Freud On The Acropolis: Reflections On A Paradoxical Response To The Real

by Sugarman, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780465083305
• ISBN10: 0465083307
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-07-15
• Publisher: Basic Books

Summary

This book analyzes a unique mental event-the paradoxical surprise that people often feel when they come upon something that they have felt sure existed but are seeing for the first time. Noted first by Sigmund Freud, this common but odd thought proves remarkably resistant to trivial explanation & marks instead a distinct type of experience. Similarly, in everyday life we often feel compelled to verify firsthand the scene of a recent event, even though we never doubted its occurrence. Susan Sugarman probes this experience & its relation to other everyday sensibilities, such as the pleasure of reencountering the familiar & people's fascination with authenticity. Although the experience manifests itself in a seeming lapse in logic & remains obscure in a way that one might-& that Freud did-associate with pathological formations, it is neither illogical nor pathological. On the contrary, it observes a moment of mental health & personal integration. On the contrary, it observes a moment of mental health & personal integration.

Author Biography

Susan Sugarman is associate professor of psychology at Princeton University, where she is an Old Dominion Fellow of the Council of the Humanities for 1996-1998.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
The Problem	p. 5
A Synopsis of Freud's Account	p. 13
Freud's Thought at Face Value	p. 17
Freud's Thought as a Literal Expression	p. 18
Literal Interpretations of Other Thoughts	p. 23
Freud's Thought as a Figurative Expression	p. 25
Linguistic Tropes	p. 25
Indirect Discourse	p. 26
Loose Usage	p. 26
Summary of Common-Sense Interpretation (Chapters 3 and 4)	p. 27
Freud's Account Analyzed	p. 29
Freud's Account of His Experience	p. 30
The General Case of the Thought	p. 32
A Different Neurosis	p. 35
A Preliminary Account	p. 35
What If ...?	p. 36
A Pure Affirmation	p. 37
The Thought as Mundane	p. 39
Miracles and Lesser Events	p. 39
Further Examples of the Thought	p. 41
The Thought as Childlike: The Reencounter with the Known in a New Guise	p. 47
The Childlike Vantage Point of the Thought	p. 48
Adult Contexts for the Return of the Childlike	p. 50
The Reencounter with the Known in Reality	p. 57
Connecting with the Object's Connections	p. 58
Connecting with the Personal Past	p. 59
Freud's Thought Revisited	p. 62
The Adult Voice	p. 65
Children and the Thought	p. 65
The Confirmation of Experience	p. 68
The Paradoxical Stance	p. 73
"A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis"	p. 79
Notes	p. 87
References	p. 99
Index	p. 105
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.