BACK TO THE HOSPITAL

Well, Murray came home, much perked up and almost his old self, but within hours he was in crisis again, and went back to the hospital. Now we expect him tomorrow, and this time he must make a satisfactory adjustment, or I do not know what we are going to do. We have cancelled our December trip to Paris because of his condition, and I confess that while he is sick, I cannot generate the appropriate concern about larger matters to blog about. He is just fourteen pounds of cat, but he has managed to take hold of my heart.

I refuse to read Sarah Palin's "book." Andrew Sullivan is doing a fine job on his blog of snarking at it, and I shall leave that to him. My time has been spent these past days, when I am not worrying about Murray, reading slowly and carefully through an eight hundred page collection of Freud's most important writings, edited by Peter Gay. It is an extraordinary experience, in preparation for a series of lectures on The Thought of Sigmund Freud as part of the Duke University Learning in Retirement program.

A propos, does anyone know where [and whether] Freud says something like this: "If there is one subject that it is not permitted to discuss in an analysis, sooner or later the entire analysis comes to be about that subject"? It is a great line, and I have been quoting it for forty years, but for all I know he never said it.