The picture of a boat approaching a wooded island held a strange sway over the early twentieth century imagination. Strindberg closes The Ghost Sonata with the image; Rachmaninoff brought forth a symphonic poem from it; Freud, Lenin, and Clemenceau all owned prints, while Hitler hung one of the original five paintings on his wall. The work's creator, a Swiss Symbolist painter named Arnold Böcklin, never cared to give it a name. It was an art dealer who first called it Die Toteninsel — "The Isle of the Dead."
posted by Iridic on Oct 31, 2008 - 27 comments

British artist Lucian Freud's painting of a rather... portly slumbering nude just set an art world record. Someone laid down a nice, fat 33.6 million dollars for it: the most money ever paid for any work by a living artist. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite on May 14, 2008 - 45 comments

Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department.
posted by AceRock on Nov 25, 2007 - 98 comments

As he read, Mr Sterling became convinced he had to publish the book. Jed Rubenfeld's "The Interpretation of Murder" had an intriguing cast of characters, an engaging plot and a dash of kinky sex. It was a historical thriller, one of publishing's hottest recent categories. It had the potential, he thought, to be the next "Da Vinci Code."

The Wall Street Journal details the fascinating mechanics of modern-day book marketing as Henry Holt & Co labors to birth this year's must-buy publishing phenomenon.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese on Oct 16, 2006 - 14 comments

Burying Freud. A collection of essays and responses by and about Freud's harshest critics, including "Confessions of a Freud-Basher" by anti-Freud point man Frederick Crews, interviewed at length here.
posted by mediareport on May 15, 2006 - 32 comments

Reflections on Psychoanalysis: 150 Years.
posted by trinarian on May 8, 2006 - 23 comments

The Century Of The Self. It's a documentary, and the four parts are available at archive.org [2][3][4] -- with a higher quality bittorrent option [via mindhacks]. The program is about the use of psychoanalytical techniques to manipulate and control the "bewildered herd", "engineering consent" in a world fraught with "irrational impulses" [more inside].
posted by gsb on Feb 26, 2006 - 16 comments

Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was a German thinker who came to America in 1933 after losing his job for opposing the national socialism movement. Tillich was at once a protestant theologian and an existentialist philosopher and humanist who attempted to intellectualize religion and bring it to contemporary audiences in the age of science. His brilliant writings and speeches would typically weave together biblical passages with discussions of philosophy and science. In this most famous work, The Courage to Be, Tillich laid out his case of how man can resolve the existential crisis of facing non-being. In echoes of Soren Kierkegaard and Freud, Tillich attempted to explain how man could resolve the fear of nothingness with the Courage to Be in the face of Non-being. Throughout his life, Tillich's ultimate concern was to try to help man understand the real value of faith and meaning by divorcing the concepts from the myths and the religious and social dogmas which cramp the mind of modern man.
posted by dios on Feb 2, 2006 - 55 comments

Wondermark An Illustrated Weekly Jocularity. While you're there, be sure to check out Malki's Comic Script Doctor columns (in particular his Freudian interpretation of Marmaduke).
posted by brundlefly on Jan 29, 2006 - 15 comments

Ring of Letters
The Einstein-Freud Correspondence (Einstein furthers the cause of peace)
The Freud-Jung Correspondence (Freud is Jung's father-figure)
The Jung-Pauli Correspondence (A QM founder buys into Jung's synchronicity)
The Pauli-Heisenberg Correspondence (The Uncertainty Principle was a letter to Pauli)
The Heisenberg-Bohr Correspondence (Was Heisenberg a Nazi?)
The Bohr-Einstein Correspondence (What is the fundamental nature of reality?)
posted by vacapinta on Jan 6, 2006 - 33 comments

Please do not alarm the llama, people. via mimi smartipants
posted by onlyconnect on Nov 29, 2005 - 40 comments

She interviewed Mussolini. She wrote plays for Eugene O'Neill's Provincetown Players. She got letters from Trotsky. Freud and Helen Keller were in her address book. She married journalist John Reed, and Diane Keaton played her in Reds. And she was nearly forgotten. Now, Louise Bryant is remembered. More here and much more here.
posted by digaman on Nov 9, 2005 - 4 comments

Pliny's Natural History, the first encyclopedia. Featuring chapters like "Other wonderful things related to dolphins" and one mentioning the lynx and the sphinx in a single passage. Obviously he got a lot very wrong, but it launched a tradition of authoritative encyclopedias. More recently, you hopefully know that the forty-four million word eleventh (1911) edition of Encyclopedia Britannica is online, later volumes are not, but you can still find elsewhere Trotsky's article on Lenin, Freud's on psychoanalysis, Houdini on conjuring, or Lawrence of Arabia on guerillas. Britannica also offers a series of articles from its archives showing how views on Mars or the debate in 1768 over whether California was an island. Other fascinating encyclopedias online include the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia and the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopedia Mythica.
posted by blahblahblah on Jul 5, 2005 - 16 comments

Iakov Levi analyzes history and literature using a very Freudian approach.
Some highlights:
Pinocchio - The Puberty Rite of a Puppet
Medusa, the Female Genital and the Nazis
Killing God: From the Assassination of Moses to the Murder of Rabin
Without Borders: The Borderline Case of United Europe
::warning! geocities links!::
posted by anastasiav on Sep 18, 2003 - 3 comments

Psychotherapy and an Arrow Key Workout Armwrestle with Sigmund Freud, the greatest "it's all related to sex and your childhood" minds ever to walk the earth. Friday Flash.
posted by gramcracker on Feb 7, 2003 - 5 comments

The Queen's latest portrait was bound to cause controversy, what with the artist being Lucien Freud. Today a photograph of it was plastered over the front pages of nearly every major newspaper. The tabloid press are, as ever, 'up in arms' about it. I rather like it, but the palace isn't commenting as yet.
posted by davehat on Dec 21, 2001 - 40 comments