Thurber Tonight: "The Conscious vs. The Unconscious" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

Psychiatrist about to phone his wife

"Of course, I believe that this particular psychiatrist [trying unsuccessfully to telephone his wife to say he could not be home for dinner] dialled the three wrong numbers on purpose. In the case of all husbands, both neurotic and normal, this is known as sparring for time and has no real psychological significance."

-- from "The Conscious vs. The Unconscious"

by Ken

After going back and picking up the opening piece of the Let Your Mind Alone! series, we've now filled in the gap between the two pieces I plucked out previously -- No. 2, "Destructive Forces in Life," and No. 6, "Anodynes for Anxieties." Now we're ready to move on, with Nos. 7 and 8, "The Conscious vs. The Unconscious" tonight and "Sex ex Machina" tomorrow night.

For the remaining pieces in the series, Nos. 9 and 10, "Sample Intelligence Test" and "Miscellaneous Mentation," you'll have to track down a copy of Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces -- they're not that hard to find (Amazon has inexpensive listings for a number of editions) -- or the Library of America Thurber anthology edited by Garrison Keillor, which includes all ten of the Let Your Mind Alone! pieces but only eight of the 28 other "more or less inspirational pieces," not including my much-loved "No Standing Room Only." (Keillor!) Actually, though, among those 28 pieces there aren't many that I love.

CORRECTION: Which reminds me: The other piece that I've been listing in the index since February as being in Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces, "The Letters of James Thurber," is in fact included in My World -- And Welcome to It. Which is vaguely ironic, because when I presented "The Letters of James Thurber," I wrote, "I always have to rummage around the Thurber books to find 'The Letters of James Thurber,' a piece of which I'm extremely fond." I must have known this at the time; I never did identify the book in the text. But I proceeded to dig up a photo of the wrong book, and then formalized the confusion in the index listing. (I've corrected the index.)


FOR A THURBER-CONDUCTED TOUR THROUGH
THE CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS, CLICK HERE

Our previous coverage of the Let Your Mind Alone! series:

1. "Pythagoras and the Ladder"
2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
3. "The Case for the Daydreamer"
4, "A Dozen Disciplines"
5. "How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work"
6. "Anodynes for Anxieties"

Tomorrow night: Our (though not the book's) concluding installment, No. 8, "Sex ex Machina" -- how can we resist a treatise with the word "sex" in the title?

ANY REQUESTS?

I'm thinking we'll let this thing run one more week, and I don't have anything planned yet. (I have to try to think of pieces I've been meaning to include, or have forgotten to mean to include, all this time. In the cases of the pieces I know about, there are reasons why I haven't gotten to them, which I'd be surprised if I can solve inside a week.) I'm not saying I can satisfy your requests, but hey, it might be worth a shot.


THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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