Rather than the diagnostic categories as such, which are conceptual tools, psychoanalytic treatment is founded upon the work of exploration and analysis of the patient’s unconscious. It is the unconscious which contains the representatives of those desires and forms of satisfaction that the patient rejects and of which he or she does not want to […]
Our New Dark Ages
September 13, 2012 By
Freud’s masterful paper, Mourning and Melancholia (Freud, 1915), is famous for its revolutionary rethinking of loss. The intuition that melancholia is not just a transitory and necessary withdrawal from the world like mourning, but a tragic attempt to keep alive a lost loved one has reverberated down the decades since Freud wrote it nearly a […]
How Are We To Live
September 11, 2012 By
Progress is a funny thing. Not just because, as the French say, ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’, but because some aspects of us are resistant to updating. Despite my affection for vinyl, turntables and valve amplifiers, this does not appear to be true of music. Not only have the old […]
Finding the words to say it
August 24, 2012 By
The hardest part about writing is making a start. Get the first paragraph right and what follows is likely to be okay. For me, it has something to do with the rhythm of speech, a matter of the sentences sounding right. I did not realize it straight away, but this quality is also an indicator […]
Psychoanalysis: An experience or nothing
August 24, 2012 By
While it is theorised within an inch of its life, psychoanalysis, in common with art, is a down to earth business. It has a research and cultural face, but at the heart of it is the kind of curiousity Merlin referred to when he advised the young Arthur to find out why the world wags […]
