There'll be scenes like this (and much worse) up and down the UK if Reform get into government and start acting out their Send Them Back fantasies. A thousand acts of sadism carried out by malevolent racist thugs employed and empowered by the state. Some of you will be safe. Many of us won't.

Last ECPS Psychoanalytic Film Club, Haneke's fascinating The White Ribbon, themes: the uncanny, the return of the repressed, fascism. As with a therapy session, the film doesn't include answers. But sometimes we shouldn't look for answers, instead allow ourselves to be transformed by an experience.

Took part as a member in the first CityLit meeting of my Nietzsche reading group. Great group of people, with interesting contributions. I've known nothing about Nietzsche, so good to continue exploring links between psychoanalysis and continental philosophy.

Interesting reflections on a significant contemporary theorist

'Angels in the nursery (2005)', Lieberman et al on possible benign childhood experiences that the traumatised child can draw upon when they become a parent. Interrupting intergenerational cycles of maltreatment. As important as Fraiberg's 'Ghosts'. Good to end the term with a hopeful message.

Update on Pinker's 'Better Angels'. Claim that we evolved to often be collaborative, except that psychopaths often achieve positions of power. worksinprogress.co/issue/the-pr...

Ego defences displayed here include rationalisation, splitting, denial, and projection.

"Of the scores of people I spoke to... all perceived their lives to be better off thanks to an [ADHD] diagnosis. [And yet, since] the diagnosis, almost all had left their job, dropped out of education & lost many old friends. Several were housebound". www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

From Christina Emanuel. In 'An Accidental Pokemon Expert' (2015), she encourages us to see the individual's subjective experience within autism.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) reports that nearly a quarter of the UK population now suffers 'material deprivation' (being unable to properly heat their homes or feed their families).... And we wonder why mental & emotional anguish escalates....

Dreams under fascism, and paralysis:

1/ Pamela Bartram (Melancholia, Mourning, Love. 2013): Therapy with disabled adults/parents of a disabled child, disability can bring loss of ego ideal and consequent harsh superego. If melancholia can turn to mourning, then Britton's 'Rueful humour' and an acceptance of impermanence can emerge.

Next seminar: Aileen Alleyne 2007 The internal oppressor. External oppression leading to an inhibiting adaptive false self. Alleyne sees this as a specific structure, different to internalised oppression, the latter being internalisation of the oppressor's values.

Raphael-Leff's 'Absolute hospitality and the imagined baby' (2020) provided a good start to a term on human development. Our beginnings lie in the body and mind of the mother. Raphael-Leff also reminds us that a degree of maternal ambivalence is to be expected.

Awais Aftab brings his usual clear thinking and compassion to the complex and non-determining relationship between biological sex and gender identity.

One of The American Psychoanalyst's top stories for 2024 is this useful and well-written piece by Lily Meyersohn... Revisiting Freud’s “Discrediting” open.substack.com/pub/american...

Another thoughtful post by Awais Aftab, this about risk and iatrogenic harm. open.substack.com/pub/awaisaft...

A great thread with a insight that continues to be challenging; but without this insight much of human life remains obscure.

Thanks for the reminder of Fairbairn. And, of course, this trauma may lead the child to believe that its own love is toxic and that this is the reason that it is not loved.

Thanks for sharing these (and other) images.

It is odd that so many people see psychoanalytic therapy as an endless, intellectual rehashing of one’s childhood experiences when, in fact, one of its core assumptions concerns the emotional power of the here-and-now therapeutic relationship. - Nancy McWilliams

"The construction of the object leads retroactively to the construction of the drive, which constructs the object" (André Green, 2000).

Last seminar for the term. Heidi Keller's paper encourages us to broaden our often culturally-bound understanding of attachment theory.

🧵 Yesterday was Frantz Fanon's death anniversary (6 Dec 1961). I want to credit what usually gets little attention: the fact that he was a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist. And that his critique of colonialism can only be understood as being build from his clinical experience...

Haneke's The White Ribbon, set before WW1. A feeling of threat throughout the film, the uncanny sense of the return of the repressed. In this case, the return of the adult's cruelty towards their children. Do the children enact the violence that erupts in the bucolic village? We're not told.

1 Teaching Freud's Three essays on sexuality. His first essay, on perversion, shows plasticity of sexual object and aim, and sets scene for the second. By describing so-called perversions as component parts of everyday sexuality, he develops a concept of libido that finds expression in infants.

One of the cornerstones of psychoanalytic therapy.

They aren’t anti-science. Not at all. They are using science to promote anti-science behaviour in others, because it weakens the population and brings them under tighter control. And they are using behaviour science, neuroscience, and computer science to do it…

Thanks, Martin, for highlighting this study, which adds to the evidence for the long-term effectiveness of psychotherapy.

1. Winnicott on his regret at being clever, a self-indulgent trap that I can fall into... 'It appals me to think how much deep change I have prevented or delayed in patients in a certain classification category by my personal need to interpret...'

—Robert Reich (2024) @rbreich.bsky.social #poem #poetry #poetrycommunity

1. Here's why I'll never use AI to assist my research or writing: A. I don't want to know exactly what I'm looking for. I mean that when I start researching a topic, I want to remain open to its contradictions and paradoxes, and to the unexpected paths that might lead off it. 🧵

The Long-Term Effectiveness of Psychodynamic and Analytical Psychotherapy in Routine Care: Preprint by Henkel, Zimmermann, Volz, Staats, Benecke 2024. AP showed greater long-term effectiveness, particularly for patients with more severe problems at baseline. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Technofeudalism '...a company like Meta, much of its capital stock is being produced not by its employees but by its users...by unpaid people who, like modern-day ‘cloud serfs’, come into contact with its algorithms and work for free...to attract other cloud serfs.' newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Steven Reisner on politics and psychoanalysis open.substack.com/pub/american...

I am going to share this story and I'm going to tell them that I do not believe in the so-called ‘unconscious bias’. I believe in ‘the conscious bias that is often defended unconsciously’. (4/4)

'Human beings have a need as deep as hunger and thirst to establish intersubjective constructions (including projective identifications), in order to find an exit from unending, futile wanderings in their own internal object world.' Thomas H. Ogden (2004). The Analytic Third. p.193

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." — James Baldwin

1/ "I was fed up with the false narrative we hear over and over, that psychoanalytic therapy has been discredited & so-called evidence-based therapy is scientifically proven. I knew the research and knew that the public, policy makers, & MH professionals were being sold a bill of goods.

Loewald 3/ ‘...and...is its atonement and metamorphosis: atonement insofar as the superego makes up for and is a restitution of oedipal relationships; metamorphosis insofar as, in this restitution, oedipal object relations are transmuted into internal, intrapsychic structural relations.’

Loewald 2/ Not only parental authority is destroyed...but the parents...are being destroyed as libidinal objects...’ ‘...(to deal) with the guilt for the crime of parricide...the superego, as internalization or narcissistic transformation of oedipal object relations, documents parricide

Loewald 1/ Loewald's revision of Oedipus as de​​sire for individuation and autonomy (The Waning of the Oedipus Complex, 1979) ‘...the assumption of responsibility for one's own life and its conduct is in psychic reality tantamount to the murder of the parents, to the crime of parricide...'

Great to be here 👋🏽 Let’s start with some good news. A new report shows free school meals in London's state primaries are having a positive impact: ➡️ Improving children’s health and wellbeing ➡️ Supporting families, esp. those struggling with the cost of living www.mirror.co.uk/news/politic...

Discussed today Regina Pally's The Predicting Brain. I like her ideas and they make sense clinically, but I don't have the bandwidth to study enough neuroscience to know how sound these ideas are. Perhaps finding them useful is enough? #psychoanalysis #neuropsychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has multiple histories, some reactionary, others emancipatory, one chooses which to carry on, but there is no tradition that explains today’s dynamics—sadism, fantasy, projection, disavowal, return of the repressed, the self-opacity of human knowledge—more thoroughly & convincingly.

Psychodynamic #therapy equaled CBT in a new, large trial of major #depression, and brought greater remission and well-being: Both given as 2 sessions per week over 8 weeks #psychotherapy #psychiatry #psychoanalysis pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39486646/

Supervision seminar Crucial that issue of race & diversity integrated into clinical supervision, not fenced off as special topic. Includes exploring within supervisory relationship itself. Safe place, so supervisor & supervisee develop awareness of their own culture & assumptions. #psychoanalysis

2/ But these thoughts arise in an analytic space. This is Ogden's Analytic Third, a co-creation of my internal world and my patient's projective identification. These are analytic objects which can carry useful meaning and communication.