One of the problems for psychoanalysis, at least in the UK today, is that no-one really wants it. This is not necessarily to say that they want CBT, person centred therapy, counselling or some other form of talking therapy either. However, I think there is something especially problematic about psychoanalysis …
Back in those halcyon days of the late 1960s there were some unlikely heroes, who almost overnight seemed to rise into the stratosphere of celebrity (and cult) status. One of these was Ronald Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who had some ten years earlier written what must truly be …
Recently The Daily Mail carried about what it describes as a ‘quarter life crisis’ for young women in this country.1 This was based on a report by the investment company Skandia, which revealed, amongst other things, that over 30% of the women surveyed said they suffered from anxiety. One …
I keep thinking about Jean Baudriallard’s essay on obscenity What are you doing after the orgy? 1. It’s actually the title itself which I find fascinating – and so apt when it comes to the aftermath of the 2012 Olympics. In a sense it (the title of Baudrillard’s essay) seems absurd, …
The more I watched the Olympics unfold, the more I thought there must be something here for psychoanalysis. And if I had to start anywhere it would be with the opening and closing ceremonies, because these seemed to set both the tone and the parameters for this event. Although perhaps …
But what do we mean by ‘ordinariness’ in the first place? To start with, of course, it is a derivative of ‘ordinary’, which according to my dictionary has seven completely different sets of meanings – including another name for a penny farthing, and a bishop or judge exercising authority. However, …
I was very struck by the amount of attention that my previous post1, on whether the Denver shooter James Holmes is psychotic, has drawn. Understandably perhaps, this subject appears to have struck a cord in a lot of people, and not only in the US. The focus of that particular …
A report has just been published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE which is a fairly damning indictment of the way the NHS deals with mental ill health compared to physical health problems.1 The report highlights the fact that although mental illness is generally more debilitating than …
It was interesting to watch a documentary about Pink Floyd the other night on BBC4, which was about the making of Wish You Were Here in 1975. The documentary was made in 2005, when both Richard Wright and founder member Syd Barrett were still alive (Barrett died in 2006 aged …
Of course, even psychoanalysis is not immune from Digital Taylorism. In fact, there are already attempts, as part of the drive towards HPC regulation, to devise a set of core competencies and skills sets that would apply to psychoanalytic therapies – though at the moment these seem to have been …
