Siggie Freud is known for a lot of things, which shan't detain us here.
[Funniest Freud thing I ever read was a play called “Le Visiteur” by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, set in 1938 Vienna. The Nazis are there, Anna's trying to get dad to London and someone turns up plausibly claiming to be God, wanting psychoanalysis because he's depressed about the coming 6 years... Check it out! But I digress]
Am just reading about him and the possible organic base for the “ego-defence mechanisms” in “Phantoms in the Brain”, a top notch popular science book by a journalist Sandra Blakeslee and an absurdly astute neuroscientist called V.S. Ramachandran. But I digress again.
One Freudian insight most people like is the “slips of the tongue” thing. It's technically known as parapraxis-
"A minor error, such as a slip of the tongue, thought to reveal a repressed motive."
Well, my favourite read, the FT, has lines worth reading between. And parapraxis.
In “California scheming”- an article on infotech/clean tech and the idea of a “smart grid” there is the following admission.
"While it prides itself on a brand of hypercapitalism defined by the self-reliance of its entrepreneurs and the almost constant state of creative destruction in which they work, the Valley has long been a big beneficiary of government largesse. From the defence build-up that helped to create the semiconductor industry to the birth of the internet (itself initially a project of the Pentagon), much of the research and early contracts for new technologies has been funded by the taxpayer."
This of course will come as No Surprise to anyone who knows the concept of Military Keynesianism. Noam Chomsky is extremely strong on this stuff. See here for a review of a good book about him, that has a quote about MK.
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