Solar Eclipse, Totality, On Transience. Psychology, Psychoanalysis of Everyday Life,  Total Eclipse of the Sun: Freud’s On Transience Elucidates Achieving a Lifelong Goal I “saw” my first partial eclipse when I was child of 8 or 10 in Florida.  My Mother made pinholes in sheets of paper and we used those to cast shadows and see the progression of the moon as it passed in front of the sun.  I was fascinated by both the celestial happenings, but also by the pinhole camera that we fashioned. At about this time, I also began reading accounts of total eclipses at historically mean ..read more

 Tom Lake, Ann Patchett, Fiction, Memoir, Truth, Psychology, Psychoanalysis My Aunt Julie and I have an ongoing debate – one that is resolved by each of us pursuing our own path while respecting the other’s.  She claims that nonfiction books are the way to learn about the world, and she doesn’t like fiction because it is just made up.  I think that that fiction tells us a lot about how human beings function.  I find pleasure in reading because I am learning something about humans – about characters and how they are imagined by people who are close examiners of others ..read more

 Succession, Logan, Kendall, Shiv, Roman Roy, Family Psychology, Psychoanalysis Succession has been an obsession for the past few weeks.  Four seasons of intense drama – 38 or so episodes in all – each episode an hour or more filled with, as everyone I have talked with about it says; a cast of characters not one of whom is likeable, and yet, like the proverbial car wreck, we can’t turn away from looking at it.  What is the draw? We watched the penultimate episode last night and I awoke a tad early this morning, as I often do after watching an episode, from a drea ..read more

 Appropriate, Broadway Play, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Race, Racism, Denial Appropriate, with Sarah Paulson and Elle Fanning, is the hot show in New York this season.  I am in New York for the American Psychoanalytic Convention with the Reluctant Wife.  The Eldest Reluctant Daughter decided to join us for the weekend, so we went to see the show that has people talking – or should.  As we were headed back afterwards, I commented that I thought the Reluctant Wife had done a good job of choosing the show.  This was based on my experience of it having been poignant ..read more

 The Big Sleep, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, film noir, psychoanalysis, psychology, heroics We were driving to yoga last week, listening to NPR, and Scott Simon was interviewing Clive Owen, the British Actor who is playing Sam Spade in a new series, Monsieur Spade, now streaming on AMC.  In the series, Sam, now in his sixties, and in the 1960s, has retired to the South of France, but gets called on to do the business of being a private detective, because that’s what happens when you are Sam Spade. As we listened to Clive describing how he wanted to play Bogart playing Sam Spade; no ..read more

 Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Series, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Mystery, Psychopathy, Psychopathology   Usually I find a movie made from a book to be disappointing.  The book seems so much richer – it is filled with inner thoughts, but perhaps most importantly, I have seen – envisioned – the environs so clearly and accurately that the representation that is on the screen is disappointing, sometimes jarringly so.  One exception to this was the Harry Potter series of movies.  Somehow, they seem to have gotten the visuals right enough – they weren ..read more

 Trust, Novel, Hernan Diaz, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, tragedy This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is actually four books in one.  The relationships between the books -  the first book, a Roman á clef, is followed by a somewhat hackneyed revision and response to the Roman á clef in the form of an unfinished memoir by the pilloried main character , then a revelatory memoir by the ghost writer of the revisionist memoir and then a very brief set of journal entries by the surprise character of interest – is, I suppose, somewhat like a set of nesting Russian dolls, but the focus o ..read more

  Fountain Pens, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Goulet Pens, Anhedonia, Hobbies Last night, I received a box in the mail.  It was filled with a cornucopia of stuff: A fountain pen from Germany, ink from France, paper from Japan, and envelopes from Belgium.  What a miracle!  I felt happy and excited as I unboxed a present - one that I had paid for - but one that was the result of the labor of many people across the world. I first became intrigued by fountain pens when I was in the fifth grade.  The disposable fountain pen, available at the local grocery story in the s ..read more

 Horse, Novel, Horse Racing, Race, Racism, Fantasy, Geraldine Brooks If you read this book, you will like it.  It is a compelling story, well told, by a competent author – she’s a former Pulitzer Prize winner (for March) after all.  But it is hard for me to recommend it because it contains a fatal flaw – well two of them.  I have complained of this flaw in other books – most recently Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – but I write about it here both because I think my understanding of the flaw has improved and because the consequences of that flaw in this book are more ..read more

 COVID, psychoanalysis, psychology, resurgence, post pandemic, endemic I thought perhaps I had written the last of these COVID Chronicles, but the virus itself had a thing or two to say about that. If I wrote a piece, I thought it would be a wrap up and I imagined writing about the palpable excitement in the classroom this fall, as the students seem to have returned with a new level of enthusiasm – perhaps even a notch or two above pre-pandemic levels.  A fellow faculty member, talking with his students about AI, was told by the students that they had heard that some of us were a ..read more