CIRCULARITY AND THE WEB

I have for a long time been trying to find the place, if it exists, where Freud says something like this: "If there is any subject that it is not permitted to discuss in an analysis, sooner or later the entire analysis comes to be about that one subject." It is a wonderful observation, applicable to Catholics and birth control or Jews and Israel, and I really would like it to turn out that my memory is accurate. After a fruitless hour paging through a collection of Freud's writings called FREUD: Therapy and Technique, edited by Phillip Rieff [Susan Sontag's one-time husband, for those who don't know -- I once had dinner with them, but that is another story altogether], I decided to see what Google could do. I tried a number of key words and phrases, increasingly more specific, until I finally got a hit on the precise statement I was searching for. With bated breath and fluttering heart, I clicked on the link, and found -- myself! I had used the phrase in a comment I posted on Juan Cole's wonderful website, Informed Opinion, and there it was. I had come full circle. Talk about narcissistic love!