11 Questions to Vanessa Sinclair
“The basic idea is that in order to become a psychoanalyst, one needs three components: one must undergo one’s own analysis, one must see analysands while being supervised by an analyst, and one must study psychoanalysis, take didactics, classes, attend lectures, etc. It’s a field in which there is lifelong learning, and if you are passionate about it, that seems obvious. So these training institutes offer these three components in a formal, organized way, but they aren’t actually necessary. Most people who tread the path towards becoming a psychoanalyst already have a clinical degree, whether it is a PhD, PsyD, LCSW, MD, at least in this country. Other places are more open about training what are called lay-analysts or psychoanalysts that may come from a non-clinical background. The...Read More
David Bell: New Barbarisms
All cultures develop their own modes of self-explanation, but such explanations, somewhat like symptoms, inevitably conceal as much as they reveal. In this sense psychoanalysis may be well placed to enter into a critical relation with the forms of consciousness that characterize our age. At the current conjuncture we are witnessing an escalating descent into a kind of institutionalized barbarism which unleashes forms of group behavior which require a social and psychological understanding. The time seems right to return to the classic texts that ache to address these matters- Freud’s ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, and Theodor Adorno’s ‘Freudian theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’. We will engage in a close reading of these text...Read More