penguin released 20 great idea books, in cheap, accesable and well designed formats--2 women, no people of colour, i picked up freud--civialastion and its discontents, b/c i hadnt read it and the uncles (jaques/michel) were born from it.

they had a contest, that asked in a 100 wds or less, which of the ones changed the world the most, this was my entry:

Freud, because he ended Descartes...made us consider our brains, cocks, hearts--made us reconside how we tell stories, how we interact with those we love, those we hate and those we see on the subway.

They gave us more hard theory, more hard science, more poetry and more popular culture--it was Moses (w/o meloncholia) splitting the rock of the victorian desert--he flooded us.

(that flood--to extend the metaphor ad absurdum--was the woman in orgasm, was the woman at menses, was the mucus plug of the birth of the 20th century, and the breast milk to continue us through the weaning. It was the piss, and the shit and they glory of the end of Lawerence's Anglo watery spunk.

Freud made the unhappiness of our bodies, the unhappiness of ourselves.
He made the personal political.

His baptism liberated.