From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Jun 01 2002 - 01:31:37 MDT
At 03:16 AM 6/1/02 -0400, Eliezer wrote:
>Doug Jones wrote:
>> To which he stiffly replied
Ho ho.
>This completely destroys the charm of the phrase for me. So this is not a
>rare flash of rationality on Freud's part?
Of course it gets worse:
http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/Aficionado/people/ff1294.html
And yet Freud had a partial
understanding that his own penchant
for cigars was significant for
psychoanalysis. In letters to colleagues,
Freud hinted that he had the beginnings
of a theory of addiction in which he
posited that addictions like smoking
were secondary substitutions, akin to
"withdrawal symptoms," from addictive
masturbation in childhood. Freud even
hinted that he felt his own addiction to
smoking may have had this
psychological origin. However, he
never published his theory, and his
abortive attempts at a theory of
addiction may be the result of his
ambivalence about examining his own
addiction to smoking.
Perhaps Freud's defensiveness about his
cigar smoking--and the enormous
pleasure he derived from it--was
understandable. It was both ironic and
inevitable that Freud, the man who
taught the world to appreciate
symbolism, would be subject to all the
cliched interpretations of his cigar as a
phallic object. Even today, banal cigar
jokes haunt Freud's image.
Freud adamantly insisted that cigars
were a part of his life that was to remain
insulated from the observing eye of
psychoanalysis. The famous quote
captures this sentiment: "Sometimes a
cigar is just a cigar." This is not the only
time Freud felt compelled to protect
himself from the the prying eyes and
sharp minds of his colleagues. In the
early 1920s, Sigmund Freud created a
minor scandal by suggesting in a
memorandum to the members of his
inner circle that he believed in mental
telepathy and that he had himself
conducted tests that convinced him of
the existence of such phenomena. In his
own defense Freud stated that "...my
adherence to telepathy is my private
affair like my Jewishness, my passion
for smoking, and other things, and the
theme of telepathy--inessential for
psychoanalysis."
Damien Broderick
[a sometime parapsychological researcher]
[but not, thank heavens, a smoker]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:32 MST