phyloxena

My remark about the absence of parents had more to do with ficwriters (whom it's unfair to blame because Tolkien killed off the parents) than with the constants of the Victorian fiction. Freud offers pretty absurd scaffolding for the character study, which is sometimes better than none, and sometimes worse. Anyway, his nonsense is common place now, contaminating the speech and hard to ignore. I used to be very enthusiastic about psychoanalysis when I discovered it in my teens. It seemed to explain and so remove from my active thought process so many irritating things; now Freud seems to me as creepy as other influential philosophers of that period, like Marx and Pavlov.

Passionate, but not (homo)sexual, friendships between people of the same sex seem to be taboo just now...expressions of passionate affection for a same-sex friend were taken entirely for granted

Have you read "The Warrior in Tiger's Skin" by Rustaveli? I have no idea what is it worth on the world's literature scale. It's Georgian poem based on a Persian legend, about adventures of the three princes who are recovering their stolen and bewitched brides. They fight demons, lions and armies, and passionately cry/comfort each other with immodest praise in between. Shakespeare, or said Rustavely, is one thing, but murky depths of Dostoevsky (very nice way to put it!) is entirely another. These girls in nighties are certainly sick in some way. Neurotic, or hysterical, or deprived of vitamins D and B16, I don't care. In my unfavorable onion he begs for psychoanalysis to appear and set things right. And I don't imply that same-sex sexuality is sick, it's none of my business.

Also, it appears that people in modern (Western) world keep larger physical distance than they used to. From the expressed ban on any physical contact in some school to larger houses, people don't seem to touch one another naturally, innocently or unintentionally.