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This article presents information on philosopher Sigmund Freud's work. The author saw a spool of film clips titled "Oedipus Complex," part of "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture," at the Library of Congress exhibit in Washington DC, and due at the Jewish Museum in New York City in April. Olivier's eyes are angry, the kiss a sarcastic smack of death for this just-widowed mother who has so quickly bedded his murderous uncle. The Oedipal interpretation now seems altogether quaint, as does so much of this century's glib Freudian gloss. In 1995, a group of independent scholars who feared that the library would embrace such concepts in an uncritical homage to their originator asked in a petition that the exhibit adequately reflect the full spectrum of informed opinion about the status of Freud's contribution to intellectual history.

Reviews the book 'The 400 Eels of Sigmund Freud,' by A.G. Mojtabai.

Focuses on Jewish creative writing in the United States. Ways in which Jewish consciousness was once the instrument of the Word; Humanization and secularization of the Word in the writings of Sigmund Freud; Modern Jewish writing's taking of the stance of a voice emancipated from the Word as being the touchstone of sanity; Strengths and weaknesses of the literary style of Saul Bellow; Power of movement of the evolving Jewish voice.

Reviews the book "The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung," edited by William McGuire and translated by Ralph Manheim and R.F.C. Hull.

Reviews the book "Sigmund Freud," by Richard Wollheim.

The article focuses on the psychoanalysis of art. Retrospective analysis was an extension of the 19th century idea of art as a means of contact with great minds. Freud's view of artists was essentially old fashioned and ennobling. Subsequent psychoanalyst possessed neither Freud's tact nor his sense of the continuum of culture, with the result that crude postmortems on absent heads flourished. Later psychoanalysts have shown themselves to be more sophisticated in terms of art and ignore sensitive to the human pain of illness.

Reviews the book "The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig," edited by Ernst L. Freud and translated by Elaine and William Robson-Scott.

Reviews several books. "The New American Arts," edited by Richard Kostelanetz; "Sigmund Freud," by Giovanni Costigan; "A Handful of Clients," by Elmer Gertz.

Reviews the book "Letters of Sigmund Freud," edited by Ernst L. Freud.

The article discusses books and authors. The popular versions of some ideas derived from theorists Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud are good examples of the fatal simplification that can overtake useful doctrines in this era of mass-culture. According to the vulgar Marxism of the salon and magazine, a given form of social organization is the inevitable outgrowth of the reigning system of economic production. And since, in this view, social organization can be wholly accounted for by reference to something else, one is led to feel that something else exhausts all the possible senses of the notion of social organization.