BLOG
Selection of articles written between 2005 and today.
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A Territory Bigger Than Any Map: Reality Tunnels, Perinatal Matrices and Psychoanalysis
Medea, Alphonse Mucha Pychoanalysis privileges the intrapersonal (and even the transpersonal) at the expense of the interpersonal. D.W. Winnicott wrote that “There is no society except as a structure brought about…by individuals”, a philosophy later mirrored by Margaret Thatcher in her infamous proclamation, “…there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women,… Read more
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The Gravity Well Of Graduate Poverty
‘Hello, my name is Gareth, and I’m a graduate.’ I picture myself staring down at a little red and white name tag, unable to meet the eyes of the others – the failures, the graduates. ‘It’s been…’ I pause, I can’t say it out loud, ‘Go on,’ someone tells me gently, patting my arm. ‘…… Read more
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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
