Pseudonym of Freud's famed hysteria patient / SAT 10-24-15 / Lead-in to exalted leader's name / Faxon who won 2011 screenwriting Oscar / Fancier of melliferous plants / Jacques French psychoanalyst who studied hysteria

Constructor: Andrew Zhou

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium


THEME:none 

Word of the Day: Jacques LACAN (31D: Jacques ___, French psychoanalyst who studied hysteria) —

acques Marie Émile Lacan (/ləˈkɑːn/;French: [ʒak lakɑ̃]; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981), known simply as Jacques Lacan, was a Frenchpsychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced many leading French intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially those associated with post-structuralism. His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis. (wikipedia)

This is pretty sweet. Didn't have high hopes, coming out of that NW corner, but the puzzle smooths out considerably in the middle. It's only in the nooks and crannies that it gets dicey—in the big white swaths toward the center, it's positively creamy. I realized today that there is some fill that is legit, but that I just don't like. Personal aversion. EOCENE is one. Feels like cheating. I mean, it's basically just all vowels, so of course constructors lean on it way more heavily than all the other epochs (of which I don't think I can name any—"Pleistocene?" Is that an epoch?). Also, AIRACE(S). I just ... don't think anyone really wants that answer. It just fits, so ... OK. but it's an answer to tolerate, at best. I can tolerate 3-, 4-, 5-letter stuff. When answers get longer, I have trouble accepting "tolerable" as the benchmark. So I balk. Or shy. Is that what a horse does? I rear up on my hind legs in alarm, is what I'm saying. I am less ambivalent about not liking answers like AGEONE and THEBEARS. Those (terrible) answers set ridiculous precedents, namely for AGE [any number] and THE [any mascot]. I sit around sometimes in the late morning and wait for THE MAIL, but ... no.


But that stagger-stack in the center there is good, as are the longer Downs that cut through it. Things didn't start out so promising, though. Got NIQAB (1A: Cover for a Muslim woman's face) immediately (NIQAB is the new COWTIPPING) (see yesterday's puzzle if that makes no sense to you), and filled that corner in pretty quickly, but ended up with ENURE / STOKE/ NESCES (which I assumed was Spanish for "nieces") (no, I'm not kidding) (1D: Two of Ferdinand VII's wives, to Ferdinand VII). But that left me with INTIVO for 2D: How many experiments are done. I found IN TIVO an intriguing answer for that clue, but ... some small, sane part of my brain said "No. Do not let that stand." Main problem here was STOKE. It looked so right. But no. EVOKE (17A: Stir up). So I stumbled out of there and managed to cross the great white divide into the bottom of the grid, such that I ended up here:

That SE corner was ridiculous easy compared to the rest of the grid. I totally lucked into an answer that broke open the center. No one who went to grad school in the Humanities (esp. in the '90s) could get out of there without hearing the name Jacques LACAN bandied about by people who wanted you to believe they knew what they were talking about. Ubiquitous, that guy. So LACAN was a fat gimme. And then LATIN LOVERS went down and the puzzle loosened up from there. My favorite part of the solve was getting to this point:

... then looking at 34A (--CKME--GN-), then just making up answers that seemed to fit, then saying something very profane ... then realizing that if I just changed the first two letters of my guess, I'd be right: KICK ME SIGNS (34A: Things some people need to get off their backs). Sometimes, just shouting out stuff that seems to fit the letter pattern actually works.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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