The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.
Growing up in Highland Park, in high school, I had some very influential teachers: I had a math teacher who taught calculus that helped me learn to be in love with mathematics; I had a chemistry teacher who inspired us to work what was in the class and to go beyond.
My dad was a terrible father. Dreadful. But he had a very difficult childhood. He was fostered - he never knew who his father was. So he had a very different attitude to family and kids. I don't have any issues. I'm not suffering some secret angst.
You do have to learn how to wear a kilt, and it's certainly very liberating and very freeing, but surprisingly very comfortable to wear, to ride a horse in a kilt. I was surprised by that.
Freud's theory was that when a joke opens a window and all those bats and bogeymen fly out, you get a marvellous feeling of relief and elation. The trouble with Freud is that he never had to play the old Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost.
He had a cringing manner, but a very harsh voice; and his blandest smiles were so extremely forbidding, that to have had his company under the least repulsive circumstances, one would have wished him to be out of temper that he might only scowl.
Is there anything worn under the kilt? No, it's all in perfect working order.
KILT, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.
Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word.
Whoever the kid had been, whoever had had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: )You just change your attitude now please, young man.
When I drank, I had a very different attitude towards my playing. It was sloppier but I kind of liked it that way. It was like the alcohol was telling my mind what to do.
All I had when I began writing the first book was rather vague images conjured up by the notion of a man in a kilt, so essentially I began with Jamie, although I had no idea what his name was at the time.
One thing about school - I always had this attitude that I was in school to learn, and attempted to do whatever was involved in that process, while school had this attitude that I was there to earn grades, which I couldn't care less about. Unsurprisingly, my grades weren't very good.
His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.
If I had different parents who were in it for the money, I might have a different perspective. But they really are artists; they intelligently approach each character and prepare in every sense of the word. I grew up in a world that had great discipline.
As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.