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By Love Redeemed:
A Fantasy on “God and Freud”
- Abstract
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to Freud my soul to keep. And if I dream-ah, that’s the ticket, I pray that it be really wicked. And if, perchance, I wake depressed, Thank Freud, I know what I’ve repressed.
“And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be also read in the church of the Laodiceans.”
“SAID a California clergyman, his back to an office window that framed a lovely palm tree: ‘What may have been sin, we would now consider an illness that the man had no responsibility for.”‘
I see him, the clergyman, sitting in a comfortable office and looking like a junior executive. A lovely palm tree is silhouetted against the sky in back of him; the surf of Santa Monica pounds against the Pacific Palisades. He looks before him and his serene gaze comes to rest on a billboard of the Forest Lawn marriage and mortuary factory. It reads: WHERE LOVE LIVES IN BEAUTY, and shows a simple chapel-a “wee kirk,” as we like to say-in a lush, arborean setting with a young couple (just married) prancing, in Fred Astaire style, through the Elysian fields of Disneyland. That’s devotion, the clergyman nods, remembering another poster catering to this noble sentiment. It shows a giant torso of Michelangelo’s David, rather nude, and bears the simple inscription: DEVOTION. If the clergyman is a rabbi, he may think of the classic contribution to the theme of love and death erected by the Sinai Memorial Foundation. It features the head of Michelangelo’s Moses and spreads the good word of FOREVERNESS. That’s it:togetherness in foreverness, within-ness in without-ness. Having worked himself into this devotional state, the clergyman nods again, blinks-smog gets into one’s eyes-and starts musing about “God and Freud.” A mighty fortress is our Freud.
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