Freud On The Acropolis: Reflections On A Paradoxical Response To The Real

This book analyzes a unique mental event-the paradoxical surprise that people often feel when they come upon something that they have felt sure existed but are seeing for the first time. Noted first by Sigmund Freud, this common but odd thought proves remarkably resistant to trivial explanation & marks instead a distinct type of experience. Similarly, in everyday life we often feel compelled to verify firsthand the scene of a recent event, even though we never doubted its occurrence. Susan Sugarman probes this experience & its relation to other everyday sensibilities, such as the pleasure of reencountering the familiar & people's fascination with authenticity. Although the experience manifests itself in a seeming lapse in logic & remains obscure in a way that one might-& that Freud did-associate with pathological formations, it is neither illogical nor pathological. On the contrary, it observes a moment of mental health & personal integration. On the contrary, it observes a moment of mental health & personal integration.

Susan Sugarman is associate professor of psychology at Princeton University, where she is an Old Dominion Fellow of the Council of the Humanities for 1996-1998.