The last eighteen months or so has seen tsunami of allegations and court cases against the rich, famous and powerful in relation to alleged and actual sexual abuse. Much of this has involved children, so we are essentially dealing with a wave of paedophilia as well as inappropriate sexual behaviour, …
It may seem a strange idea to talk about the ‘traumatisation of history’; after all how can history itself be traumatised? Wouldn’t it make more sense to speak of the history of trauma? For a while this is what I thought, especially in relation to writing about the Great War. …
If the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of peace. Since war takes place outdoors and always within nature, its symbolic status is that of ultimate anti-pastoral…….it belongs to the demonic world, and no one engages in it or contemplates it …
The past is always in the news. At the time of writing (May 2014) old wounds have been reopened regarding The Troubles in Northern Ireland in the wake the arrest and subsequent release of Gerry Adams in relation to the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. Connected to this is …
The First World War is often presented as a schism, a fracture, a discontinuity, in the fabric of history. This gives rise to the idea of a ‘lost innocence’, i.e. the pre-war (and in the case of Britain, the Edwardian) period. But was it that simple? As all historians will …
On Private Madness is a collection of papers by the French psychoanalyst André Green. 1 In his introduction to the book, Green writes: Freud already knew that the boundaries between neurosis and normality are barely discernable. Following him, we have learned that many persons who are well adapted to social and …
A hundred years later the First World War still casts its shadow over our society, and in some ways, even more so over mainland Europe. The legacy of the war was not only the collapse of empires, but also the rise of new ones – most notably the United States …
The current crisis in the Ukraine has led to speculation in some quarters that we might be about to enter a new Cold War with Russia. Interestingly, though, there are some who argue that the ‘original’ Cold War never actually ended in the first place, and that we are simply …
There is a long and somewhat unfortunate tradition within psychoanalysis that appears to ‘downgrade’ psychosis. In other words, psychosis is seen as something of an aberration in relation to the ‘norm’ of neurosis. This is not to say that psychoanalysts don’t work with psychotics – far from it- but one …
I’ve just been reading Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness. 1 One of the things that struck me is how much it belongs so much to another age (it was originally published in 1922). All the texts in the book were written in the shadow of the end of the first …
