psychoanalysis
“How little we still commit ourselves to living. We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life. We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light. How can we presume to want to know in advance, from where the light will come to us?”
Read MoreThe notion that the appropriate response to experiencing “symptoms” is to seek their immediate removal is a bizarre product of our time which has become dangerously ordinary. It positions us immediately against our bodies, hearts, and souls, and frames them as systems that are prone to meaningless malfunction, like an iPhone engineered to break after a certain time for no apparent reason. People with lots of symptoms, or more severe symptoms, are deemed very unwell, and by virtue, less powerful, less important and less good than those who are not symptomatic. In our capitalist economic structures, they may also be less productive and therefore less valued or successful.
Read MoreI have never found anything that summarises my experience of therapy (as both therapist and patient) quite like Garrick Duckler’s short film, On Being A Patient. His words provide two gifts: they touch the intricacies of the kinds of problems that people bring to therapy, as separate from diagnostic categories or symptoms, and they articulate the nuances of what can be frightening about the intimacy and vulnerability of a therapeutic relationship. It is nine minutes unequivocally well spent for any patient, therapist, or curious other.
Read MoreBeing a therapy patient, especially in a longer-term, more exploratory treatment like psychoanalysis, requires a certain kind of courage. Those who choose this mode of healing (arguably the most expensive, open-ended and uncertain option, in many respects, of those ‘on the market’) submit themselves to a path towards the perimeter of themselves as they have come to be known, by others and by themselves. Eventually, they must heave open the rusty gate at the edge of their familiar, conscious self, step into the overgrown grass and begin their navigation of the unmapped, incoherent, shadowy outskirts of who they are.
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