Category: Everyday
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Three women
A few days after the Brexit vote, I am talking to N. over the phone: an intelligent, skilled businesswoman – in fact someone much more skilled at managing the world and its demands, laws and finances than I am (which isn't setting the bar very high, I admit). She is, however, upset, also as I am – concerned about…
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Cracks in the world
A strange and fragmented time. It feels like a distant echo of the 1930s: erosion, disintegration of supports and safety. Feral rage, roving attacks. A distant whiff of rot and gunpowder. Milder, of course, by far – at least at this point in history: that weird sense that, with a massacre of innocents at a Florida gay bar,…
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Spring
And, distinctly strangely, after only three days, feeling much better… even, perhaps, better than most of the past seven months, since the first change in medications. (Honestly a bit bewildered by this… no sense of weakness at any point…) Yes of course, it is perhaps merely shifting biochemistry and mood… probably helped by cutting one…
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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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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 party
And so… a birthday party for Andrew, thrown mostly by his partner Michael and a number of helpful friends, in their large house. With many people from different places, who have different styles… lots of fun, the usual rambunctious cheer in some rooms, quieter and more relaxed in others, and a lot of talking and…
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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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Mid–
Solstice night, nadir of the year. In the middle of the long night: the point where our day goes down to seven hours, then the direction reverses and the day rapidly lengthens… This winter I seem to be waking in the middle of the night – not a new thing: since my 2009 stroke I…
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[Panic / anger / calm: shifting grounds]
[a] Friday. I am upset. No, that's not quite true: I am not pleased, but… it is as though the negative emotions are at least partly in brackets. I can see myself panicking a bit, angry and disoriented – but, perhaps because this is how psychoanalysis can work, the emotions are understandable but don't quite…
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Restart / reset
Home. Weather warm and damp by local standards, but rather cool compared to the hot day in Zürich I just left. Recovery from packing, airport, plane – and I do know that this wasn't a difficult trip. After all I wasn't traveling to Asia, or using one of the painfully brutal American arilines, or doing…
Paul Attinello 