On Loving and Hating; on Art and Neuroscience and on wisdom: An interview with Eric Kandel
Eric Kandel articulates the binding dilemma of Vienna, echoing Peter Gay’s memoir, entitled, “My German Problem.”
Kandel begins: “I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 — the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind that we now hold was born. It was like a second Renaissance in Western culture. Austria was simply wonderful in this period. It was perhaps its greatest hour.”
Then continues:
“I have on the one hand a hatred and on the other a yearning for Vienna. I left when I was nine years old because I was Jewish. And even before 1938, the anti-Semitism in Austria was probably deeper than it was in Germany or in other European countries. Then Hitler came in and Austrians welcomed him with open arms. The marching in of the Germans was accompanied by an unprecedented outbreak of violence toward Jews. The Austrians accomplished in a few days what took the Germans six years to do. Austrians also participated disproportionately in the killings of the Holocaust. They loved to run concentration camps.”
Love and hate, what Freud taught.
Here is more and also the link to the review by Barry and Kupferman,
our mother-daughter/psychoanalyst-neuroscientist pair:
Click Here to Read This Article
Nathan M. Szajnberg, MD, Managing Editor
Click Here to Read: Kandel Illuminates Art and Mind: Book Review by Barry and Kupferman on this website.