Historicist Reduction of Freud

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

As Jones presents it, the logic of repression of sexual desires is as follows: 1) The desires are most likely to be repressed are those that are socially disapproved, disapproved by the “herd.” 2) We unconsciously push back those disapproved desire. The imagery is hydraulic: Repressing disapproved desires creates pressure, and the desire is squeezed out in neurotic behaviors. 3) Among the natural instincts to disapprove, “the herd unquestionably selects . . . the sexual one on which to lay... Read more

What Psychology Taught Us

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:48 pm By Peter Leithart

Ernest Jones notes an essential contribution of modern psychology: “We are beginning to see man not as the smooth, self-acting agent he pretends to be, but as he really is, a creature only dimly conscious of the various influences that mould his thought and action, and blindly resisting with all the means at his command the forces that are making for a higher and fuller consciousness.” Read more

Plus choses changent

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

Long before Greenblatt and the New Historicists, Shakespeare had been interpreted as a commentator on the religious or political circumstances of Elizabethan England. Among the interpretations of Hamlet summarized by Ernest Jones in his essay on Oedipus and Hamlet (first published in 1910!) are the notions that the play is “an elaborate defense of Protantism,” “an expression of the revolt emanating in Wittenberg against Roman Catholicism and feutalism,” or “a defense of Catholicism.” Others “made out a case for the... Read more

Jesus’ Thoughts

Last updated on: January 24, 2006 at 8:48 am By Peter Leithart

Donald Macleod offers some intriguing insights in his IVP book on the Person of Christ: In many respects, Jesus’ human knowledge was like our own, as He learned about His Father through revelation: “his own capacity for such knowledge would differ significantly from that of ordinary men. But it would not differ in kind or in principle. He knew the will of the Father because the Father revealed it to him.” Jesus’ knowledge differed from ours because of His sinlessness... Read more

Jesus’ Thoughts

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Hamlet: Act 1

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

Still more. ACT 1, SCENE 1 Several things about the first scene are worth examining. First, the play begins on a cold and bitter night on the ramparts of Elsinore. The darkness provides a fitting setting for the revelation that the world is out of joint, that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Beneath the brightly lit exterior that Claudius invents is the darkness of murder and incest. (more…) Read more

Hamlet: Texts

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

More notes toward a lecture. Shakespeare’s Hamlet exists in three significantly different forms. The earliest published text, the First Quarto or the “Bad Quarto,” appeared in 1603. Though recognizably Shakespeare’s play, it is different in many significant ways, and scholars have speculated that it is the product of one of the actors’ notes or memory. The opening lines of the First Quarto are these: (more…) Read more

Hamlet: Sources

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

Some notes toward a lecture on Hamlet. When Shakespeare put the story of Hamlet on stage in the early seventeenth century, the story was already an old one. Saxo Grammaticus, a 12th-century monk, told the story of Amleth, Prince of Jutland in his Historiae Danicae. According to Saxo’s version of the story, Amleth’s uncle Feng killed his father, Horwendil, and married his mother, Gerutha, quite publicly, and Amleth put on his “antic disposition” in an effort to appear harmless and... Read more

Girardian Dickens

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities rings the changes on the Girardian dynamic of mimetic violence. Blood evokes and demands more blood, until an oppressive and disordered ancien regime collapses into chaos. And the only path out of the game of violence and counter-violence is through Sidney Carton’s voluntary – and substitutionary – shedding of blood. Read more

“Natural” architecture

Last updated on: January 23, 2006 at 8:48 am By Peter Leithart

In an overview of the architectural work of Santiago Calatrava, Sara Williams Goldhagen (TNR January 23) cautions against the chimera of architecture grounded in “nature”: “Maybe the first architects needed to pay obeisance to nature’s designs, but that primal moment is long gone. Architecture – and ‘nature’ too – is a human construct. Whether or not designers need to acknowledge their buildings’ physical and material properties (and for reasons too complex to lay out here, I believe they do), they... Read more