Clinical
Clinical

PTSD and its vicissitudes

The invention of PTSD According to the standard narrative, prior to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) there were a range of psychological ‘conditions’ or ‘disorders’ that were essentially describing the same set of symptoms, which included nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks, depression, anxiety, difficulties in concentrating, and so on. Much of this …

All in the mind?

Louise Atkinson has just written an interesting article on chronic back pain, which focuses on the controversial ideas of  physiotherapist Nick Sinfield. 1  Judging by many of the comments to the article, Sinfield has stirred up something of a hornets nest, because his basic argument is that not only does chronic …

Three types of trauma?

In my previous post I argued that there are two, very different, discourses of trauma. The first is what I labelled as the ‘mental health’ discourse, and the other I called the ‘psychoanalytic’ discourse. The ‘mental health’ discourse essentially regards trauma as related to specific events in a subject’s life, …

The two discourses of trauma

I would like to propose that there are two radically different ways to look at psychological trauma. These can also be referred to as two different discourses of trauma. For the sake of this argument I will refer to them as the ‘mental health discourse’ and the ‘psychoanalytic discourse’. Furthermore, …

History and psychosis

Following on from my previous article, in which I explored the idea of ‘hystory’ in relation to history and Nachträglichkeit, I now want to look at the question of history and Nachträglichkeit in relation to psychosis. Going back to Miller’s paper, The Space of a Hallucination, having explored Lacan’s notion …

Trauma as a missed encounter?

Introduction The function of the tuché, of the real as encounter—the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter—first presented itself in the history of psycho-analysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, …

Applied psychoanalysis?

In my experience, there is a commonly held view in clinical circles that the only people entitled to call themselves ‘psychoanalysts’ are those individuals who have a case load; that is, they see patients/clients/analysands for some form of psychoanalytic treatment.  Of course, it’s actually more complicated than this because one …