Category: Academia
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Getting there
Traveling… After the past couple of shaky months, and shakier weeks, and all of the activity around World AIDS Day, a trip for two conferences – a small conference on identity and music in Graz, and a larger one of Jungians doing politics, in Rome. How was it in general? – a lot of travel (Newcastle-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Vienna,…
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Depths… or dregs
Continuing to go through everything in my office… preparatory to moving. Which will be delayed a few days (hallelujah) and will be to a relatively large office at the quiet far end of a corridor… hmm my luck seems to be improving. (Don't get too excited, I'm only there for two years, then they move…
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Wandering the stacks
So: I am finally going through all the books, and then the papers, in my office. My office is being moved soon – rather sooner than I'd expected: repeated insistence on a clear date on my part gave rise to a flurry of emails assuring me that it wouldn't happen until mid-September; but now of…
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It’s complicated
A complicated time. The Book, the one I had all those bizarre death dreams about, arrived in my office TODAY. And yet I breathe. Too much to do in the past weeks, some of it distinctly though not disastrously late… Merrie and I performed duets on my students' musicals night. We made blunders but it…
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Associations
In our studies at the Jung-Institut, there is one apparently archaic procedure we have to run through – the Association Experiment (or Association Test). It's basically the thing that got Freud interested in Jung in 1906 (as The Interpretation of Dreams is the thing that made Jung, along with everyone else, interested in Freud). Stopwatch, list…
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Gastronomic, hypothetic, erotic
Barcelona… So, history: frequently, between about 2003-4 and 2008-9, Susan and Rob and I spent some time each summer in Barcelona, or Sitges, which is nearby enough. Changing circumstances, the deaths of Chris and then Dennis, and my increasing preoccupations in Zürich broke that pattern… And: a few years ago, Susan gave a seminar at…
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Masterworks
Before I leave Switzerland behind – the next to last night in Küsnacht, some people who were about to graduate (= who have now graduated) from the Jung-Institut told us about their dissertation topics. I took substantial notes on at least four, because frankly – and yes, I did indeed say this out loud afterwards…
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Amidst
Three psychoanalysis clients!… uh, patients? Analysands? And those terms: clients is too business-y of course; and after all the arguments in the 1980s in the AIDS community (the ones that created the term 'PWA'), I'm not comfortable calling anyone a 'patient'. Analysand… an exact and respectable term. Unfortunately a rather long one, and one most…
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Death in…
I, Aschenbach… Perhaps, partially, because it is November: Scorpio, darkness… the weather has been suddenly, sharply colder the past two weeks; a couple of nights of miserably torrential rain, though more days are sunny than is usual for us here on the North Sea. But Scorpio is always the darkest part of the year for…
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First-world problems
I understand the joke, 'first-world problems' – it's what we say when the refrigerator breaks or our flight is delayed. The sense is that we are rich and expect everything to be easy, and that our biggest problems are details, minor frustrations, compared with those in other parts of the world. Especially when several other…
Paul Attinello 