Freud
Freud

Left-wing melancholia?

There was an interesting book review in the Boston Review recently by Peter Gordon of Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory. In his introduction Gordon was very quick to link the book’s subject with the recent election of Trump: November 9, 2016, was a strange day to walk …

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 …

Freud’s trauma

In the end it all goes back to Freud.  Not that he invented the term ‘trauma,’ far from it.  In fact, it’s instructive to look at how Laplanche and Pontalis introduce the topic of trauma in their entry on the subject in The Language of Psychoanalysis: ‘Trauma’ is a term …

The Real of everyday life

It’s often tempting to think of the Real as something mysterious and esoteric; something that is transcendental or even, in some way, supernatural or occult.  However, I think this is to completely misrecognise the Real.  Or rather, although it’s actually very easy to misrecognise the Real, this is not because …

Psychosalvation?

Many years ago, when I was in final year of my undergraduate studies, I wrote a dissertation on humanistic psychotherapy, within which I strongly criticised its concept of the ‘self’ or ‘ego’ and, linked to this, the notion of ‘psychosalvation’.  By this I mean the idea that therapy can, in …

The nature of trauma

There are a number of ways to consider psychological trauma, and perhaps the most common one is that the individual is overwhelmed by an event which they struggle to come to terms with.  This may either be an event in their early childhood, for example being sexually and/or physically abused; …

Imaginary histories?

One of the problems with any form of history, be it personal, social, or political, is how the historical narrative, the story told by the historian, relates to ‘what really happened’.  As the quotation marks suggest, the status of this ‘what really happened’ is itself problematic.  In semiotic terms we …