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  • Arts & Culture
  • Issue 39

Half a Notion

A reassessment of ambivalence.
Words by Asher Ross. Photograph by Leonardo Anker Amadeus Vandal.

Words change meaning over time, and the way it happens can reveal secrets about the culture that’s changing them. Take ambivalence. For many of us, it has come to refer to an absence of opinion: “You choose, I don’t care.” Traditionally, however, it refers to the simultaneous presence of contradictory feelings and attitudes. It’s a surprisingly young word, coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1910. Soon after, it was adopted by Freud, who saw that ambivalence—particularly the coexistence of

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This story is from Kinfolk Issue Thirty-Nine

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