/lit/ - Literature

>A similar view of a homosexually inclined but chaste Leonardo appears in a famous 1910 paper by Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood, which analysed a memory Leonardo described of having been attacked as a baby by a bird of prey that opened his mouth and "stuck me with the tail inside my lips again and again.”

>According to Freud, this was a childhood fantasy based on the memory of sucking his mother's nipple. He backed up his claim with the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphs represent the mother as a vulture, because the Egyptians believed that there are no male vultures and that the females of the species are impregnated by the wind.

>However, Freud's premise was based on an erroneous translation of the bird as a vulture, leading him in the direction of Egyptian mythology, when it was actually a kite in Leonardo's story. This disappointed Freud because, as he confessed to Lou Andreas-Salomé in a letter of 9 February 1919, he regarded the Leonardo essay as "the only beautiful thing I have ever written".

I can’t believe this fucking charlatan hack ended up becoming one of the most influential people in modern history

Why is psychoanalysis still alive and influential in literary criticism and continental philosophy?

Hasn't it been completely discredited scientifically? Might as well have astrological lens in criticism where you guess characters' star signs or something.

>>8364259
I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed

Why are people so keen to tear his theories apart?

Is it because he strikes a nerve in many even in this day and age?

All of them

I am looking for psychology books that illuminate character dynamics/constellations I can use for my fiction writings.

Any suggestions?

Freud scares me. It would be better if his stuff turned out to be true. That the vileness was just like.. accepted by almost the entire world for decades... disgusting. Also, it's like Bloom says... His assertions sometimes have a kind of hypnotic power to them that makes you just kind of accept them. Dark jew magic.

Also Norman O. Brown. Makes me kind of sick that his stuff was allowed in a world where people had to wear clothes and walk from place to place and keep the electricity running. It all just seems so irresponsible.

Also Eliot Rodger and I have a few too many similarities.

Also read something in James Holmes manifesto where he just scribbled "WHY?" for like ten pages... then he started writing the plans for the theatre shooting. Unsettling

Camille Paglia unnerves me because she seems at once so feminine and yet she's working from a foundation of pure logos which even she herself would have to concede is masculine... or I shouldn't speak whereof I know not, but she really really scares me even more than the existentialist feminists (who just fill me with doomthirst) and I can't explain why. Sexual Personae just kind of weirds me out... didn't get through it

>>7424491
Because without the quelling of man's narcissism mankind would not be able to maintain civilization.

Hedonism would result in an anarchic order of things, thus man would once again succumb completely to the ironic death that exists within only the realm nature. While it is a struggle to deal with privations of culture and civilization, it is far better than just falling into hedonist debauchery.

I just started reading Freud.

One thing that strikes me about his writing is his willingness to admit when he doesn't know something:

It's extremely common to hear Freud say,

"I don't have the necessary expertise on this matter"

"I can't comment on this."

"I'm not certain about this proposition."

... it's extremely rare to hear intellectuals speak like this, and it improves my estimate of him immensely.