Tag Archives: psychoanalysis

‘Like An Open Sky’ – a documentary about the ‘Courtil’ treatment centre for children

It’s very good to hear that Mariana Otero’s acclaimed film about Le Courtil, the Lacanian-oriented treatment centre on the French-Belgium border for children, adolescents and adults with mental health problems, will be released with subtitles in the UK in October. We’ll try to see about getting a showing in Bristol somehow…

“Alysson considers her body with mistrust. Evanne spins and twists until he collapses. Amina can’t manage to make words come out of her mouth. At the border between France and Belgium there exists a special place which takes care of psychologically and socially challenged children. Day after day, the adults working there try to understand the enigma that each of these children represent and invent, case by case, without ever imposing anything, solutions that will help them live peaceful lives.”

Click the image below to watch the trailer for the film on YouTube:

Making Space – Psychoanalysis and Artistic Process – videos from 2012 UCL conference

Videos from ‘Psychoanalysis and Artistic Process – a day of dialogues between artists and psychoanalysts’ which took place on 25th February 2012 at University College London. Discussion between artists and psychoanalysts including Kenneth Wright, Sharon Kivland, Grayson Perry, Valerie Sinason, Martin Creed and Lesley Caldwell.
[To view these videos on Vimeo, please click here (page 1) and here (page2)]

On Poetry and psychoanalysis – Jenny Xie interviews Sarah Arvio

[Click here to read the whole article on the website of the Los Angeles Review of Books]

“Poetry and psychoanalysis share a way of thinking: searching, reaching, shifting. They’re both an enactment of the mind, or a dance of the mind. Above all, they share the accidental discovery: the clarifying moment of surprise.”

The enduring legacy of Freud – Anna Freud

[Read the whole article on the BBC website]

The legacy of Sigmund Freud – the founder of psychoanalysis is well known. But perhaps less so is the impact his daughter Anna had, and continues to have, on child psychoanalysis. Anna, the youngest of Freud’s six children, was the only one to follow in her father’s footsteps. Her involvement began at the age of just 13, when she took part in her father’s weekly discussions on psychoanalytic ideas. Controversially, she is also believed to have received some informal therapy from her father. By the time of her death in 1982, Anna Freud’s work had revolutionised how we treat children in many walks of life, such as in hospital – with longer visiting hours when children are having treatment – and in the judicial system, where screens and video cameras are used when children have to give evidence. […]

Darian Leader: “Heed the new age of anxiety rather than bemoaning it”

[Click here to read the whole article on the Guardian Website]

If the postwar age of anxiety was supposed to have ended 30 or 40 years ago, a swath of media articles now suggest a dramatic comeback. A new and widely reported study claims a massive increase in anxiety disorders in the UK, with an estimated 8.2 million sufferers compared to 2.3 million in 2007. The pressures of modern life, we are told, must play a large part here, with job stress aggravating the difficulties of urban populations.

The focus on socio-economic conditions is surely a good thing. In the 1980s, Thatcherism encouraged a redrafting of work-related problems as psychological ones. As each person became a unit of economic competition, it wasn’t the market’s fault if they didn’t get a job but their own. Injustice in the marketplace was glossed over as individual failure.

Hundreds of books and articles have questioned this without gaining media exposure, so why the visibility of the new research? I was puzzled to find not a single sentence in the report linking the supposed increase in anxiety to social causes. In fact, there was no explanation at all, and the headline-grabbing prevalence rate for the UK was estimated from Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.

Here, we find a perfect expression of the new mental hygiene movement. Anxiety is grouped together with dementia, stroke and neuromuscular conditions as a “brain disorder”, and the authors urge an approach that uses “comparable methodologies for both mental and neurological illness”. Disorders are listed in terms of their cost to the economy rather than to individual lives, families and communities. […]

Artist Martin Creed on his own psychoanalysis.

[Click here to read the whole article on Culture24.org.uk]

Anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with the practice of artist Martin Creed will know all about the fastidious numbering of his works. These begin with Work No.3 in 1986 (a yellow painting) and so far stretch as far as this year’s Work No. 1461 (an installation made with adhesive tape).

What might surprise you is that Creed’s appetite for order and record keeping extends to collecting sound files of every interview he undertakes. So when I catch him on the phone a technical hitch at his end throws the methodical artist.

“Wait, are you recording this?” he wants to know. “Can I get a copy of it?” And after the giving and receiving of assurances that I will later send him an MP3, we are ready to continue. It is quite clear that Creed takes the business of talking seriously.

This bodes well for those lucky enough to find themselves at the Freud Museum during Museums at Night 2013. On Thursday May 16 the Scottish artist will be on the spot, if not on the couch, as he improvises an after hours lecture, with the help of slide projections and a bit of music.

“It’s hard to do things,” he says. “Everything seems just as difficult as everything else: it’s just as much work to try to talk and say something that I think is alright as it is to try to fix and be okay with the shapes or colours in a painting or a sculpture or whatever.”

Creed refuses to be drawn about finer details pertaining to the evening: “I’m not sure — I’ll probably try just to think out loud and talk about whatever comes up”.

But he does admit the event should resonate with his newfound surroundings. “Absolutely, aye,” he says, “I do psychoanalysis and I’m a fan of Freud. Yeah, I have been [in analysis] for a very long time.”

Creed reveals he first saw an analyst in 1993: “I did it because I was desperate. I wanted to speak to someone.” Now he goes four times a week. “It’s a bit like going swimming or something like that: I think it’s an integral part of my life.”

At any rate, intensive therapy is clearly commensurate with a blue chip art career. This most exacting of artists views the activity as labour: “It’s work and I feel like I have to keep doing it.” This may come as some surprise, considering how effortless the artist’s official numbered works appear to be…

UKCP Event: ‘Black men on the couch: talking therapy’

UKCP ‘Black men on the couch: talking therapy’ – 12 May 2012 – RADA Studios, London from Lydia Dumont on Vimeo.
A sell-out event in the ‘Black Men on the Couch’ series took place with guests Ashley Walters (Hustle, Top Boy, Inside Men) and Stuart Lawrence (brother of Stephen Lawrence). Fascinating and moving by turn, the evening revealed some of the different struggles and obstacles in life overcome by both Ashley and Stuart and provided an insight into just how valuable it is to talk about them.

‘Strictly Bipolar’ – Darian Leader at the Bristol Festival of Ideas – 18th May 2013

‘Strictly Bipolar’ – Darian Leader at the Bristol Festival of Ideas – 18th May 2013

Click here to read the full article on the Watershed Website.

Strictly Bipolar is Darian Leader’s treatise on the psychological disorder of our times.If the post-war period was called the ‘Age of Anxiety’ and the 1980s and ’90s the ‘Antidepressant Era’, we now live in Bipolar times. Mood-stabilising medication is routinely prescribed to adults and children alike, with child prescriptions this decade increasing by 400% and overall diagnoses by 4000%. What could explain this explosion of bipolarity? Is it a legitimate diagnosis or the result of Big Pharma marketing?

Exploring these questions, Darian Leader challenges the rise of ‘bipolar’ as a catch-all solution to complex problems, and argues that we need to rethink the highs and lows of mania and depression. What, he asks, do these experiences have to do with love, guilt and rage? Why the spending sprees and the intense feeling of connection with the world? Why the confidence, the self-esteem and the sense of a bright future that can so swiftly turn into despair and dejection? Only by looking at these questions in a new way will we be able to understand and help the person caught between feelings that can be so terrifying and so exhilarating, so life-affirming yet also so lethal.

Freud Museum Podcast: Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran

[Click here to view the whole article and download the podcast from the Freud Museum website.]

Is psychoanalysis possible in the Islamic Republic of Iran? This is the question that Gohar Homayounpour poses to herself, and to us, at the beginning of this memoir of displacement, nostalgia, love, and pain. Twenty years after leaving her country, Homayounpour, an Iranian, Western-trained psychoanalyst, returns to Tehran to establish a psychoanalytic practice. When an American colleague exclaims, “I do not think that Iranians can free-associate!” Homayounpour responds that in her opinion Iranians do nothing but. Iranian culture, she says, revolves around stories. Why wouldn’t Freud’s methods work, given Iranians’ need to talk?

Thus begins a fascinating narrative of interlocking stories that resembles–more than a little–a psychoanalytic session.

Psychoanalyst Darian Leader on nail biting and the DSM

[click here to read the whole article on the Guardian website]

Meaning has been stripped from the diagnostic enterprise, in favour of pure external classification.

Clinicians who want to pursue a dialogue here find that they are allocated less and less time with their patients by a bureaucratic and managerial healthcare system. The tragedy is that this deprives us of having any authentic understanding of the symptom, and it introduces a rigid, normative vision of human behaviour. We can know what is a disorder, and what isn’t, without listening to what the person has to say.

Yet nail biting might be a totally irrelevant detail for one person, a terrible curse or a pleasurable habit for another. Classifying such behaviour externally as a symptom, without taking into account what it means to that person, is profoundly inhuman. It is yet another vehicle for imperatives telling us how we should live and how we shouldn’t.