"Ever more irritated and isolated individuals find themselves surrounded by impossible offers," he writes, and, out of this frustrated desire, "an impulse to hate everything emerges".
The novel might well have been entitled Parallel Psychologies, since the central characters are constantly bemused by their own impulses and frustrated by others'.
PRIME Theory proposes that impulse generation is a low-level cognitive process that lies outside of awareness unless the impulse is frustrated, in which case it becomes consciously experienced as an urge to engage in behaviour (West & Brown, 2013).
Salamon guides us through Wasserstein's childhood (privileged, Jewish, upwardly mobile Brooklyn and later Manhattan) and past the booby traps set by Wendy's mother, Lola, a theatrical, frustrated matriarch, with minimal impulse control.
What elevates the story above the ordinary is its trenchant — symbolic and exaggerated, but psychological apt — depiction of the tyrannical impulse of the frustrated intellectual.
"Deeply frustrated," Heywood replied, resisting his natural impulse to point out that delaying inconvenient reports was a sign of a job well done.
"I come from the belief that the less frustrated an individual is with sex, the less likely they are to develop rape impulses or abusive impulses".
"Just frustrated, frustrated, real frustrated," he said.
The immediate impulse for this dramatic reversal was the attempted assassination of the emperor in January 1858 by an Italian patriot, Felice Orsini, who sought thus to draw public attention to the frustrated hopes of Italian nationalists.
