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Prof. Hinton Bradbury died in June at age 82 after a long and storied career at the University of Winnipeg.
I missed his obituary, so it was a bit of a shock when I heard my colleague Ben Waldman would be writing about him for our weekly Passages feature, which focuses on Winnipeggers who contributed in meaningful ways to our community.
Bradbury was my developmental psych prof at the U of W in the early ‘90s; I liked his teaching so much, I signed up for all his Freud seminar classes (the mere idea of which ran totally contrary to my then-burgeoning feminism).
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It is not overstating to say those courses probably changed my life — not because I became a Freudian; in fact, I have never used my psychology degree in any concrete fashion beyond unflattering armchair diagnoses of people I don’t like — but because of how they shaped my thinking.
I’ve had lots of influential teachers in my life (shoutout to Bob Moore, Bernadette Phillips and the late Harry Pauls, who once called me “the queen of the bullshitters,” which I took as the compliment I’m sure he intended).
But Bradbury — who reminded me a bit of Buck Owens — was the first to really shake me out of the comfortable rut of rote memorization and regurgitation of facts; up until that point, I had done pretty well for myself as a top-notch regurgitator.
In Bradbury’s Freud classes, you read… and read and read some more (I own a complete set of Freud’s works), and then talked about what you’d read and wrote about what you’d talked about.
He forced you, gently but with a firm hand, to stop merely parroting or rewording other people’s ideas in essays. He introduced the idea of archetypes, talked about poetry and religion, Joseph Campbell and The Golden Bough.
We learned about how the stories we tell ourselves (and others) are both as old as time and as unique as the person telling them — a lesson that applies both to psychology and the arts. In a way, he prepared me to be a critic before I ever dreamed of doing such a thing.
He loved it when you brought your own extracurricular reading to bear on the class material, and he appreciated attempts to synthesize the most disparate elements — modern pop, ancient Greek — into a cohesive whole.
And he really, really loved the father of psychoanalysis. I recall running into him in line at Cinema 3 (now the Gargoyle Theatre) before a showing of Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply. As the lights went up after the emotionally wrenching rom-com, I idly thought, “Well, there’s nothing Freudian Prof. Bradbury can find in THAT movie.”
As if on cue, he materialized in the aisle. Ignoring my tear-drenched face, he asked, “Did you notice the rats? The lugubrious rats! I’ll send you an article.”
True to his word, three days later a manila envelope arrived in my mailbox, containing an article on the Freudian significance of rodents.
He also did an annual noon-hour lecture on Freudian symbolism in Last Tango in Paris. In 1993 or ‘94, he switched it up, analyzing the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, which I had introduced him to during his Freud on Film class.
It remains one of my proudest moments, and I think of him every time I hear Jon Polito as Johnny Caspar say, “And I’m sick of the high hat!” (One guess as to what the hat symbolizes).
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