Friday, October 18, 2013

Freud's Archivists: Janet Malcolm was born in Lidka's Prague

In the Freud Archives tells the story of an unlikely encounter among three men: K. R. Eissler, the venerable doyen of psychoanalysis; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a flamboyant, restless forty-two-year-old Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst turned virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a mischievous thirty-five-year-old former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar. At the center of their Oedipal drama are the Sigmund Freud Archives—founded, headed, and jealously guarded by Eissler—whose sealed treasure gleams and beckons to the community of Freud scholarship as if it were the Rhine gold. In the Feud archives

Janet Malcolm's Journalistic Relationship With Analyst Jeffrey Masson Seemed as Intimate as Romance. No Wonder Their Libel Trial Felt Like a Divorce Till Death Do Us Part ~ Janet Malcolm

In a fascinating but anecdotal (and probably ultimately pointless) experiment, psychologists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland averaged the faces of young women from around the globe to create "averaged" faces of various nations.
Averaged faces