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I decided to attend Wesleyan University instead of University of Pennsylvania, even though I had been awarded a full scholarship (room, board and tuition) to attend Penn. But I would have been expected to carry on as a long-distance runner. I had had enough of that. I'd been running since I was four-years old.

So, there I was as a freshman in 1959. There were two special "Western Civilization" classes. I happened to be assigned to the one taught by Norman O. Brown (great scholars taught undergraduates then, and Brown enjoyed being a teacher). 

Brown had just published Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. There I was in an early class, with approximately twelve other students. 

We were reading Aristotle's Politics. There was a passage "All communities aim at some good, but the polis aims at the highest good because it is the most complete form of association." I remember the phrase as, "Everyone joins the polis to lead the good life."

I raised my hand and said, "What about masochism?" Brown ran excitedly to the blackboard and wrote the word on the blackboard." MASOCHISM.

The students congratulated me on the way out of class. 

I immediately ran to the bookstore and purchased A Primer of Freudian Psychology.  As Hitler said to his boyhood friend, August Kubicek when Kubicek visited him after he had become Chancellor, recalling conversations of their youth, "That where it all began."

NORMAN O. BROWN