Jezebel: freud

"How Do I Explain That My Coworker's A Raving Lunatic?"

Sadie — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

Oh dear. There's a very troubling letter in today's Financial Times by a distraught citizen with a dodgy coworker. Really, there was nothing to do but get the opinions of a bunch of dead people, without delay.

My colleagues and I are convinced that one of our co-workers is insane. The details are bizarre and too numerous to go through, but as an example, when collecting clothes for needy children we found that this worker, who admitted to never having been in a relationship, mentioned that he had a basement full of toddler clothing. When I told him about an encounter with a pushy beggar, he said: "You should have sliced his hand off with my knife." I have this fear that something bizarre will happen and then when the police ask: "Were there any signs?" we'd answer: "Sure, tons of them." Yet what were we going to do? Go to human resources and tell them he's crazy?

Dorothy Parker: Sticks and stones are mighty harsh/But beat your body in a marsh.

Soapy Smith: "Collecting clothes for needy children?" I know that game.

Lizzie Borden: Don't you travel with your own weapons?

Michel Foucault: Maybe you're insane.

Marie Antoinette: What are these "coworkers" of which you speak?

Jesus Christ: Y'know, you should really be more careful how you treat beggars. That's all I'll say. Verily.

Sigmund Freud: And who are you, Freud?

Jeffrey Dahmer: In his defense, there are much worse things you could have in your basement.

Robert Frost: Good fences make good neighbors.

Oscar Wilde: At least madness would be amusing; this is tedious.

Henry Darger: What? Some of us really like toddlers. And sometimes the state won't let us adopt, okay?

Baby Jane Hudson: Exactly! How else are you supposed to do musical numbers?

Jack the Ripper: Hand? Then they can identify you! That's why the lord made "disemboweling."

Franz Kafka: You say "something bizarre" like that's a bad thing.

Jane Austen: One may live a very full life without a "relationship," Sir.

Jack Kerouac: Fuck offices.

DearLucy [Financial Times]

"How Do I Explain To My Friend That Her Bad Mothering Drove Her Daughter To Suicide?"

Sadie — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:00:00 EDT

This psychopath asks Obit's resident sage Judy. We whip out our pink Ouija board and ask a bunch of dead people!

Dear Judy,

When her boyfriend broke up with her, a young girl 17 committed suicide. She is (was) the daughter of a longtime friend. And to put it candidly, my friend was a so-so mother. Always criticizing the girl, never praising her, telling her she was "fat" or that her grades weren't up to par. Like that.

So I really think my friend's attitude contributed to that poor girl's suicide. My friend talks about it a lot, obviously, keeps pinning the tragedy on the boy who broke off with her daughter. And keeps saying she was always "a good mother."

What should I say? If anything? Should I correct her? In my mind she was an awful mother, and maybe she should acknowledge that.

Lidia

Dorothy Parker: If I trusted you behind the wheel and I wasn't already sipping a martini, you'd have just driven me to drink.

Ayn Rand: How does this serve your rational self-interest? You are a fool.

Freud: Seriously?

Leopold and Loeb: Our superior intellect impels this kind of honesty. Carry on.

Saint Paul: I hate women.

Agamemnon: You know, "acknowledging it?" Doesn't really help that much.

Joan Crawford: Maybe she was fat.

Hume: Honesty is part of letting go. It is seeing the need to let go. (The desire for humility comes from admitting that one is prideful.)

Innocent III: The only sinner here is the miserable girl who's now in hell. Let's pray for her.

Edith Piaf: It was love! IT WAS LOVE, I SAY!

H.L. Mencken: Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. And you make me glad to be dead.

Judas: You're a good friend.

Aurelia Plath: Go to hell, go directly to hell.

[Jack Kerouac was not apparently available for comment at this time.]

A Second Opinion, The Oversharing Widower And A Guilty Mother [Obit]

Earlier: What To Do When You're In Love With Your Sister's Widower?

"How Do I Keep My Sullen Daughter From Alienating My Wealthy Boyfriend?"

"How Do I Keep My Sullen Daughter From Alienating My Wealthy Boyfriend?"

Sadie — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:00:00 EDT

The writer may have asked The Spectator's "Mary." We asked a bunch of dead people!

Writes the seeker,

Q. I am a widow with a 15-year-old daughter. I have been going out with someone for six months but he lives and works abroad and I usually go and see him. On the few occasions when he has come to stay with me and my daughter in England, she has been absolutely poisonous towards him. (She is just jealous. He is a very nice man.) Now he has invited us both to stay with him for a fortnight in the summer in his holiday house in Italy and I am at my wits' end to know how I can get my daughter to behave on this holiday and prevent her from putting him off me because the ‘baggage' is too difficult to handle. What can I do?

Freud: I'm leaving this one alone.

Marie Antoinette: I don't understand. Why don't you just stay at separate chateaux?

Vladimir Nabokov: Urbane, European boyfriend? Bratty 15-year-old daughter? Selfish, widowed mother? This should end well!

Joan Crawford: Isn't there a bathroom somewhere she should be cleaning?

Nathan Bedford Forrest: I hate Italians.

Little Edie Beale: She's jealous? YOU'RE JEALOUS!

Oscar Wilde: I find you unspeakably tedious.

Dorothy Parker:
You're boyfriend's married,
You're daughter's a pill.
I wish I didn't, but
I know that drill.

Lizzie Borden: Watch your back.

Dare Wright: Why don't you just live together, do elaborate photoshoots and play with dolls? What is this "going out" of which you speak?

Joseph Smith: And why is this young woman yet unmarried?

Jack Kerouac: Fuck You

Your problems solved [SpectatorUK]

Earlier: What To Do When You're In Love With Your Sister's Widower?

Study Shows Men Attracted To Women Who Look Like Their Mothers

Jessica — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:30:00 EDT

The media has long noted Lance Armstrong's preference for wiry, long-faced blondes, and a new study shows he might have a hard-wired reason for his sexual predilection: these women look like his mother. (Pictured, from left: Lance's mom, Linda, his ex-wife Kristin, and ex-girlfriend Sheryl Crow). According to a new study, "men were more likely to pair up with women whose bone structure was similar to their own mothers, with a similar effect holding for womens' choice of men," the Guardian reports. Psychologists call this "sexual imprinting" and the study leader, Tamas Bereczkei at the University of Pecs in Hungary, says that this imprinting isn't just due to familiarity alone. "If that were the case, women would be drawn to men whose faces were similar to their mothers as well as their fathers," the Guardian points out.

Professor Bereczkei and his team measured the facial proportions of 52 families during the course of the study, and found " significant correlations between the young men and their fathers-in-law, especially on facial proportions belonging to the central area of face - nose and eyes," the BBC notes, while "Women also showed resemblance to their mothers-in-law in the facial characteristics of their lower face - lips and jaw." Somehow, hearing from a guy that you have a mouth just like his mother's doesn't exactly endear. Science is creepy!

Psychology: Parental Link Found In Attraction [Guardian]
Women Pick Men Who Look Like Dad [BBC]

How Ladymag Editors Anna Wintour & Bonnie Fuller Talk Directly To Your Id

Moe — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:00:00 EDT

In the olden days, magazine editors were famed for...well, I guess not a lot of them were famed so much as respected: for cultivating writers, ushering in new journalistic forms and most critically, broadening the horizons and sating the curiosities of any reader longing for a connection with the world outside themselves. But onto the present! Bonnie Fuller and Anna Wintour, the most influential, economically important magazine editors of our time, were profiled in the weekend papers in two stories from which we gleaned a new job description for those of you pining for success in this most rewarding field. Just as Wintour "taps into that core desire to be gorgeous," you see, Fuller focuses on "that prurient desire to know just a little bit more." Further explains Janice Min, Bonnie's successor at US, the job is "to almost distill the id of the reader." The Id of the reader! I remember hearing the same rationale behind a certain author's recent romance with animal pictures. Maybe that's just it! You have to learn how to locate and then stimulate that magical spot deep within the hippocampus where women's most infantile desire for fabulosity collides with their worship of large numbers.

Here, allow me to excerpt. Here's the NY Times' David Carr on Fuller:

When the current issue of Glamour promises "101 Racy Little Sex Ideas," you are seeing Ms. Fuller's twining of sex and numerology. Ditto for this week's People, which promises "91 Sexy and Single Guys." The added single digit seems gratuitous, but admit it: you wonder what the 101st weapon in the erotic arsenal looks like and which guy came after the 90 other hotties. That prurient need to know just a little more is pure Bonnie Fuller.
The critical moment Ms. Fuller's version of published cold fusion arrived in 2002 when she took over Us Weekly, a distant cousin of People magazine that Jann Wenner owned. She not only turned Us into its own darn thing, but found a way of presenting celebrity news as a not-so-guilty pleasure... "I'm not embarrassed to say that I was reading proofs in the delivery room," Ms. Fuller wrote of the birth of her second child.

And ex-employee Robin Givhan of the Washington Post on Wintour, whom she reminds us is famous for being thin and having bobbed hair and forcing other people to get thin and bob their hair and also, dressing in Prada:

The magazine is at its most provocative, though, when it turns its attention to personalities not typically associated with high fashion Oprah Winfrey, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Cindy McCain, Condoleezza Rice. The resulting photographs are fascinating not because of any reality they reveal but because of the fantasy they unleash.
Vogue sets its sights on an of-the-moment character and transforms her into an impossibly perfect version of herself. In the accompanying story, her accomplishments are detailed: Her charitable acts. Her legislative successes. Her business acumen. But the primary photo rarely illustrates all that brainy, do-gooder activity. The photo is pure glamour.
It taps into that core desire to be gorgeous and declares it righteous and worthy and, most important, smart. Vogue validates the modern careerist's fantasy, that she can run the world and look fabulous doing it.

I happened to be on the bus while I tugging at my nonexistent beard (since I can't caress my nonexistent schlong in public!) reading these stories. What was my problem with all this? I glanced at the little girl next to me. Clad in a pink ruffled shirt and a pink tiered skirt with soft metallic streaks on the lowest ruffle, bejeweled silver sandals and a few subtle pink streaks in her hair, she looked about five, and reminded me of myself at the same age. She was reading a book called The Jewel Fairies: Collection 1, Books 1-4. Over her shoulder I read the words:

The little fairy wore a prett dress with a fluttery skirt. The dress was white but every time the fairy moved it shimmered...

I didn't get any further, because at that moment she flipped to the front cover and stopped reading. I didn't blame her. That Id, it does get boring! Maybe because neuroscience has sort of pointed out how unlike the G-spot! it doesn't really exist. Or maybe it's just the cold fusion, thawing out, I don't know. Either way, around that point my basest instincts intervened and summoned my attention to a story in the Journal about the disenchantment of Iranian youth with religion. They're turning to self-help, it turns out! Before long they will be seeking solace in celebrity gossip and perhaps fabulosity too when the oil revenues kick in. But eventually they, too, will get bored, right? You're sort of sick of animal pictures, no?

No?

Eh, I give up.
The Editor Who Keeps Vogue In Fashion [Washington Post]
101 Secrets (And 9 Lives) Of A Magazine Star [NY Times]

Who's Afraid Of The Badly-Dressed Princess?

Jennifer — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 18:00:48 EDT

Rabblerouser/Celebrity Big Brother contestant Germaine Greer is lashing out at the late Princess Diana for no apparent reason (well, except for all that gratuitous dog and pony show-ing about the 10-year anniversary of her death) calling the royal icon "slow", "devious" and "disturbingly neurotic." Disturbingly neurotic? Seriously? Is the infamous Ms. Greer (she of such pseudo-feminist tomes such as The Female Eunuch) really going to use one of those "bad" words that feminists (not to mention the most recent edition of the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual) hate to hear directed other women? Why yes she is, and in fact, she's got another barb to throw Diana's way: She was a bad dresser!

As for Diana's fashion icon status, Greer dismisses her 'nondescript' sartorial choices as comparable to that of female TV newsreaders. 'Diana was never a fashion icon; she dressed to the same demotic standard of elegance as TV anchorwomen do, plus the inevitable hat.'

At least Germaine didn't compare her to a "weathergirl." Then the we'd really be pissed. Diana Was 'Devious, Slow And Disturbingly Neurotic' Mocks Germaine Greer [Daily Mail]