No comments about Man of Mana: Marius Barbeau, a Biography.

No comments about HIGH ADVENTURE LIFE LUCY (Women in American Protestant Religion 1800-1930).

No comments about Freud and Women.

No comments about Partnership Games: The Musings of a Recently Retired Psychiatrist.

No comments about Freud's Women/Family, Patients, Followers.

No comments about Grahame Clark: An Intellectual Biography of an Archaeologist.

3 comments about John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946.

1. The last part of Robert Skidelsky's magnificent biography of J.M. Keynes is a tale about the fall of the British Empire with Keynes as one of its most clairvoyant and active go-betweens trying to avoid the disaster. Great-Britain had won the war but it was bankrupt crushed by its debt contracted to buy US weapons.
   This book shows clearly through its analysis of the Bretton-Woods negotiations and the discussions about the conversion of the British debt, that the ultimate goal of the US Administration was to get Britain on its knees and to take its place as world leader.
   The US prefered an alliance with the Soviet Union against Britain. Their most important negotiator H.D. White was a convinced Soviet spy.
   Keynes defended exhaustingly Britain's role in world matters by begging time for a reconversion of the British industry from a war to a civilian economy and for safeguarding its Commomwealth with its preferential tariff and pound sterling payment system.
   The humiliating conditions for its debt conversion imposed by the US would cripple the British economy for years.
   The suicidal internecine European wars created a new world hegemon: the US.
   
   Before the war, Keynes defended his 'Treatise' policies, but saw them applied in Germany by a very clever economist, Hjalmar Schacht, who also saved the German economy internationally by creating a bilateral trade system.
   Prof. Skidelsky shows us also pregnantly the deterioration of Keynes's physical condition, aggravated by his exhausting travels, difficult (empty handed) negotiations and even hard opposition at home when he was in the US.
   
   One could perhaps slightly criticize the exhaustive excerpts of letters or the extremely detailed evolution of the negotiations in Bretton-Woods or about British debt relief. But, all in all, this is a fascinating read.



2. It's unexpectedly well decscibed how's Keynes in his childhood. He's in fact a well-spoken, witty gentleman with its charms inside which is mysterious. How could he become such a great economist, how he invent the theories, how he generated such a beautiful mind. It talked about Keynes' life in Eton College( a fundamental place for him to grow up and how his schoolmates affect him), and more is in King's College,Cambridge( which definitely a crucial turning point in Keynes' life) which included keynes' letter which he sent expressed his point of views, his love to Duncan. His writings were precise but in-depth. Moreover, it also includes a lot of cultural background informations which is like Cambridge traditions.It's a must-read book if you like Keynes.



3. In this, the third and concluding volume of his biography of Keynes, Skidelsky offers a brilliant analysis of one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Skidelsky offers a remarkable discussion of the man (as opposed to the icon) whose influence seems to have fluctuated according to conventional (received?) wisdom with regard to fundamental economic principles. Economists have either agreed or disagreed about the value of Keynes's ideas (often with more heat than light) since the publication of his major work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). As a non-economist, I have only casually observed how his principles have gone in and out of favor as the national economy itself improves, flattens out, weakens, improves, etc. I enjoyed this book because it connected a human being with the principles to which so many others have referred in books and articles. Also because, as international trade accelerates in terms of both scope and depth (largely because of the Internet and the WWW), the role of government in each country will inevitably change...especially governments in those countries which were formerly members of the U.S.S.R. as well as in other countries in Asia, notably China. Thanks to Skidelsky's book, I am now much better prepared to recognize and understand such changes. I wish I had read the second volume in the trilogy (subtitled "The Economist as Savior") before reading this one. Those who read this review are urged to do so. However, judged wholly on its own merits, this final volume (subtitled "Fighting for Freedom") is a first-rate achievement.

4 comments about The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud.

1. This book is a lot like the comedy film, "The Aristocrats." Maybe not at the beginning, where the ability of writers is in the long dark tunnel of trying to find something to say, but by Chapter 8, "Music, Painting, and Comedy of the Night," parts of the book which seem like a documentary on the editorial board of `The Onion' are secondary to considerations of "hysterical conversions" (p. 189), which, "if it resembles a work of art, then the genre in question is surreal or absurd. Compulsive neurosis generates more meanings, but the wrong ones." (p. 189). The Ratman is associated with an "Oriental" (p. 190) torture as an example of "the perverse tergiversation of a psyche in conflict," (p. 190). "In the unconscious our passions are headless, with detachable identities, like live parts kept in stock in a joke shop, which we can draw on any time we need to assemble an identity." As in the comics retelling of imaginative variety acts, "our unconscious minds, unconstrained by the need to produce a grammatical or logical structure, behave like circus acts, throwing all definite reality into the air." (p. 191). "A chiasmus is inscribed in the Oedipal family situation where, against the norm, son loves mother and daughter loves father. This is the prime instance of animated rhetoric lying at the heart of Freud's view of the world." (p. 192). It is also key to a variety act called "The Aristocrats," according to the joke endlessly embellished in the movie "The Aristocrats."
   
   The intellectual activities of modern life mirror a world in which "the same person can feel love and hostility, attraction and the desire to gain revenge. Splitting and doubling seem to be approximate psychic mobilizations of the synecdoche, another trope by which the name of part of the object stands in for the whole (or the whole stands for the part) but then acquires a new poetic life of its own in the poetic text." (pp. 192-193).
   
   "Freud amplifies the unconscious; he creates a fantastic arena for what, in a desperate attempt at meaning, we call our personality; like Nietzsche he shows the sustaining power of metaphor, but also that we live in the depths of delusion. Nietzsche and Freud tell us that the human mind primarily has a gift for the ornamentation of life, not the analytical confrontation of which Western culture was for so long proud." (p. 194). This book seems entirely serious when it confronts "A chill comes over one at the spectacle of so much unconscious mimicry ruling once proud human autonomy" (p. 194) in Freud "writing perhaps the most bizarre poems to life ever to have entered the Western canon, for they are close to nonsense." (p. 194). Also, with a note of appreciation, "Nietzsche is a musician. Freud is a painter." (p. 195).



2. This book is a failure. While Chamberlain attempts to create both an authentic biograhpy and insightful literary criticism, she succeeds at neither. Her central premise relies upon the notion that Freud was really an artist at heart, who invented a new artistic practice to complement these repressed desires. While this idea on its own is not altogether flawed, the argument is marred by Chamberlain's constant cries to be heard as an intelligent and unconventional author. Chamberlain pretensiously reminds the reader of the apparent ingenuity and unorthodox nature of her claim every 7 pages; a claim mind you, that is as unprovable as it is unsupportable. There is no additional perspective gained from this reading. Shocking fact: their is no clear boundary between science and art! This book illustrates controversy for controversy's sake and is its own best example of "pen envy." Freud or Chamberlain: who really wishes to be The Secret Artist? Don't waste your time with this one.



3. The Secret Artist: A Close Reading Of Sigmund Freud by journalist and educator Lesley Chamberlain is a deep and perceptive study of the written works of Sigmund Freud, considered to be the founder of modern psychotherapy. In an effort to help readers better understand the mind of Freud, The Secret Artist closely dissects his writings with intense attention to detail. A thoughtful, scholarly, erudite, informative work, The Secret Artist is very highly recommended reading for students of Freud's pioneering work, as well as the non-specialist general reader with an interest in the history of psychotherapy.



4. Early in this terrific book the versatile British scholar Lesley Chamberlain writes of the young Sigmund Freud that what he "wanted and already expected was success," and that his writings "radiate the confidence and ambition and talent that would make it possible; but also the complexity that would not make it easy." This is a complex story and a scholarly work that presupposes the reader's positive regard for Freud (if not as a scientist, as an artist) and then aims to greatly enlarge upon it.

   Freud the analyst is revealed as a "secret artist," not furtively artistic but, rather, unconsciously artistic. He was, she writes, a pioneer and an utterly original thinker and writer who contributed amply to our present-day notions of the forms and possibilities of literature. In her view Freud virtually "fathered the creative writing class" by legitimizing not only subject matter but writing forms that had hitherto been considered unsuitable for public consumption. From Freud we inherited new literary forms for self-revelation, self-discovery, and confession.

   Chamberlain shows how Freud devised "the "double-well," an "artistic form with a moral component," a new way to tell a story in which "a dream sits on the divide." His stories about his patients have more in common with contemporary novellas than the medical case histories of their time, extending at times "a typical Freudian invitation to the reader, to pull the [...] thread and see where it leads."

   Chamberlain examines Freud positively without minimizing his shortcomings. "Freud was not a model of tolerance by today's standards, " she writes, and cites his views on homosexuality, women's sexuality (on which she says he was "underinformed"). Nonetheless, Chamberlain writes that Freud "gave us a more relaxed attitude toward sex, freed from values of God and the soul, and gender, and divorced from insensitive stereotypes." This is, then, no small thing.

   Chamberlain has accomplished an unusual and stimulating combination of biography, literary analysis, intelligent conjecture, and thrilling narrative. Her writing is crystal-clear, she tackles complicated things, and explains them wonderfully well. Freud's wide-ranging creative and personal relationships to philosophy, the visual arts, poetry, nature, music are explored. Along with a good index and bibliography, here are over a hundred pages of fluid and impossible-to-resist (because so interesting and energetic) "Notes, Arguments, and Explanations."

   Well worth reading.

1 comments about Piaget for Beginners (For Beginners Series).

1. This 150-page book is a very quick read, having the "for Beginners" format of pictures and cartoons mixed with very concise text. The book gave me an appreciation for Piaget far beyond his most famous idea of the "stages" of cognitive development, which is actually only covered very late in the book. Piaget was as much epistemologist as psychological theorist and researcher. This is a fine and entertaining overview. The explanations are short and merely give one an appetite for more details, but what is said seems to be stated very carefully and clearly. All in all, a few hours well spent if one seeks an introduction to Piaget.

1 comments about From Both Sides of the Couch: Reflections of a Psychoanalyst, Daughter Tennis Player and Other Selves.

1. I read this book in two days. Dr. Cohen's articulate and accessible account of her own journey as a patient, informed by her knowledge as a practitioner, really clarifies the difference between psychoanalysis and other forms of talk therapy. Having felt rather isolated as a layperson undergoing psychoanalytic treatment, finding a book which so adeptly describes the intensity of the process at it's most effective has been an affirming gift.