This is getting good. We’re 5th 3rd 1st on Google for ‘Freud Rubbish’ and 2nd for ‘Rubbish Freud’. Helen will be pleased.
Competition winner : Stevie
I judged Helen’s Freud competition and Stevie won it with this strip cartoon featuring Freud obtusely mishearing a patient (on a couch) and an excellent cod-analysis of the Winnie-the-Pooh story that declared Piglet’s slip down a rabbit hole was, of course, a Freudian slip. I missed Stevie at the leaving bash for Helen’s class so well done, Stevie.
Zoë came second, with a slightly implausible claim that Eeyore had a crush on Piglet and Helen won the best teacher award from the leaving 6th-formers (she was secretly chuffed).
One year, a student (Kirsty) came up with the notion that Christopher Robin had been sexually abused and had retreated into a fantasy world populated with stuffed animals who represented adults. Just as plausible as anything Freud ever suggested, of course. She won the comp that year and is now trying to be a Clinical Psychologist.
Crews : The Pooh Perplex
I think the idea of using a Winnie-the-Pooh story for the competition comes from The Pooh Perplex, by Frederick C. Crews, first published in 1964. Crews adopts the personas of a number of critics from differing theoretical approaches to review Pooh and spoof literary theory. If you’ve ever had to read Leavis or Lyotard or Baudriallard or Kristeva or (uurgh!) Derrida there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it.
As the Marxist critic, Martin Tempralis, Crews writes:
It is hardly fortuitous that all the chief actors are property owners with no apparent necessity to work; that they are supplied as if by miracle with endless supplies of honey, condensed milk, balloons, popguns, and extract of malt
And as himself, Crews has said:
[what critics] discover in a standard work is usually a defect of consciousness that they had posited from the outset - most often some form of compliance with [a political ideology], racism, sexism, homo-phobia, or environmental rapacity.
Here’s a brief extract from the Amazon reviews:
This is a brilliant send-up of the pretentious critiques that has masqueraded as literary criticism
Absolutely convincing, and a breath of fresh air. You will love it - unless you are one of the poseurs, of course
An hilarious parody of intellectual analyses
