Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”?The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease–the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right, ” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts, ” who can never be proved wrong. It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach, ” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts. The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well, ” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man. David Mamet
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
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Martha Gellhorn
Self-talk reflects your innermost feelings.
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Asa Don Brown
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.
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C.g. Jung
How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole
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C.g. Jung
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
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C.g. Jung
More Quotes By David Mamet
We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.
It's only words... unless they're true.
Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?
Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired...
In the meantime: (1) be direct; (2) remember that, being smarter than men, women respond to courtesy and kindness; (3) if you want to know what kind of a wife someone will make, observe her around her father and mother; (4) as to who gets...
