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Re: Freud, Umbrella and Bernheim's experiments.
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Anthony Stadlen: There are many links between Freud and umbrellas. For example, in Studies on Hysteria (1895), in a remarkable footnote, Freud explains how he got himself into the embarrassing situation of having attempted to hypnotise an umbrella.... (if I remember rightly -- I am in Athens, away from almost all my books) This story is almost worthy of Nabokov.
Again, in Freud's book on jokes (1905), he tells the joke that appeared in a magazine: "A wife is like an umbrella; sooner or later one takes a cab." ...More prosaically, forgetting an umbrella is routinely referred to (by, among others, Freud himself, I am almost certain) as a paradigm of the apparently meaningless but, from Freud's point of view, intentional and meaningful slips and "Fehlleistungen" ("mischievements" in Walter Kaufmann's translation, "parapraxes" in James Strachey's) charateristic of what Freud called "the psyhopathology of everyday life" (1904
[1901]).
JM: Thanks again, Anthony Stadlen, for the amusing anedoctes that bring together Freud and umbrellas. This is one of the advantages of an open-forum List, our information is constantly being renewed to acquire a measure of precision. My Cedarn cave is not in Athens, but what I wrote relied solely on what I could still remember, items which helped me to plot the words for a google search to offer adequate links,nothing more. With old age memory tends to function too selectively. This is why, even after your description, the two stories were a novelty and a delight to me ( Bernheim's experiment was, of course, impossible to forget because such a lot of the Freudian theory derives from his confrontation with Bernheim's demonstration.)
I'll use the present opportunity to correct something I set down in a former posting about the similarity I found bt. Freud's and Nabokov's ideals ( life as an open system which constantly adds to it new traits and developments). In the same article ("Beyond the Pleasure Principle") where Freud concluded that there is no "basic drive for perfection," and that growth takes place solely because a living organism must cope with the external obstacles that cross its direct path towards its goal ( a return to a basic equilibrium, ie, to Nirvana and death...), he postulated a second drive that would be working alongside his initial basic drive (ie, Eros, the "Life-Instinct"), namely an active "Death Drive". Freud now includes the effects of entropy and describes its internal operation opposing life's unceasing strife towards progressive complexity and differenciation. The addition of a fundamental "Todestrieb" interacting with life changes the initial picture I brought up, when I compared Nabokov's and Freud's ideals! There's no "hereafter", no transmigrating souls and no "metempsychosis" to be read in Freud and his dire vision of "eternity.".
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