Robert Coles - Sex, Envy, Videotapes

Never mind the videotapes. Educators are fully aware of the insights of Harvard's professor of psychiatry, Robert Coles. For those with mimetic theory ears to hear and eyes to read, the following is a wealth of wisdom.

When Freud listened to his first patients, he observed their substantial difficulty in coming to terms with their sexual thoughts and impulses -- to the point that, he began to realize, this aspect of their lives was hidden even from them, never mind others who might want to attend them, be of help to them. So it was that the unconscious, thoroughly familiar to novelists, and poets and playwrights over the centuries, took on new life as a construct in a neuropsychiatrist's metapsychology -- one, however, derived not from the reveries of a theorist, but from his daily clinical effort to understand his patients. Today, of course, sexuality is a virtual mainstay of our bourgeois, capitalist culture, a commodity, even -- sold, as it were, on the covers of magazines, in the advertisements for a host of products, and increasingly in the advertisements by individuals on behalf of themselves that appear in the respectable press (journals, newspapers), never mind the scandal tabloids ...

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