Purpose, or the lack there of

Craig Mod keeps dropping these wonderful bits of text that are so smart and very well said. When you watch something or read something and it falls flat, it’s because (for me, at least), it’s missing a core “purpose,” may simply be going through the motions of “movie”

The Role of Reading in Analysis

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the patient’s/analysand’s speech can be “read” as if it were text. Writing about this idea Shoshana Felman says, Lacan's view is more radical than that. For the activity of reading is not just the analyst's, it is also the analysand&

Transmitting What Happens in Psychoanalysis

Neville Symington writes: Psychoanalysis is an experience that occurs between two people. It is a deep experience and can only be very inadequately communicated to another person. It is as impossible to convey the sense of it to another person as it is to explain to an eight-year-old child what

How lunatic your life is getting

From Warren Ellis’s Orbital Operations newsletter: Rewatching some episodes of SUCCESSION the other day: there's a bit where Logan Roy tells someone to pencil in a phone call for midnight. It gave me a sudden cold shock of "that used to be me." You don&

So True

From Craig Mod: I am always astonished by kindness and never astonished by cruelty, and in this way my mind feels broken. Well said.

Lacan on Reading & Psychoanalysis

What does Lacan say about the act of reading as a metaphor for psychoanalytic practice? Shoshana Felman offers the following: Lacan's particular perspective on the matter? "It is obvious," says Lacan, "that in analytic discourse, what is at stake is nothing other than what can

Libido & Desire

Very early in Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation, Lacan points out: Libido, [which is] a notion that lies at the heart of psychoanalytic theory, is nothing but the psychical energy of desire (p. 4). He also points out that when a person is defensive, they are often defending themselves

Combining Two Things

From the Paris Review interview with Emmanuel Carrère, speaking about W, or the Memory of Childhood, by Georges Perec. ...the way he uses these two stories—it’s as if he is trying to harness something he isn’t able to say. I have often used that method, combining things

Creating the Conditions

One of the many things I'm reading at the moment is On Getting Better by Adam Phillips. As I read it, the following stood out to me. Phillips quotes Winnicott as saying: [Psychoanalysis] is not just a mater of interpreting the repressed unconscious; it is rather the provision

◉ A Say 001 | Hello World

Hi there, When I was young and first became interested in using the web to communicate with others, I played with many early blogging tools. One of the things I remember about all of those tools is the default post (the post that was already there as a kind of