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

Sugarman, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0465083307 ISBN 13: 9780465083305

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

This book analyzes a subtle but intriguing mental event,the paradoxical surprise that people sometimes 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 experience proves remarkably resistant to trivial explanation.Upon seeing the Acropolis for the first time, Freud remarked, So all this really does exist, just as we learned in school!" 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 and its relation to other everyday sensibilities, such as the pleasure of reencountering the familiar and people's fascination with authenticity. Although the experience manifests itself in a seeming lapse in logic and remains obscure in a way that one might,and that Freud did,associate with pathological formations, it is neither illogical nor pathological. On the contrary, it observes a moment of mental health and personal integration.Similar to approaches in modern philosophy and linguistics, Sugarman's analysis is applied here accessibly and in ordinary terms to concrete behaviour and experience. As a result, thought and feeling, normally believed to elude systematic inquiry, yield to it, allowing for genuine progress in understanding the human mind.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465083307
• ISBN 13: 9780465083305
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 126