Category: Blog

It is often said that psychoanalysts should look at structure, not surface symptoms, in order to make a clinical diagnosis. There are two problems with this. First, the definition of a particular structure has to be rigorous enough to recognise it when you see it. The question is: what characterises this structure, and is particular […]

A few months back I wrote a rather long article tracing the historical debate about the nature of the unconscious in psychoanalysis across three key turning points – 1915, 1928, and 1960. It was a bit wordy (material for my PhD) so here’s a video version for those who prefer watching to reading. Expect more […]

Who is ‘allowed’ to tell your story? Are you and you alone the only one that can represent your unique experience, past, and identity? Or is it sometimes okay – perhaps even better – for someone else to do this in your place? This month marks the 50th anniversary of a radical answer to these […]

This is Abdoulaye Yerodia Ndombasi, helping Lacan into his car as he leaves his seminar in March, 1980. And this is Yerodia again, around the time of the international arrest warrant issued against him by Belgium, for serious violations of international humanitarian law under the Geneva Convention. This short article is about his story. But […]

What does it mean to say that something is ‘unconscious’? The idea of the unconscious is the single biggest differentiator separating psychoanalysis from all other ‘psy-’ practices. Fidelity to a certain understanding of the nature and character of the unconscious is at the bedrock of psychoanalysis as a discipline. So it follows that a theory […]

“It’s one thing to see images of an experience you had, but it’s another thing to have an experience of the experience. It was the closest I’d ever come to feeling like I was there again.” – Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat (now Snap), announcing the launch of his company’s camera-embedded glasses. When we look […]

No film in recent years has had quite as much input from the field of psychology as Disney and Pixar’s latest offering, Inside Out. Charming though the film is, its portrayal of emotional life tells us a lot about how current psychological theories treat the study of emotions. This gives us an excuse to contrast […]

Hip hop, it is sometimes claimed, is born of an absent father. If this is true perhaps rock music is born of an absent mother. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Elvis, Jimmy Hendrix – to name just a few – all lost their mothers when they were young. As did Bono, lead singer of U2, whose […]

In The Question of Lay Analysis from 1926, Freud imagined himself being asked by an ‘Impartial Person’ whether psychoanalysis is a confession. He imagines the following question being thrown at him: “‘You assume that every neurotic has something oppressing him, some secret. And by getting him to tell you about it you relieve his oppression […]

From the symptom to the sinthome The title of this short article will resonate with readers of the Écrits,but rather than Kant or Sade here I am going to argue for why Lacan should be read with another Master of his art – the father of modern-day karate, Gichin Funakoshi. At the end of his […]