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On love, on grief, on every human thing, Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.
I did dispute the pessimistic poet's view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth. On the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time.
No social institution is more peculiar to the twentieth century than psychoanalysis, the “talking cure” discovered and shaped by Sigmund Freud a little over a hundred years ago. Resisted and suspect as a bold upstart in the early years, then climbing to immense cultural prominence in the first half of the century, by century's turn psychoanalysis was beleaguered: a superannuated dowager under attack, lagging behind new medical technologies, new social and economic realities. Moreover, while from the outside the social place of psychoanalysis (and its offshoots) remains ambiguous, from the inside the basic philosophy of the talking cure remains vague.
And yet this unusual professional arrangement retains its prominence, even centrality, despite revisionisms, evolutions, adaptations, withering critiques, and formidable rivals. Why? Two people meet alone in a room regularly, over time, and they talk, with their relationship itself an object of scrutiny. No