Personal Intimacy Research Articles

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

Aloha America: Hula circuits through the U.S. empire by Adria Imada (review)

Reviewed by: Aloha America: Hula circuits through the U.S. empire by Adria Imada James Revell Carr Aloha America: Hula circuits through the U.S. empire By Adria Imada. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. When Americans hear the word “hula,” we usually think of tourist shows featuring comely young women in cellophane skirts and bras made of coconut shells. In academia, our instinct is usually to reject these images as simulacra, as the fraudulent products of commercialized culture and tourism industries. In her book, Aloha America: Hula circuits through the U.S. empire, Adria Imada does not completely dispel this image of the exotic yet Americanized “hula girl” as inauthentic; instead, she illustrates how the living tradition of hula has taken on many guises as Native Hawaiians, or Kanaka Maoli, have negotiated their personal and cultural identities in the context of American hegemony. Plastic flowers and cellophane skirts were just two ways that cosmopolitan Hawaiians made conscious choices that allowed them to confront and subvert American “soft primitive” fantasies of Hawai‘i. Imada finds illuminating case studies of particular dancers and musicians whose stories evoke a unique frisson between the personal and the political. These stories intertwine with the history of the colonization, commodification, and militarization of Hawai‘i itself during the long twentieth century. She has brought together little-known oral histories and archival materials, with individual insights and anecdotes that give the reader a sense of both the broad scope and personal intimacy of the subject. One of the overarching themes of the book is intimacy, both real and “imagined.” The author argues that hula dancing, initially at international expositions, and later in American nightclubs, military bases and USO shows, created the illusion of intimacy between Hawai‘i and the United States so that, “imagined as feminine, passive, and full of sensual good will, Hawai‘i came to be understood and treated as manageable” (68). Mainlanders interpreted this openness and accessibility as a natural facet of the complex Hawaiian concept of aloha, but Imada shows that the appropriation of aloha by haole (non-Hawaiian) businessmen, tourists and, most violently, the military, masked the very real expansion of U.S. imperial interests into Hawaiian land and culture. Yet, while Hawaiian autonomy was being overthrown by American incursion, Kanaka Maoli were themselves expanding the reach of their culture onto the mainland, through music and dance. In the process, these members of the “hula diaspora” created intimate cross-societal bonds and cultivated relationships that supported their own cultural and economic interests. The first three chapters examine hula as a symbol of Kanaka Maoli resistance during the overthrow of the indigenous Hawaiian government and subsequent annexation by the U.S. during the 1890s and 1900s. These chapters also trace the lives of some of the early “culture brokers,” like bandleader and politician Johnny Wilson and his wife, the pioneering hula dancer Kini Kapahukulaokamāmalu (aka Kini Kapahu, or Jennie Wilson), who mediated the relationship between Hawai‘i and the U.S., and it is stories like theirs that give the book its great richness of ethnographic and biographic detail. The fourth and fifth chapters move to the 1930s and 40s, during which the increased military importance of Hawai‘i led to calls for statehood, while suspicions about the loyalties of Hawai‘i’s multiracial population led many politicians to keep Hawai‘i out of the union. Through it all, Hawaiian musicians and dancers acted as mediators, embodying the fantasy of accessibility that “began a process of marking Hawai‘i as an eroticized and feminized space, a space disposed to political, military, and tourist penetration” (6), yet at the same time these performers engaged in strategic “practices and desires that are not easily categorized as anticolonial but nevertheless contain latent critiques of imperial influence” (64). Imada skillfully uses interviews, some archival, some her own, with former professional hula dancers that show the very real relationships that networks of Hawaiian musicians and dancers created amongst themselves while working and travelling in the often racially hostile environs of the United States. She takes much of her anecdotal “behind the curtain” materials from “‘native informants’ whose knowledge underwrote twentieth century ethnography and ethnomusicology of Hawai‘i...

Respecting patient intimacy

Transparency as a general rule for all our professional acts casts doubts about the statement of the Hippocratic Oath that says "Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, I will keep secret, as considering all such things to be private". Medical secrecy protects the intimacy of patients, who reveal to their physicians their most hidden secrets aiming to recover their health. Therefore, physicians should receive those secrets with reverence and care, as servers and not as their owners. The values associated with the respect for personal intimacy are the anthropological basis of medical confidentiality. A medical act is performed by definition between two equally honorable individuals. Therefore, the professional honors the trust of his patient, maintaining strict confidence of what is revealed. Therefore, medical secrecy must be strengthened rather than weakened, pursuing common wealth and dignity.

Self-estimation by nurses care on patients staying in hospices

Introduction: Medical care especially in the last part of life is very important regarding its quality. Holistic care of ill people should in equal part take into account psychological, physiologic, social and spiritual needs of the patients. Aim of the study: Estimation to what extent the needs of the hospitalized in the hospices patients are satisfied. Establishing which elements are the most important in holistic nature of taken care.Material and method: The study included 68 hospice nurses taking care of patients. The research tool was a questionnaire consisting of proprietary specifications and 23 closed questions for self-assessment of care. The research was voluntary and anonymous, carried them among employees working in hospices fixed Trzebnica, Wroclaw, Chojnów, Kowary, Lubin and Wałbrzych in the period from June to August 2012.Results: Most of the interviewees (62%, 42) are self-satisfied and regard their service has good quality. They think their attitude to the patient is proper and contact is fully acceptable (59%, 40). They achieve satisfaction at work (43%, 29), show empathy (69%, 47), patience and respect (84%, 57), observe personal dignity and intimacy (51%, 35), and his psycho-social and spiritual needs are equally important as physiological (88%, 60). However from time to time patient is treated instrumentally (53%, 36). The main reason for that is haste (85%, 58). Conclusions: Most interviewees are satisfied with own attitude toward hospitalized patients and is taking their opinion regarding care fundamentals into account. Interviewees are respecting patients’ dignity, they notice psycho-social and spiritual needs. The most important factors diminishing quality of performed care are haste, work overload and fatigue. The results show, however, that there is a difference between its own assessment of care and the actual.

Nouvelle poétique de l’intimité chez Pierre Reverdy

In the nineteenth century, intimacy, for the poet, usually signifies staging the suffering of his own self in his verse, with a variable degree of drama, and offering it to the reader. The exhibition of personal intimacy is a way of creating another form of intimacy, this time of a literary nature, between poet and reader. Pierre Reverdy shattered this system when —while proposing to touch the reader emotionally— he wrote poems without a subject, whose enunciation was carried out by a poetic voice, and when he moved the source of lyricism from the self to the shock created by word associations in the poetic image. A new form of intimacy is thus created, in which the reader has to take responsibility for the lyrical voice, and is then required to look into himself to till out what lies between the lines of the poem. By doing so, the poet opens a door for a poetry featuring the intimacy of the reader, a poetry whose ultimate goal shifts from the expression of the self to the expression of the unsayable, our state of being in the world.

Accommodating Intimacy, Compromising Sex

Review Article| June 01 2013 Accommodating Intimacy, Compromising Sex Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy, by Wolfe, Jesse, Cambridge University Press, 2011. 272 pages. Matthew Eatough Matthew Eatough Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2013) 59 (2): 360–368. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2013-3003 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Matthew Eatough; Accommodating Intimacy, Compromising Sex. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 June 2013; 59 (2): 360–368. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2013-3003 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Hofstra University2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Post-traumatic hypopituitarism (PTHP): an under-diagnosed complication

One of the main objectives of this article is to advance understanding of a substantially under-diagnosed complication of brain injury. Damage to the hypothalamus or pituitary gland can affect the production and secretion of several hormones, specifically growth hormone, luteinising hormone, follicle stimulating hormone, prolactin, cortisol, adrenocorticotropic hormone, thyroid stimulating hormone, testosterone and oestradiol. Low levels of these hormones can lead to a variety of clinical manifestations and can have serious physical and/or psychological effects including on a person's quality of life. Even small disruptions in hormone levels can affect growth and development, concentration, and sexual function, causing depression, difficulty with personal intimacy and difficulty sustaining personal relationships. Collaboration between neurosurgeons, neuropsychologists and endocrinologists is required to review which effects may be related to pituitary levels and which may be physiological results of the brain injury. However, for patients presenting with overt signs of hypopituitarism it is not unreasonable to advocate baseline pituitary function tests to diagnose biochemical deficiencies.

Travels in ‘becoming-Aboriginal’: research reciprocating between anecdotes and theory

While undertaking research for a PhD on Aboriginal cultural tourism, I began to wonder how the strategy of reflexivity – or an awareness of one's own presence, one's ‘positioning’ – could be employed to further enhance an analysis of the connections between experience, data and theory. This article presents an experimental effort in opening up more orthodox or conventional analyses of tourism to include personal experience, of researcher, tourists and operators, as a means of understanding how desire operates in the field of cultural tourism. In doing so, an interplay between anecdotes and theory attempts to demonstrate how the social and political forces inherent in desire motivate and impact on people in their roles as travellers, tourists and tour operators. The opportunity for personal intimacy available in the (inter)cultural tourism experience is invaluable for people to reflect on not only their own (perhaps mistaken) perceptions and attitudes towards Aboriginality, but also to consider their own subjective positions as Australians. This has significant relevance in the contribution to, and perhaps reordering of, wider socio-political discourses such as reconciliation that frame Australian intercultural relations.

T. S. Eliot's Ambiviolences: Oscar Wilde as Masked Precursor

T. S. Eliot's Ambiviolences:Oscar Wilde as Masked Precursor John Paul Riquelme (bio) "Literature prevents the question Who speaks? from ever being answered." —R. Barthes, S/Z LIX A Masked and Queer Modernist Aesthetic Oscar Wilde's place in the history of literary modernism has yet to be satisfactorily described. The obscuring of his position in modernism's emergence and development involves thorny issues. Thorns aside for the moment, as with Thomas Hardy (especially his poetry and his late fiction) and some other writers of the 1890s, there is no consensus about whether Wilde is a late Victorian writer or one who produced works that anticipate aspects of later modernist writing so thoroughly that they stand at the beginning of the modernist canon and fully within it. Among authors of the 'nineties, Wilde's situation is especially tortuous, as I explain in the next section. His significance to modernism would be clearer if prominent first-stage modernists had been able to acknowledge more directly and candidly his effect on their thinking and writing. T. S. Eliot provides a particularly revealing case, one that involves his ambivalence concerning Wilde, some of whose works we know that Eliot owned and lectured on before he became an established poet-critic. In the fourth of his "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry" in The Egoist of July 1919, drawing a parallel between experiences in life and experiences in art, but not conflating them, Eliot describes in remarkably [End Page 353] amatory terms the powerful relation a contemporary poet can have to a precursor who instills a "passion." The passion involves a "profound kinship" and a "peculiar personal intimacy" that is "imperative" during "a genuine affair" in which the younger poet is "quickened" and can produce work that would not have been possible without the experience. Eliot emphasizes that the "imperative intimacy" is not to be confused with admiration, and that the result is neither imitation nor borrowing. When mature poets steal, they presumably do so having reached a maturity beyond imitation and borrowing through the quickening effect of intimacy with a precursor. Poetry that Eliot did not publish during his lifetime and poetry that he did indicate that he experienced such an affair with Oscar Wilde, with consequences of lasting significance. Salomé had a particularly intense effect on Eliot. "We are changed," Eliot says about the younger poet's experience. He was, for the long term. Eliot also mentions the likelihood that the ardor will cool, as happens in life: "Like personal intimacies in life, it may and probably will pass, but it will be ineffaceable." Eliot's cooling toward Wilde is an important element in understanding Wilde's continuing but varying role in Eliot's writing and thinking. Equally important is the ineffaceable quality of the initial effect. About the "dead master" in Eliot's "Little Gidding" II (1942), at the beginning of the dialogue between the quickened and the dead, we hear that he is "a face still forming." That could mean a face about to resolve itself into a definitive shape, one that is coming into crisp focus in the particular scene. But the temporal implications of still, a word that occurs in Four Quartets with various meanings, suggest a continuing state of emergence, or generation, like the Chinese jar of "Burnt Norton" V, which "Moves perpetually in its stillness." Eliot's statement in "Reflections" resembles Wilde's response, during the first of his two criminal trials (1895), to the request that he explain the phrase, "the love that dare not speak its name," from a poem by Lord Alfred Douglas. Mentioning "the sonnets of [End Page 354] Michelangelo and Shakespeare," the "great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan," and the basis of Plato's philosophy, Wilde says that "It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him." Eliot's version translates Wilde's perspective into terms relevant to poetic creation enabled by contact between different generations. Made a quarter of a century apart, the two statements...

INCESTO FENOMENAS AKADEMINĖJE BENDRUOMENĖJE: REALIJOS IR VIZIJOS

The article examines the genesis of incestuous connection and its expression in the academic community, focusing on the moral, psychosocial, and educational dimensions and meaning. These aspects recently are obviously deviated from the social standards. Anomaly is becoming more and more the norm. With reference to psychological patterns and personal experiences, it is analyzed and illustrated the real and projected impact of incest phenomenon on functioning of academic community: on quality of studies, on research activities, on psychosocial climate and on profes-sional motivation of community members. The consequences of incest are revealed when formally in-groups are established or informally establishes themselves. In such groups typically group thinking is developed, which implies the occurrence of three essential conditions: the group friendship, unity: the relative group isolation from different-minded and the presence of directive leadership, which allows to understand what decisions are appreciated. In in-groups professional and personal intimacy is dominated, withdrawal in their own thoughts circle, rejection of any criticism, censorship and self-censorship, conformism and unconditional obedience to leaders, disregard to moral norms and other features are noticed. Negative impact of the incest phenomenon and its disposal options is set out in two scenarios: pessimistic and optimistic one. In pessimistic scenario a group thinking features and division of community into two hostile camps: us and them, are examined. In-groups are usually characterized by the phenomenon of internal favoritism, where inappropriate, ineffective actions and decisions of this group members are justified. The members of out-group are assessed uniformly and trite, i.e. not taking into consideration the individual personalities. They are usually assigned with negative „labels“. Dissidents instead are considered to be particularly enimies, who submit their own evaluations, opinions and criticisms, thus, different ways of their rejection or even exclusion from the community are searched. In optimistic scenario visions are concretized, thanks to which disappearance of incestuous relations and together the positive changes in everyday life of the academic community are likely expected. Key words: academic community, incestuous connection, quality of studies.

Inscribing Friendship: John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens and the Writing of Male Intimacy in the Victorian Period

Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (1872–4) was described in contemporary reviews as ‘The Autobiography of John Forster with Recollections of Charles Dickens’, and continues to be charged with making Forster a disproportionately large character in Dickens's life story. This article takes a different approach to The Life, viewing Forster's biography of his friend and literary advisee as a significant document for the exploration of personal and professional intimacy between men in the period; a document that reveals a plenitude of available languages for the expression of a rich emotional experience of male friendship, encompassing amity, tenderness, loss and mourning. In exploring the Life of Dickens as a narrative of the life in relation, this article endeavours to expand upon often rather fleeting critical references to the significance of a personal relationship between biographer and subject. I close-read Forster's biography alongside Dickens's own discussions of male friendship in his fiction, journalism and letters, using approaches from queer theory and a historical approach to friendship between men to offer a new framework for understanding the narrative and emotional effects of biographical intimacy.

Rol de la pareja en el proceso de rehabilitación de personas con discapacidad física por situaciones de guerra

Objective. The article studies the role of the couple in the rehabilitation process of one of its members with a medullary injury, suffered during service as a member of the armed forces. Method. A qualitative, descriptive, non-structured study was carried out with one only sample unit. We received the voluntary participation of a family of a family of medium-low socio-economic strata (husband and wife and two children). Three aspects were evaluated based on the systems illness model proposed by Rolland (2000): intimacy, communication and asymmetry management. Results. The results highlight how the capacity to maintain equilibrium between personal autonomy and intimacy figures as a protecting factor; open conversation about the illness and its demands ensures better adaptation to the disability. The possibility that a person with a disability can remain productive, and that a couple can creative find ways of managing limitations in the sexual area are key elements in the process. Conclusions. The intention is that these findings will be useful for the therapeutic work carried out in the armed forces, with those who suffer losses such as those described here, and that action can be taken which will strengthen patterns of interaction which will further personal, family and marital resilience.

Social networks and physician adoption of electronic health records: insights from an empirical study.

To study how social interactions influence physician adoption of an electronic health records (EHR) system. A social network survey was used to delineate the structure of social interactions among 40 residents and 15 attending physicians in an ambulatory primary care practice. Social network analysis was then applied to relate the interaction structures to individual physicians' utilization rates of an EHR system. The social network survey assessed three distinct types of interaction structures: professional network based on consultation on patient care-related matters; friendship network based on personal intimacy; and perceived influence network based on a person's perception of how other people have affected her intention to adopt the EHR system. EHR utilization rates were measured as the proportion of patient visits in which sentinel use events consisting of patient data documentation or retrieval activities were recorded. The usage data were collected over a time period of 14 months from computer-recorded audit trail logs. Neither the professional nor the perceived influence network is correlated with EHR usage. The structure of the friendship network significantly influenced individual physicians' adoption of the EHR system. Residents who occupied similar social positions in the friendship network shared similar EHR utilization rates (p<0.05). In other words, residents who had personal friends in common tended to develop comparable levels of EHR adoption. This effect is particularly prominent when the mutual personal friends of these 'socially similar' residents were attending physicians (p<0.001). Social influence affecting physician adoption of EHR seems to be predominantly conveyed through interactions with personal friends rather than interactions in professional settings.

GUTS – Katherine Mansfield as a Reviewer

The paper begins by engaging with recent reviews of volume five of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, challenging the principles on which the reviews were written and questioning the assumption of personal intimacy that reviewers, critics and biographers often make in relation to Mansfield. Her role as a reviewer for the Athenaeum is then analysed, principally using reviews that were not covered by Clare Hanson in her selection of Mansfield's critical writing. Initially the paper considers Mansfield's experience as a reviewer and editor during the Rhythm period, and the significance for her of the Fauvist aesthetic of that journal. Mansfield's ruthless scrutiny of the fiction of contemporaries is examined for what it reveals about her own practice, and is then applied to two particular themes in her fiction, the depiction of children and of the secret self, here specifically in relation to tuberculosis. The opportunities that were not offered to Mansfield, perhaps because she was seen as an uneducated woman, are discussed as well as the dimension that her witty and incisive reviewing adds to our assessment of her literary achievement.

Napoleonic Ambition Versus Jeffersonian Virtue: The Case of Lewis Rand

This paper undertakes to give a reading of Mary Johnston's 1908 historical novel entitled Lewis Rand. The novel tells the story of a young Virginia man who receives a Jeffersonian education - literally - Lewis Rand is educated by Thomas Jefferson person. The young man later breaks with the great man over the character of his own political ambition and the limits which would be put upon this ambition if he were to continue in his adherence to Jeffersonian principles. These principles had undergirded his climb from poverty and obscurity to the position of rising star in Virginia politics. But when forced to choose between these principles and the future prospect of joining the ranks of the great emperors and conquerors of history, Lewis Rand opts for the latter, which meant in his case to opt for ambition over his personal intimacy with Jefferson (although at the last moment he pulls back at the brink of political action). Lewis's story is thus one concerning the limits of liberal democratic politics and the perennial dialectic between the politics of reason and the politics of tyranny.

Staying Blue by Gibbons Ruark

Staying Blue by Gibbons Ruark

Sustaining Jouissance: Commercial and Heian Modes of Intertextuality in Tanka by Tawara Machi

This essay argues that Tawara Machi's poetry both sustains the intertextual bias of classical court poetry and uses it to incorporate some of the most ubiquitous texts of our age: advertising and other consumer discourse. Tawara's reinvention of contemporary tanka is based on the application of the conventional matrices of associations in classical poetic language to contemporary consumer-oriented intertexts. Foregrounding intertextuality provides a means of gauging premodern and modern texts in terms of multiple modes of textuality, canons, and cultural assumptions in Japanese verse. Roland Barthes's analysis of fashion discourse provides a specific critical apparatus for situating Heian poetics and consumer discourse on common ground. I borrow his insights on how classes of commodities and language concerning their uses enter into creative cross-referencing, in a way that resembles how premodern tanka attributed qualities according to seasonal and other (formally and informally) classifiable associations. While the Heian mode forms the template, Tawara's poetics is shown to operate in precisely this ahistorical consumer mode, passively absorbing and reflecting dominant media-projected attitudes. While thematically arranged, usually in sequences more or less centered on romantic entanglements, these poems reflect the rational, national, industrial capitalist environment and its totalizing effects. Critical lines of escape are left only in the force of fresh juxtaposition of words and consumer items, thus providing a contained sandbox for aesthetic play without endangering corporate decorum and sponsorship. A running theme in her tanka is the ever-elusive partner in love, a motif providing the basis for the building up toward an always-deferred satisfaction, jouissance. By alluding to Heian serial relationships, she aestheticizes alienation from her partners on her dates. By echoing classical matrices of seasonal words, poetic places, and conventional associations in all stages of romance, her accounts of consumer objects carry their own advertised associations as well as a reified canonical force. Thus her verses expand the intertextual modality in premodern Japanese poetry seamlessly into consumer culture, and one must examine the subject being reproduced here. Slavoj Žižek is helpful in understanding the appearance of passivity in her positioning. Jouissance, in Žižek's Lacanian usage, is used to understand the mechanism by which Tawara personally and socially excuses herself from having to engage her material in a more critical way that would alter rather than simply reflect her media- and advertising-defined environment. Jouissance is the key to her postponement of personal intimacy as well as public involvement and, ultimately, to understanding her ahistorical poetics.

Don Bosco: History and Spirit, Vol. 1: John Bosco's Formative Years in Historical Context (review)

Reviewed by: Don Bosco: History and Spirit, Vol. 1: John Bosco's Formative Years in Historical Context John Dickson Don Bosco: History and Spirit, Vol. 1: John Bosco's Formative Years in Historical Context. By Arthur J. Lenti, edited by Aldo Giraudo. (Rome: Editrice Libreria Ateneo Salesiano. 2007. Pp. xx, 498. €30,00 paperback.) This is the first of a seven-volume series that aims for the first time to offer English readers a comprehensive critical historical survey of the history and spirit of St. John Bosco set firmly in the particular cultural context of ninetheenth-century Italy. What is presented here is not just a critical survey of all the existing historical and spiritual studies of Don Bosco's early life (1815–44) carefully set out in bite-size chunks but also an original contribution to the study of Salesian spirituality. Father Lenti's survey is called "History and Spirit" because it sets the life and work and spirituality of Don Bosco firmly in the rich context of Europe in the Age of Revolutions and the movement for Italian Unification. Lenti offers his readers not just a general historical survey but also a set of specific studies of the political and religious movements and careful pen portraits of the main protagonists that allow the general reader to grasp the context at some depth. At the same time, he offers his readers unique insights into the spiritual development of John Bosco as a young man. This capacity to combine historical critical method with a deep appreciation of spirituality is particularly evident in his study of Don Bosco's biographical [End Page 594] tradition. Lenti's own training as a biblical scholar enables him to explore the various sources and layers of tradition, including Don Bosco's own Memoirs of the Oratory and the various traditions that became the massive nineteen-volume Biographical Memoirs of St John Bosco, which have dominated the traditional Salesian understanding of their founder, and underline the hagiographic presuppositions of its authors. He offers critical reconstructions of such difficult issues as John Bosco's period of "exile" at the Moglia farm and the resulting chronological problems raised for biographers. Lenti's insights offer a truly human understanding of John Bosco as a young man, whose life was marked by the tragic early death of his father, by unresolved family difficulties, compounded by desperate poverty, but in which he was sustained by the deep faith and loving presence of his mother. Her extraordinary wisdom and insight encouraged him to develop his own inner freedom and strength of character with a growing trust in God's goodness. Lenti offers genuinely new insights in his sensitive exposition of John Bosco's crying need for a father figure, his hunger and capacity for deep personal intimacy and friendship. His exposition of the complexities of the processes of priestly formation in the Turin diocese, based on the original regulations, with his wonderful pen portraits of the main characters and the various theological and political movements involved mean that both the general reader and the specialist have an invaluable resource for understanding the model of priesthood that John Bosco both embraced and modified. This exhaustive study offers an encyclopedic resource for any student of Don Bosco in his original context. The care that the author and his editor have taken with the arrangement and organization of the text is commendable. More to be lamented than to be criticized is the quality of the proofreading that has sometimes transposed dates that should clearly be in the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. Overall, the first volume of this master work has whetted the appetite of this reader for the arrival of the next six volumes that will be a real milestone in the international study of Don Bosco and the Salesian phenomenon. John Dickson St. John Bosco House Farnborough, Hampshire Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

Collect Calls

Collect Calls

Evidence for a Sexual Relationship between Sigmund Freud and Minna Bernays?

Evidence for a Sexual Relationship between Sigmund Freud and Minna Bernays? Albrecht Hirschmüller On December 24, 2006, the New York Times published an article by Ralph Blumenthal concerning a paper by Franz Maciejewski, who had found an entry in the log book of the Hotel Schweizerhaus in Maloja, Switzerland, showing that Freud and his sister-in-law Minna Bernays were registered as "Dr. Sigm. [End Page 125] Freud und Frau" in room No. 11 on Saturday, August 13, 1898. Other newspapers and magazines, American, German, French, reprinted this item as proof of what had been a gossip story for decades: starting with a transference fantasy of Sándor Ferenczi in a 1912 letter to Freud (Brabant, Falzeder, and Giampieri-Deutsch 1993, 453), followed by an interview given by the aged C. G. Jung and purporting to report a confession made to him by Minna herself (Billinsky 1969), and finally elaborated in papers by Peter Swales (1982; 1998; 2003), beginning more than twenty years ago. In its Winter 2006 issue, American Imago published an English translation of Maciejewski's paper. Since I am the editor of the correspondence between Freud and Minna Bernays (Hirschmüller 2005), I examined this new document in the light of the assessment I had offered in my introduction to that volume. The letters do show a relationship of mental and personal intimacy, as between siblings, but they do not in any way hint at a love affair, nor do any of the other available historical sources. Now, a historian sometimes has to draw his conclusions from sources even if there are gaps or contradictions in them. Whether or not one should trust Jung's testimony is debatable.1 Still, before drawing far-reaching conclusions, historians should try to establish the facts as far as possible. At the very least, it seems premature to take sharing a room as proof of a sexual relationship, as Maciejewski does. What was the situation Freud and Minna found in Maloja? Was there an option to book separate rooms? Did they share rooms and register as man and wife in the other hotels they stayed in during their journey? Maciejewski was unable to answer such questions when asked, nor does he appear to have raised them himself. So I tried to find out more by myself. In the correspondence, Freud and Minna sometimes speak of having rented two rooms,2 but, of course, those passages are no solid proof of how they signed in or in which rooms or beds they in fact slept. Unfortunately, the other hotels either no longer exist or their old log books have disappeared. The document from Maloja seems to be a singular hit. The owner of the Schweizerhaus, Jürg Wintsch, kindly told me the following: The house was quite filled with guests. The [End Page 126] Fremdenbuch (log book) shows only arrivals, not departures. So it is impossible to reconstruct which other rooms would have been available on what day. There are no plans, no photographs of the rooms, and no brochures showing prices of those years, whereas Maciejewski speaks of "what is to this day a standard double room" (501). It is quite clear that two separate rooms—if available—would have been more expensive than one. Whether they shared one bed or not, and what may or may not have happened in that bed, remains a matter of speculation. However, it is a matter of fact that they did not stay for "three nights" (501), as Maciejewski says, nor even for "three days." The Fremdenbuch shows the next guests entering room No. 11 on August 15. In fact, Freud and Minna arrived in the late afternoon of Saturday and left on Monday morning, by no means an "unusually long" (Maciejewski 2006, 501) stay. They just spent an additional Sunday in wonderfully scenic Maloja before returning home. With the suggestion of a couple lingering three days in a love nest, we see a new legend in statu nascendi. But what about Freud and Minna Bernays signing in as man and wife, if they were not a couple in love? I would like to turn the question around. Once they decided to share...