Diagnosis #1. MELANCHOLY
Before Daylight Savings Time ends on Nov. 6, and we wake up to a pitch-black morning in our narrow, airshaft view apartment, we’re picking up a FeelBright Light (), the personals site of n+1 magazine, for a nice new lover who, if not a sex god, has at least read The History Read More
In 1909, after a six-day journey from Vienna with his associates Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud arrived in New York Harbor and spent a week sightseeing in the city. He had traveled to America to give a series of lectures on his “talking cure” at Clark University in Massachusetts. Before heading north, he Read More
It’s easy to imagine that therapists who marry each other have lives like those of Lilith and Frasier on Cheers. Frasier first kissed Lilith when he discovered he had a Pavlovian (and Pynchonian?) reaction to Lilith’s letting down her hair: Lilith would remove a hairpin and Frasier would succumb to lust. Episode after episode, season Read More
Recently, a woman entered taxi driver Marc Preven’s cab just outside of FAO Schwartz on Madison and East 60th with her “son,” a Jack Russell terrier. “She tells me, ‘It’s his birthday,’” Mr. Preven recalled. “Then she says that every year on his birthday she takes him to FAO Schwarz to pick out a toy. This year the dog picked out a Paul Frank plush monkey. But you know, that’s not even weird to me anymore—it’s like, don’t all dogs get to go to FAO Schwarz on their birthday and pick out a birthday toy?”
In 1936, Karen Horney, a Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst who once had an ill-fated affair with pioneering social psychologist Erich Fromm, published what was then the definitive work on neurosis, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. Naturally, she was a New York City resident at the time. (Brooklyn, actually.) Read More
Three days after we picked up The Secret, we won the lottery. It was a Friday night in Williamsburg, and we were drunkenly blinking into the fluorescent lights of a local bodega, waiting for our dinner—also, technically, a late lunch and tomorrow’s early breakfast—of a beef patty with cheese, when we decided to feed two dollars into a machine to purchase an Instant Take 5 ticket, which enticed us with a promise that we could “Win Up To $5,555!”
