Category: Psychology
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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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relatively quiet – continuing developments
A calm day – mild rain since last night, Zürich is cooling off after a sunny week. The hourly church bells – they have seemed remarkably reassuring for the past few days; perhaps I am getting accustomed to them. After, of course, several years – have I really been coming here, however irregularly, since 2009?…
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Miseries
Yesterday I went to Leicester for psychoanalysis… unfortunately started to feel a bit off while getting to the train; suggesting IBS, or something very like it. By the time I arrived, three hours later… My analyst is fortunately a psychiatrist, so can write prescriptions; he kindly wrote a prescription and drove me around until we…
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Anniversary
My first blog post was dated 14 May 2006… good lord, eight years ago. 689 posts (including this one), therefore eighty-six or so per year – actually rather better than I thought. I experience this as – partly – a long-term narrative of moving from sadness, and a lot of retelling stories of the past,…
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Meta-memory
… or meta-awareness… or something like that. There are a number of links in the chains of what is passing through my mind – reading Buddhist stories (especially Paul Reps' wonderful translations), working on a project nearly twenty years old, my own analysis sessions – and even the experiences of working with my own analysands,…
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The experience of fragments
I seem to be functioning in a very, as it were, multi-leveled way lately. Things that must be done – working as an analyst, teaching classes, observing classes, editing a volume, meetings, being in analysis, planning, conferences, Jung-Institut homework – even: vacuuming the apartment, buying groceries – are functioning in often brisk and sharpy outlined…
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Insight
How unexpected – some of the events and understandings of the past two months – with those of the past five or six years, with those of the past thirty-one years, and even with those of the past fifty-seven years – seem to have turned a narrowly configured corner, one that leads from the the…
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Downs… and ups
Zürich. Küsnacht. Jung-Institut. Two and a bit out of three weeks. I do seem to be emotionally volatile while I'm here… anxiety over my ability to become an analyst, excitement over new ideas – or, as you'll see, anger over new ideas – plumbing unexpected depths… Well, the past week was a rough one. Both…
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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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Backwash
So, as the events and discussion around AIDS gradually dwindle… even after World AIDS Day, there are still backwashes (or perhaps: backdrafts?) from all these memories and feelings. Monday was the patient group discussion with graduate students in clinical psychology – which is always both easier and deeper than our more usual presentations for medical…
Paul Attinello 