . . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
. . . and tell them . . .
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
. . . the job . . .
Edgar B.P. Darlington, The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings.
. . . concerned a traitor who was passing information to the Soviet embassy. Except for the fact that the Russians subscribe to the New York Times, this was untrue.
William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream.
How much, to repeat, did . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . the President . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . know of all this?
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
As always—
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
. . . the short answer is that we don’t know.
Think Tank: A Few Questions, Mr. Shakespeare.
The President . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . liked the passage from Nietzsche that . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . the Secretary of State . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent.
. . . quoted to him: “ ‘I did this,’ says my Memory. ‘I cannot have done this,’ says my Pride and remains inexorable. In the end—memory yields.”
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
As to the moral part of his character, . . .
Alexandre Dumas, Ten Years Later.
. . . the President, . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . as a matter of routine, . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . Amalgamated . . .
Elden LaMar, The Clothing Workers In Philadelphia: History of Their Struggles for Union and Security.
. . . Fiction and Truth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fiction and Truth.
In Nixon the . . .
Bruce Mazlish, In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry.
. . . good reasons . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . and the . . .
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . real reasons . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . would embrace . . .
H.G. Wells, A Moonlight Fable.
. . . interlace, part and unite; like a dance.
The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865-1882 — The Brown Book.
The subject . . .
Joe Klein, The Running Mate.
. . . of covert . . .
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.
. . . action had been . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . broached gingerly . . .
Joe Klein, The Running Mate.
. . . darkly, . . .
Richard Wagner, Gotterdammerung.
. . . and almost as a . . .
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
. . . bothersome subplot of the greater drama, the quest to get . . .
Joe Klein, The Running Mate.
. . . the President’s . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . political . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . future squared away.
Joe Klein, The Running Mate.
Whatever the . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . President knew . . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
. . . the order of the acts . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Excerpt from “Hamlet”).
. . . had been . . .
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
. . . schemed and plotted,
And nothing . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Excerpt from “Hamlet”).
. . . could . . .
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
. . . avert the final curtain’s fall.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Excerpt from “Hamlet”).
In the end, . . .
Edgar B.P. Darlington, The Circus Boys Across the Continent.
. . . the President . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . would be forced to . . .
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . stand alone . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Excerpt from “Hamlet”).
. . . on the political stage, . . .
Alexandre Dumas, The Black Tulip.
. . . accountable for the . . .
Charles Dickens, Hard Times.
. . . deeds of others.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy.
The attorney for . . .
Elden LaMar, The Clothing Workers In Philadelphia: History of Their Struggles for Union and Security.
. . . the President . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . later described . . .
Booth Tarkington, Penrod.
. . . Nixon as a stage manager . . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
—nothing more!
John Galsworthy, The Dark Flower.
. . . of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in.
John Le Carre, The Night Manager.
It is plain that denial and hypocrisy . . .
K.R. Eissler, Discourse on Hamlet and HAMLET.
. . . two qualities that are present . . .
LuxSonor Semiconductors, Inc., The LuxSonor LS188.
. . . in every individual . . .
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.
. . . are also . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . the very foundations of society
K.R. Eissler, Discourse on Hamlet and HAMLET.
To take an analogy from . . .
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis.
. . . psychoanalysis—
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
We see the ego, Freud wrote, "as a poor thing, which is in threefold dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the superego." Exposed to anxieties corresponding to these dangers, the ego, for Freud, is a beleaguered, far from omnipotent negotiator earnestly trying to mediate among the forces that threaten it and that war with one another. It labors to make the id tractable to the pressures of the world and of the superego, and at the same time tries to persuade the world and the superego to comply with the id's wishes. Since it stands midway between id and reality, the ego is in danger of "succumbing to the temptation of becoming sycophantic, opportunistic, and mendacious, rather like a statesman who, with all his good insights, still wants to keep himself in the favor of public opinion."
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
___________________________________________________________
Be that as it may—
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
I propose that for the moment we should leave all these questions on one side and pursue our way further along one particular path.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
In 1980, I met with Anna Freud and Dr. K. R. Eissler, the head of the Sigmund Freud Archives and Anna Freud's trusted adviser and friend, in London, and Miss Freud agreed to a new edition of the . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . Freud . . .
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
. . . archival collection . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
—including . . .
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
. . . the unpublished letters between Sigmund Freud and his best, perhaps his only, friend, Wilhelm Fliess.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
It took more than a year of cajoling and persuading to convince . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
. . . the Freud Archives . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . officials to cooperate with me.
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
As a result I was given access to this sealed correspondence (the originals are in the Library of Congress), which constitutes our most important source of information concerning the beginnings of psychoanalysis.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I was editor-in-chief of an elaborate series of translations of Freud's unpublished letters that were to be published by Harvard University Press in the coming years. My daily life consisted in talking to people around the world who would work on these editions, in finding letters still missing (which involved, to my pleasure, a great deal of travel), in frequent trips to the Library of Congress, almost daily conversations with Kurt Eissler, a large correspondence, and of course my own research.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
And so . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
. . . the inner circle of psychoanalysis . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . lifted its veil of secrecy ever so slightly, in a rare attempt to justify its actions to the public.
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
As I was reading through the correspondence and preparing the annotations for the first volume of the series, the Freud-Fliess letters, I began to notice what appeared to be a pattern in the omissions made by Anna Freud in the original, abridged edition. In the letters written after September 1897 (when Freud was supposed to have given up his "seduction" theory), all the case histories dealing with the sexual seduction of children had been excised. Moreover, every mention of Emma Eckstein, an early patient of Freud's and Fliess's, who seemed connected in some way with the seduction theory, had been deleted. I was particularly struck by a section of a letter written in December 1897 that brought to light two facts previously unknown: Emma Eckstein was herself seeing patients in analysis (presumably under Freud's supervision); and Freud was inclined to give credence, once again, to the seduction theory.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
All that had been suppressed and edited out reappeared . . .
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
. . . as clear, as transparent as . . .
Alexandre Dumas, Ten Years Later.
. . . objective.
Paul Wienpahl, On Translating Spinoza.
I asked Anna Freud why she had deleted this section from the letter. She said that she no longer knew why.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
A masterpiece of evasion.
Don Delillo, The Names.
It was while she held a photograph . . .
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day.
. . . of Emma Eckstein . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . in her hands that she exclaimed, impulsively, if incongruously:
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day.
It never occurred to me to know more.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Modern English Version).
When I showed her an unpublished letter from Freud to Emma Eckstein, she said that she could well understand my interest, since Emma Eckstein had indeed been important to the early history of psychoanalysis, but the letter should nevertheless not be published. In subsequent conversations, Miss Freud indicated that since her father had eventually abandoned the seduction theory, it would only prove confusing to readers to be exposed to his early hesitations and doubts. I, on the other hand, felt that these passages not only were of great historical importance but might well represent the truth. Nobody, it seemed to me, had the right to decide for others, by altering the record, what was truth and what was error. Moreover, whatever Freud's ultimate decision, it is my belief that he was haunted by the seduction theory all his life.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
The question . . .
Emile Zola, Germinal.
. . . of child sexual abuse, . . .
Robert A. Phillips, Jr., Introduction to Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls.
. . . I was sure . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . continued to trouble him, though he had supposedly, with scientific smugness, settled it.
Emile Zola, Germinal.
There exists, as far as I know (I looked without success), not a single published account of the devastating effects of incest or childhood sexual abuse before Freud’s time. And yet if this was happening to anything like the extent that is true today—and why should it be any different?—then at least one in three women, possibly more, in the general population had been exposed to a forced and unwanted sexual advance during childhood. In other words, sexual abuse of one form or another was the core trauma of many women’s lives, yet there was total silence about it. J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
In the tradition we are dealing with, . . .
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
. . . one was allowed . . .
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
. . . to perform these acts but not to speak of them.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
There was no taboo on the commission of incest, only a taboo on speaking about incest.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
As a scientist . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . had an almost unique opportunity.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Here was a man, possibly the first in recorded history, who heard about the sexual abuse of children and recognized what it really meant.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
At that time, had one man put up a fight, it would have had wide repercussions.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
For Freud to have broken that taboo of silence was, to my mind, one of the great moments of history.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
And yet—
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Later, in one of the most famous retractions in the history of ideas, Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . contrary to the truth . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
. . . had recanted.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
As he put it in 1925 in An Autobiographical Study: “I was at last obliged to recognize that the scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.”
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Freud’s earliest insights . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
. . . about child abuse . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . would only reemerge much later, provoking a host of other episodes.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
I showed Miss Freud the 1932 correspondence I found in Freud's desk concerning Ferenczi's last letter, which dealt with this very topic. Clearly, I thought, it was her father's continued preoccupation with the seduction theory that explained his turning away from Ferenczi.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
Most of the items brought silence.
Don Delillo, The Names.
After Fliess, Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933) was for more than twenty years Freud's closest analytic friend (Freud often addressed him as "dear son"). Until the last years of his life, Ferenczi was a loyal pupil, loved by many analysts, a constant source of papers, ideas, encouragement, and inspiration to younger analysts. But in the last few years of his life, Ferenczi began developing in a direction that alarmed Freud. In a series of three papers that uncannily parallel Freud's three 1896 papers, Ferenczi began to believe more and more strongly that the source of neurosis lay in sexual seductions suffered by children at the hands of those closest to them. . . .
Ferenczi had returned to Freud's earliest insights, while putting a different interpretation on many later analytic concepts. For example, he maintained (July 24, 1932) that the Oedipus complex could well be "the result of real acts on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward the child, who then develops a fixation, not from desire [as Freud maintained], but from fear. 'My mother and father will kill me if I don't love them, and identify with their wishes.'"
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
His aim was a human nature reconciled to itself, that did not depend on illusion.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
The paper he read before the 12th International Psychoanalytic Congress is a somewhat milder distillation of these views. Yet the ideas he expressed in the paper met with the strongest disapproval by every leading analyst of the day. Ferenczi's tenacious insistence on the truth of what his patients told him would cost him the friendship of Freud and almost all his colleagues and leave him in an isolation from which he would never emerge.
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
And now what kind of truth was I stalking?
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
Miss Freud, who was very fond of Ferenczi, found . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . several papers . . .
Joseph Conrad, Chance.
. . . in her father’s . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . desk . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . concerning . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . Ferenczi’s . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . last letter . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady.
. . . painful reading and asked me not to publish them. But I insisted that the theory was not one that Freud had dismissed lightly as an early and insignificant error, as we had been led to believe.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I thought the final argument was the coup de grace—the killer point that she couldn't counter. Instead . . .
George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education.
She would insist that nothing of significance had been omitted, and when I tried to argue she would become upset.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
No real answers were forthcoming . . .
The Watergate Hearings: Break-in and Cover-Up.
She and I said nothing . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . further . . .
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
. . . to each other about the
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . issue.
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
It was coded matter. It was matter we could refer to only within the limits of a practiced look. Even this became too much.
Don Delillo, The Names.
For a psychoanalyst, she was remarkably closed on many issues that one would expect her to be open to.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
I was trying to be perceptive about her . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . but I remember thinking at the time . . .
Stewart Edward White, Arizona Nights.
—canny therapist that she is—
Striking Silence. Film Critic James Harvey Explores the Singular Landscape of PARSIFAL.
. . . she will remain . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . evasive and distant.
Irvin Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
She hated the feeling that someone knew her mind.
Don Delillo, The Names.
Central Casting would have made her the librarian of a New England Christian Science reading room. She was a small, fine-featured, quiet, thoughtfully intelligent, generous . . .
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
. . . lady with . . .
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.
. . . a purity of purpose, a holiness to her devotion that gave off a whiff of religious piety. I did not find it attractive, but it was genuine, and I was impressed. I don't think she invented this trait, either. I am sure she got it from her father, who of course was entirely consumed with holy zeal for the cause. Her father's legacy lay heavy on her shoulders . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Woe to any truth-seeker who endangered it.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
Of course, she was curious about his actions and correspondence. But . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
Her unquestioning loyalty made it impossible to deal with events on their basic, real level, he thought. Her stubbornness was difficult to contend with. At times he imagined her as the heroine of a movie, the devoted daughter defending her embattled, innocent father.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
For her . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . her father . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday—nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time—his death and her sorrow—I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together—I heard them together.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Here in this house . . .
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
. . . in London, . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . Between one June and another September . . .
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
. . . Freud lived out the year he still had to live . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . extremely ill; . . .
Henry James, The Chaperon.
. . . an exile, . . .
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Excerpt from Evangeline.
. . . alone in an alien culture.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (Explanatory Note by T.J. Reed).
What images return
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
June
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters.
crossing the Channel
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
through the fog
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
by the night boat
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
water lapping the bow
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
Then, land!—then England!
Elizabeth Barret Browning, Aurora Leigh.
the first eight weeks of freedom
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
June, May . . . April . . . February . . . November
Simon Gray, Butley.
September
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
this long disease
Simon Gray, Butley.
his daughter Anna,
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
Freud, Living and Dying
Max Schur, Freud, Living and Dying.
—his death and her sorrow—
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
the final summons
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans.
‘What is it—what?’
Robert Frost, Excerpt from Home Burial.
My daughter.
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
“—and the doctor.”
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
his loyal and loving physician
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
the morphine
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
Freud’s end as a stoic suicide
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
syringes and needles
Alan Dershowitz, Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case.
the portal where they came
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II) (Final Scene).
this last of meeting places
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from The Hollow Men.
The pulse in the arm, less strong and
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
his last words
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady.
the words of bliss, the sentence,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II) (Final Scene).
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
My hope
Henry James, The Aspern Papers.
My daughter.
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
And now, in this house, . . .
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Anna Freud—
Robert Coles, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis.
. . . who was . . .
Alice Sokoloff, Cosima Wagner: Extraordinary Daughter of Franz Liszt.
. . . inordinately proud of being her father’s daughter . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . listened in stony silence while I painted a marvelous mural of all the hidden truths coming to light; doors being unlocked, things falling into place.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
She seemed staggered by my confrontation and retreated by sinking into her body.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
I told myself that the road ahead would be hard.
Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin.
The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him. There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope for the end of man is to know.
Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men.
But there is more than this.
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
There was . . .
David Evanier, The Man Who Refused to Watch the Academy Awards.
. . . I now began to see . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the chance to be an actor in a drama of historical importance.
K.R. Eissler, Crusaders.
I found myself, after years of comparatively unproductive labor, on the threshold of what might prove to be a magnificent discovery.
Howard Carter and A.C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
It is hard for me to convey the excitement . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the fever of suspense, the almost overmastering impulse, born of curiosity, to break down seals and lift the lids of boxes, the thought—pure joy to the investigator—that you are about to add a page to history, the strained expectancy—why not confess it?—of the treasure-seeker.
Howard Carter and A.C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
There were puzzles everywhere, and not unimportant ones. Why did Freud keep a whole packet of Ferenczi material, all connected with Ferenczi's views about childhood seduction, in the top middle drawer of his desk? Why was it so important to him? Or had somebody else put it there? Who?
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
The cache of letters had lain unnoticed in a locked drawer of a battered wooden box that . . .
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
. . . looked . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . like the slanted top of a lectern.
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
A puzzlement.
Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers, The King and I.
How did they end up in that wooden box, which apparently . . .
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
. . . dated . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . from around 1900?
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
I, of course, kept my reverie to myself.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
At times . . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries, not fit for a human being to behold.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
One day Anna Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . motioned me to a chair. We sat down.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
It had become very still—
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw.
I laid the packet . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . of material . . .
Jack London, Grit of Women.
. . . I had found . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . gently on the little table, and she put her hand over it . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
And then, as he was silent, she . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . said something in German . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
. . . in tones so clear and evenly-pitched that each separate syllable tapped like a little hammer on his brain:
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
“Herr Doktor, . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
Um Gott, was klagest du mich an? War ich es, die dir Leid gebracht?
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
Dr. Masson take note!
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . Mein Vater . . .
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
(Whenever she used that phrase "my father" I would shudder a bit at its historic magic—knowing, too, that in just a few years, nobody else would ever be able to say that again . . . )
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . my father . . .
Anna Freud, On Losing and Being Lost.
. . . based his rejection of these women's memories on clinical material. He recanted because he was wrong the first time."
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
" . . . I am proud to know I understood him better than anyone on earth—he told me so himself. . . ."
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
"Is that not plain enough for you, Dr. Masson?"
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Anna Freud urged me to . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . begin anew, make a new start . . .
Langenscheidt’s German-English/English-German Dictionary.
But over all else . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
Anna Freud urged me to direct my interests elsewhere.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I wanted to get inside her, see myself through her, learn the things she knew.
Don Delillo, The Names.
That, of course, was futile.
Zane Grey, The Gold Desert.
She spoke faster, more expressively. Blood vessels flared in her eyes and face. I began to detect a cadence, a measured beat. She . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
. . . held out as firmly as ever . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . in defense of her . . .
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
. . . dear father
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
At the same time, she started to make gestures as if she were bored, gave evidence of some restlessness, and looked repeatedly at her watch.
Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.
I began to suspect that there were a lot of secrets I was not to know about.
Gottfried Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy.
The uneasy thought came to him that perhaps . . .
W. Somerset Maugham, A Man with a Conscience.
. . . somewhere . . .
Emile Zola, The Debacle.
. . . contained in those papers . . .
Foster W. Cline, An Essay on Dreaming.
. . . somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about.
Alfred Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt.
He tried to persuade himself that what was done was done and that he had really not been a free agent, but he could not quite still the prickings of his conscience.
W. Somerset Maugham, A Man with a Conscience.
I decided that the best step would be for me to get an outside opinion . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
But . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
Where should he go? Whom could he ask?
Emile Zola, The Debacle.
In conversations with other analysts close to the Freud family, I was given to understand that I had stumbled upon something that was better left alone.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
Some added—
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
" . . . Everything is treated like a secret over there. Everything."
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
I knew I was taking a risk.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
(This was made even more apparent when my connections with the Freud Archives were suddenly terminated).
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
________________________________________________________
Our curiosity drives our efforts toward discovery, and it is the constant tension between the satisfaction of a search ended and the seductive lure of the unknown promising more discoveries that keeps the explorer exploring.
Linda C. Mayes, Exploring Internal and External Worlds: Reflections on Being Curious.
The explorer must be prepared for contradiction and complexity.
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
On the one hand, to be curious is often portrayed as naively foolish at the least and aggressively intentioned at the worst. On the other hand, curiosity is an inevitable fate that at least a few individuals must accept in order to advance knowledge.
Linda C. Mayes, Exploring Internal and External Worlds: Reflections on Being Curious.
My curiosity, I trust, needs no explanation.
Matthew Gurewitsch, Bayreuth, Like Wagner, Survives the Critics.
_____________________________________________________
That I feel no curiosity at all about reviews of my books, especially in newspapers, should be forgiven me. My friends and my publishers know this and do not speak to me about such things. In one particular case I once did get to see all the sins that had been committed against one of my books—it was . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . published in 1984—a truly Orwellian irony.
Giles Hugo, Can You Grok Cyberia?
The Assault was . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . a book whose principal aim was to revive Freud's seduction theory, . . .
John Forrester, Dispatches from The Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions.
. . . which ascribed . . .
Herman Melville, Typee: A Romance.
. . . neurosis in . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, ‘Assault on Truth’ — Letter to the Editor, N.Y. Review of Books (August 16, 1984).
. . . adults to . . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess to Mars.
. . . seductions in childhood . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, ‘Assault on Truth’ — Letter to the Editor, N.Y. Review of Books (August 16, 1984).
. . . by reasserting the truth—that is, the absolute trustworthiness—of Freud's early patients. Masson accused Freud of scientific cowardice, in that he claimed Freud rejected his own evidence that his patients had been abused in childhood . . .
John Forrester, Dispatches from The Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions.
. . . evidence that amounted to no more than . . .
Supreme Court of Canada, Her Majesty the Queen v. Alexander Nikolovski.
. . . narratives really . . .
Michael Gleghorn, Was Jesus Really Born of a Virgin?
. . . narratives, moreover, . . .
Lawrence Warner, Genesis the Giant: The City, the Wanderer, and the Sodomite in Late-Medieval Narrative.
. . . that 'bristled with ambiguities,' . . .
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al.
. . . in favor of the view that his patients, and therefore the analyst, had no sure way of knowing whether the events they remembered had actually taken place or not.
John Forrester, Dispatches from The Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions.
I could make a pretty report about . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . some of the reviews.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Would you believe it?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
According to one reviewer, "Masson the promising psychoanalytic scholar emerges gradually, as a grandiose egotist—
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al. quoting Robert Coles, M.D., Freudianism Confronts Its Malcontents (Boston Globe).
“a man swollen with vanity and presumption”
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner quoting a correspondent from the Berlin Nationalzeitung.
—mean-spirited, self-serving, full of braggadocio, impossibly arrogant and, in the end, a self-destructive fool. . . ."
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al. quoting Robert Coles, M.D., Freudianism Confronts Its Malcontents (Boston Globe).
So this is what comes from the lying newspaper reports!
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Monday, June 18, 1877).
Having a talent is not enough: one requires your permission for it—right, my friends?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Believe’t, . . .
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra.
. . . one writing . . .
Amy Lowell, Men, Women and Ghosts.
. . . was full of the most . . .
Edith Nesbit, The Story of the Treasure Seekers.
. . . unconscionable breaches of basic rules of quoting, culminating at least once in . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
. . . the author . . .
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Devil in Manuscript.
. . . "quoting" the very opposite of what . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
. . . the subject . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius.
. . . had actually said . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
. . . so as to give the impression that I had said some such thing, . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, July 9, 1874).
—I know not what—
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan.
. . . thereby offending . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, July 9, 1874).
. . . the whole psychoanalytic establishment
Janet Malcolm, In The Freud Archives.
Very pitiful stuff—
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, July 9, 1874).
In general, quotation marks around a passage indicate to the reader that the passage reproduced the speaker's words verbatim. They inform the reader that he or she is reading the statement of the speaker, not a paraphrase or other indirect interpretation by an author. By providing this information, quotations add authority to the statement and credibility to the author's work . . .
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al. (1991).
. . . by means of . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . what I would like to call "the charisma of the quotation mark."
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
I can see now how impossible it is for a person to remain decent when he happens to be a journalist.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, September 30, 1869).
There is honor even among thieves, as a man from whom I had expected a particularly dastardly transgression assured me. The reader who is not expert is at the mercy of . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
. . . the Reviewer . . .
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species.
. . . when the latter puts a sentence into quotation marks. Honor requires a maximal scrupulousness: once the reader cannot rely on quotations, the whole transaction is bound to go into bankruptcy.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
I ask you:
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura.
What crime of doubt could be greater than that which would rob you of credence?
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
His reputation had . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 11).
. . . been shattered by . . .
Henry Miller, Man In The Zoo: George Grosz’ Ecce Homo.
. . . psychoanalytic character assassination.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
He was . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 11).
. . .demeaned in public and private, in plain words and in jargon, in professional and lay circles. . . E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
. . . and his opinions were . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 11).
. . . received with . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . contempt, ridicule or obloquy.
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al. (1991).
What did I have to say to that?
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
"I'll tell you this. . . ."
Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman.
Put bluntly, . . .
Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul.
"They can all go to Hell."
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory quoting Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
Period. End quote.
U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs.
With these words, he . . .
Charles Dickens, The Schoolboy’s Story.
. . . expressed what is essential in his story.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
He had conceived his . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . Assault . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . in defiance, written it in defiance, and published it in defiance. This was the stance he thought proper to a discoverer at odds all his life with the "compact majority."
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
" . . . a great scholar, a major analyst—"
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al. (1991) quoting Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives.
Oh yes!
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
. . . a great scholar . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
But note . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
In the end, to be sure—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
"It's got nothing to do with me. It's got to do with the things I discovered."
Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives.
I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . carefully constructed lies, . . .
George Orwell, 1984.
. . . smelling them out.—My genius is in my nostrils.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
I found the temptation of making my withheld knowledge accessible to the world irresistible . . .
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism.
But my truth is terrible; for so far one has called lies truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
_______________________________________________________________
In the meantime Ellsberg continued reading his documents and thinking about the "lessons of Vietnam," and concluded that the lies and deception were systematic, not just the aberrations of particular Presidents or the result of errors of judgment. The intelligence estimates, he concluded, despite his earlier feelings about inaccurate reporting from the field were "remarkably accurate." He had become privy to a new secret.
That ultimate secret seemed to have something to do with the nature of secrecy itself. He could verge on the rhapsodic when he spoke about what the possession of secrets could do to the possessor, about the safes within safes, the clearances above Top Secret, the secrets within secrets that he had discovered in the inner chambers of the Pentagon. People in Washington derived kicks from having access to information from those inner chambers, achieved a kind of euphoria from knowing things that were not known by others. He would later say that his own fascination with them might have some relation to a parallel fascination with pornography. For years he had collected pornography, and his apartment was full of the stuff. Now he also possessed the hardcore information about the war, the pornography of Vietnam. Was the language suggestive: disclosure, revelation, protection, penetration?
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty.
The Book of Genesis warned against exposing the myths that bound society, and against setting up a purely human morality. If men knew the truth, and saw themselves as they were, and made their own values, they would be like the gods. The gods would then become unemployed, there would be revolutions, societies would perish. The secret must be kept, . . .
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
. . . the nature of the secret . . .
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
. . . was that it had to be kept . . .
Cyber Sarge, Questions on Vietnam War.
. . . so that the past might be preserved.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
In 1968 . . .
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty.
. . . Daniel Ellsberg . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Emperor’s Embrace: Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood.
. . . had warned . . .
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty.
. . . Secretary of State . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent.
. . . Henry Kissinger (he would later testify) not to be seduced by secret data, which constitutes "a magic potion that turns ordinary human beings into arrogant, contemptuous, menaces to democracy," but two years later, when he saw Kissinger again, he concluded that Kissinger was "eating the secret honeydew."
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty.
_______________________________________________________________
In Scripture, the conflict between curiosity and the prohibition against it appears as early as the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. When God prohibits Adam from eating from the tree of knowledge, presumably He was not thinking of prohibiting Adam from learning the multiplication tables (at least not literally). The prohibited knowledge related to matters of instinctual interest, of identity and destiny. The consequences of eating the forbidden fruit is that Adam and Eve became aware of the distinction between good and evil and also of the need to cover their genitals. They became mortal and were exiled from their infantile or perhaps prenatal paradise into the world of reality, of pain and hard work, of thorns and thistles, and of the grave.
Mortimer Ostow, Ultimate Intimacy: The Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism.
What is involved is not Fall but a wounding estrangement, an expulsion from home, from a garden where Yahweh, who is both mother and father, likes to walk about while enjoying the cool breezes of the evening.
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
At this particular point in Scripture, Creation seems to have come to a standstill. God speaks of Ketz kol bassar: He mentions the end, the mystical end. The term He uses is neither Sof nor Siyum (which also means the end), but Ketz: a brutal termination, a breakdown of all systems—the closing of a spectacle that has barely opened . . . to poor notices, one might say. . . .
It seems that Creation has broken away from its Creator. No wonder He was disappointed. It's understandable. He had hoped to produce something unique: a work of purity and ecstasy, a colossal project with grandiose possibilities.
Elie Wiesel, Sages and Dreamers.
. . . a most majestic vision . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
And then came the letdown. He had been mistaken, misled, deceived. Deceived by His favorite and most privileged creature—betrayed by man, who appeared unworthy of His trust and kindness. Their relationship could have been so gratifying: it wasn't. Why? Because man, in his foolishness, his pettiness, his selfishness, perverted and destroyed all. God therefore decided, Better put an end to it right then and there. Curtain, please. The author is dissatisfied with the performance. He chooses to work on another draft. And start all over. From the beginning.
Elie Wiesel, Sages and Dreamers.
God said that Adam would have to die on the day he ate of the Tree of Knowledge. According to God, the instantaneous result of eating of the Tree of Knowledge would be death; according to the serpent (at least it can be understood so), it would be equality with God. Both were wrong in similar ways. Men did not die, but became mortal; they did not become like God, but received the indisputable capacity to become so. Both were right in similar ways. Man did not die, but the paradisiacal man did; men did not become God, but divine knowledge.
Franz Kafka, Paradise.
But since they are to die, the chain of reproduction is initiated so that life may continue, and so Adam "knew" his wife, Eve. The myth tells us that a paradisiac existence is incompatible with a sense of reality, with self-consciousness, and with values. Curiosity is vital for the human but nevertheless its price is the forgoing of immortality.
Mortimer Ostow, Ultimate Intimacy: The Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism.
_____________________________________________________________
Once and for all, there is a great deal I do not want to know.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
and—I would add—
Marianne Krull, Freud and His Father.
I have even . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . learned some things I wish I didn’t know.
Jack Thomas, Tales from Cooking Class. Learning to Cook Rabbit Is One Thing; Eating It, Another.
— Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
By the end of 1877, . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, His Music.
. . . the shrewd old master . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II).
. . . Richard Wagner and . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . his disciple and assistant, . . .
Peter Salm, Introduction to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
. . . Nietzsche, . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . had become . . .
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty.
. . . estranged by an almost incredible incident. In October Wagner took it upon himself to suggest to Nietzsche's doctor that the young man was essentially suffering the effects of excessive masturbation and recommended a water cure!
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, His Music.
This seems surprising; it comes close to seeming fantastic.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
To anticipate the denouement of the sorry affair, somebody talked. Nietzsche found out about the correspondence . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . between Wagner and . . .
Danny O’Rourke, Forensics Expert Calls Painseeker Murder “Conspiracy” – Ex-Employee Helps Police Draw Motive, Timeline (Los Angeles Tribune, July 25, 2002).
. . . Nietzsche’s . . .
Jack London, Martin Eden.
. . . doctor, though . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Monster Men.
. . . when and from whom remains uncertain.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
Wagner had to dominate and was incapable of a relationship on equal terms. He had only disciples, no true friend.
Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay—Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus.
Dr. Eiser, who revered Wagner and Nietzsche in equal measure, . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . had been sent to chat with the disciple, by the old master—who was a frantic traditionalist, and could not help knowing, by now, how iconoclastic were the views of his brilliant disciple.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
Whatever the truth, rumors were rife at the latest during . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . Wagner’s opera . . .
Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self.
. . . festival of 1882, when Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth and Lou von Salome found Bayreuth's hotels and private houses buzzing with gossip.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
This seemingly preposterous scenario . . .
Curt Suplee, 'Big Chill' Theory Starts to Snowball.
. . . had . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . leaked out—no one, as usual, knew where from—
John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
Nietzsche, upon hearing of this meddling, naturally became enraged.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, His Music.
The Professor . . .
Charlotte Bronte, The Professor.
. . . was so furious as to be hardly intelligible.
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
David Berlinski, Has Darwin Met His Match?
The functional importance of the . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . the presidential office . . .
Ronald C. White, Jr., Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural.
. . . in this field . . .
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus.
. . . is manifested in the fact that normally control over . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . .domestic-intelligence-gathering activities by the FBI, the CIA and military intelligence units. . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
. . . devolves upon it. Thus in . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . the President’s . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . relation to . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . covert operations . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . he is . . .
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset.
. . . like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . President of the United States . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . the President . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . is in the habit of transforming the . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . intelligence community’s . . .
James Risen, Probe Faults CIA on 9/11 Terrorist.
. . . will into action as if it were . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . his own.
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset.
But then . . .
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . as the saying goes, . . .
H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds.
. . . the President . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . is not master in . . .
Sigmund Freud, A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis.
. . . his . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (editor’s note).
. . . own house.
Sigmund Freud, A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis.
Chief’s orders . . .
John Le Carre, The Night Manager.
. . . were to . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent.
. . . use undercover operatives with no White House ties, . . .
William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream.
. . . to break into . . .
Jack London, The People of the Abyss.
. . . the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist . . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
. . . and tell them . . .
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
. . . the job . . .
Edgar B.P. Darlington, The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings.
. . . concerned a traitor who was passing information to the Soviet embassy. Except for the fact that the Russians subscribe to the New York Times, this was untrue.
William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream.
How much, to repeat, did . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . the President . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . know of all this?
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
As always—
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
. . . the short answer is that we don’t know.
Think Tank: A Few Questions, Mr. Shakespeare.
The President . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . liked the passage from Nietzsche that . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . the Secretary of State . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent.
. . . quoted to him: “ ‘I did this,’ says my Memory. ‘I cannot have done this,’ says my Pride and remains inexorable. In the end—memory yields.”
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
As to the moral part of his character, . . .
Alexandre Dumas, Ten Years Later.
. . . the President, . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . as a matter of routine, . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . Amalgamated . . .
Elden LaMar, The Clothing Workers In Philadelphia: History of Their Struggles for Union and Security.
. . . Fiction and Truth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fiction and Truth.
In Nixon the . . .
Bruce Mazlish, In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry.
. . . good reasons . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . and the . . .
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . real reasons . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . would embrace . . .
H.G. Wells, A Moonlight Fable.
. . . interlace, part and unite; like a dance.
The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865-1882 — The Brown Book.
The subject . . .
Joe Klein, The Running Mate.
. . . of covert . . .
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.
. . . action had been . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . broached gingerly . . .
Joe Klein, The Running Mate.
. . . darkly, . . .
Richard Wagner, Gotterdammerung.
. . . and almost as a . . .
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
. . . bothersome subplot of the greater drama, the quest to get . . .
Joe Klein, The Running Mate.
. . . the President’s . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . political . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . future squared away.
Joe Klein, The Running Mate.
Whatever the . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . President knew . . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
. . . the order of the acts . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Excerpt from “Hamlet”).
. . . had been . . .
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
. . . schemed and plotted,
And nothing . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Excerpt from “Hamlet”).
. . . could . . .
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
. . . avert the final curtain’s fall.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Excerpt from “Hamlet”).
In the end, . . .
Edgar B.P. Darlington, The Circus Boys Across the Continent.
. . . the President . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . would be forced to . . .
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . stand alone . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Excerpt from “Hamlet”).
. . . on the political stage, . . .
Alexandre Dumas, The Black Tulip.
. . . accountable for the . . .
Charles Dickens, Hard Times.
. . . deeds of others.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy.
The attorney for . . .
Elden LaMar, The Clothing Workers In Philadelphia: History of Their Struggles for Union and Security.
. . . the President . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . later described . . .
Booth Tarkington, Penrod.
. . . Nixon as a stage manager . . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
—nothing more!
John Galsworthy, The Dark Flower.
. . . of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in.
John Le Carre, The Night Manager.
It is plain that denial and hypocrisy . . .
K.R. Eissler, Discourse on Hamlet and HAMLET.
. . . two qualities that are present . . .
LuxSonor Semiconductors, Inc., The LuxSonor LS188.
. . . in every individual . . .
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.
. . . are also . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . the very foundations of society
K.R. Eissler, Discourse on Hamlet and HAMLET.
To take an analogy from . . .
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis.
. . . psychoanalysis—
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
We see the ego, Freud wrote, "as a poor thing, which is in threefold dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the superego." Exposed to anxieties corresponding to these dangers, the ego, for Freud, is a beleaguered, far from omnipotent negotiator earnestly trying to mediate among the forces that threaten it and that war with one another. It labors to make the id tractable to the pressures of the world and of the superego, and at the same time tries to persuade the world and the superego to comply with the id's wishes. Since it stands midway between id and reality, the ego is in danger of "succumbing to the temptation of becoming sycophantic, opportunistic, and mendacious, rather like a statesman who, with all his good insights, still wants to keep himself in the favor of public opinion."
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
___________________________________________________________
Be that as it may—
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
I propose that for the moment we should leave all these questions on one side and pursue our way further along one particular path.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
In 1980, I met with Anna Freud and Dr. K. R. Eissler, the head of the Sigmund Freud Archives and Anna Freud's trusted adviser and friend, in London, and Miss Freud agreed to a new edition of the . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . Freud . . .
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
. . . archival collection . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
—including . . .
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
. . . the unpublished letters between Sigmund Freud and his best, perhaps his only, friend, Wilhelm Fliess.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
It took more than a year of cajoling and persuading to convince . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
. . . the Freud Archives . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . officials to cooperate with me.
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
As a result I was given access to this sealed correspondence (the originals are in the Library of Congress), which constitutes our most important source of information concerning the beginnings of psychoanalysis.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I was editor-in-chief of an elaborate series of translations of Freud's unpublished letters that were to be published by Harvard University Press in the coming years. My daily life consisted in talking to people around the world who would work on these editions, in finding letters still missing (which involved, to my pleasure, a great deal of travel), in frequent trips to the Library of Congress, almost daily conversations with Kurt Eissler, a large correspondence, and of course my own research.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
And so . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
. . . the inner circle of psychoanalysis . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . lifted its veil of secrecy ever so slightly, in a rare attempt to justify its actions to the public.
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
As I was reading through the correspondence and preparing the annotations for the first volume of the series, the Freud-Fliess letters, I began to notice what appeared to be a pattern in the omissions made by Anna Freud in the original, abridged edition. In the letters written after September 1897 (when Freud was supposed to have given up his "seduction" theory), all the case histories dealing with the sexual seduction of children had been excised. Moreover, every mention of Emma Eckstein, an early patient of Freud's and Fliess's, who seemed connected in some way with the seduction theory, had been deleted. I was particularly struck by a section of a letter written in December 1897 that brought to light two facts previously unknown: Emma Eckstein was herself seeing patients in analysis (presumably under Freud's supervision); and Freud was inclined to give credence, once again, to the seduction theory.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
All that had been suppressed and edited out reappeared . . .
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
. . . as clear, as transparent as . . .
Alexandre Dumas, Ten Years Later.
. . . objective.
Paul Wienpahl, On Translating Spinoza.
I asked Anna Freud why she had deleted this section from the letter. She said that she no longer knew why.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
A masterpiece of evasion.
Don Delillo, The Names.
It was while she held a photograph . . .
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day.
. . . of Emma Eckstein . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . in her hands that she exclaimed, impulsively, if incongruously:
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day.
It never occurred to me to know more.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Modern English Version).
When I showed her an unpublished letter from Freud to Emma Eckstein, she said that she could well understand my interest, since Emma Eckstein had indeed been important to the early history of psychoanalysis, but the letter should nevertheless not be published. In subsequent conversations, Miss Freud indicated that since her father had eventually abandoned the seduction theory, it would only prove confusing to readers to be exposed to his early hesitations and doubts. I, on the other hand, felt that these passages not only were of great historical importance but might well represent the truth. Nobody, it seemed to me, had the right to decide for others, by altering the record, what was truth and what was error. Moreover, whatever Freud's ultimate decision, it is my belief that he was haunted by the seduction theory all his life.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
The question . . .
Emile Zola, Germinal.
. . . of child sexual abuse, . . .
Robert A. Phillips, Jr., Introduction to Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls.
. . . I was sure . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . continued to trouble him, though he had supposedly, with scientific smugness, settled it.
Emile Zola, Germinal.
There exists, as far as I know (I looked without success), not a single published account of the devastating effects of incest or childhood sexual abuse before Freud’s time. And yet if this was happening to anything like the extent that is true today—and why should it be any different?—then at least one in three women, possibly more, in the general population had been exposed to a forced and unwanted sexual advance during childhood. In other words, sexual abuse of one form or another was the core trauma of many women’s lives, yet there was total silence about it. J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
In the tradition we are dealing with, . . .
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
. . . one was allowed . . .
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
. . . to perform these acts but not to speak of them.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
There was no taboo on the commission of incest, only a taboo on speaking about incest.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
As a scientist . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . had an almost unique opportunity.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Here was a man, possibly the first in recorded history, who heard about the sexual abuse of children and recognized what it really meant.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
At that time, had one man put up a fight, it would have had wide repercussions.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
For Freud to have broken that taboo of silence was, to my mind, one of the great moments of history.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
And yet—
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Later, in one of the most famous retractions in the history of ideas, Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . contrary to the truth . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
. . . had recanted.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
As he put it in 1925 in An Autobiographical Study: “I was at last obliged to recognize that the scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.”
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Freud’s earliest insights . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
. . . about child abuse . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . would only reemerge much later, provoking a host of other episodes.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
I showed Miss Freud the 1932 correspondence I found in Freud's desk concerning Ferenczi's last letter, which dealt with this very topic. Clearly, I thought, it was her father's continued preoccupation with the seduction theory that explained his turning away from Ferenczi.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
Most of the items brought silence.
Don Delillo, The Names.
After Fliess, Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933) was for more than twenty years Freud's closest analytic friend (Freud often addressed him as "dear son"). Until the last years of his life, Ferenczi was a loyal pupil, loved by many analysts, a constant source of papers, ideas, encouragement, and inspiration to younger analysts. But in the last few years of his life, Ferenczi began developing in a direction that alarmed Freud. In a series of three papers that uncannily parallel Freud's three 1896 papers, Ferenczi began to believe more and more strongly that the source of neurosis lay in sexual seductions suffered by children at the hands of those closest to them. . . .
Ferenczi had returned to Freud's earliest insights, while putting a different interpretation on many later analytic concepts. For example, he maintained (July 24, 1932) that the Oedipus complex could well be "the result of real acts on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward the child, who then develops a fixation, not from desire [as Freud maintained], but from fear. 'My mother and father will kill me if I don't love them, and identify with their wishes.'"
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
His aim was a human nature reconciled to itself, that did not depend on illusion.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
The paper he read before the 12th International Psychoanalytic Congress is a somewhat milder distillation of these views. Yet the ideas he expressed in the paper met with the strongest disapproval by every leading analyst of the day. Ferenczi's tenacious insistence on the truth of what his patients told him would cost him the friendship of Freud and almost all his colleagues and leave him in an isolation from which he would never emerge.
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
And now what kind of truth was I stalking?
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
Miss Freud, who was very fond of Ferenczi, found . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . several papers . . .
Joseph Conrad, Chance.
. . . in her father’s . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . desk . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . concerning . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . Ferenczi’s . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . last letter . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady.
. . . painful reading and asked me not to publish them. But I insisted that the theory was not one that Freud had dismissed lightly as an early and insignificant error, as we had been led to believe.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I thought the final argument was the coup de grace—the killer point that she couldn't counter. Instead . . .
George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education.
She would insist that nothing of significance had been omitted, and when I tried to argue she would become upset.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
No real answers were forthcoming . . .
The Watergate Hearings: Break-in and Cover-Up.
She and I said nothing . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . further . . .
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
. . . to each other about the
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . issue.
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
It was coded matter. It was matter we could refer to only within the limits of a practiced look. Even this became too much.
Don Delillo, The Names.
For a psychoanalyst, she was remarkably closed on many issues that one would expect her to be open to.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
I was trying to be perceptive about her . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . but I remember thinking at the time . . .
Stewart Edward White, Arizona Nights.
—canny therapist that she is—
Striking Silence. Film Critic James Harvey Explores the Singular Landscape of PARSIFAL.
. . . she will remain . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . evasive and distant.
Irvin Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
She hated the feeling that someone knew her mind.
Don Delillo, The Names.
Central Casting would have made her the librarian of a New England Christian Science reading room. She was a small, fine-featured, quiet, thoughtfully intelligent, generous . . .
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
. . . lady with . . .
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.
. . . a purity of purpose, a holiness to her devotion that gave off a whiff of religious piety. I did not find it attractive, but it was genuine, and I was impressed. I don't think she invented this trait, either. I am sure she got it from her father, who of course was entirely consumed with holy zeal for the cause. Her father's legacy lay heavy on her shoulders . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Woe to any truth-seeker who endangered it.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
Of course, she was curious about his actions and correspondence. But . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
Her unquestioning loyalty made it impossible to deal with events on their basic, real level, he thought. Her stubbornness was difficult to contend with. At times he imagined her as the heroine of a movie, the devoted daughter defending her embattled, innocent father.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
For her . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . her father . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday—nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time—his death and her sorrow—I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together—I heard them together.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Here in this house . . .
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
. . . in London, . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . Between one June and another September . . .
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
. . . Freud lived out the year he still had to live . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . extremely ill; . . .
Henry James, The Chaperon.
. . . an exile, . . .
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Excerpt from Evangeline.
. . . alone in an alien culture.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (Explanatory Note by T.J. Reed).
What images return
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
June
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters.
crossing the Channel
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
through the fog
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
by the night boat
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
water lapping the bow
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
Then, land!—then England!
Elizabeth Barret Browning, Aurora Leigh.
the first eight weeks of freedom
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
June, May . . . April . . . February . . . November
Simon Gray, Butley.
September
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
this long disease
Simon Gray, Butley.
his daughter Anna,
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
Freud, Living and Dying
Max Schur, Freud, Living and Dying.
—his death and her sorrow—
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
the final summons
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans.
‘What is it—what?’
Robert Frost, Excerpt from Home Burial.
My daughter.
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
“—and the doctor.”
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
his loyal and loving physician
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
the morphine
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
Freud’s end as a stoic suicide
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
syringes and needles
Alan Dershowitz, Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case.
the portal where they came
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II) (Final Scene).
this last of meeting places
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from The Hollow Men.
The pulse in the arm, less strong and
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
his last words
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady.
the words of bliss, the sentence,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II) (Final Scene).
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
My hope
Henry James, The Aspern Papers.
My daughter.
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
And now, in this house, . . .
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Anna Freud—
Robert Coles, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis.
. . . who was . . .
Alice Sokoloff, Cosima Wagner: Extraordinary Daughter of Franz Liszt.
. . . inordinately proud of being her father’s daughter . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . listened in stony silence while I painted a marvelous mural of all the hidden truths coming to light; doors being unlocked, things falling into place.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
She seemed staggered by my confrontation and retreated by sinking into her body.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
I told myself that the road ahead would be hard.
Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin.
The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him. There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope for the end of man is to know.
Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men.
But there is more than this.
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
There was . . .
David Evanier, The Man Who Refused to Watch the Academy Awards.
. . . I now began to see . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the chance to be an actor in a drama of historical importance.
K.R. Eissler, Crusaders.
I found myself, after years of comparatively unproductive labor, on the threshold of what might prove to be a magnificent discovery.
Howard Carter and A.C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
It is hard for me to convey the excitement . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the fever of suspense, the almost overmastering impulse, born of curiosity, to break down seals and lift the lids of boxes, the thought—pure joy to the investigator—that you are about to add a page to history, the strained expectancy—why not confess it?—of the treasure-seeker.
Howard Carter and A.C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
There were puzzles everywhere, and not unimportant ones. Why did Freud keep a whole packet of Ferenczi material, all connected with Ferenczi's views about childhood seduction, in the top middle drawer of his desk? Why was it so important to him? Or had somebody else put it there? Who?
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
The cache of letters had lain unnoticed in a locked drawer of a battered wooden box that . . .
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
. . . looked . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . like the slanted top of a lectern.
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
A puzzlement.
Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers, The King and I.
How did they end up in that wooden box, which apparently . . .
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
. . . dated . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . from around 1900?
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
I, of course, kept my reverie to myself.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
At times . . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries, not fit for a human being to behold.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
One day Anna Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . motioned me to a chair. We sat down.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
It had become very still—
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw.
I laid the packet . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . of material . . .
Jack London, Grit of Women.
. . . I had found . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . gently on the little table, and she put her hand over it . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
And then, as he was silent, she . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . said something in German . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
. . . in tones so clear and evenly-pitched that each separate syllable tapped like a little hammer on his brain:
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
“Herr Doktor, . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
Um Gott, was klagest du mich an? War ich es, die dir Leid gebracht?
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
Dr. Masson take note!
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . Mein Vater . . .
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
(Whenever she used that phrase "my father" I would shudder a bit at its historic magic—knowing, too, that in just a few years, nobody else would ever be able to say that again . . . )
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . my father . . .
Anna Freud, On Losing and Being Lost.
. . . based his rejection of these women's memories on clinical material. He recanted because he was wrong the first time."
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
" . . . I am proud to know I understood him better than anyone on earth—he told me so himself. . . ."
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
"Is that not plain enough for you, Dr. Masson?"
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Anna Freud urged me to . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . begin anew, make a new start . . .
Langenscheidt’s German-English/English-German Dictionary.
But over all else . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
Anna Freud urged me to direct my interests elsewhere.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I wanted to get inside her, see myself through her, learn the things she knew.
Don Delillo, The Names.
That, of course, was futile.
Zane Grey, The Gold Desert.
She spoke faster, more expressively. Blood vessels flared in her eyes and face. I began to detect a cadence, a measured beat. She . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
. . . held out as firmly as ever . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . in defense of her . . .
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
. . . dear father
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
At the same time, she started to make gestures as if she were bored, gave evidence of some restlessness, and looked repeatedly at her watch.
Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.
I began to suspect that there were a lot of secrets I was not to know about.
Gottfried Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy.
The uneasy thought came to him that perhaps . . .
W. Somerset Maugham, A Man with a Conscience.
. . . somewhere . . .
Emile Zola, The Debacle.
. . . contained in those papers . . .
Foster W. Cline, An Essay on Dreaming.
. . . somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about.
Alfred Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt.
He tried to persuade himself that what was done was done and that he had really not been a free agent, but he could not quite still the prickings of his conscience.
W. Somerset Maugham, A Man with a Conscience.
I decided that the best step would be for me to get an outside opinion . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
But . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
Where should he go? Whom could he ask?
Emile Zola, The Debacle.
In conversations with other analysts close to the Freud family, I was given to understand that I had stumbled upon something that was better left alone.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
Some added—
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
" . . . Everything is treated like a secret over there. Everything."
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
I knew I was taking a risk.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
(This was made even more apparent when my connections with the Freud Archives were suddenly terminated).
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
________________________________________________________
Our curiosity drives our efforts toward discovery, and it is the constant tension between the satisfaction of a search ended and the seductive lure of the unknown promising more discoveries that keeps the explorer exploring.
Linda C. Mayes, Exploring Internal and External Worlds: Reflections on Being Curious.
The explorer must be prepared for contradiction and complexity.
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
On the one hand, to be curious is often portrayed as naively foolish at the least and aggressively intentioned at the worst. On the other hand, curiosity is an inevitable fate that at least a few individuals must accept in order to advance knowledge.
Linda C. Mayes, Exploring Internal and External Worlds: Reflections on Being Curious.
My curiosity, I trust, needs no explanation.
Matthew Gurewitsch, Bayreuth, Like Wagner, Survives the Critics.
_____________________________________________________
That I feel no curiosity at all about reviews of my books, especially in newspapers, should be forgiven me. My friends and my publishers know this and do not speak to me about such things. In one particular case I once did get to see all the sins that had been committed against one of my books—it was . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . published in 1984—a truly Orwellian irony.
Giles Hugo, Can You Grok Cyberia?
The Assault was . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . a book whose principal aim was to revive Freud's seduction theory, . . .
John Forrester, Dispatches from The Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions.
. . . which ascribed . . .
Herman Melville, Typee: A Romance.
. . . neurosis in . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, ‘Assault on Truth’ — Letter to the Editor, N.Y. Review of Books (August 16, 1984).
. . . adults to . . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess to Mars.
. . . seductions in childhood . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, ‘Assault on Truth’ — Letter to the Editor, N.Y. Review of Books (August 16, 1984).
. . . by reasserting the truth—that is, the absolute trustworthiness—of Freud's early patients. Masson accused Freud of scientific cowardice, in that he claimed Freud rejected his own evidence that his patients had been abused in childhood . . .
John Forrester, Dispatches from The Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions.
. . . evidence that amounted to no more than . . .
Supreme Court of Canada, Her Majesty the Queen v. Alexander Nikolovski.
. . . narratives really . . .
Michael Gleghorn, Was Jesus Really Born of a Virgin?
. . . narratives, moreover, . . .
Lawrence Warner, Genesis the Giant: The City, the Wanderer, and the Sodomite in Late-Medieval Narrative.
. . . that 'bristled with ambiguities,' . . .
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al.
. . . in favor of the view that his patients, and therefore the analyst, had no sure way of knowing whether the events they remembered had actually taken place or not.
John Forrester, Dispatches from The Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions.
I could make a pretty report about . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . some of the reviews.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Would you believe it?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
According to one reviewer, "Masson the promising psychoanalytic scholar emerges gradually, as a grandiose egotist—
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al. quoting Robert Coles, M.D., Freudianism Confronts Its Malcontents (Boston Globe).
“a man swollen with vanity and presumption”
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner quoting a correspondent from the Berlin Nationalzeitung.
—mean-spirited, self-serving, full of braggadocio, impossibly arrogant and, in the end, a self-destructive fool. . . ."
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al. quoting Robert Coles, M.D., Freudianism Confronts Its Malcontents (Boston Globe).
So this is what comes from the lying newspaper reports!
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Monday, June 18, 1877).
Having a talent is not enough: one requires your permission for it—right, my friends?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Believe’t, . . .
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra.
. . . one writing . . .
Amy Lowell, Men, Women and Ghosts.
. . . was full of the most . . .
Edith Nesbit, The Story of the Treasure Seekers.
. . . unconscionable breaches of basic rules of quoting, culminating at least once in . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
. . . the author . . .
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Devil in Manuscript.
. . . "quoting" the very opposite of what . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
. . . the subject . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius.
. . . had actually said . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
. . . so as to give the impression that I had said some such thing, . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, July 9, 1874).
—I know not what—
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan.
. . . thereby offending . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, July 9, 1874).
. . . the whole psychoanalytic establishment
Janet Malcolm, In The Freud Archives.
Very pitiful stuff—
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, July 9, 1874).
In general, quotation marks around a passage indicate to the reader that the passage reproduced the speaker's words verbatim. They inform the reader that he or she is reading the statement of the speaker, not a paraphrase or other indirect interpretation by an author. By providing this information, quotations add authority to the statement and credibility to the author's work . . .
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al. (1991).
. . . by means of . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . what I would like to call "the charisma of the quotation mark."
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
I can see now how impossible it is for a person to remain decent when he happens to be a journalist.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, September 30, 1869).
There is honor even among thieves, as a man from whom I had expected a particularly dastardly transgression assured me. The reader who is not expert is at the mercy of . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
. . . the Reviewer . . .
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species.
. . . when the latter puts a sentence into quotation marks. Honor requires a maximal scrupulousness: once the reader cannot rely on quotations, the whole transaction is bound to go into bankruptcy.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
I ask you:
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura.
What crime of doubt could be greater than that which would rob you of credence?
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
His reputation had . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 11).
. . . been shattered by . . .
Henry Miller, Man In The Zoo: George Grosz’ Ecce Homo.
. . . psychoanalytic character assassination.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
He was . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 11).
. . .demeaned in public and private, in plain words and in jargon, in professional and lay circles. . . E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
. . . and his opinions were . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 11).
. . . received with . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . contempt, ridicule or obloquy.
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al. (1991).
What did I have to say to that?
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
"I'll tell you this. . . ."
Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman.
Put bluntly, . . .
Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul.
"They can all go to Hell."
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory quoting Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
Period. End quote.
U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs.
With these words, he . . .
Charles Dickens, The Schoolboy’s Story.
. . . expressed what is essential in his story.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
He had conceived his . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . Assault . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . in defiance, written it in defiance, and published it in defiance. This was the stance he thought proper to a discoverer at odds all his life with the "compact majority."
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
" . . . a great scholar, a major analyst—"
U.S. Supreme Court, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., et al. (1991) quoting Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives.
Oh yes!
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
. . . a great scholar . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
But note . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
In the end, to be sure—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
"It's got nothing to do with me. It's got to do with the things I discovered."
Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives.
I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . carefully constructed lies, . . .
George Orwell, 1984.
. . . smelling them out.—My genius is in my nostrils.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
I found the temptation of making my withheld knowledge accessible to the world irresistible . . .
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism.
But my truth is terrible; for so far one has called lies truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
_______________________________________________________________
In the meantime Ellsberg continued reading his documents and thinking about the "lessons of Vietnam," and concluded that the lies and deception were systematic, not just the aberrations of particular Presidents or the result of errors of judgment. The intelligence estimates, he concluded, despite his earlier feelings about inaccurate reporting from the field were "remarkably accurate." He had become privy to a new secret.
That ultimate secret seemed to have something to do with the nature of secrecy itself. He could verge on the rhapsodic when he spoke about what the possession of secrets could do to the possessor, about the safes within safes, the clearances above Top Secret, the secrets within secrets that he had discovered in the inner chambers of the Pentagon. People in Washington derived kicks from having access to information from those inner chambers, achieved a kind of euphoria from knowing things that were not known by others. He would later say that his own fascination with them might have some relation to a parallel fascination with pornography. For years he had collected pornography, and his apartment was full of the stuff. Now he also possessed the hardcore information about the war, the pornography of Vietnam. Was the language suggestive: disclosure, revelation, protection, penetration?
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty.
The Book of Genesis warned against exposing the myths that bound society, and against setting up a purely human morality. If men knew the truth, and saw themselves as they were, and made their own values, they would be like the gods. The gods would then become unemployed, there would be revolutions, societies would perish. The secret must be kept, . . .
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
. . . the nature of the secret . . .
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
. . . was that it had to be kept . . .
Cyber Sarge, Questions on Vietnam War.
. . . so that the past might be preserved.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
In 1968 . . .
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty.
. . . Daniel Ellsberg . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Emperor’s Embrace: Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood.
. . . had warned . . .
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty.
. . . Secretary of State . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent.
. . . Henry Kissinger (he would later testify) not to be seduced by secret data, which constitutes "a magic potion that turns ordinary human beings into arrogant, contemptuous, menaces to democracy," but two years later, when he saw Kissinger again, he concluded that Kissinger was "eating the secret honeydew."
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty.
_______________________________________________________________
In Scripture, the conflict between curiosity and the prohibition against it appears as early as the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. When God prohibits Adam from eating from the tree of knowledge, presumably He was not thinking of prohibiting Adam from learning the multiplication tables (at least not literally). The prohibited knowledge related to matters of instinctual interest, of identity and destiny. The consequences of eating the forbidden fruit is that Adam and Eve became aware of the distinction between good and evil and also of the need to cover their genitals. They became mortal and were exiled from their infantile or perhaps prenatal paradise into the world of reality, of pain and hard work, of thorns and thistles, and of the grave.
Mortimer Ostow, Ultimate Intimacy: The Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism.
What is involved is not Fall but a wounding estrangement, an expulsion from home, from a garden where Yahweh, who is both mother and father, likes to walk about while enjoying the cool breezes of the evening.
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
At this particular point in Scripture, Creation seems to have come to a standstill. God speaks of Ketz kol bassar: He mentions the end, the mystical end. The term He uses is neither Sof nor Siyum (which also means the end), but Ketz: a brutal termination, a breakdown of all systems—the closing of a spectacle that has barely opened . . . to poor notices, one might say. . . .
It seems that Creation has broken away from its Creator. No wonder He was disappointed. It's understandable. He had hoped to produce something unique: a work of purity and ecstasy, a colossal project with grandiose possibilities.
Elie Wiesel, Sages and Dreamers.
. . . a most majestic vision . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
And then came the letdown. He had been mistaken, misled, deceived. Deceived by His favorite and most privileged creature—betrayed by man, who appeared unworthy of His trust and kindness. Their relationship could have been so gratifying: it wasn't. Why? Because man, in his foolishness, his pettiness, his selfishness, perverted and destroyed all. God therefore decided, Better put an end to it right then and there. Curtain, please. The author is dissatisfied with the performance. He chooses to work on another draft. And start all over. From the beginning.
Elie Wiesel, Sages and Dreamers.
God said that Adam would have to die on the day he ate of the Tree of Knowledge. According to God, the instantaneous result of eating of the Tree of Knowledge would be death; according to the serpent (at least it can be understood so), it would be equality with God. Both were wrong in similar ways. Men did not die, but became mortal; they did not become like God, but received the indisputable capacity to become so. Both were right in similar ways. Man did not die, but the paradisiacal man did; men did not become God, but divine knowledge.
Franz Kafka, Paradise.
But since they are to die, the chain of reproduction is initiated so that life may continue, and so Adam "knew" his wife, Eve. The myth tells us that a paradisiac existence is incompatible with a sense of reality, with self-consciousness, and with values. Curiosity is vital for the human but nevertheless its price is the forgoing of immortality.
Mortimer Ostow, Ultimate Intimacy: The Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism.
_____________________________________________________________
Once and for all, there is a great deal I do not want to know.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
and—I would add—
Marianne Krull, Freud and His Father.
I have even . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . learned some things I wish I didn’t know.
Jack Thomas, Tales from Cooking Class. Learning to Cook Rabbit Is One Thing; Eating It, Another.
— Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
By the end of 1877, . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, His Music.
. . . the shrewd old master . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II).
. . . Richard Wagner and . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . his disciple and assistant, . . .
Peter Salm, Introduction to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
. . . Nietzsche, . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . had become . . .
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty.
. . . estranged by an almost incredible incident. In October Wagner took it upon himself to suggest to Nietzsche's doctor that the young man was essentially suffering the effects of excessive masturbation and recommended a water cure!
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, His Music.
This seems surprising; it comes close to seeming fantastic.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
To anticipate the denouement of the sorry affair, somebody talked. Nietzsche found out about the correspondence . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . between Wagner and . . .
Danny O’Rourke, Forensics Expert Calls Painseeker Murder “Conspiracy” – Ex-Employee Helps Police Draw Motive, Timeline (Los Angeles Tribune, July 25, 2002).
. . . Nietzsche’s . . .
Jack London, Martin Eden.
. . . doctor, though . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Monster Men.
. . . when and from whom remains uncertain.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
Wagner had to dominate and was incapable of a relationship on equal terms. He had only disciples, no true friend.
Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay—Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus.
Dr. Eiser, who revered Wagner and Nietzsche in equal measure, . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . had been sent to chat with the disciple, by the old master—who was a frantic traditionalist, and could not help knowing, by now, how iconoclastic were the views of his brilliant disciple.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
Whatever the truth, rumors were rife at the latest during . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . Wagner’s opera . . .
Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self.
. . . festival of 1882, when Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth and Lou von Salome found Bayreuth's hotels and private houses buzzing with gossip.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
This seemingly preposterous scenario . . .
Curt Suplee, 'Big Chill' Theory Starts to Snowball.
. . . had . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . leaked out—no one, as usual, knew where from—
John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
Nietzsche, upon hearing of this meddling, naturally became enraged.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, His Music.
The Professor . . .
Charlotte Bronte, The Professor.
. . . was so furious as to be hardly intelligible.
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
posted by My Daily Struggles at 9:13 AM
|
0 comments
