Painting Fakes

So, in honour of the Gas-Fired Recovery (TM) and the Technology Roadmap (TM) I have included the Minister for Energy and (ensuring there is no) Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor in my latest Dear Scomo letter. My source of hope (and don't we all need hope?) is that the federal Liberal and National Parties are part of a small and decreasing number of people and organisations who still don't get that climate action is essential.  The climate war is over, but our current Commonwealth Government is like one of those Japanese soldiers still holed up in some remote jungle, not having heard the news and still holding their posts for the Emperor.  We need to entice them out and give them the good news so that they can get on with their jobs. *** Dear Prime Minister and Minister I trust you and your families are well and thriving through the COVID crisis. Thanks to your success in keeping COVID-19 at bay so far (and trusting we continue to do a god job on this front!) we are now able to...

 As a kind of bonus on the whole Freud/Jung thing, I also treated my self to a read of  H. Rider Haggard's She , which Jung refers to several times as an exemplar of the archetype of the anima , the female (for men) figure who represents our souls, our unconscious or our inner life in both dreams and myths. She  was Haggard's second novel, following the phenomenal success of  King Solomon's Mines  in 1885.  Before publishing his first blockbuster Haggard was a British civil servant and, in the role of secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, spent six years in Southern Africa where both novels are set.  Afterwards he retired to his native Norfolk and became a writer of fanciful and massively popular adventure stories, many set in exotic locations which at least in theory were in Africa.   Haggard was an early exponent of what these days we would think of as pulp fiction.  He was a forerunner of such prolific writers as Edgar Rice ...

 Among the backlog of unread books on my shelf was a copy of Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.   It consists of a course of 28 lectures delivered by Freud at the University of Vienna in 1915 and 1916, designed to introduce students to the main ideas involved in psychoanalysis.  I gave this book to my father many years ago, I forget why, and eventually it made its way back to me and sat on my shelves until this year, when I finally read it.  Perhaps there is some kind of subconscious significance to the fact that the volume fell apart as I was reading it, so I had to bin it when I got to the end. My first introduction to Freud's ideas was not encouraging.  When I did introductory psychology subjects at the University of Queensland in 1979 and 1980 as part of my social work degree, the psychology faculty there was very much dominated by the idea of psychology as an experimental science, driven by scientific methodology and randomised co...