Sometimes a single person is so professionally successful that they become the thing they work on. Call it the Kleenex conundrum or the Dumpster dilemma. Sigmund Freud is so strongly associated with psychoanalysis that it’s easy to forget others had a hand in the creation and development of “the richest systematic description of inner experience that the Western world had produced.”

George Makari (pictured), director of Cornell’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry, against the backdrop of Germany before the World War I, describes in Revolution in Mind the historical, cultural, and artistic currents then being bantered about amongst the cognoscenti , and the great historical thinkers who helped Freud develop his theories, starting in particular with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

A Guardian review illustrates the loose borrowing tendencies that make ownership of psychoanalysis’ creation murkier than our id:

Makari shows the ferment of discussion and revision at the Wednesday Psychological Society, the sounding-board for Freud’s theories, which started in 1902 as a small group of colleagues meeting for discussions at his house, and expanded into the huge Vienna Psychoanalytical Society which lasted till the Anschluss in 1938. Here members would offer papers and discuss Freud’s theories, and were liable to be trounced or excommunicated by Freud, only to find later that choice parts of their rejected revisions had been incorporated into his own revised model. Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Otto Rank, Georg Groddeck were all followers whom Makari shows Freud rebuffing and then stealing from. “I have a decidedly obliging intellect and am very much inclined toward plagiarism,” he blithely said.

In a discussion that will include philosophy, psychology, and history—as well as a look at Vienna before the war—Makari will talk about his recent work on January 28 at the Y.

In the end, you will be educated enough to blow your nose at those who use “Freudian” as a proprietary eponym, and you can discard the facial tissue in a trash receptacle.

Newsarama is live-blogging the “Boys of Steel: The Jewish Origins of Superman” talk with Marc Tyler Nobleman right now. Check it out.

7:54PM: Already starting off interesting, even though Nobleman isn’t here yet. Sightings of Eliot Spitzer and Paul Krugman — and I thought this was going to be a low-key event.

7:55PM: Abel, a guy who is working with Nobleman, sits next to me — and is a big Newsarama fan! He says big ups to his friend Terrence Irvine. Keep sharing the wealth!

8:00PM: I overhear that Krugman is speaking for another event at the Y. Might be awkward if Spitzer ditches him.

8:19PM: The program begins! Mr. Nobleman comes up — he’s written more than 70 books, and his cartoons have come out in publications like the WSJ and Forbes!

8:19PM: Ooh, he calls Superman “the” icon. Good start. Says he was blown away by Superman: The Movie, and that started a love affair with comics. Discussing the slow build of superhero movies back then — “I’m glad I was of the generation that Christopher Reeve could be my Superman.”

8:21PM: Shows a logo for Siegel and Shuster — a shield with two S’s. Says that someone said it looked like the Nazi SS. Not sure how to respond to that.

8:23PM: Wants a sign in Cleveland saying “Welcome to the birthplace of Superman.” The back of his book says “Before Metropolis, Smallville, and Krypton, Superman came from Cleveland.”

For those of you who have excitedly made a jaunt through Foxwoods, looking for untold riches at the black jack table while offering only a cursory glance at the full room of people moving small tiles around in front stacks of chips worth thousand of dollars, the 92nd Street Y’s resident Mah-Jongg expert, Elisa Meth will be teaching a four session course for beginners, starting January 27. “Soon you’ll be yelling ‘3 bam!’, ‘6 crack!’ and ‘9 dot!’ with gusto.”

For those already well versed enough to start playing with others, come to our Mah-Jongg night on January 14 for some informal play with other players, where Elissa will be present to offer coaching and tips if needed.

The Wall Street Journal once said of Mah-Jongg, “The ancient and sometimes rowdy Chinese game, long popular in the U.S. with elderly women, is back in vogue. It’s finding a new and wider following among the young and techno-savvy, many of whom discover the game on the Internet.” The trend continues today and stereotypes remain broken.

After taking the lessons learned from Elisa’s class in Mah-Jongg, go back to Foxwoods with a new sense of determination and confidence. But remember, it can be an excitable game, and outbursts related to your play are acceptable. Take note of the terminology Elisa has taught; as ramped up as you might be when you Rob the Kong, please try to resist the urge to shout “Boo-Yah!”

NY1’s Tara Lynn Wagner covered last week’s NYC real estate talk with Jacky Teplitzky and reports:

“Everybody is afraid to be the last fool to pay high because everybody is telling them more bad news is coming and prices are going to go down,” said Teplitzky.

Broker Donata Marcus took fastidious notes during Teplitzky’s speech. She said buyers need to be coaxed past the fear factor.

“There’s good value, there’s money out there to be borrowed. People need to move forward and not be terrified that they haven’t picked the very bottom of the market,” said Marcus.

Teplitzky said part of the pause in transactions is the sudden shift of power from seller to buyer that took place toward the end of ‘08.

“Everybody is smelling the blood on the street and everybody for the first time is saying ‘I have the power. And if I have the power I’m going to use it’,” said Teplitzky.

TV crime drama fans, mystery readers, or the morbidly curious can hear Kathy Reichs on January 27 discuss how to properly assess skeletal remains from a crime scene (should you ever need to). Reichs, vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, is a forensic anthropologist, which means she “assists in the identification of deceased individuals whose remains are decomposed, burned, mutilated or otherwise unrecognizable.”

In addition to her scholarly writings (”Quantified comparison of frontal sinus patterns by means of computed tomography”) and her work at Ground Zero as part of the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, Reichs is also the author of 11 highly accurate crime novels—“My books are not for the fainthearted.” She and her fictional hero Temperence Brennan (a forensic anthropologist too) share the same CV, minus the alcoholism. Cleverly, in Bones, the TV series that spun off from the novels, Brennan is an author who writes about a fictional forensic anthropologist named Kathy Reichs.

In an interview with the Smithsonian Magazine, Reichs explained that she got her start because “I was doing archaeology, and the police started bringing me cases. If there was a local bones specialist at a university, often law enforcement would take skeletal remains there.”

In the same interview, she comments on a terrifying, made-for-TV moment during while testifying in court:

“There was one trial in the States in which the defendant said he was going to kill me. They couldn’t bring extra cops into the courtroom because that would be prejudicial, but they put them at the doors. They said, “If he comes at you, just get down.” I thought, if he comes at me, I’m diving behind the judge. (The defendant was convicted.)”

In his latest work, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of Outliers—the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful people and asks the question: Why are high achievers different from regular people? Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, the cultural forces that make Asians so successful at math and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Blink and The Tipping Point.

About the Giants of Science Series: This is not just for folks who got A’s in high school chemistry. The scientists are such good storytellers, their subjects so provocative and the conversation so easygoing that all you have to do is bring your mind (and a friend). Robert Krulwich of Nova Science Now, an NPR regular and an ABC News correspondent, is the host.

Herbert Bayard Swope of The New York Evening World invented the op-ed in 1921 as “a catchall for book reviews, society boilerplate, and obituaries.” He wrote:

It occurred to me that nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial, which became the most important in America...and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.

It’s sometimes easiest to define it in the negative. Op-Ed is different from the editorial page in that it does not represent the views of anyone in the editorial division, even its own editors. It is different from letters in that it is not a venue to debate articles that have appeared in The Times. It is different from the columnists in that, well, the columnists do their own thing.

These differences are important because Op-Ed, in some measure, is shaped by its neighbors. The Op-Ed editors tend to look for articles that cover subjects and make arguments that have not been articulated elsewhere in the editorial space. If the editorial page, for example, has a forceful, long-held view on a certain topic, we are more inclined to publish an Op-Ed that disagrees with that view. If you open the newspaper and find the editorial page and Op-Ed in lock step agreement or consistently writing on the same subject day after day, then we aren’t doing our job.

Since The Times began printing op-eds in 1970, the Grey Lady has featured such political luminaries as Madeleine Albright, Al Gore, and Donald Rumsfeld. John McCain wasn’t so fortunate. Not all opinions come in as prose, though: John Ashbery wrote a poem (”Infomercial 2”) and Dave Eggers drew a diagram (”Thanksgiving at Dan and Jane’s”).

World Superhero-registered crime fighter Master Legend (pictured and subject of a recent Rolling Stone profile) is “not an eccentric billionaire moonlighting as a crime fighter. He is, as he puts it, just a man hellbent on battling evil.” If you’re a seven-year-old boy, he has some career advice to impart to you: “Anyone can have this power… All you need to do is tie a towel around your neck and put a sock over your head and run out the door.”

However, when that seven-year-old grows up, he’ll realize that he looks lousy in tights, cape, and a mask, and will unfortunately settle for a regular job. While villain-fighting isn’t likely to be a career option, life coach Sharon Good does want you to be happy in your job. She passionately believes that “no dream is right or wrong, too big or too small.” She adds, “One of my passions is to encourage and support others to follow their desires and dreams despite the discouraging messages they’ve received.” On January 12, Good will be at the Y to encourage you to fight for your perfect job.

But if you’re still determined to fight the “good” fight, stick around for Marc Tyler Nobleman, author of the first-ever illustrated biography on the superhero genre and the rise of comic books, who comes to the Y on the following night to talk about how Superman thundered into existence in 1934 as the product of two Jewish teens creating a character who was everything they were not.

Despite the wrestling-style gorilla-press powerslam the economy has been subject to of late, the good news is that NYC real estate doesn’t give up as easily as elsewhere. According to some, it’s resilience is matched only by San Francisco. Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard, writes on the New York Times Economix blog:

Today’s Case-Shiller housing price figures indicate that New York City’s prices dropped 7.5 percent in the last year, while prices in Los Angeles declined 27.9 percent. Nationwide prices dropped 18 percent. New York is the only major metropolitan area with prices that are still 90 percent above prices in January 2000. According to National Association of Realtors data, New York is the only city in the continental United States, outside of San Francisco Bay, where median sales prices remain north of $500,000.

We’re proud to offer diverse and stimulating programming to the world outside of the walls from our corner of 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. If you were unable to visit us in person, sit back and browse the lectures and readings that we published on our blog and YouTube channel in the past year, just a small sample of the 2,000+ audience events that we host annually. Note: Since we also enjoy dipping into our extensive archives, a fair number of these events took place before 2008.

His appearance at the Y is around the corner so we hope you’ve had time to read the reviews of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, buy said book, read it, digest it, and then read the coverage about it, digest that, and then finally be able to move on. The great thing about Gladwell is his ability to digest the source documents behind his books so that we don’t have to. Would you want to read:

As a young man, Earvin "Magic" Johnson admired his father and other small-town entrepreneurs who created jobs and served as leaders in his Midwestern community. He worked for them, watched them and his interest in building communities through economic development grew even while his basketball career flourished. His fame as an NBA star gave him access to some of the most successful business leaders in the country. On November 20, 2008, he sat down with Stephen Adler of BusinessWeek for the Y's Captains of Industry Series. In the excerpt above, Johnson talks about his early development as a basketball player and the racial tensions he encountered in high school.

The full program will be broadcast on the weekly From New York’s 92nd Street Y program in a new time slot this Sunday at 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm, 9pm, 11pm and Monday at 3am EST on the SIRIUS XM STARS Channel. If you're not a subscriber, go to www.sirius.com/freetrial for a 3 day free trial.

You can also download the MP3. [3 MB]
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Related: Gwen Ifill with Michelle Norris: Politics and Race on Jan 25

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Philanthropy News Digest recently interviewed Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and co-author of the new book Money Well Spent - A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy.

PND: In a conversation I had last month with Matthew Bishop, the New York bureau chief of The Economist and co-author of a new book about philanthrocapitalism, Bishop suggested that this is precisely the moment when wealthy donors and foundations need to step up and extend themselves on behalf of their grantees and the nonprofit sector. Do you agree?
PB: I would put it differently. This is a moment when individuals and foundations need to be very focused and intentional in what they do. If ever there were a time when strategy and clarity about goals was important, this is the time. In terms of foundations stretching themselves, that goes to the fundamental question, which we address in the book, of whether foundations should exist in perpetuity or should spend themselves down over a fixed period of time. Especially for foundations not committed to perpetuity, this may indeed be a time to stretch.

PND: Is this a time for foundations to be raising their risk profile?
PB: The risks a foundation takes have to do with what it expects the social return on its investments to be at any given time. I’m not sure that the current financial situation changes that in any significant way.

PND: A few days ago, I learned that Changemakers, a ten-year-old nonprofit in your region that worked to raise awareness of social justice issues, was shutting its doors, a victim of the economic downturn. Can we expect to see more of that as the economic crisis drags on? And is that necessarily a bad thing?
PB: We’re going to see more organizations struggling to survive, and I agree with the implication of your question. Times of crisis provide opportunities as well as challenges, including opportunities for consolidation among weaker organizations that otherwise might have to shut their doors. The difficulty is when a strong organization ends up having to shut its doors, not necessarily because of a lack of efficacy, but because its donors, for whatever reason, are not there for it when it needs them. Foundations that care about organizations in a particular field should pay particular attention to those kinds of situations.

PND: What is your view of mergers in the nonprofit sector?
PB: My view is that there is not enough pressure for mergers in our sector, and a time like this is an opportunity to look for good mergers, if circumstances warrant it.

You can attend a merger of sorts when Paul Brest, Matthew Bishop and current Carnegie Corporation of New York president Vartan Gregorian (the former head of the New York Public Library and Brown University who is leading an effort to obtain federal stimulus money for public colleges) join together for a discussion on “Return on Philanthropic Investment” at the Y on January 4.

If you missed last night’s live webcast of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Businessweek editor-in-chief Steve Adler, you can still watch it here.

Further analysis of the discussion can be found at BusinessWeek, MarketWatch, Bloomberg and Portfolio.com.

Meredith Bryan of the New York Observer catches up with journalist Calvin Trillin, The Nation’s “Deadline Poet,” in advance of his Dec 22 talk at the Y with Garrison Keillor about poetry, humor and politics.

Thinking woman’s sex objects Calvin Trillin and Garrison Keillor give their tally-whackers a good scrub, iron their shirts and show up in public to discuss Mr. Trillin’s latest tome, Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme. “I’m hoping Garrison will sing a few of the songs,” said Mr. Trillin of his fellow humorist. “Like a song for Sarah Palin called, ‘On a Clear Day I See Vladivostok.’ And there’s also a song to the tune of ‘O Tannenbaum’ called ‘Mike Huckabee.’ … I think Garrison would be very good because he’s had some church training!” Mr. Trillin said his book of election rhymes came to him last spring. “It’s sort of like asking somebody, ‘Where did you get the idea of doing a model of the palace of Versailles in beer cans?’ The answer is usually something like ‘I had these cans in the garage.’”