Mortenson as Frued.

An antiseptic departure for shock jock David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method is a psychological tug of war between the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson), and his disciple Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) over the mind and sex of an overwrought mental patient named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a mad Russian with a craving for spanking. Whacking her on her naked bottom must have worked. She ended up, years later, analyzing patients of her own. Too bad she didn’t also analyze this movie. It would have saved so much wasted time.

A grim 1912 period piece set in a mental clinic in Vienna at the dawn of 20th century enlightenment, the movie flirts with the peculiar relationship between novice Jung and mentor Freud while they both flirt with the same patient, but aside from Ms. Knightley’s lurid whupping without her panties on, nothing ever happens. The “dangerous method” in the title refers to the experiment by both analysts to radically treat the same female patient by taking her to bed. Not very scientific, but very, very talky. The textbook talk is more layered than the plot. The two doctors discuss their opposing theories in such a drawn-out series of academic letters between Austria and Switzerland that by the time they’re finished, the patient has developed an abstract hypothesis of her own. By the time they get around to testing their primal interest in Sabina between the uncomfortable-looking starched cotton sheets, they (as well as esteemed screenwriter Christopher Hampton) might be unhinged to discover their audience is snoring. Mr. Hampton adapted the script from his own stage play The Talking Cure, and it shows. Veteran Polish cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, who shoots all of Mr. Cronenberg’s films, gives everything the refined sheen of polyurethaned mahogany.

Considering herself vile, filthy and corrupt because she lusts for humiliation, Sabina listens to the inner voices of angels, then shrieks, shakes and stutters her way into a nervous fit while she squishes her food between her fingers in what I assume Ms. Knightley considers great acting. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, everyone was twittering furiously about her titillating spanking scenes, but they hardly made up for the huge lapses of tedium between smacks. As Freud, who believes the basis of all insanity is sexual repression, and Jung, who is monogamous and resistant to such extremist views, the miscast male stars are bland as dust and look like a box of Smith Brothers cough drops.

In his two previous collaborations with Mr. Cronenberg, Mr. Mortenson’s full-frontal wrestling scene in Eastern Promises and twisted gang killer-turned-suburbanite in A History of Violence offered more challenges than anything in the buttoned-up role of Freud, and after Mr. Fassbender’s brutally punishing role as IRA hunger-strike-martyr Bobby Sands in Hunger and his rollicking nudity as a sex addict in Shame, I can’t imagine what attracted these two megahunks to such a bore.

rreed@observer.com

A DANGEROUS METHOD

Running Time 93 minutes

WRITTEN BY Christopher Hampton

DIRECTED BY David Cronenberg

STARRING Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen

2/4

Illustration by Fred Harper

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 spent time walking in Central Park and visiting the tenements of the Lower East Side. He saw the amusement rides on Coney Island and marveled at the antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum. Though his physical presence in the city was short-lived, New York has become Freud’s cultural home in the U.S. One hundred years later, the archetype of the neurotic, upper-middle-class Upper West Sider lying on the couch—perpetuated by everyone from Philip Roth to Woody Allen—is still how much of the public thinks of psychoanalysis. (“Tell me about your relationship with your mother…”) Several generations have been raised on the notion of psychoanalysis as New Yorker cartoon.

This is something that analytic institutions like the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute must reckon with.
Inside NYPSI’s headquarters on the Upper East Side, the cream-colored walls and dark brown carpet give off a sterile, medical feel, like a photograph of a hospital lobby from decades past. Posters and busts of Freud adorn the space. NYPSI, the oldest analytic institution in the country, celebrated its 100th anniversary this year. The faculty here have a reputation among fellow analysts as the most Freudian of Freudians, but they are nevertheless trying to keep up with changing times.

Sitting in an upstairs office was Maxine Gann, a Ph.D. who trained at the institute in the ’90s and was in the first class that was entirely female, and Roger Rahtz, M.D., the president of the board, who enrolled at the Institute in 1973.

The NYPSI, first known as the New York Psychoanalytic Society, was founded in 1911 by Dr. A.A. Brill, at the time Freud’s biggest champion in the States and the person responsible for bringing the good doctor to America. It was here that Freud’s disciples like Ernst Kris, Charles Brenner and Margaret Mahler began developing Freud’s theory in the United States.

“It’s not just about doing psychoanalysis anymore,” said Dr. Gann, speaking of the practice today. “Nobody so far as I know would raise an eyebrow if an analyst prescribed an antidepressant for a patient who was really in a bad way.”

“Among some,” Dr. Rahtz clarified.

“Well, at this instant.”

“To some degree,” he conceded.

“There’s a much broader, more open mind-set,” Dr. Gann said. “I’ll tell people to lay down on the couch and ‘tell me more’ if I think that’s the best treatment for my patient. But I know people who say, ‘I wish my analyst would shut up.’”

Indeed, among analysts there is little consensus on how to keep Freud relevant, and like the rest of the field, the NYPSI is trying to expand and make room for methods other than classical Freudian analysis. Even so, they still have a reputation among the analytic community of being dogmatic. One analyst, a social worker with a Ph.D. in psychology who did an externship at the NYPSI a few years ago, described a class syllabus that had been reprinted since 1980, the date crossed out and a more current one put in its place.

Further adding to the difficulty of negotiating such a balance is that the discourse is taking place in a cultural milieu in which the figure of Freud is at best a looming historical presence, and at worst a punch line.

By the time the man who invented the “talking cure” was dying from cancer of the mouth, he was a public celebrity and revered in his field, though his controversial reputation, which persists today, was already in place. An unsigned editorial published in The New York Times two days after his passing at age 83 in 1939 questioned his clinical validity in the same breath that it championed him as a great thinker: “Whether he was a true scientist or not, Freud’s place is secure if for no other reason than that he broke down ancient taboos and cleared the way for a new approach to the mind.” The literary scholar Harold Bloom, writing in The Times in 1986, the centennial of Freud’s establishment of his private practice in Vienna, called Freud “The Greatest Modern Writer” (in his headline, no less) while dismissing psychoanalysis as a kind of living fossil that “still survives among us, as an isolated and disputable therapy.” A 2008 report published in The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association said psychoanalytic theory thrived in English departments and in the arts—from film to television to theater—but was treated as “desiccated and dead” by psychology programs in universities. As Freud’s stature as a historical figure grows, analysts must treat him as something more than pop culture fodder; he is also their field’s founder and its seminal thinker.

This task is increasingly important; today, Freud is more of a pop icon than ever. A recent nonfiction book about Freud’s cocaine use was a best-seller at the end of the summer. A star-studded blockbuster film directed by David Cronenberg and starring Viggo Mortensen as Freud recasts the father of analysis’s relationship with Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his patient—herself a future analyst—Sabina Spielrein (played by Keira Knightly) as a sexed-up psychological thriller. It recently became a critical smash at its debut during the New York Film Festival. The success of Freud’s Last Session—a modest but thrilling one-act play now in its second year of sold-out shows off Broadway—should come as no surprise. To much of the public at large, Freud and his theories are dated oddities, stigmatized as disproved, even as they help sell innumerable books and movie tickets. Ask an analyst, however, and they’ll tell you Freudian analysis is alive and well—even if its form is unrecognizable to those familiar with the cliché of the couch-bound patient being asked by an old man to “hear more about that.”

In the office of Lewis Aron, a Ph.D. and director of the N.Y.U. Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, there were two leather chairs, a long couch and a wispy line drawing of Freud hanging behind the reclining chair where he sat slouching as he spoke to The Observer. We entered the room and inspected the furniture and he told us to take a seat—not to lie down, mind you—on the couch.

“The mistake most people make is that the way they are defining analysis is how it was in the 1950s, in its heyday, which is really when it was first being defined. If they then look out in the world and wonder, ‘Is analysis alive or dying?’ … My feeling is that if you see psychoanalysis as something that’s alive and changing and growing,” he trailed off, the portrait of Freud frowning heavily over his shoulder.

“Maybe it’s not going to look like I expected it to look,” he added, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

One of the country’s preeminent programs in analysis, N.Y.U. postdoc was established in 1961 by Bernard Kalinkowitz; it was the first university program to give non-M.D. psychologists a way of formally training in psychoanalysis. It is known for using a progressive curriculum, incorporating—like many other institutions these days—various methods of psychology into the general spectrum of analysis. But Freud is still a complicated influence. Some students discussed an anxiety of being branded “too Freudian.” Last year, the program renamed the “Freudian” track the “contemporary Freudian” track.

In his office on the Upper West Side, Dr. Aron hosts reading groups that speak to this assimilation of various theoretical models into classical Freudian practice (his forthcoming book is called Towards a Progressive Psychoanalysis). A few weeks ago a group of five women joined Mr. Aron to discuss Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris, a book about Jean-Martin Charcot, with whom Freud studied hypnosis. The conversation turned to the issue of countertransference, or how much an analyst’s own individual take on the treatment should be brought into a session with a patient. It is a topic debated by everyone from classical analysts to relational psychologists to contemporary Freudians and more progressive analysts like Professor Aron.

“Freud defines psychoanalysis in contrast to suggestion,” he said. There was a brief silence and the conversation continued about Ms. Hustvedt’s book. Later one of the students in the class interrupted.

“You say we’re not supposed to be influencing our patients,” the student said. “Just by sitting and having an expression on our face we do have influence.”

“I was being ironic,” Dr. Aron said.

Another student chimed in: “If we were so influential, wouldn’t we see dramatic improvements in our patients immediately? We’re not influential. We’re not.”

This line of conversation doesn’t have an end. The level of an analyst’s presence in a session has been a question since the beginning of psychoanalysis. Though Freud insisted that he be seated out of his patient’s view, he would go on walks with them. He would even feed them (admittedly, exceptions and not the rule). The persistence of the debate speaks to the difficulties of reconciling the Great Man’s ideas with what modern therapy has become.

Dr. Aron defines Freudian analysis in broad terms with many subsets—a belief in the unconscious (or, as another professor put it, “Anyone who is middle class and has gone to college is a Freudian”).

“As an educator,” Professor Aron said, “to call yourself an analyst or call yourself a psychologist in 2011 and not have a pretty good familiarity with Freud is just to be uneducated. It seems to me that it’s part of anybody’s good education. That doesn’t mean that people are identified as working in a Freudian tradition. Our Freudians are adapting Freud to modern life. Nobody’s practicing the way he practiced in Vienna. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Most Americans, in 2011, do not want to hear a theory—even a highly metaphorical one—that deep down they desire to kill their one parent in order to make love to the other. As Steven Ellman, of the contemporary Freudian faculty at N.Y.U. postdoc, put it, Americans have a “very narrow view of Freud,” one that is grounded predominantly in the Oedipus complex. Many of his writings, however, moved away from that.

“Narcissism,” Dr. Ellman said, “something that shouldn’t be unknown in New York society, was a major aspect of his theory.”
No matter. Was Freud a coke addict? Did he have a love affair with his sister-in-law? And besides the torrid details of his biography, there is the much-documented misogyny, his often laughable treatment of homosexuality in his writing and his inability to say when he is wrong. Arnold Rothstein, director of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training at N.Y.U. Medical Center, has noted in his own work when Freud reaches the limits of psychology, he blames it on biology.

Freud is not respected clinically, but for all his contentiousness, he’s an easier sell as a pop culture figure than he is a scientist. Dr. Alan Bass, a psychoanalyst and a first generation student of Derrida (he translated four of his books), teaches Freud in both a clinical and an academic setting (at the New York Freudian Society and in the philosophy department of the New School, respectively). He said that with philosophy students he stresses how Freud’s theory is constructed and held together. With analysts in training, he emphasizes clinical principles—what a given theory has to do with the way one works with a patient.

“I would say Freud’s clinical reputation in my very particular view is mixed,” he said. “It contains clinical genius, it provided clinical tools that are indispensable but there are also major problems and blind spots in it at the same time. To be really responsible about Freud is to really come to grips with both sides.”

This is a time of 140-character rants and news updated by the half-minute, all of it breaking. The NYPSI’s Dr. Gann put it succinctly: “the zeitgeist runs counter to what an analytic perspective and process necessitates.”

WOODY ALLEN HAD A SESSION BARBARA WALTERS HAD A SESSION ALEC BALDWIN HAD A SESSION JERRY STILLER HAD A SESSION MARCIA GAY HARDEN HAD A SESSION WARNER WOLF HAD A SESSION CELESTE HOLM HAD A SESSION DICK CAVETT HAD A SESSION JOHN CLEESE HAD A SESSION T.R. KNIGHT HAD A SESSION PATRICIA HEATON HAD A SESSION DAN LAURIA HAD A SESSION

So goes the sign out front of the theater where Freud’s Last Session is playing. It is referring to the celebrities who have gone to see the play. Based on The Question of God by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr., it imagines an encounter between C.S. Lewis and Freud on the day England declared war on Germany, a few weeks before Freud’s death. The two are in Freud’s study in London; Freud provides the comic relief. He talks to a non-complacent dog. He says things like, “Psychoanalysis does not profess the absolutes of religion. Thank God.” As a recurring joke, he answers the phone with a drastically drawn-out Teutonic “Hey-looooo?” When Lewis enters the room for the first time and hesitates before the famous couch in the study, Freud sneers at him and tells him to sit in the chair by his desk. That got a big laugh from the crowd.

“From day one, Freud was a huge magnet to pull people,” said Mark St. Germain, the production’s playwright of the audience-garnering subject.

Psychoanalysis changes along with culture, but Freud stays the same. Analysts and theorists continue to work with him, to build on his foundations, but to much of the American public he remains a cocaine-sniffing, whacky old man, the kind who speaks of an unseen other, buried deep inside us, who really just wants to play house with Mommy. His life’s work, of course, goes deeper than that, and what he created persists—but he remains, as one practicing Freudian called him, “a figure of levity.” For that, Freud is the great patriarch of mental health: both feared and respected, hated and idealized.

Near the beginning of Mr. St. Germain’s play, there is a moment that alludes to a scene from Freud’s childhood that is recounted in Peter Gay’s brilliant biography Freud: A Life for Our Time. His father, Jacob, a feckless wool merchant, was talking to his son about how much life had improved for Austria’s Jews. “When I was a young fellow,” he told Freud, “one Saturday I went for a walk in the streets in your birthplace, beautifully decked out, with a new fur cap on my head. Along comes a Christian, knocks off my cap into the muck with one blow, and shouts, ‘Jew, off the sidewalk!’” Freud asked his father what he did. He said: “I stepped into the road and picked up my cap.” “I don’t know which of them I detested more,” the dying Freud tells Lewis in the play.

It is the one indisputable fact that Freud got right: there’s no living down one’s parents.

mmiller@observer.com

The Orgone Accumulator

Wilhelm Reich wrote The Function of the Orgasm in 1927, and The Sexual Revolution in 1936. He studied psychoanalysis under Sigmund Freud, caused a scandal on two continents, and composed a theory of existence based on the orgasm. Women loved him. Governments surveilled him. His books were burned in Nazi Germany, and burned in New York State. “Science!” Reich wrote. “I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!!”

It is a goatish résumé, and it suggests a satyr of a figure. Yet the Galileo of the orgasm, as Reich thought of himself, could also be something of a grumpy old man. “Now, that is a sexual revolution!”  Reich declared in 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency. Reich disapproved of porn and promiscuity, “abhorred” homosexuals, and “always took a shower in his underpants,” according to one mistress. Reich also saw UFOs, and believed he could control the weather. “In the 1920s,” writes Christopher Turner in his new book, Adventures in the Orgasmatron (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 544 pages, $35.00), “Reich was known by his colleagues as ‘the character smasher.’” The life consecrated to smashing would end in smithereens. When Reich died, in 1957, he was in prison. He thought the planes flying over the yard “were guarding him at Eisenhower’s instruction.”

“If Reich had been a surrealist artist,” said Mr. Turner, “he would still be celebrated today.” Christopher Turner is blonde, beamish, and British. On a recent afternoon, The Observer met him at the Nevins Street headquarters of Cabinet magazine, where he is an editor. “Wine? It’s not too early. Coffee? We’ve just put some on. Water? I’ll get you a glass.” The Fifties buried Reich, but the Sixties dug him up and made him an icon, and Mr. Turner’s book, a history of the intellectual prelude to that decade, is mostly about him. “I was interested in looking at Reich’s ideas as a historian, at how they spread out into the culture at large,” said the author. We sat an elongated banquet table that had been improvised out of a few stubbier tables—an artifact of the night before, when Mr. Turner and colleagues had toasted the unveiling of Orgasmatron. “It’s been listed as forthcoming for several years. We were celebrating the end of the forthcoming.” The day was hot; Gowanus glowed beyond the windows. If Mr. Turner had a hangover, his concealment of it was bravura.

“There are certain people who click, just click,” Reich recalled. “I knew Freud liked me.” Wilhelm Reich was born to a Jewish family on the edge of the Hapsburg Empire in 1897. After the First World War, Reich moved to Vienna to study medicine, where he met Freud The master was impressed by his pupil’s abilities but alarmed by his ambitiousness. “Reich wanted to change the world,” Mr. Turner writes. Freud wanted to keep the world as it was, and the click became a clash.

Their disagreement pivoted on Freud’s concept of repression—the regulation of man’s primal impulses, or id, by his acquired ones, or superego. For Freud, repression wasn’t a problem, exactly. Repression was the human condition. Although it engendered neurosis, it also prevented civilization from dissolving in a havoc of the passions. Even if it chafed, the libido had to go on a leash—else the world would go to the dogs. But Reich didn’t see the need for the leash. He thought a good orgasm could sort out a sick psyche, and that a lot of them could unsnarl a repressive society. “He realized,” as Mr. Turner writes, “that a revolution in sexual attitudes could bring about a true political revolution.”

This theory mushroomed as the theorist matured. “Reich never had an idea and then detached himself from it. He always elaborated,” said Mr. Turner. Reich came to think that life was made up of microscopic orgasmic emanations, called orgone. Reich had discovered it; it was the “discovery of the century.” Orgone could cure disease, kill cysts, stoke the sex drive. It could also stave off space invaders. In the 1950s, Reich invented an orgone cannon. He called it “The Cloudbuster.”

The Cloudbuster would struggle to jibe with the peace pipe. By the time the counterculture took them to market, Reich’s ideas had been pruned of their wilder flowers. “That’s what happens with ideas,” Mr. Turner said. “People take what they like and reject the rest.” What they liked about Reich’s ideas was their seeming invitation to sleep around. As John F. Kennedy put it, “I get a migraine headache if I don’t get a strange piece of ass every day.” Reich himself, of course, was adamantly schmaltzy about sex, and would have been aghast at the licentiousness of his legacy. “He would say things like, You shouldn’t laugh when you’re making love,” said Mr. Turner. The irony was too involuted for the attention span of the age. Reich started out as a crusader for the sublimity of sex, and ended up the pope of its banality. “An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away,” wrote Kim Philby, in 1963. The orgasm had gone from being life-altering to part of a lifestyle.

The lifestyle came with accessories.

“Do you want to go in the box?” asked Mr. Turner, when  The Observer first arrived at Nevins Street.

“You should ask me questions from the box,” he said.

The box was an Orgone Box—an Orgone Energy Accumulator. “It was built of plywood and lined with sheet iron,” Mr. Turner writes, “and had a small window in the door to provide ventilation.” As Reich explained it, the Accumulator worked by decanting atmospheric orgone into its interior, where the user crouched. It was Reich’s iconic machine, and it would also be his undoing. When Reich went to jail, it was for contravening a court-ordered injunction to stop manufacturing more Accumulators. “Reich hoped that one day every household might have an accumulator, which might be used to prevent cancer and other ailments, and to keep the nation charged up with bioenergy,” Mr. Turner writes.

Scientists soon shredded these claims, along with the entire tapestry of Reichian science. But the Accumulator’s allure as an opportunity for simile could not be touched. It was “a sort of psychoanalysis machine,” as Mr. Turner writes; or it was “like a sentry post,” as he writes again. It struck an FDA inspector as “like a privy.” It struck Alfred Kazin as like a “telephone booth.” A woman raised by Reichians recalled the Accumulator looming like “a mute, Cyclopean sentinel.” When it came her turn to go inside, “She felt like Anne Frank, hiding from the Gestapo.” “It sometimes seems that all America is one big orgone box,” wrote Time Magazine. Woody Allen satirized it in Sleeper. He called it “The Orgasmatron.”

The Cabinet Accumulator struck The Observer as like a cabinet. “The guy who built it for me is called John Murphy,” said Mr. Turner. “He’s a professor at Pratt.” Initially a novelty, the Accumulator had since delved out a new role as a nuisance. Staffers had relocated it from the center of the room to a corner, which it shared with the office bathroom. The next day it would be gone—donated to a man who, unlike the magazine, possessed enough square footage to accommodate his sense of drollery.

The Accumulator gave The Observer a pain in our lumbar. We had to hunker to fit inside.

Was it undersized, we asked?

It was not.

The Observer and Mr. Turner talked.

“Shall I leave you in there a while?”

We agreed on ten minutes, and Mr. Turner disappeared.

William Burroughs “claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm” in the Accumulator. Saul Bellow claimed to have “cured a couple of warts." Others claimed to have remitted cancer. So we waited. We idled and twiddled. But our loins were unmoved. Our wart count was stable. Our tumors, such as they are, were undisturbed.

“Frankly, I always thought the box was kind of crap,” said Norman Mailer, whom Mr. Turner interviewed before he died.

Mailer also said, “I think in a basic sense Reich was right.”

The Observer looked through the chink in the Accumulator. On the wall opposite, an “Exit” sign shone above a door.

Only, the Exit sign read “Evil.”

An editor walked by, and we asked him about it.

“It’s art,” he said.

In the late 1980’s, two oncologists tested a chemotherapy drug called EPHO. One doctor’s patients did surprisingly well; three-quarters of them responded to treatment. But only one-quarter of the other doctor’s patients showed improvement. Why the disparity? The first doctor explained that he had rearranged the acronym EPHO to spell HOPE. Optimism, it would seem, is a potent drug.

The story of the two oncologists is not true; it’s a prevalent self-help myth. But if you fell for it, you’re not alone. When Anne Harrington, chair of history of science at Harvard, related this yarn to a large class of undergraduates, almost all her students accepted the idea that hope itself can heal. Ms. Harrington’s admirable new book, The Cure Within, digs up the roots of her students’ credulity. She gives us, as her subtitle promises, a history of mind-body medicine.

Without resorting to academic jargon, Ms. Harrington documents how religious doctrines have been “imperfectly secularized.” The early Christian belief that exorcism cures demonic possession gave way to mesmerism, which purports that specially trained physicians can harness magnetic fields to cleanse the body. In the late 19th century, psychoanalysis tried to elucidate puzzling diseases like hysteria and took Svengalis out of the equation. Metaphorical demons such as traumatic memories, Freud argued, manifest themselves physically. To achieve relief, patients must “speak aloud previously resisted or denied truths.”

In recent memory, Norman Vincent Peale’s midcentury best seller The Power of Positive Thinking drew upon the patient-empowerment idea advanced by psychoanalysis—illness originates from within and can be cured from within, too. Practices such as yoga and meditation, ever-present in crunchy communities from Park Slope to Portland, add an exotic Eastern inflection to the mind-over-body dogma.

Ms. Harrington’s historical overview is highly original, but her account of why the willpower approach to healing has such traction is rather less so. Lab-coat doctors, she maintains, don’t present a satisfying story: Bacteria cause infection, and antibiotics help the immune system defend itself; our enemies are malign but motiveless, and the sick are simply unlucky. Holistic medicine, on the other hand, offers a more tangible explanation: Stress leads to illness, and qigong paves the road to recovery. This is the stuff of Psych 101.

Facile psychology aside, The Cure Within is a bit too leveling for my taste. In Ms. Harrington’s account, neuropsychology and the fight-or-flight thesis carry the same weight as the so-called laughter cure or Christian Science or acupuncture. A well-documented study about the benefits of affection in foster care gets the same treatment as the dubious notion that Type-A behavior causes heart attacks.

In her conclusion, Ms. Harrington chides the Harvard students who wonder if “stories that flourish on the kooky alternative margins of society” should “be treated with the same respect as … impeccable laboratory research.” Presumably, her protégés grit their teeth and settle for detached historical inquiry. Readers, however, may feel irked that the million-dollar question—“does it work?”—is, for Anne Harrington, of secondary importance.

Juliet Lapidos is an editorial assistant at Slate. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

“Vienna,” the first of the two narrative essays that make up Marc Edmundson’s meditation on the late life and thought of Sigmund Freud, is a tale worthy of a libretto. On March 11, 1938, Neville Chamberlain informed the Austrian chancellor that the British would not intercede on Austria’s behalf to halt the invasion of Hitler’s army. Soon after the German army entered Austria unopposed the next morning, Sigmund Freud’s son Martin was at work destroying documentation of his father’s foreign financial holdings. The Nazis had declared it illegal for Jews to hold assets in foreign accounts—and with anti-Semitic violence already unleashed in the streets of Vienna, Martin knew better than to waste time.

If you want to know exactly how the drama plays out, read Mr. Edmundson’s book. (Here’s a preview: Nazi thugs bust in as if on cue, and Martin attempts to wriggle free by playing on the greed, stupidity and resentment appropriate to Nazi thugs.)

Cut to 11 days later. On the pretext of investigating the International Psychoanalytic Association for antifascist political activity, Gestapo officers arrive at the Freuds’ Vienna residence. They arrest Anna, Freud’s daughter and closest confidante, taking her into custody for interrogation. She returns home safely several days later; no one, including Anna, knows why the Gestapo released her unharmed. Mr. Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, is eager to speculate: Anna Freud, he writes, “was no doubt telling the most blandly respectable story she could about her father. … But she might also have been thinking more candidly about the bearing her father’s work actually had on the Nazis.”

She might have, of course. Mr. Edmundson’s narrative stands or falls on just this sort of imaginative leap: “My father, [Anna] might have thought … knows you far better than you know yourself. … He knows why you need the leader the way you do. He sees the God-shaped hole in your heart.”

In “Vienna,” forays like this into historical fiction, while sometimes melodramatic, complement the plot-driven narrative of Freud’s escape to England after the Anschluss. But once we reach “London,” the second half of The Death of Sigmund Freud, something goes wrong. Freud spends his last days in comparative tranquility, but Mr. Edmundson’s imagination continues to roam.

ON HIS ARRIVAL IN LONDON, THE 83-year-old Freud completed his last essay, Moses and Monotheism, in which he offered a psychoanalytic interpretation of the biblical story of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Moses, Freud suggested, was not a Jew but a member of the Egyptian aristocracy who followed the monotheistic cult of Aton. The Egyptians found the stringency and abstraction of monotheism insupportable, so Moses turned his religion on the enslaved Jews, leading them from Egypt into the desert. Like the Egyptians, the Jews found the strictures of monotheism unbearable, so rebelled by killing Moses and returning to polytheism. Finally, the Jews, sorry for having killed their leader, came to hold Moses’ memory sacred while gradually reverting to monotheism.

As Mr. Edmundson convincingly argues, Moses and Monotheism represented a new development in Freud’s thought about religion. In 1927 Freud had come out squarely against the value of religious belief in The Future of an Illusion, claiming that belief in an omnipotent God was a vestige of the infantile yearning for an omnipotent father. In Moses Freud appears to view monotheism as a step toward atheism—the gods became God, who himself, given the momentum of civilization, would dissolve into nature.

Freud’s Moses thesis—unorthodox, to say the least—had little evidence to support it, and reviewers dismissed it as an aberration. But Mr. Edmundson uses the issues of belief it raises as a way into the public discussion led by Christopher Hitchens, Mark Lilla and others over the fate of secular humanism. Like Mr. Hitchens, Mr. Edmundson views fundamentalism as a subset of totalitarianism; but unlike Mr. Hitchens, he doesn’t have the stomach to address the Big Issue head-on.

Enter Freud the surrogate: Explicating The Future of Illusion, Freud’s definitive rejection of religious belief, Mr. Edmundson writes that “religion [has not] become more comprehensively enlightened over time. In the twenty-first century a stranglingly intolerant version of faith is abroad not only throughout the Islamic world, but in the United States of America. Fundamentalist faiths have a number of identifying dimensions. … But most saliently, for Freud, there is the presence of the patriarchal god, looking down on his worshippers, issuing his harsh but luminous commands, and blessing his chosen ones above others.”

Here, as elsewhere in “London,” Mr. Edmundson’s ideas mingle unchastely with those of his subject. “London” could almost have done without Freud—but what would have been left?

Damian Da Costa is on the staff of The Observer.

But sometimes we meet a practical sociologist who is engaged in more alarming work: Walker Percy (Lost in the Cosmos), George W.S. Trow (Within the Context of No Context), Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae). They take a big bite of homo sapiens, with shreds of philosophy or art attached. Their tone of voice is bracing, but also a little angry, a little bullying, even a little nuts. They have reason to be hyper, because they are trying to explain what the hell is wrong with everything. My Life Among the Deathworks by Philip Rieff may be such another book.

Mr. Rieff has an academic résumé as long as your arm. Once upon a time, he was married to Susan Sontag (the book is dedicated to her). The author photo shows him wearing a derby and a pinstripe suit with a gray vest: not your usual C-SPAN Booknotes garb. His message is that Western man—what we used to call the Orient is not his concern—lives in three contending worlds, or cultures: pagan, Jewish/Christian and modern.

The first world is populated with ancient gods and godlets, though it’s ruled not by them, but by fate. “Fate teaches no moralities; nor does it teach immoralities. It is merely remorseless.” The second world is ruled by the God of Judaism and Christianity. Like any devout Jew, Mr. Rieff is leery of Christianity—maybe this Saul of Tarsus guy and his idol really started all our problems—though he gives high praise to certain Christian artifacts, and believers: “The Gulag Archipelago is the greatest book of remembrance, the greatest martyrology, ever written.” Mr. Rieff’s third world—producer alike of great art and a great many martyrs—is modernity.

The deathworks of Mr. Rieff’s title are masterpieces of third-world genius aimed at the second world: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (on the front cover); the philosophy of Nietzsche; the poetry of Wallace Stevens; the poetry (once called science) of Sigmund Freud. Mr. Rieff ranges widely, picking fights with everyone: Harold Bloom’s Book of J is dismissed as “fiction,” and John Paul II is chided for calling totalitarianism a “substitute religion” when it really opposes “all sacred orders” (you have to like a man who lectures the Pope on his job).

Mr. Rieff’s most audacious claim is that Hitler was “a great third world artist,” because he attempted a “clean sweep”—not only against second-world ideas and morals, but against a whole chosen people. Mr. Rieff returns to the Nazis again and again: “Remark the cut of the German uniform in the Nazi time. No more erotic uniform has ever been created.” Nazis made common cause with various Christians, even as modern artists borrow pagan props, like Picasso’s masks, but in neither case do they really mean it. The third world is liberated from both faith and fate. In it, men must make themselves. All too often, this involves unmaking Jews.

Mr. Rieff’s counterideal is that we should know where we are. We can only know this if we place ourselves in a sacred order superintended by the Almighty. This gives us both a local habitation and a name. God’s separateness guarantees our identity.

This is certainly unexpected, considering the source. Flip through the academic press ads in the New York Review of Books; you won’t find many that say this. There are several reasons, though, why My Life Among the Deathworks might not make a splash.

Mr. Rieff admits that he has little to say of Islam, because it has “scarcely more than started up in America.” Oops. Islamists have been making a mark far out of proportion to their numbers, from the Iranian who drove a Jeep Cherokee through a crowd at the University of North Carolina this month to 9/11. Are they legitimate defenders of a second-world culture, as they believe? Or are they, as Paul Berman argues, a demented modernist riff, owing as much to fascism as to Islam? This, one of the big questions for the rest of our lives, is outside Mr. Rieff’s purview.

Curious readers will have to contend with Mr. Rieff’s prose. Most of it is like chewing ball bearings; every once in a while, there is a cherry. Marching through this book, I considered the possibility that the jawbreakers were deliberate, an ironic invitation to Mr. Rieff’s fellow academics: I am as dense as Heidegger—read me. I could only finish the book by murmuring it aloud; I haven’t done that since See Spot Run.

Mr. Rieff won’t play well on Hannity and Colmes because he has no program, no action items, no plan to save America. We live in all three of his worlds simultaneously, and we can’t disentangle ourselves from any of them. The war against Hitler, Freud and their friends “cannot be won,” Mr. Rieff explains. “But it can be lost.” His best hope is to hold off defeat by showing people what they are up against, in the ads they see, in the TV they watch and in their own minds. Even “the current debate over curriculum in the university [is] pointless; you can only offer [kids] whatever they want, a smattering of everything/nothing.”

There is ample precedent in second-world religion for such quietism. For centuries, Jews had to make the best of ghetto and shtetl. Hermits sat on pillars, nuns took the veil, Quakers would not fight or swear. But the sacred orders that Mr. Rieff honors were also orders of this world. We are supposed to do a variety of concrete things—help the poor, spurn graven images. Judaism and Christianity have also thrown up a variety of political leaders, from Abraham to George W. Bush. Some of them were monsters or nuts. But if any of them weren’t, maybe we are obliged to go and do likewise.

Writing is an unkillable impulse. It is like second sight or a blood disease, a gift or a state beyond our control. Writing is older than writing, as the songs and stories of the illiterate attest, and will go on, in whatever should be the prevailing technology, as long as intelligence thinks in language. But the book, the bound collection of written or printed pages that has been the main vessel of writing for 1,500 years, may be on its last legs. So those who tout the e-book tell us.

Sony will be releasing an e-book in Japan in April. Sony promises, rather opaquely, that it will be “half” the size of a paperback book (which paperback—Atlas Shrugged, or The Prophet?), and that it will have memory capable of storing 20 books (same question). Sony is more definite about the price—$375—and claims to offer “a level of text clarity comparable to paper.” In other words, reading it won’t be like staring at a sidewalk A.T.M. in the blizzard of ’06.

This is an experiment; what better guinea pigs than the people who brought us manga? If it takes off, the price will drop and memory will balloon. The model for Sony and other potential e-bookmakers is the iPod, which, with computer downloading, has blasted away at the CD, even as CD’s and tapes overthrew the once-mighty record. Will the e-book take off?

New information technologies supplant old ones when they prevail in four areas: size, use, storage and purchase. The traditional book more than holds its own in the first two.

Books have already found the optimal size. “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket,” John Adams told one of his sons—and that was two centuries ago, long before paperbacks. Big books push the limit; some readers of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy razored the tome into eight or 10 more portable sections. But one reason the book has had such a long run is that most books fit the hand.

Books also optimize the user’s experience. Computers allow us to mix and match the musical tracks we like, bringing us all into the paradise envisioned by wacky Glenn Gould, holed up in his studio, playing with his recorded takes and sampling a few bars of this and a few of that to create the perfect performance. Now anyone can do the same to his version of the Goldberg Variations, playing only the even-numbered pieces, or playing the whole thing backward. But books have always allowed readers to do this; their technological breakthrough, centuries before computing or even electricity, was the page. The page allows you to read over and over, to skip ahead or flip back, with no more effort than the flick of a finger. Even a Dark Ages chieftain might have felt awkward asking his bard to stop and recite the bit about Grendel’s mother again, but readers have been making comparable choices for ages.

When we come to storage and purchase, the e-book starts to make up ground. Sony’s e-book will store 20 books. I probably give away 20 books a month, what with reviewer’s copies and other freebies. But suppose all your “books” were on some master e-file, which your e-book could summon; and suppose, when you wished to buy new ones, you clicked onto the Amazon of the future and got a direct e-mail delivery. You would still have to pay for your “books,” or at least I hope you would; as an author, I depend on the self-interest of publishers to see to it that, pace the techno-zealots, my information will never want to be free. What we could very well be free from is bulk. Our shelves will be empty, and we will suck information and diversion from a disembodied pixel teat.

In sum, the e-book loses, or at best ties, any one-on-one competition with an existing traditional book. But when books are considered en masse, in libraries or even in multi-volume sets—encyclopedias, legal codes, the standard edition of Sigmund Freud, the complete Harry Potter—the e-book begins to look like a future that will happen, because it serves a need.

What would we lose in that future? The nature of browsing will change. E-browsing follows links, which, heaven knows, can be wacky enough: Put something like “Freemasonry” in your search engine and see what agendas, malice and general human craziness will produce. But those fortuitous discoveries that depended upon the alphabet-finding “bobolinks” on the way to “Bohemia”—or even wispier coincidences—will go the way of all paper. We may also miss the physical book as prompt and goad: Their spines, looking down at us, remind us of what we once read, or urge us to stop playing solitaire and plunge in. I have been having a struggle with The Egoist for 10 years. It sits in a conspicuous place, from which I have taken it twice, and given up both times after a hundred pages. One day, though, it will force me to prevail.

This is the affection we lavish on artifacts, even though we know that they are fleeting. Remember the LP, with its cover art and its liner notes? H.L. Mencken and Friedrich Nietzsche would have been brilliant writers of liner notes, had they only been born in the right century. But before LP’s, there was piano sheet music. I have from my mother, who had it from hers, a mournful dirge, “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere,” sung, as the cover tells me, by the ladies of the Euterpean Quartet at the funeral of “our martyred president,” William McKinley. The ladies are pictured: One wears a pince-nez like Teddy Roosevelt; another is quite lovely. They are all as gone now as McKinley.

McKinley was shot in 1901, only a chapter ago in the history of the book. I hope, without total confidence, that there are many more chapters still to come.

Reclaiming narcissism as a good thing might seem an odd cause célèbre , but that's the very restoration project that psychologist and business guru Michael Maccoby has taken up in his latest book. As Mr. Maccoby sees it, in the three years since the boom lowered on the bubble and once-admired CEO's like Steve Case, Bernie Ebbers, Jean-Marie Messier, Martha Stewart and Jack Welch all fell to earth, the business press, Wall Street and, significantly, other business theorists like Jim Collins (author of Good to Great ) have learned the wrong lesson from the crash and scandals: that the failings of these high-flying, iconic and, yes, narcissistic CEO's only prove that we don't need self-styled visionaries running things.

"The lack of understanding of narcissistic leaders has already led to a backlash, a pendulum swing to conservative, value-based, bottom-line CEOs," Mr. Maccoby writes. He allows that these more self-effacing, weekends-spent-puttering-in-the-family-garage execs have their place. They're ideally suited to run a retail empire such as Walgreens or Circuit City. But when it comes to the kinds of rapidly changing high-tech and entertainment enterprises The New York Times calls the "information industries," he insists you want a narcissist at the helm.

"In the 80's and 90's, a whole school of leadership thought emerged that can be summed up by Daniel Goleman's concept of 'emotional intelligence,'" Mr. Maccoby says. "This leadership theory … equates successful leadership with empathy, listening to others, sensitivity to feelings, anger and impulse control, and working through consensus. This is the business equivalent of wishful thinking-I've found that it may make for a nicer place to work, but emotional intelligence does not guarantee success." What does-and this is the meat of his book-is narcissism coupled with what Mr. Maccoby calls "strategic intelligence," a set of skills that keeps the obnoxious aspects of narcissism in check.

From the get-go, Mr. Maccoby is careful not to appear an apologist for self-absorbed prigs. Aware that the colloquial use of narcissism evokes a negative stereotype, he swoops to the semantic rescue.

"If you're like most people, you think a narcissist is a vain, self-centered egomaniac. But this is a description of behavior-and most likely, bad behavior-rather than portrait of a personality type …. A true narcissist is the kind of person who (1) doesn't listen to anyone else when he believes in doing something and (2) has a precise vision of how things should be. A narcissist possesses this dual combination of traits, not one or the other; plenty of people who aren't narcissists never listen to anyone else (they are negativistic, closed-minded or arrogant), and plenty of people have an idea of how things should be (they are often just know-it-alls or big-talkers). It is the combination of a rejection of the status quo, along with a compelling vision, that defines the narcissist."

As a term, narcissism dates to 1908; it was first used by Sigmund Freud, who took it from the first-century poem by Ovid, found in Metamorphoses , about a boy, Narcissus, who stares at his own reflection in a pond until he drowns. The myth of self-destruction, Mr. Maccoby notes, has long eclipsed Freud's later, more subtle definition of narcissism as one of three "Libidinal" types: the erotic (seeks love above all), obsessive (upholds ideals-a.k.a. totally anal) and narcissistic (fulfills himself). Mr. Maccoby's broader agenda with The Productive Narcissist is to promote recognizing and managing relationships based on these types-along with a fourth, Erich Fromm's "marketing personality," which describes those who readily adapt to new circumstances.

Mr. Maccoby has always liked categories. In a previous best-seller, The Gamesman, 1976, he delineated four: the Craftsman, the Organizational Man, the Jungle Fighter and the Gamesman. (The representative gamesman of the title, Richard Hackborn, later recruited Carly Fiorina to Hewlett-Packard). But Mr. Maccoby confesses that he, too, succumbed to the vogue in emotional intelligence and leaders-as-facilitators, and now it's really Freud's and Fromm's categories you ought to master. He even includes a personality questionnaire at the end of Chapter 1 so readers can take a little journey of self-discovery. "The best way to illustrate to clients that personality type actually exists," he explains, "is for them to determine their own personality type."

(Full disclosure: your reviewer scored as a Narcissist-Marketing, which, naturally, is a walking contradiction. By nature and nurture, the marketing type tries to get along, while the narcissist does it his way. The weaknesses of the marketing personality proved an especially harsh toke: "No center, no inner core that directs them. No lasting commitments to their work or to people. Anxiety hangs over them. Pervasive anxiety turns into depression." Might as well dial up some Xanax now.)

No doubt some will find these categories immensely useful; at the same time, personality types such as Obsessive-Erotic suggest a scary personals ad. There's also an echo of the Vanity Fair horoscope here, as Mr. Maccoby does his best to cite individuals who embody the various personality types he describes. Narcissistic-Erotic? Oprah Winfrey. Narcissistic-Obsessive? Jack Welch, sure, but also Larry Ellison. Narcissistic-Marketing? (Hey, that's like me!) Jan Carlzon, the former CEO of Scandinavia Airlines.

Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Craig McCaw? Narcissists all. Also: Napoleon Bonaparte, F.D.R. and Mohandas Gandhi.

Much of The Productive Narcissist reads like it began life as a speech or two. Since in speechwriting, the rule is to say what you're going to say, say it, then sum up by saying what you just said, Mr. Maccoby repeats himself. Like any good consultant, he also never misses a chance to interject something about his 30 years' experience or his former illustrious client So-and-So.

Ignore the usual self-help business foibles and the ever-dubious use of personality surveys, and you may find that The Productive Narcissist delivers some useful insights, especially if you have a narcissist boss. Or if you happen to be one yourself (ever suffer from paranoia, overcompetitiveness, isolation, grandiosity?).

Michael Maccoby will never recruit an army to defend narcissism as a virtue, but he's convincing when he agues that for many firms, it's a mistake to hire a do-it-as-it's-always-been-done-only-cheaper obsessive: A narcissist is the right egomaniac for the job.

Brad Wieners is a columnist for Business 2.0 and correspondent for Outside. He lives in New York.

It was in the late 40's that Kafka began to be assigned reading in certain college classes, and by the 50's the term "Kafkaesque" was commonplace among people who had never read a line by Kafka himself; they had just picked up on what people were saying about Kafka and his work. There had developed a kind of Kafka cult that looked upon his vision of the modern world-or what was said to be his vision: an Existentialist vision-as a key to life itself. If you went to a party in Greenwich Village in those days, you were certain to hear some argument about the latest article on Kafka in Partisan Review or the book pages of the liberal weeklies.

Kafka is still read, of course. It's even likely that more people read Kafka today than ever before. But the Kafka cult is long gone. Kafka is now too respectable-an established modern classic-to be the object of a cult. In any case, the kind of people who used to argue about Kafka at parties are now more likely to be heard talking about movies, television or something that caught their attention on the Internet. Something that can be looked at, sat through or listened to, not just read in a book in a room by oneself.

This being the case, it was probably inevitable that someone, somewhere, would sooner or later undertake to update Kafka by making him the subject of-what else?-a multimedia "environment." This is what has now come to the Jewish Museum, in a show called The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague , a sort of nightmare entertainment that aspires to take us inside the mind of the writer and backward in time to the Prague of his day-or rather the Prague of his nights. The City of K. is, with one exception, a very nocturnal environment: The walls of the first-floor galleries at the Jewish Museum are painted dark green, and the light levels are minimal; the single exception is a bright white space in which we are treated to the creations of what is called "a mirage-making machine," which consists of blurry film images accompanied by spooky sound effects.

In fact, The City of K. isn't a single environment, but a succession of thematic environments designed to retrace the sorrows and suffering-both real and imagined-that marked the course of Kafka's life in Prague and determined the style and content of his writings. These environments are crammed with things to look at: photographs, film clips, documents and manuscripts. They're also studded with things to read, mainly quotations from Kafka's writings translated into English. These are accompanied by a whole repertory of freaky, ominous sounds, and staged with special props that are lurid and abundant enough to furnish a couple of big-time Broadway thrillers.

There is even an elaborate maze for us to walk through so that we may have some inkling of the kind of penal colony that is the subject of a Kafka short story. Did Kafka also have a phobia about bureaucratic office work? Threatening, overscale metal filing cabinets illustrate this fear-only here the open file drawers feature illuminated passages from his writings.

This succession of gloomy environments is divided into two parts, opening with "Kafka in Prague: Existential Space," and closing with "Prague in Kafka: Imaginary Topography," which is nothing if not imaginative. Each of these is divided into sub-subsections, with titles like "The Primal Scene" and "The Constantly Postponed Marriages" in the first part, and "The Endless Office" and "In the Penal Colony" in the second. The elaborate catalog accompanying the show explores many of these themes in greater detail, with essays on "Prague as a Literary City," "Prague, Kafka, and Judaism" and "Space and Time in Kafkaesque Architecture," among others. The catalog, too, is illustrated with abundant photographs and quotations.

Oddly enough, The City of K. comes to us not from Prague itself, but from Barcelona, Spain. It was organized and designed by Juan Insua for the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona as part of a cycle of exhibitions called Cities and Their Writers . It's all brilliantly conceived and effectively produced. And yet, for all of its brilliance and its undeniable devotion to its subject, I think The City of K. is a terrible thing to do to a great writer: The show inevitably vulgarizes and simplifies the literary achievement it has been designed to celebrate. It crushes every nuance in the writings under the weight of a highly melodramatic audiovisual fiction. Everything that's left unsaid in Kafka's writings, everything that's implied but not spelled out, is transformed into a multimedia stunt. And all the humor, too-for there's plenty of macabre humor in Kafka-is gone.

As a result, this well-intended effort at exploring the mind of Franz Kafka is likely to be of more interest to people who haven't read his work than to those who have. The real horror of it all-call it Kafkaesque, if you like-is that many innocent visitors to this exhibition will leave with the impression that they know everything there is to know about this spooky character and his strange writings.

The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague remains on view at the Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, through Jan. 5, 2003.

Granger goes grunge? Here's how it works this office-party season: People are still having parties, but the way to do it is sort of quietly and abashedly, a not-a-party party, which always results in some interesting fashion choices. In other words, fancy New York companies are now having office parties that resemble office parties in Dayton, Ohio …. Tonight it's Esquire magazine's Christmas shindig , held under the flattering fluorescent lights of the magazine's offices, with editor in chief David Granger "dressing down" in recession-appropriate flannel and senior editor A.J. Jacobs trying to liven things up in his trademark tight red velveteen trousers. Meanwhile, a mere block south, Entertainment Weekly scales back its holiday party-which used to be an extravagant-buffet, gyrating-under-the-disco-ball, interns-mashing-lips-in-the-corner kind of affair -to what the invitation says is an "intimate event" in an "upscale bar." Suggested dress is "casual chic"-we don't even want to try and interpret that …. (P.S.: How to tell if you've stayed too late at the office bash: If you find yourself doing karaoke in Koreatown, you've stayed too late.)

[Esquire party, 250 West 55th Street, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 649-4020; Entertainment Weekly party, Light, 125 East 54th Street, 6:30 p.m., by invitation only, 522-5457.]

Thursday 20th

Who's the coolest theater of them all? For years, the city's "cool" movie experience has been the Angelika , with its long lines of uptowners trying to look downtown by wearing clever little eyeglasses and gripping black satchels and unread copies of Henry Miller and trying very hard not to smile or show any pleasure …. Now the Angelika gets a rival , as the newly renovated Sunshine Cinema (formerly a Yiddish vaudeville house) opens tomorrow a few blocks east, with "art" flicks and perks such as stadium seating and honey-mustard wrap sandwiches and-in a telltale sign that the owners hail from L.A.- a Japanese rock garden. Tonight there's an opening party for super-deluxe film snobs, with cocktails and a screening of the Miramax movie Behind the Sun (traveling circus performers hit the Brazilian badlands-does Miramax have a computer program that churns these things out?).

[143 East Houston Street, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 869-6702.]

Friday 21st

New Age agonistes antiwar activists and perhaps a Self editor or two don shawls , light candles and slap that winter solstice into submission at urban shaman Donna Henes' drumming ceremony in downtown Manhattan. "I'm asking people to look bright, you know," said Ms. Henes, "because the whole idea is that the light has to come from within us, and that we will sort of pledge to partner with the sun. I have a ritual outfit that has a lot of Day-Glo orange in it, comprised of several multicultural layers. You can bring any kind of instrument or soundmaker; the idea has nothing to do with being a good drummer ." Buddy Rich, eat your heart out! Exact location to be determined; she's still working it out with the authorities.

[1:30 p.m., Bowling Green Park, solstice occurs at 2:21 p.m., 718-857-2247.]

Saturday 22nd

Shrinks analyze Sopranos ! There's a big psychoanalysis symposium taking place at the Waldorf , and they've planned a Sopranos gabfest-which will surely consist of much harrumphing about what a terrible therapist Dr. Melfi is-but, alas, it's not open to the public …. Here's your consolation prize: New York Times reporter Sarah Boxer talks about her new book, In the Floyd Archives: A Psycho-Bestiary , at a "Writers and Psychoanalysts" panel with Sigmund Freud Archives director Harold P. Blum. Ms. Boxer, a Harvard grad in philosophy, first encountered Freud at age 15. "My dad is a Freud fan and he has a big shelf, and I liked the title The Ego and the Id and I just started reading it," she said. Her book is a cartoon novel that follows the analysis of four animals: Bunnyman the rabbit, Ratman the rat, Wolfman the wolf and little Lambskin -what, no Pooh bear ? Perhaps one of the shrinks can confirm our suspicion that the annoyingly balmy weather we've been having this December is making everyone bonkers …

[Waldorf-Astoria, 301 Park Avenue, 9 a.m., 752-0450.]

Sunday 23rd

The millennial boyfriend is like Jekyll and Hyde, isn't he? Sipping green tea and prancing off to yoga in the morning, then chugging beer and sitting slack-jawed in front of the football game in the afternoon. Somehow this isn't what we bargained for, is it, ladies? Maybe that's why so many women seem to fall for "mutts" (male sluts ). You know the type: jazz-cat piano players, weedy short-story writers - men who are sleazy, but who seem to get points for being "charming" because they're still a bargain compared with ambisexual, "nervous" Yale men ….

[Giants play Seattle, 1 p.m., FOX.]

Monday 24th

Goy to the world! It's Christmas Eve , and if you want carols, choruses, motets and Masses , New York's got 'em! Unless you're Jewish, in which case you might choose the two-drink minimum, $15 cover, fried mozzarella sticks and yuks of the "A Very Jewish Christmas" show at the Gotham Comedy Club. Upper West Side comic Lenny Marcus , a former computer programmer who's appeared in commercials for the Marriott and Wendy's, is getting 15 minutes! We asked him for a joke. "No. No. That's like going up to a dentist and saying, 'Come on, fill my tooth,'" said Mr. Marcus. It looks to be a looong night ….

[34 West 22nd Street, 7 and 9:30 p.m., 367-9000.]

Tuesday 25th

Proulx is in the pudding: It's Christmas, and for months upscale New Yorkers have been claiming it's going to be a "meaningful, non-materialistic" day …. Which means they'll still spend a bundle, but quietly: "comfort food" (truffled mashed potatoes), "simple gifts" ($80 candles), "dressing down" ($125 designer jeans) …. Meanwhile, non-Christians head to the city's movie houses, perhaps to see the cinematic version of Annie Proulx's The Shipping News , with Kevin Spacey , Julianne Moore , Dame Judi Dench and future Dame Cate Blanchett -hel- lo, Oscar! …. See the film, so you can finally pretend with conviction that you really did read the book.

[777-FILM.]

Wednesday 26th

Why is it that British people- who, we assure you, can cook nothing except leg of mutton and are not exactly known for their "legs" in bed-are suddenly trying to be sex symbols and celeb-chefs all at once? See under Oliver, Jamie ( The Naked Chef ), and now meet luscious temptress Nigella Lawson , whose TV show will be here any day now and from whose book, How to Be A Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking , we offer the following bonus dirty excerpt -but only because it's Boxing Day, that English holiday in which your Brit-expat pals in New York invite you over to celebrate their "charming" holiday and somehow you end up paying for all the food and drinks. Writes Ms. Lawson, "[W]e don't want to feel like a postmodern, postfeminist, overstretched woman, but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake." Bring air freshener ….

Thursday 27th

Still-and Stiller: Contrary to twee actor Ben Stiller, who has been getting way too much attention lately (though we love his dad), director Mauritz Stiller (no relation-we think ) is mainly remembered as a) the man who launched Greta Garbo and b) "the Swede who didn't make it in Hollywood." But that's about to change, baby …. Today, that other Angelika alternative-the Museum of Modern Art -begins a fortnight's festival of Stiller films that includes such early-20th-century gems as Vingarne ( homoerotic tale about a sculptor ) and Erotikon (another sculptor, this time tormented that his lover might have been unfaithful, though he doesn't care that she has a husband). There will be live simultaneous translation and piano accompaniment , lending a sort of ragtime feeling to the proceedings. Bring your own flat breads.

[11 West 53rd Street, 2:30 p.m., 708-9400.]

Friday 28th

White glove whiteout? If you ask us, a passel of curtseying debutantes in satin dresses on the Upper East Side is precisely what New York needs right now, but alas-and alack !-the organizers of the International Debutante Ball have decided to get Ball-sy only in even years, kind of like the Olympics. (And hey, aren't those supposed to start soon? Where's our memo?) Another thing New York needs right now is "modernized" Shakespeare, right? Right ? Which brings us to Midnight Brainwash Revival , a play by Kirk Wood Bromley on the Lower East Side. "Think Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, but totally modernized, goofy and Simpsons -esque," said the playwright. "It's just kind of this big, rollicking comedy that culminates in a bomb plot. I write in verse, but it's not like 'thee' and 'thou' or 'my lord' and stuff … it's more like modern poetry or rap . I call it more 'downtown' than 'avant-garde.'" My lord.

[Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, 107 Suffolk Street, 8 p.m., 501-4528.]

Saturday 29th

Weekend with the kids? Put absolutely everybody in dashikis and head to the good ole American Museum of Natural History, which is having a big Kwanzaa celebration: gospel choirs, mimes, and the Hall of Ocean Life transformed into a bustling African marketplace filled with pottery, textiles and ( Bill Clinton alert ) special snacks.

[Central Park West at West 79th Street, noon, 769-6100.]

Sunday 30th

Baby Chaka? Who says we know absolutely nothing about the "music scene"? … Meet Sandra St. Victor , who has worked with three of our all-time favorite performers: Chaka Khan, Prince and Daryl Hall (of Hall & Oates). After a little trouble with Warner Brothers over her first album, Mack Diva Saves the World , she's going it alone on her new one, Gemini: Both Sides . She sings songs from both tonight at Joe's Pub. "They want you to fit into this niche," she said, "and I have so much music in me that I always felt kind of stifled, like 'Oh, dear.' So what I decided, my perspective could be dark and introspective or light and peaceful, and I just decided to pick up those two sides of my Gemini personality. Chaka was like my sister and my mother and my friend all at the same time , my teacher and my mentor; she really took me under her wing and cared about me. Prince , of course, I respect him immensely. Well, he's a genius-he's a strange little fellow, isn't he, but he's brilliant." Sort of like George Stephanopoulous ….

[425 Lafayette Street, 8:30 p.m., 539-8778.]

Monday 31st

We dropped a dime to our "sources" about all the swish New Year's Eve parties this year, and it doesn't look good, honey … but let's just take this opportunity to observe how many New Yorkers like to host something called a "pre-party." No one actually wants to suck it up and have a real, honest-to-goodness New Year's Eve party! So what you hear is, "We're just having a few people over; people are just stopping by on their way to New Year's Eve parties." Our theory: There are no later parties … and the hosts of the "pre-parties" get the credit for hosting an evening without having to pony up for any real food or quality champagne, all of which will be served at the aforementioned, nonexistent "real" party …. Got that?

Tuesday 1st

What's less enticing when you're hung over : a mad dash to the greasiest diner you can find for salty food and two milkshakes-or facing down a room of spoken-word poets? This year you have two rooms of poets from which to choose: the Poetry Project's Marathon Reading at St. Mark's Church , with "downtown personalities" such as Penny Arcade and Patti Smith and lots of people with proudly unwashed hair under plain black ski caps , and the Spoken Word–Performance Extravaganza at the Knitting Factory, with even more "downtown" types, such as the poet Sparrow. On the plus side, the Extravaganza is sponsoring a canned-food drive for City Harvest; on the minus, there's an open mike- yikes ! Stay home and pull the covers over your head. But stay away from MTV or VH1; their new crop of V.J.'s is unbearable ….

[Poetry Project, St. Mark's Church, 10th Street and Second Avenue, 2 p.m., 674-0910; Spoken Word–Performance Extravaganza, Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard Street, 4 p.m., 219-3006.]

Wednesday 2nd

Sayonara, sugarplums! This is how you know the lean, tough New Year is really here: The New York City Ballet kicks out The Nutcracker -and not a moment too soon, we might add.

[20 Lincoln Plaza, 8 p.m., 870-5570.]