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May 6, 2009
There are 2 entries for this date: George Clooney and Sigmund Freud. George Clooney On this date in 1961, George Clooney was born in Lexington, Kentucky. Clooney, whose aunt was the famous singer Rosemary Clooney, attended Northern Kentucky University. Clooney's acting career began on television in the early 1980s, where he played in such shows as "Roseanne." He was a regular on "ER" from 1994-1999. Clooney has made more than 20 movies, including a comic turn as a skeptical, Depression-era Ulysses, in "O Brother, Where Art Thou" (2000). Other notable movies include "Three Kings" (1999), "The Perfect Storm" (2000), and "Ocean's Eleven" (2001). Clooney has directed one movie himself and has worked with Stephen Soderbergh, the freethinking director. Clooney is known for intelligent and funny interviews. “I don't believe in heaven and hell. I don't know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won't allow this life--the only thing I know to exist--to be wasted.”
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George Clooney, profile in Washington Post (September 28, 1997)
Sigmund Freud On this date in 1856, Sigmund Freud was born in Moravia. Freud grew up in Vienna, where he lived until fleeing the Nazis in 1938. He earned a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1881. He and Joseph Breuer co-wrote Studies in Hysteria (1895). Freud developed his theory on psychoanalysis, then wrote The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Three Essays on Sexual Theory (1905), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and The Ego and the Id (1923). The Future of an Illusion (1927) is his masterpiece critique of religion, postulating that God is a projection of childish father-figure preoccupations, that prayer and religious ritual are obsessive-compulsive, and that religion is a "universal neurosis." Freud followed that with Moses and Monotheism (1938), in which he wrote: "Its [religion's] doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. . ." Civilization and its Discontents (1929) also addressed Freud's views on religion. In 1933, Freud collaborated with Albert Einstein on Why War?, a compilation of their memorable correspondence. Dying of mouth cancer, after more than 30 operations Freud ended his suffering with physician-prescribed morphine. D. 1939. “Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.”
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Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927)
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