Old meme, improved:
#SCHOPENHAUER: Existence is shit.
#NIETZSCHE: How delightfully nihilistic of you, Schopenhauer. Try loving your fate instead of writing its obituary. Freud?
#FREUD: Classic case of chronic celibacy. His despair starts in his pants & ends in the unconscious. Sartre?
#SARTRE: If existence is shit, then someone flushed it without essence.
CAMUS (arriving late): You’re all debating if life stinks. I just want to know: who lit the match?

4/6 She’s a fan of Freud. I told her flat out: I hate Freud. I hate fraud. In the 19th century, they called psychology "philosophy," but that doesn't make it gospel. Especially that "latent stage" invention—a total fabrication. It ignores the natural, vibrant complexity of human development at every age. #Psychology #Freud #Debate

RE: https://flipboard.com/@tagesspiegel/tagesspiegel-nachrichten-s5m3i3qjz/-/a-6DtkderrSwyP4lwJ_XbFnw%3Aa%3A2598872424-%2F0

Ich hatte vor einigen Jahren einen solchen Dooring-Unfall in Berlin, der glücklicherweise glimpflich für mich ausging. Die Erfahrung hab ich vorletztes Jahr zum Anlass für einen langen Essay genommen, den ihr, wenn ihr mögt, ohne Paywall hier nachlesen könnt:

https://wespennest.at/pdf/wn187_karin_nungesser.pdf

#musil #doderer #benjamin #freud

"So there I was, moving from apathy to disbelief, holding the same plant my great-grandfather Sigmund had nurtured nearly 100 years ago." —Emma Freud for The Observer

https://observer.co.uk/news/first-person/article/emma-freud-sigmund-freuds-begonia/?src=longreads

#freud #writing #reading #longreads #familyhistory #begonia

Hello London! Soon me and the missus will be back:

https://thelasttuesdaysociety.org/exhibition/fabulous-freaks-of-yesteryear-by-carl-abrahamsson-live/

https://www.freud.org.uk/event/surreal-secrets-of-the-psyche-the-creative-zeitgeist-of-psychoanalysis-film-and-the-avant-garde/

Get your tickets NOW before the end of the world!

#freud #freudmuseumuk #viktorwynd #thelasttuesdaysociety #pabst #surrealism #psychoanalysis #freaks #vanessasinclair #carlabrahamsson

Creative thinking as mushroom picking: a sketch of a psychoanalytical account of thinking-through-writing

I’ve been preoccupied by this passage from Feud’s Interpretation of Dreams about the lattice work of associations which builds up the texture of our dream worlds:

The dream thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings: they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.

Bollas talks about this the Evocative Object World (pg 29-30) in terms of “internal constellations of interest” which “form through the associations of thought during the day, usually in response to discrete episodes of lived experience, following long-standing desires in the self”. The analytical significance comes “When the structure reaches an ‘epiphany’ , understood here as a moment of insight that allows the self to increase its reflective capacity, the person looks upon himself and others in a somewhat new manner”. These constellations of interest, the meshwork, builds throughout our everyday experience. From The Evocative Object pg 63:

Without thinking about it much, when we traverse a city – or walk in our district – we are engaged in a type of dreaming. Each gaze that falls upon an object of interest may yield a moment’s reverie – when we think of something else, inspired by the point of emotional contact – and during our day we will have scores of such reveries, which Freud termed psychic intensities, and which he believed were the stimuli for the dream that night. But as a type of dreaming in their own right, the reveries wrought by evocative objects constitute an important feature of our psychic lives.

The clinic provides a site where these associations can be articulated in a manner that ensures reception. The unconscious communication in the psychoanalytical dyad receives these associations in a manner that contributes to further building the meshwork but also creates the condition for these ‘epiphanies’ to emerges the points at which the mushroom rises up out other mycelium and is picked in a manner which changes everything. You cannot go back to being the person who saw things in the old way. Psychoanalysis provides occasions for articulation along with a specific mode of reception. This process happens outside of analysis as well though, in dreams (as in the opening quotation) but also in our engagement with cultural objects. From Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas pg 37-38:

And now and then we will be quite transformed by the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object meeting up at just the right time. One late afternoon in the summer of 1972, I heard a performance of one of Hindmith’s viola sonata in a small church in New England. It immediately served to process a feature of my idiom, and this occasion sponsored vivid and intense feelings and ideas which lifted me into the next moments of my life. Shall we ever have the means to analyse that? Why that particular work?

In a real sense I was not the same person after reading Eliot’s Four Quartets for the first time. Nor was I the same person after binge-reading Game of Thrones. Nor after reading my first x-men comic when I was a kid. Or seeing Gaslight Anthem live for the first time. Or going to my first rave. Or reading Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo for the first time in my late 20s. Or trying to make my own breakcore this winter. Or indeed really getting into Bollas over the last few months. What I love about Bollas is how he provides the means to treat these cultural experiences in a roughly symmetrical way: some are imbued with cultural capital, others are not, but they all contribute to the elaboration of my personal idiom. I’ve chosen these examples because they contribute to ‘epiphany’ as well: in the sense of leading to a change, even if subtle, in how I see myself and my place in the world. They are points where the micro-structure of my idiom gives rise to a change in the macro-structure of my character. Or to put it more poetically, the mushroom rises up out of its mycelium.

As so often happens I’m reminded of a letter C Wright Mills wrote to his friend, the historian William Miller, who was struggling with a new job he had started:

You ask for what one should be keyed up? My god, for long weekends in the country, and snow and the feel of an idea and New York streets early in the morning and late at night and the camera eye always working whether you want or not and yes by god how the earth feels when it’s been plowed deep and the new chartreuse wall in the study and wine before dinner and if you can afford it Irish whiskey afterwards and sawdust in your pants cuff and sometimes at evening the dusky pink sky to the northwest, and the books to read never touched and all that stuff the Greeks wrote and have you ever read Macaulay’s speeches to hear the English language? And to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about and yes by god the world of music which we must now discover and there’s still hot jazz and getting a car out of the mud when nobody else can. That’s what the hell to get keyed up about.

In the register of Bollas we could say that Wright Mills is reminding his friend of all the sensory pleasures to be found in the world (“too much society crap and too much mentality and not enough tactile and color and sound stuff going on“). These are evocative objects which provoke enjoyable feelings in us. They are the objects which make us feel alive. These include “the books to read never touched”, “all that stuff the Greeks wrote”, “to hear the English language” and “to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about”. But also earlier “the feel of an idea”.

This is a phrase forever lodged in my psyche because it immediately captured the phenomenology of creation for me. I know what it feels like when an idea is ready. I know that if I reach for that idea at that moment then expressing it will be energising and rewarding. I’ve written this blog post in less than 10 minutes so far because my experience is that when I have the ‘feel of an idea’ the words will pour forth because I am in contact with what has been evoked in me. If I write it down to return to it later I occasionally find some residue of the energy but usually it’s an inert experience in which I churn out words to tick something off a list. The versatility of blogging rests in its capacity to provide a continually available occasion for articulating a single idea. If I have that feeling, I can immediately reach for the blog and in less than 20 minutes (almost always) I have articulated the idea I felt.

I now see the ‘feel of an idea’ as a particular kind of mushroom which has emerged out of its mycelium. Much as analysis provide fertile terrain for articulating associations (in a manner which leads to more associations) and which are then received in a fruitful way, writing provides the means through which we articulate idea-mushrooms with different modes of reception which shape what we do with them. In these sense we can think of occasions for articulation provided by the different writing practices as offering different ways of ‘picking’ these idea-mushrooms and working with them. I would argue the creative use of LLMs can be seen in terms of this genealogy, or at least they can be used in this way. This is essentially Bertrand Russell’s advice which I picked up a long time ago:

My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying deliberately, and in this way, the unconscious can be led to do a lot of useful work. I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity – the greatest intensity of which I am capable – for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered his technique, I used to to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress: I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits.

In Generative AI for Academics I wrote that LLMs can be used to plant ideas in the unconscious mind in this way. What I think I’ve finally sketched out is a psychoanalytical account of what this means and how it differs across different kinds of writing practice. How can we plant ideas and then pick the idea-mushrooms in the most enjoyable and creative way possible? I suspect mostly by having multiple modalities through which we do this work i.e. a range of occasions for articulation with the different modes of reception associated with them.

#BertrandRussell #bollas #cWrightMills #feelOfAnIdea #Freud #Thinking #thinkingThroughWriting #writing

Demystifying the unconscious: building the meshwork in everyday life

When you’re reading a book a certain phrase will sometime stand out to you. When you’re listening to music a certain lyric is heard with a greater force than the others. When you’re listening to a friend a particular image they use will sometimes feel oddly prominent. These are common experiences which all embody the role of unconscious communication in the sense that an aspect of what you encounter evokes something in you which is not immediately present to your consciousness.

These experiences often prompt reflection and elaboration. We might play the song on repeat, dwell on the phrase from the book or find ourselves returning to the unsettling image. There are a wide range of mental activities associated with such reflection and elaboration. It might be quite analytical (“why did that bother me so much?”) just as easily as aesthetic (i.e. continually returning to a track over the course of the day) or creative (i.e. writing something as you mull over what you’ve read). In doing so these actions often lead to further things which grab our attention, move us in some way and direct our attention in ways which cannot be explained by what is immediately present in your consciousness. In the Interpretation of Dreams Freud described this in terms of a network:

The dream thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings: they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.

We can explore this meshwork through free association, creative practice and through analysis. But we build the meshwork through everyday actions of objects in the world evoking things in us which lead us to act in a range of ways. Bollas suggests in The Evocative Object World a kind of magnetism in which “organised inner compositions … attract further impressions and serve as the self’s creative articulation of the inner compositions themselves” (pg 30). If we’re already occupied by a particular effect of a recent object then things are likely to evoked in us which reflect that as associations bind together into particular clusters within the meshwork. Crucially this is something we can do with other people outside analysis. Indeed it’s a common experience as Bollas suggests on pg 14:

Indeed, in free dialogue, when two people free associate in the course of a long conversation, as is typical of friends, they create unconscious lines of thought, working associatively, as they jump from one topic to the next. This is easy to do because we are open to such unconscious mutual inlfuence when relaxed in the presence of another.

This process is underway across all communication. What we encounter in others evokes things in us which are not reducible to the contents of our consciousness i.e. it’s all the reactions we are having which aren’t simply a matter of what we are explicitly thinking about. The same process is happening in reverse in ways which lead the other person to act in relation to us, much as we are acting in relation to them. This in turn then produces an emergent relational layer which provides its own source of evocative objects which feed into the interaction.

What makes the analytical process unique is that it formalises this feature of interaction in order to make it apparent. The analyst’s subjectivity is used as a device to bring the unconscious into explicit form as an object for the interaction. However the practice of free association itself can be done just as readily outside of this setting, even if it might remain restricted to the preconscious:

The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty while on the other not to hold back from any communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material.

In practice this is attending to what comes to mind and how you react to it. Then narrating it internally or externally, with a view to evoking something else. It’s the same mode of relating to evocative objects, it’s just that an internal object is evoking something within you. The things you feel reticent to explore are exactly what is most interesting to do this with. It also suggests a parallel practice of cultural engagement centred on dwelling on what is evoked when reading, watching, listening etc. This isn’t delving into repressed contents strictly speaking but it enables a generative engagement with unconscious process with the capacity to change one’s relationship to it.

The thing which fascinates me here is the relationship between evocation and articulation. When objects evoke something within us they are contributing to the meshwork and through our articulation, trying to put what has been evoked into words, we are steering the subsequent elaboration of that meshwork. This is the essence of creativity I think: the relationship between what Freud called the ‘psychic intensities’ of everyday life (contributions to the meshwork and the stuff of dreams) and practices of symbolic expression which remain in contact with those psychic intensities.

#articulation #associations #dreams #Freud #meshwork #Network #thought #unconscious

Cosa ha rappresentato la ricerca personale e la riflessione teorica di Sabina Spielrein per Jung e Freud? Quale è stato il suo ruolo nell'indirizzare i due noti psicanalisti a nuovi approcci e nuovi orizzonti?
Sabina Spielrein fu una giovane paziente e allieva di Gustav Jung, che da un profondo personale percorso di auto-guarigione, costruì la propria riflessione teorica e la professione psicoterapeutica. Fu medico psichiatra e musicologa. Molto le deve la psicanalisi, ma il suo nome ed il lavoro sono praticamente misconosciuti.

#sabinaspielrein #jung #Freud #psichiatria #psicanalisi
#storiedidonne

@psicologia

Enciclopedia delle donne | Biografie | Spielrein Sabina: Rostov 1885 - Rostov 1942 https://www.enciclopediadelledonne.it/edd.nsf/biografie/sabina-spielrein

#mckenziewark | Follow the white rabbit

👇👇👇

https://factoryinternational.org/factoryplus/editor-in-residence-mckenzie-wark/mckenzie-wark-follow-the-white-rabbit/

#trans #rave #matrix #metaphor #symbol #symbolism #myth #philosophy #politics #nietzsche #freud

@t3n Wer hat auch Fitnessziele gelesen? #Freud

#professorgilmar #psicanálise #freud

Sigmund Freud, o pai da psicanálise, nasceu em 1856, na Áustria, e dedicou sua vida ao estudo da mente humana. Suas teorias revolucionárias sobre o inconsciente, os sonhos e a sexualidade influenciaram profundamente a psicologia e a cultura do século XX. Freud acreditava que muitos dos nossos comportamentos e emoções são moldados por impulsos inconscientes e experiências da infância. A frase em questão reflete essa crença na complexidade da psique humana.

Dokumentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbfdCCIDiSM&t=5s

Screenshot https://bit.ly/3G7CYVT #Freud #Persönlichkeit #psychotHHerapie

I like the configuration of #history in current Problems. Its my opinion that being Aware of History sharpens our perception of living today! Enjoying #arts do the same 🥰
Sorry for my englisch 🤷🏼‍♀️
For Exempel this great Book about #NobelPrizewinner and #scientist Eric #kandel about the connections between #freud the scientific developments in psychology and the artists of the Vienna Secession

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ZlYAAeSwsU5pO8-j/s-l400.jpg

Goed stuk van @basheijne "De verleiding van de kettingzaag: Brave New World – maar dan erger.

Waar vroeger werd neergekeken op de onbeschaafde dictators in ‘onvolkomen’ landen, daar dienen ze nu juist tot voorbeeld voor populisten die genoeg hebben van de democratische spelregels."

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/12/25/de-verleiding-van-de-kettingzaag-a4915742?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share&utm_term=share-modal

#Musk #Trump #BigTech #Freud #Orwell #Huxley #DaEmpoli

Dr. #Freud passeia em seu #jardim e brinca com as girafas. Fiz uma #colagem digital e coloquei no #Grok pra fazer a animação.

🤔 xD

Riya Yadav critiques Sigmund Freud's infamous "penis envy" theory as a failure of courage, arguing it symbolizes women's social subordination under patriarchy rather than literal anatomy. 🧠 Updated in 2024, the piece highlights its outdated status amid modern psychology's push for equity. Dive in: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/sigmund-freud-and-penis-envy-failure-courage #Freud #PenisEnvy #Psychology

The paperback versions of my last two edited books are now available via Haymarket Books. #Freud #psychoanalysis #populism #philosophy #politics #Trump #MAGA #Europe #USA #sociology #newbooks https://www.dustinjbyrd.org

@t04d8b Hahaha always… 🤣🤣🤣 Key elements #eros & #thanatos and #oedipius 🫳 🎤 #freud

A little #christmas #shopping advice from yer old pal Ape.

If somebody you know is feeling down this Christmas season, or is struggling, or needs help, may I suggest NOT getting a Desktop Therapist, and maybe buying them some physical music instead?

Maybe a CD, tape, or record?
Or perhaps an old Walkman or portable CD player if they don’t have the means to play those formats?

Instead of a toy asking “How does that make you feel?”, maybe have Jimi Hendrix tell THEM how they feel, through a series of gnarly guitar solos? Or perhaps Frank Black shrieking “Where is my mind?” at them?

This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen. If I ever got this as a gift from somebody, I’d rifle it into their face, and then steal their wallet.

Tell me about YOUR mother, asshole.

#vinyl #vinylrecords #vinylcommunity #vinylcollection #retro #vintage #art #music #toys #freud

1/n
"Il desiderio di #Deleuze non è il desiderio di #Freud. Non è l’istanza in conflitto con l’interdetto e la Legge, né è il bisogno prefigurato dalla teoria marxiana. Si distingue dal bisogno perché il bisogno è bisogno di un qualcosa, trascende sé stesso, mentre il desiderio è produrre per produrre, senza prodotto."