“... to teach them to ‘take care of themselves and others’. For that, she says, ‘to answer Freud and the Spice Girls, is what women really, really want’. And they should hurry up – since the ‘new motherhood’ won’t happen until we have the ‘new fatherhood’, and a man is ‘in sufficient charge of his own working time, and his own ...”

“... down. His attack on rhyming translatorese includes a telling examination of a stanza from ‘To Anna Kern’ as rendered by Kisch, Newmarch, T.B. Shaw and Bowra. His own version has no difficulty in achieving a more tactful, as well as more literal, fidelity: I remember the moment of wonder: You appeared before me, Like a momentary vision, A spirit of pure ...”

“... slide into despotism. Mill made resisting social norms a social duty of its own.Tobias Kelly and Anna Neima are Millians. Both authors admire their subjects. Kelly’s are the conscientious objectors who refused to fight during the Second World War; Neima’s are the creators of the utopian community of Dartington Hall. Both show how thoughtfully these ...”

“... be solved by parking him in an old people’s home, and marriage counselling would do nothing for Anna Karenina. Anything that can be rectified by social reform or a spot of psychotherapy lacks the sublimity tragedy demands. Surprisingly, however, it’s not necessary for tragedies to end badly; in fact, Euripides’ contemporaries seem to have thought he ...”

“... discovered. William attributed Helen’s conduct to mulish pride and folly. A generation later, Freud identified radically different reasons for such unhappiness. He transformed our understanding of negotiations within families, while continuing to hold quite conventional notions of gender identity. His daughter Mathilde was worried about her ability to ...”

“... for her daughters may have been her sole maternal pleasure.) Blackwood’s first husband, Lucian Freud, painted her; Walker Evans photographed her; she was the dedicatee of Lowell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dolphin. (Sample epithet for Blackwood: ‘baby killer whale’.) He was likely writing the poems while she was writing The Stepdaughter ...”

“... disturbing means by which we create psychic space for ourselves. Alice Kaplan cites the case of Anna O., the legendary patient, first of Breuer and then of Freud, whose inhibitions were of such a kind that she chose to speak to her doctors in English and not her native German, and who coined the phrase about ...”

“... with theoretical effervescence. It posits a kind of linguistic materialism, with openings towards Freud and Marx, towards Lacan and (more secretly still) Mao: towards literature and politics alike. Elisabeth Roudinesco’s summary is as useful as any other: Sollers put together a skilful amalgamation with the help of concepts elaborated during the ...”

“... book on adultery hardly as much as mentions jealousy. In a second volume, he proposes to discuss Anna Karenina, The Scarlet Letter, The Good Soldier and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, among other books; they will hardly afford him opportunities to say much more. So the novel, like bourgeois marriage, its central theme, has its emotional limits. Within them, it ...”

“... the orderly development of personality through time. In his ‘Autobiographical Study’ of 1925, Freud serenely reports his education, professional achievements and growing stature as a psychoanalyst, revealing his inner life or formative experiences only, Ellmann writes, ‘by way of omission and ellipsis’. Novelists and poets were sometimes more willing ...”

“... ought, in my view, not to have revealed himself. He was being abject: not in, or with, his body as Freud dreamed of his father, but emotionally. I am not talking about my father in dreams – he almost never appears there – but of him in his ‘real life’. I have a strange photograph of him in that life. It shows three young men dressed in high riding ...”

“... that it is unclear to which precise set of medical conditions the word refers. The condition that Freud and Breuer encountered in their late 19th-century consulting-rooms has vanished. As Showalter points out in a useful history of the idea, the accepted line is that by the not so swinging Sixties, the well of Victorian repression had dried up and with it the ...”

“... of Yourcenar’s life? Two other recent Yourcenar publications are relevant to her memoirs. One is Anna, Soror, a collection of three novellas, previously published as Two Stories and a Dream. The ‘dream’ is a strong, persuasive tale about incest in 17th-century Naples, the love affair of a brother and sister, children of the Spanish governor. Another ...”

“... should have, survived. Suicide is rarely the singular, definitive act it appears to be. The ego, Freud tells us, turns onto itself the hatred it feels towards the object. But the object is never spared. No one commits suicide, the psychoanalyst Karl Menninger wrote in 1933, unless they experience at once ‘the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be ...”

“... reader can contemplate the fact that Lowell’s arms had to be broken in hospital to release the Freud painting of Caroline Blackwood (Calypso) he had been clutching when he died in a taxi between JFK and West 67th Street, where Elizabeth Hardwick (Penelope) was waiting for him. The myth that poets are aristocrats of the literary world, that their deaths are ...”