i am having frequent interesting conversations with someone who is formally undergoing psychoanalysis, striking differences between it and whatever it is that i do and equally striking correspondences.

for example transference and counter transference, which also happens in other relationships eg teacher student❊

there are disadvantages to my method such as it it, but one major advantage is that there are all kinds of continuities with other conversations with people, that are not and could never be sessions as such, and yet here you are engaged in a process which is more than a conversation — and it is being driven.

it begins as an ordinary conversation but it can turn at any moment ... or i can issue an invitation and then it can turn ... or not.

for a moment i am in the driver seat, my hands are on the wheel. we are idling. we were in neutral but i have shifted into first gear, the clutch is still depressed.

i look at you and say : wanna go for a ride? — where would we go? there is no way of knowing and we may never get to 'a there' ... but you won't be here any more ...

it's entirely up to you, from one session to the next. if you want to hide you can hide. you can avoid me for as long as you like.

ha ha ha ... i wouldn't be a psychoanalyst for quids ... sixty five for forty minutes ... what a rort.

oh! a quid is also a partly masticated lump of food that is dropped from the mouth?! it is apparently said of horses.

#work #psychoanalysis #conversations

one morning you wake up and, as the first of the sun's rays begin to appear on the horizon ... actually no ... wait ... it's a cloudy morning, deep dark clouds hanging low and at dawn, at first it begins to get light and then the skies darken again.

i imagine a different time, before the whatsapp, and too busy lives, and so many distractions, when people lived as nomads.

you notice he has pitched his tent in the distance. the flag is unmistakable. centuries later the design bots at apple would appropriate it as an icon for transparency mode on the airpods pro.

i am currently engaged in a highly speculative experiment with presence.

when i worked in the hospital i learned that sometimes all you can do for people is to be there, hence one of the reasons for the title of my book.

what are the different ways of 'being there' for someone? i have thought about that a lot in the nearly ten years i've been working with people directly as it were, existentially.

what constitutes a consoling presence?

what is presence?

---

this is not art but it is a practice, or rather a praxis — a process of practice being informed by theory and theory being informed by practice — and i would suggest, a theory and practice informed by ethics (and vice versa).

the most basic unit of ethics : respect.

a book like an action painting.

this is in part an action painting made with words and silences and ellipses and dashes, and partly a performance❊ with an audience of one — one who is not actually present in the space where the performance is taking place but nearby.

perfect for corona times. fuck one and a half metres. how about one and a half kilometres?

❊performance here in the sense of a kind of beuysian aktion but like i said, this is not art. so.

#work

in the spirit of transparency — and also to undermine the possible power relationship — it is customary, in the world of narrative therapy, to give the person you've worked with the notes you took during the session at the end.

i was my narrative therapy teacher's worst nightmare (hi ron!) because there were all kinds of things i refused to do and one of them was to take notes during sessions. the wisdom was that taking notes shows the person you're working with that you are paying attention. my argument was and is that if you're taking notes it is impossible to give 100% of your attention to the person. you are not completely being there. and isn't the note taking like a performance then? also, at least for me, because i take words seriously, the fact that the notes are going to be read by the person i am working with (and possibly others) afterwards inevitably means that would be keeping the reader/s in mind whilst you are writing.

after 10 (or 28 depending on how you look at it) years of working with people i have become convinced that it is certainly valuable to share your thoughts/notes arising after a session with the people you're working with and indeed they may also be valuable (or of interest) not only for the particular person but for other people that you're working with (but if it contains personal information, only ever with permission) and i've started doing this slowly, haphazardly, as is my wont.

this morning a new experiment : voice recordings — because of course sometimes one does not have time and energy to write things down properly.

#work

freud and jung : who doesn't love them? you could make a great fi... oh wait. you could also make a dreadful film about them that takes way too many liberties and i find keira knightley a little ... how shall i put it? pouty? and she always looks as if she's acting? and as for michael fassbender, he is just too damned good looking to be jung.

but like many people who did some interesting thinking a long time ago, some of it was useful and still is — and some of it was, but no longer is and some of it never was and never will be, and some of it has been co-opted by people whose intentions are ... questionable.

apparently freud wrote, in a letter to jung in 1906 : “Analysis is, in essence, a cure through love.” i've never seen this before but i haven't read much freud. it does seem like an odd thing to say from one so keen on maintaining professional distance and being a blank slate, but perhaps this was why?

i rather think freud wanted to have his cake and eat it, and if you've seen 'a dangerous method' you might be tempted to say, and so was jung. in fact there is a lot you could say about that, or i could.

in newspaper profiles of famous people the question is sometimes asked by lazy journalists : which person, living or dead, would you most like to have dinner with? and then they say something really boring like shakespeare or plato or some such. i would say, can i have two? jung and freud, but before the feud.

or, if they have to be living, i would say : arnon grunberg.

en nu ga ik nog even een ouwe koei uit de sloot halen.

jung :

‘I've treated a lot of old people. What is striking is that the unconscious usually completely denies the threat of total annihilation. So I encourage my patients to do exactly that: to go on living as if death doesn't mean the end. That doesn't necessarily mean that there is life after death, only that there is something in us that believes that.’

I found this quote (which I had also not seen before) in an interesting article in Dutch from De Groene by Arthur Eaton in which he talks with Sonu Shamdasani, the editor of C.G.Jung's Liber Novus: The Red Book, about, amongst other things, the way in which the alt right has co-opted some of Jung's ideas. That in itself is hardly surprising since both the old and the so-called new right have a history of appropriating ideas which they wilfully (or through ignorance) misunderstand in an attempt to lend legitimacy to their cause by including some names in their half—baked rantings. In this they are no different from the so called New Age 'movement' who do the same with Jung, quantum physics etc.

I like the idea that it is valuable and useful to believe in something, but what that something is, is not unimportant. To allow someone who is dying to believe that they are not going to die is tricky. I have worked with people who I felt were not ready to face the fact that they were going to die very soon. And some people die like that.

But it is the ego, consciousness, which rejects the possibility of its own annihilation, and this is at the core of the human condition. Instead of encouraging people to live as if death doesn't mean the end, I would suggest what is needed, the work, is fully realising the finite nature of the self — but not almost everyone is ready for that.

It does make me wonder if Jung ever read Being and Time?

archive copy of de groene article

#work #death #love #psyche