At which of these jokes did Freud laugh:
(1) Catholic is to wholesale as Protestant is to retail.
(2) “A wife is like an umbrella. Sooner or later you take a cab.”
(3) “This girl is like Dreyfus. The army doesn’t believe in her innocence.”
(4) “Was your mother once in service at the palace?” “No, your Highness, but my father was.”
(5) Blind man: “Wie gehts.” Lame man: “As you see.”
-- DL
Freud maintained that death was
(a) the best of a bad business
(b) the best of both worlds
(c) the right answer
(d) one of two unknowns in the equation
(e) the greater of two evils
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Bonus points: Auden concludes his elegy for Freud by saying, “Sad is Eros, builder of cities, / And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.” What makes Freud call Eros – the impish god of love, known in Latin as Cupid -- “builder of cities"?
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Below: Caravaggio's Cupid
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DL
Freud, an avowed agnostic, said that he remained culturally Jewish. The best evidence for this is
(a) the skullcap that he wore when having sexual intercourse with his wife
(b) in no photograph do you ever see Freud smile
(c) Freud compiled a joke book as diligently as he collected dreams and errors
(d) he refused to take a Rorschach Test
(e) he left Vienna for London rather than die at the hands of the Nazis
-- DL
1. Who wrote the Confessions of Rousseau?
2. Who wrote the Confessions of Nat Turner?
3. Who wrote the Confessions of a Justified Sinner?
4. Who wrote the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas?
5. Who played Boswell to Samuel Johnson?
Clues:
1. Rhymes with Robinson Crusoe.
2. Rhymes with Byron.
3. Rhymes with the hero of Around the World in 80 Days starring David Niven.
4. Rhymes with Einstein and is a genius.
5. "Nothing concentrates the mind like a hanging in the morning."
-- DL
If Jacques Lacan had written "Beyond the Pleasure principle," death would be
a) A one-way ticket to Palookaville
b) The big sleep
c) A modern office building
d) A seventeenth-century orgasm
e) The mirror
Match wits with the experts:
1) Auden
2) Queen Elizabeth I
3) Terry Malloy
4) Sylvia Plath
5) Philip Marlowe
Freud Quiz is supported by a grant from the tomb.
-- DL
In Freud’s view, when the Dalai Lama met Salvador Dali
(a) they discussed a possible merger of Surrealism and Buddhism
(b) it was in his waiting room and they criticized US foreign policy
(c) they were in a Gap commercial for khaki trousers
(d) they sang “Hello, Dolly”
(e) it was like the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on the operating table.
-- DL
Psychoanalysis became known as the "talking cure" because
(a) it depends on free association
(b) all talk and no action make Jack a dull boy
(c) it was the talk of Viennese café society
(d) he heard a woman’s voice in a dream: “she’ll be riding six white horses when she comes.” and he woke up feeling pretty good.
(e) the shrink with the hearing aid is the single greatest metaphor for the profession since Groucho Marx told a mother of eight that he liked his cigar a lot but took it out of his mouth once in a while
-- DL
The Compulsion to Repeat
(after reading David Lehman's Freud Quiz #5)
I'm going to begin by repeating a phrase
oft repeated
and despised by those like me who dislike
repetition for impression
a friend of mine
a poet
made a quiz about Freud:
what is the compulsion to repeat
to do the thing that scares you
over again and be
forgiven
or should we ask Hitler about Napoleon
and Russians about the madness of repeating the same futile action in hopes of expecting a different
result repeat it
in repeating your quiz, David
I pretend to make a poem
because
pretender
in Spanish is a lovely way to say
you tried, didn't you
implied, the failure being the outcome of your compulsion,
also to woo, court,
pretender
try it is better than our word to be
repeated repeat try
in a rhetorical strategy
to be better than pretending
to repeat what almost was
yet another attempt
to try and get
that Spaniard to pretend.
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-- Kathleen Ignatius,
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Madrid, Spain
5 marzo
The title Beyond the Pleasure Principle refers to
(1) Death
(2) The unconscious
(3) The desire to retreat into the womb
(4) The hero’s disastrous first marriage
(5) A German translation of the Arlen and Harburg song Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz
-- DL
What is the "compulsion to repeat"?
(a) the impulse to keep doing the thing that scares you -- in an effort to master the fear
(b) the wish to make the same mistake twice, and be forgiven
(c) the reason why Hitler copied Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia
(d) the need to repeat the same futile action and the madness of expecting a different result
(e) the rhetorical strategy of using the same word (or an anagram of it) in every sentence of a paragraph
-- DL
