Can’t get enough of Dr. Freud’s online incarnation? Browse on:
Doctoral student Benjamin Y. Fong, in a contribution this month to the NYT’s Opinionator blog, makes a case for the enduring relevance of “radical talking”:
What Freud proposed, and what remains revolutionary in his thought today, is that human beings have the capacity for real change, the kind that would undo the malicious effects of our upbringings and educations so as to obviate the need for “breaks from real life,” both voluntary and involuntary.
Edward Bernays pioneered another use for Uncle Freud’s psychological insights in the new field of “public relations,” according to a 2005 NPR report.
Essayist and actor David Rakoff once scored an unusual gig playing Freud in a Barney’s window display and he talks about it in a 1996 episode of This American Life.
Time Magazine deemed Freud cover-worthy five separate times in between 1924 and 1999.
Literary critic Harold Bloom anointed Freud in 1986 as “the greatest modern writer” in The New York Times:
No 20th-century writer – not even Proust or Joyce or Kafka – rivals Freud’s position as the central imagination of our age. We turn to Freud when we wish to read someone absolutely relevant on any matter that torments or concerns us: love, jealousy, envy, masochism, cruelty, possessiveness, fetishism, curiosity, humor or what we will.
W.H. Auden paid tribute to a man who is “no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion” in the 1940 poem In Memory of Sigmund Freud.
And a 1910 watercolor by Adolf Hitler may once have hung on the wall of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna practice, prompting speculation (after the painting’s reemergence in 2010) that the two men may have met.
