Lectures
The meaning of moonlight
19th May 2008A Dorset country lane at night. The moon seems to rise behind its beam continuously, against a sky on which light drums. The intensity of the beam shrouds areas of the landscape in lunar shadows. It seems so purposeful, and so immense in its radiance over hill, plain and sea. Intense silence. The silence of the moon, related to the whiteness of the light, is piercing.
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Life Before words
14th May 2008The beauty of the pre-human world appears to be largely one of anticipation - a waiting for Man. Or so we would like to believe, perhaps because the thought of a beautiful world in which mankind has no being is too desolating for human beings to bear.
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The Dream Screen
17th March 2008In this paper I shall draw a distinction between the nature of history and of mythology, which I think is helpful in understanding the evolution of different kinds of belief about the meaning of transference interpretations.
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The boy who had dreams in his mouth
17th March 2008Jaan Puhvel introduces his readers to a survey of comparative mythology by considering the derivation of the word myth.
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First Light: Knowing the infant as an actuality and as an idea
13th March 2008An observer who 'enters the field' in conducting an infant observation comes to know the infant and its care-takers directly. As it thinks about the experiences of the observer, the seminar group comes to know an experience by hearsay.
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Killing to remain ignorant
13th March 2008I want to compare the experience of being invaded by pain with the idea of someone else's pain. What do I mean by the idea of someone else's pain; am I referring to a psychic entity with a specific structure?
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Adrian Stokes
13th March 2008Both Bion and Stokes, as patients of Mrs Klein, evolved fascinating theories out of Mrs Klein's seminal discovery of the paranoid schizoid and depressive positions and the transition that can occur between the two positions.
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Donald Meltzer
13th March 2008A question that takes the reader into Donald Meltzer's book The Apprehension of Beauty is: in what sense is the experience of love at first sight a form of knowledge? Love at first sight is inexplicable, and so is be hate at first sight, or failures in love and hate; but such events invite the need to attend to them as realisations.
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The overlap of two skeletons
13th March 2008A patient at the end of a session tells me about someone he knows who is in prison - and who suffers from an unusual bone disease. The man in prison appears to have two skeletons: one full skeleton, rather, and another one adjacent to it that seems to shadow the first skeleton, and exists only in bits.
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Mind and it’s boundries
12th March 2008The other day, as I had a first session with a new patient, I became aware of how I was clinging to his speech as though moving by touch along a surface. I was unusually conscious of the way in which his sentences were constructed. They might have been put together like bits of mosaic. The joins between the mosaic bits might have been gaps, blurs, disappearances of themes and half themes. My contact with this mosaic surface was adhesive.
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Recent Books
This is an utterly profound work. Eric Rhode seeks…
Buy Notes On The Aniconic»
This is an extraordinary book. The author is unique…
Buy Plato’s Silence»