Contributions by:

Kurt Jacobsen

Bettelheim And Fromm On Freud

Kurt Jacobsen In 1959 Bruno Bettelheim, his own reputation in ascent (and since unjustly despoiled in the US ), reviewed Erich Fromm’s volume Sigmund Freud’s Mission, a perceptive little book he later thought could be most instructively compared with Ernest Jones’ adulatory and unreflective rendition of the master. So Bettelheim paired the reviews in the…

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The Mystique Of Genetic Correctness

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The advent of Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996 – RIP in 2003 – left many an onlooker feeling both celebrative and uneasy.1 With irrepressibly manic ingenuity the biological sciences are dissolving our supposedly fuddy-duddy moral boundaries so that many scientists find themselves in debates they really would rather avoid as to the wisdom of playing cavalierly…

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The Great ‘Israel Lobby’ Fuss

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In the mid-1980s an obligatorily air-headed action film entitled Delta Force popped up on American cinema screens. The gaudy Golan-Globus production dangled before its audiences a wish-fulfillment fantasy as to how the bungled 1979 effort to rescue hostages in Iran somehow might have succeeded. (The braggart advertisement could have been scrawled by Dubya: “They don’t…

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V For Vendetta, Graphic Enough?

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You say you wanna a revolution? Well, you know – or readers of a certain age will know – that even beloved old reactionary Walt Disney was a passionate fan of revolutionaries, if they were of the right lily white breed. Exhibit A is the stirring 1950s Disney TV series ‘Johnny Tremain,’ chronicling a handsome…

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London Bombs Come In All Sizes And Shapes

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On the terrible morning of the London suicide bombings the Sky news cable channel in Britain, owned by Rupert Murdoch and anchored by manic Murdochian mannequins, summoned three terrorism experts plus an Amnesty International spokeswoman. The latter obviously was tossed in for a bit of balance, although duly outnumbered by what one guessed were truculent…

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A Conversation With Sylvia Zwettler-Otte

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Sylvia Zwettler-Otte was from 2001-2004  President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Her most recent book is ‘Freud in Der Presse’ co-written with Marina Tichy. We met in July 2005 in London where she genially agreed to this wide-ranging interview. Our conversation darted from Freud’s reception in Vienna in his early years of struggle, to the…

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Prologue To Mark Twain’s “to The Person Sitting In Darkness.”

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Picture Huckleberry Finn, a bit older and flintier, in Army uniform remorselessly slaughtering Filipino insurgents, and their hapless families, at the inauspicious turn of the 20th century. What would nigger Jim think?[1] A tad earlier, these same villainous Filipinos had been hailed in the fickle US press as glorious freedom fighters for helping America to…

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Tin Foil Hats, The Msm And Election Mischief

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Was the 2004 election, perchance, fixed? 1 in 5 Americans, according to a December Gallup poll, suspect so.[1] Four out of five fellow Americans never heard a peep about rigging, believed scoffing authorities, or, being Bush backers, gloated. The first whiff our solid, and mostly white, middle class usually got of electoral mischief was the…

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India And Pakistan: Hair-triggers And The Question Of Reconciliation

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Shaking off a colonial power is never easy and rarely results in anything one might call a clean break. With the waning of Western domination, stretching from the 18th century exploits of the East India Company, with buccaneering Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, through the somewhat more civilized heights of the post-Mutiny British Raj, the…

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Dubya’s Fellow Travelers: Left Intellectuals And Mr. Bush’s War

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What are “fellow travelers”? Once upon a time, during the 1920s and 1930s, the epithet referred to left-wing intellectuals who, while not members of the communist party, were sympathetic to its political project. No preening right-winger or proud moderate will let anyone on the left ever forget how writers like Lion Feuchtwanger, Romain Rolland, Lincoln…

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