15 జనవరి, 2026

"So there I was, moving from apathy to disbelief, holding the same plant my great-grandfather Sigmund [Freud] had nurtured nearly 100 years ago."

"A cutting grows up to be a perfect clone of the original – no matter how many times you pass on cuttings of the cuttings of the cuttings, they’re all genetically identical to the original shrub. Sigmund died before I ever met him, but I now owned a tiny part of his story. A biological heirloom that had lived alongside him and brought oxygen into his pioneering study – growing alongside his evolving ideas, laying down roots as he laid down theories...."

From "The strange tale of Sigmund Freud’s begonia/How the gift of a plant helped Emma Freud finally get to know her great-grandfather" (The Observer).
వీరిచే పోస్ట్ చేయబడింది Ann Althouse వద్ద 4:37 PM
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16 కామెంట్‌లు:

rehajm చెప్పారు...

…growing alongside his evolving ideas, laying down roots as he laid down theories…

Sometimes a begonia is just a begonia….

15-01-26 4:40 PM
Fred Drinkwater చెప్పారు...

How weird. Just a few days ago someone in my meditation group talked about recently being allowed to take a cutting of Freud's begonia
Small world

15-01-26 5:04 PM
Ann Althouse చెప్పారు...

"How weird. Just a few days ago..."

The linked article was published 2 weeks ago.

15-01-26 5:14 PM
Money Manger చెప్పారు...

I'm lucky if my begonias live over the winter.

15-01-26 5:18 PM
Maynard చెప్పారు...

The begonia has survived longer than Freud’s theories, except in the minds of his true believers.

15-01-26 5:40 PM
William చెప్పారు...

Freud was like that climate alarmist who live by the ocean and travel around by private plane to preach the gospel of global warming. He believed in his ideas, but in some strange way he felt that they didn't apply to him. He psychoanalyzed his own daughter. He explained to her how her various dreams were fantasies of having sex with him. She believed he was a great man and accepted his analysis of her dreams. As a result of this, her libido was stranger. She never married. She lived with a woman but claimed that she did not have sexual relations with her......It's just as well she didn't get to know her great-grandfather. Freud has some plausible ideas, but there are some real clunkers. Burbank did more for begonias than Freud did for the psyche.

15-01-26 5:43 PM
Smilin' Jack చెప్పారు...

Freud was a good writer (The Interpretation of Dreams is an engaging read), but his ideas turned out to be nonsense.

There are (supposedly) clones of Newton’s apple tree all over the world. He was definitely not a good writer, and his books are very rarely actually read, but his ideas have held up rather better.

15-01-26 6:04 PM
Jaq చెప్పారు...

The Freud family laid foundations for the science of propaganda. Freud called it "group psychology" but his nephew ran with it, and as we all know, the Germans raised it to a perfected science.

The Science of Political Propaganda - Glenn Diesen

I am not sure that I would revere the cutting as if it were a piece of the "true cross."

15-01-26 7:01 PM
Jaq చెప్పారు...

"The begonia has survived longer than Freud’s theorie"

Oh, his theories are alive and well, just not the ones that people think of. Why did he write about primitive tribes in books like "Totem and Taboo," because this is the level of human emotional need baked into our DNA that propagandists use against us every day.

15-01-26 7:03 PM
Hassayamper చెప్పారు...

Freud's ideas are nonsense and horse shit. Confabulations and fantasies and vaporous flatulence he pulled out of his ass. His pronouncements on the influence that parenting styles had on children, particularly their mothers, did incalculable damage to millions of families. His advocacy of "talking cures" instead of biochemical interventions doomed millions of schizophrenics and manic-depressives to lifetimes of misery. Maybe he's not quite the equivalent of Dr. Mengele, but the phrenologists, eugenicists, and frontal-lobotomy butchers of the past stand in his shade when it comes to life-destroying quackery handed down from on high by so-called intellectuals.

15-01-26 7:08 PM
Narr చెప్పారు...

Oh what the hell; I'll pile on too: Dr. Fraud, the Viennese Quack.

But to be fair, he didn't hold a gun to anyone's head. People believe what they choose to believe. Same with Marx et. al.

15-01-26 8:07 PM
john mosby చెప్పారు...

She wore Sigmund's begonias, tucked into her curls;
I knew right away she was not like other girls, other girls.

CC, JSM

15-01-26 8:50 PM
Dagwood చెప్పారు...

Do the name Ruby Begonia ring a bell?

15-01-26 10:37 PM
Money Manger చెప్పారు...

Of course Bob Weir played rhythm guitar and vocals on Scarlet Begonias. Anne, when you posted, you were probably thinking about that sub-consciously.

16-01-26 4:01 AM
G. Poulin చెప్పారు...

Bananas are clones too. I don't know if they long to have sex with their parent banana plant or not. But I've never come across a neurotic banana, so I suspect not.

16-01-26 7:02 AM
Jaq చెప్పారు...

You can lead a horse to water....

This is what ChatGPT had to say:

Totem and Taboo is better understood as Freud thinking aloud about a single, foundational problem:
How does authority become internal?
The anthropology is scaffolding. The real subject is:
—Why prohibitions persist without enforcement
—Why symbols bind groups more strongly than reason
—Why shared myths outlive their factual basis
—Why loyalty precedes justification
Those questions turned out to be extraordinarily fertile, even though Freud’s answers were mostly wrong.

And this:

Enter Freud’s nephew:
Edward Bernays, —Bernays did something Freud never attempted:
—He discarded the speculative cosmology
—He kept the psychological mechanism
—He made it operational
Bernays explicitly believed:
—Masses are not persuaded by argument
—Individuals behave differently in groups
—Desire, identification, and symbolism drive action
—Consent can be engineered rather than earned
At that point, Totem and Taboo stops being a failed theory and becomes upstream intellectual infrastructure.

You see this stuff play out even today here in the comment threads. So much of what is called "persuasion" boils down to telling people to believe something because if they fail to believe it, they will lose their membership in their group and be shifted to a membership in a disfavored group, and the need to avoid this emotional disaster overrides a person's need to come to rational conclusions, except maybe for autistic people, who have some level of resistance to propaganda techniques.

But sure, Freud is dead, whatever, but remember that he wrote in German, and the Germans understood him quite well, and even his "dead ends" turned out to be earth shattering.

16-01-26 9:18 AM

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