The Joy of Freud

Freud may have been the sophist of the last century: as the winner of a Frankfurt Goethe prize (1930), his rhetoric merits attention in the original German.

One delight is the opening of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The term "Spannung" is interwoven with walking, running, falling. Today it may be hard to capture how this may have delighted some female readers in its day.  The term, of course, covers both 'tension' and 'voltage'. The "Spann" is intimate to the exposed ankle.

Only a few decades ago, Canada's Eli Mandel was trumpeting the family triangle.  Today I prefer Gruenbein's Im Zweieck, the two-cornered polygon which escaped Escher.