Nadia and Sigi

This book served as a great refreshment to what I had already learned about Freud as well as an informative means of what I hadn’t known or what had been unclear. I think it does a much better job of communicating the ideas of Freud in a manageable way in comparison to the similar Marx book. "Freud for Beginners" was much more focused on Freud’s life and theories and not everyone else‘s.

As I was reading, I kept finding myself piecing together a puzzle which lead me to contemplate my thoughts on Freud even more. For example, Freud being the favorite child and “Golden Sigi” to his mother puts a lot into perspective on many of his theories. He was clearly infatuated with his own mother growing up.

His ideas certainly coincide with much of the art that is produced and how it can be produced in the future (as does psychology in general). Ironically enough I went to the Guggenheim this weekend to see the Louise Bourgeois exhibit. I couldn’t help but respond to the book with regard to the artist and vise versa. For example, there are many pieces which depict psychoanalytic feminism. Her series of phallic marble and latex over plaster sculptures exert a certain comedy or parody to the genitals and primal drives. I found it interesting there were several pieces which related to the reading directly. There was a piece called the Arc Of Hysteria, which was in reference to Charcot’s unorthodox theory that hysteria didn’t only occur in women. The sculpture depicts and exaggerates one of the many symptoms of hysteria in which the body has a muscle spasm making the spine curl backward. Not only is the arch aesthetically beautiful as a bronze ring, but its male genitals is an expression that hysteria was not linked to sexual organs.