David’s Reviews > On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand > Status Update

Two figures stand out massively as the architects of our present-day conception of man: Darwin and Freud. Freud's was the more daring, the more revolutionary...As the summit of an evolutionary process, man could still view himself with smug satisfaction,...It remained for Freud to present the image of man as the unfinished product of nature: struggling against unreason, impelled by inner vicissitudes and urges

Bruner writes on what the end of the power of myth means for death: "Today death has become somehow impersonal and unnecessary, perhaps like a fatal vitamin deficiency that might have been prevented or at least delayed...The wonder drugs have shed still another abstract light on dying, and one reads drug advertising with the sense that death must be an error on the part of the consumer."