Home
From the Other Side of the Couch
- Details
- Category: From the Couch
From the Other Side of the Couch
by Audrey Cantlie
To repeat the introduction, without having to consider which is more ‘true’, it remains instructive to see the experience of treatment from two different points of view. It is in this spirit that I offer some remembered fragments from my analyses.
I say ‘fragments’ advisedly. I have had four analyses with four distinguished analysts (Rickman, Gillespie, Bion, Segal), each at one time President of the British Society. Although many patients, even analysts themselves, undertake a second analysis (Derrida’s la tranche), usually from a different ‘school’, four bites of the cherry is unusual and it has often been suggested to me that I should write about my experiences. ‘Yes, yes,’ I reply, ‘I am thinking about it, when I can find time.’ But that is not the reason. I have had more than 25 years of analysis, ending some 30 years ago, 50 minute sessions 5 times a week, altogether thousands of hours. But what I recall from my analyses can be counted on my fingers.
The Power of Psychoanalysis
- Details
- Category: General Interest
The psychoanalytic discourse is a very powerful tool as it may be used to deconstruct other discourses, analyse its formulations and to revise social categories and its political implications. It can also provide the framework to explain the genesis and structure of human subjectivity. But far from being a unified field, the theoretical body discovered by Freud has developed into different schools with their own views and particular conceptualizations. Most of the psychoanalytical approaches might be useful to analyse other theories and social categories, as they seem to share a similar logic of thought. Also, they enable us to find alternatives to explanations based on a unilateral point of view. However when considering their views on human subjectivity and the way it is structured, they might differ significantly or even be contradictory which can lead to erroneous conceptualisations. Throughout the history of the feminist movement many intellectuals have tried to analyse the issue of "being a woman", its essence and the specificity of her desire taking into account the development of psychoanalytical ideas from different traditions and readings of Freud. I will try to summarise some of them and point out their implications, and finally will try to outline some concepts - more specifically Lacan's theorisation - that may give a tentative answer to the question: what is the essence of woman?
Questioning Identities; Philosophy in Psychoanalytic Practice
- Details
- Category: General Interest
Mary Lynne Ellis and Noreen O’Connor
This extract from our book Questioning Identities; Philosophy in Psychoanalytic Practice (Karnac 2010) contextualises the relevance of 20th and 21st century European philosophy to clinical work with individuals from a diversity of race, class, and cultural backgrounds, genders, and sexualities. Our book is principally concerned with questions of identity which arise consciously and unconsciously in the analytical relationship.
Read more: Questioning Identities; Philosophy in Psychoanalytic Practice
John Fletcher
- Details
- Category: Media
John Fletcher is a man of many parts. He is a Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, and has a long-standing interest in psychoanalysis. He has written on film, melodrama and Gothic writing, psychoanalytic theories of sexuality and gender, and primal fantasies. He is the leading commentator in this country on the work of Laplanche.
In this paper he addresses:
Time And Trauma In Freud’s Thought
Page 9 of 10