Wednesday, June 04, 2014

Becoming Bohemian-Moravian Born and Bred Freud



That is the new and excellent book by Adam Phillips, in the US available on Kindle only.  Here is one bit:
…Freud was discovering that we obscure ourselves from ourselves in our life stories; that that is their function.  So we will often find that the most dogmatic thing about Freud as a writer is his skepticism.  He is always pointing out his ignorance, without ever needing to boast about it.  He is always showing us what our knowing keeps coming up against; what our desire to know might be a desire for.
And later:
Psychoanalysis would one day be Freud’s proof that biography is the worst kind of fiction, that biography is what we suffer from; that we need to cure ourselves of the wish for biography, and our belief in it.  We should not be substituting the truths of our desire with trumped-up life stories, stories that we publicize.

~ Australia's wealthiest people use a complex web of trusts and companies to hide what could potentially be billions of dollars from the tax office. Auditor general Ian McPhee has released a report on the Australian Taxation Office's handling of high-wealth individuals (HWIs) – people who control an estimated net wealth of $30m or more each. McPhee said the tax compliance of the 2,650 HWIs and 3,700 potential HWIs, who had a total estimated wealth of $500bn in 2012/13, represented a "significant revenue risk".
The tax office estimates the wealthiest Australians contributed $1.4 billion in tax in 2011/12. Managing Compliance of High Wealth IndividualsTax policy and The Bible, by Bruce Bartlett



Wall Street Journal (blog)

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