BLOG
Selection of articles written between 2005 and today.
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A Detailed Look At Winnicott – Book Review: Playing & Reality
Playing and Reality (Winnicott, 1971) represents a compendium of papers published during Donald Winnicott’s career as a paediatrician and psychoanalyst. The book offers an overview of Winnicott’s theories relating to the development and use of the internalised evaluations of ourselves that lie at the heart of the object relations approach. These essays outline the role… Read more
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An Argument for Psychoanalysis. Book Review: The Gossamer Thread, by John Marzillier
John Marzillier’s autobiographical account attempts to convey what the experience of therapy ‘is really like’. Rather than elucidating case histories, he has provided a fictionalised, novelistic memoir of cases spanning his four decade career. Marzillier began working as a behaviourist and became during practice a cognitive therapist, and finally a ‘psychodynamic narrative therapist’. The book’s… Read more
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Lets Pretend! Synchronicity, Suffering & Psychoanalysis
Can there be a more reliable indication of stupidity than the phrase ‘everything happens for a reason’? But if we play the game of presupposing a shape or interconnection to life, this play space connects us to the real – the shared experience of illusion. This game allows us to act as though our lives… Read more
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Winnicott & Creativity
The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott was one of the pioneers of the ‘object relations’ school. Broadly object relations (an enormously diverse area, underlying modern approaches like family systems theory and transactional analysis) situates the primary parental bond as the source of the individual’s ability to contain threatening feelings, and understand themselves as a subjective participant in… Read more
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If you bike in Dublin, park it here
Dublin has a surprisingly little known treat hidden away on Drury St. A free indoor car park for cyclists, provided by Dublin City Council. Given the inordinately high number of bike thefts in Dublin, the place is a god send. It’s open every day, until midnight or one except on Sundays and public holidays, when… Read more
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What Was A Hipster Anyway?
I used to be cool. There have been a couple of times in my life when I flew close to the zeitgeist, and felt almost part of something. Way back in 2009, much closer to the temporal epicentre of the hipster menace, I wrote the first article of an intended two parter, attempting to analyse exactly what… Read more
Gareth Stack 