As Thrul suggests, the end of history thesis fits well with the rise of the biological deterministic model for understanding mental distress. The widespread adoption of this paradigm in the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic communities has much to do with the current devalued status of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. […]
In issue 10.22, Mike Eigen offers a vignette that acts like a koan inviting the reader to depths beyond the obvious.
All of us are regularly asked to engage with the past in some way. The world is saturated by history. But, then, a simple question: What is history? Ask fifty people and you’ll get, typically, fifty shades of the same answer: History is something about a past. Whether as myth or memory, narrative or science, or found in gradients in between each, the most common denominator is a starting place in an ambiguous past, a “before now,” which is given meaning only insofar as it is connected to other things either similarly before now or, sometimes even more strangely, to things happening “now” or “later.”
William Blake was outraged by the idea of a bird in a cage, it being a violation of the natural order. One can only imagine what he would think…
Engaging with marginalized social histories and recognizing the psychic consequences these histories hold for the treatment dyad poses a challenge for psychoanalysis…
For the previous issue of ROOM, I contributed a piece that argued against the idealization of tolerance, diversity and understanding that I see so many in the psychoanalytic community currently engaged in. I’m aware that some readers…
