The word perversion in Lewis's entry (below) interests me. From one point
of view a perversion is a "turn" (vertere) or trope. This would put an
a different, or at least an additional, spin on Lewis's comment.
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> At 1:43 PM -0400 6/30/04, David Wilson-Okamura wrote:
> >At 08:14 AM 6/30/2004 -0400, D. L. Miller wrote:
> >>As for Lewis's knowledge of Freud, Ken Gross suggested to me yesterday in a
> >>phone conversation that Lewis may not only have been reading Freud, but also
> >>conversing with one or another analyst at Cambridge.
>
> Not that it matters for this discussion, but Lewis didn't move from Oxford to Cambridge until 1954.
>
> >This sounds promising. I'm not sure there's anything in Pilgrim's Regress
> >that he couldn't have picked up from conversation, or from tertiary sources
> >like TLS.
>
> From Lewis's published diary entry for 3 June, 1922 (_All My Road Before Me_, ed. Hooper):
>
> "I also looked into a copy of Freud's _Introductory Letters_ which lay among the new books [at the Union library]: got quite a new point of view about perversion wh. has stuck in my head: i.e. that it is always the substitution of some minor detail for the act itself. Query -- from the comparatively naturalistic point of view, is all human love, as opposed to mere appetite, one huge perversion? . . . Took Havelock Ellis's _World of Dreams_ from the Union and returned home.
> In the garden after lunch I read Spenser -- the beautiful canto about Phaedria."
>
> Interesting that he "looked into" Freud (and I assume he means _Introductory Lectures_, not _Letters_), but took home the English writer Havelock Ellis. I know next to nothing about Ellis, but what little I've heard suggests that he, too, could be a source for the various variants of the love of looking under discussion here. Lewis also has diary entries in 1922-23 indicating he was an avid reader of Lytton Strachey, who of course translated Freud. As David W-O pointed, out, this stuff was all new and current and in the TLS and elswhere when Lewis was a young scholar.
>
> Also interesting that he picks up and reads the Phaedria canto immediately after contemplating perversion as substitution.
> --
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> Craig A. Berry
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>
> "... getting out of a sonnet is much more
> difficult than getting in."
> Brad Leithauser
>
>
>
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