Category: Awareness
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Lessons
On the plane from Amsterdam to Zurich, a large, angry-looking man is already sitting in the row in front of us. First one, then the other of the seats in his row are filled by men who have suitcases. But he has put some flowers in the overhead bin… Twice he explodes with rage at…
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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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Addressed to the passions
(If you don't know that phrase, it is from one of the funniest and most touching of essays by Max Beerbohm, 'A Clergyman.' I suggest you find it and read it.) An intense week… after another intense week, but this one was very different…. Well, for four days, at least: verve, intensity, demands on time…
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A week later
Really not an unsuccessful week: a good supervisory session, two colloquia, part of one good seminar – a trip to Lausanne to look into a new exchange partner for our department; a lot of complicated back and forth beforehand, because Switzerland no longer is part of the EU exchange system – did someone tell me…
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To Züri
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by
A busy, rapidly moving ten days or so, resulting in numerous things done – patients, classes, editing, emails – and also at some points just stopping, almost startled that I didn't want to work on the next thing. My new version of procrastination, I think: something barer, simpler – with far less anxiety. Perhaps this…
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Evening, station
Arriving on the evening train home from Sheffield – after a day with emails, meetings, a lecture, a sandwich on the midday train to Sheffield, where my analyst kindly travels to see me weekly. The train is on time, 8:47, or a bit earlier, walking out of the station, everyone bumping along, some suitcases. At…
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The hard part
I've become increasingly aware, in a somewhat embarrassed way, of the difference between psychologically recovering from irrational complexes that hamper us, that keep us from living – and actually, actively, doing things in the world, doing things in life. I mean, okay, I've always kind of stunk at this. My sister and brother will easily…
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Solstice
In the dark of the year, I had the task of introducing one of our series of movie musicals at a local café. We'd chosen Meet Me in St. Louis – always an odd one: sentimental, structured – but at the same time there are strange, dark eruptions into the story: the youngest daughter in…
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[fragment]
[After a long day at the end of a long week with lots of things to do – but successful, even enjoyable, if a bit pressured: a student's year abroad rescued, two postgrads off in different research directions, supervision and personal analysis, analysands energetic but entangled, an HIV patients' meeting with a long list of…
Paul Attinello 