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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Saturday, December 5, 2009

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!

3 comments:

ajrosa said...

I did the same search with the same result, which led me to wonder that maybe, with the passing of time and the elasticity of memory, Freud's phrase had become uniquely Wolffarian.

ajrosa said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Robert Paul Wolff said...

Andrew, phone home. Jen wants you to call her.