In an imaginative, insightful, learned collaboration, novelist Appignanesi (Memory and Desire, 1991) and historian of science Forrester (Cambridge Univ.) present Freud's female relatives, patients, friends, disciples, and colleagues; their contributions to his work; and their actual and symbolic roles in his life. Although little is known of Freud's family life (the information still carefully guarded in the Freud Archives), the psychoanalytic ``family,'' tied by powerful ``transferential bonds,'' is well documented but often misunderstood. It is in dispelling some of the myths about Freud's work (particularly about castration anxiety and penis envy), about the women he encountered and his attitude toward them and toward the feminine in general (e.g., his reputed misogyny) that this book is most successful. In spite of the patronizing title, the women themselves are represented with their own character and integrity intact. All of them—patients such as ``Dora,'' disciples such as daughter Anna Freud, friends such as Lou Andreas-SalomÇ—were creative allies in Freud's work, guides and mediators carrying his ideas, theories, even his mistakes into new territories with their writings and their organizations: Marie Bonaparte in France, Alix Strachey in England, Ruth Mack Brunswick and Muriel Gardner in America. As for Freud himself, the ``demonized'' and the ``idealized'' psychiatrist are replaced here with a humanized male figure, with all his insecurity revealed—especially through the King Lear analogy that appears throughout the text. To those familiar with Freud: a fresh and perhaps controversial interpretation, as well as a tribute to the women who helped create him. For others: an absorbing if somewhat biased introduction to the canon and archetypes that helped shape modern ideas about human development and sexuality.
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1993
ISBN: 0-465-02563-3
Page Count: 588
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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