I finished reading Alias Grace a couple of nights ago. I think one of the quotes from the blurb on the back read something like 'surely, this is as far as a novel can go' and I think I agree. Not so much with the plot, which is still brilliant and involving, but by the sheer amount of technical skill Atwood demonstrates. You'll find a number of different writing methods – styles that lesser novels pick one of and use all the way through – like poetry, letters from characters to other characters and extracts from other (real life) texts of Grace Marks' murder trial. What makes it all so impressive is that in one chapter you could be reading straight from the mind of Grace herself and then the next a number of letters from Dr. Simon Jordan (her fledgling psychologist) addressed to his mother, and it all seamlessly connects while feeling relevant to the story. And the story is an interesting one. I have the feeling I would've appreciated more if I had heard of Grace Marks or knew a little bit about the case before reading. There's a sense that Atwood is writing for people who might have wondered about Grace Marks' past and needed someone imaginative to fill in the gaps for them. But Atwood still does an excellent job of catering for the ignorant. Alias Grace is also a book that needs to be read all at once in a fairly short period of time; just to process all the information and keep events straight in your mind. My casual reading habits weren't much help with that. But either way, like I said before, the book did what I wanted it to do: prove to me that Margaret Atwood is a bloody good writer. I think I now appreciate The Handmaid's Tale a little more because it.
             Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is universally considered the ' 'father'' of psychoanalysis, and many date the birth of psychoanalytic theory from the 1899 publication of The Interpretation of Dream...