Previously unpublished work casts new light on Taubes, who killed herself in 1969.
In Sigmund Freud’s “Rat Man,” a case history of a neurotic young man, there is a curious footnote about the natural uncertainty of paternity. For a man to believe that his father truly was his father, he had to accept what no evidence could corroborate. Paternity was not a physical relation, Freud explained. It was an idea that sprang, as if already fully formed, from one’s mind. “The prehistoric figures which show a smaller person sitting upon the head of a larger one are representations of patrilineal descent,” he wrote. “Athena had no mother, but sprang from the head of Zeus.”
But Freud was wrong. Athena did have a mother: Metis, whom Zeus swallowed, fearing that the children she bore would be too mighty for him to govern. In some versions of the myth, Metis, while pregnant inside Zeus, made her daughter a breastplate, which Athena eventually adorned with the decapitated head of the gorgon Medusa, whose eyes held the power to turn anyone who looked upon her into stone. “To decapitate = to castrate,” Freud wrote elsewhere. Had he put the two heads together, he might have wondered at the paradox they presented: that the fierce and divine female child could symbolize both the extension of the patriarch’s authority and its undoing.
Denne historien er fra June 12, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra June 12, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.