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International Forum of Psychoanalysis 17, 180-8, 2008
Joy and sadness, the comic and the tragic, making jokes and telling jokes, have been known in life, literature, the theater, and art since the dawn of civilization. Following in the footsteps of classical antiquity, Freud added to the philosophical analysis of humor the insights offered by the psychoanalytic method. The bridge was the cathartic method of treating neuroses, where discharge of affect was one of the foundations of technique, and the cathartic, or discharge, function of humor. Freud's analysis of humor, that ‘A joke … is the most social of all mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure’ introduces Freud's first explicit formulation of an interpersonal approach to the human situation in health and disorder.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89, 299-312, 2008
This paper describes the characteristics of subjective time (in contrast to objective time), with particular reference to a specific form of pathological experience and relation to the passage of time in patients with narcissistic personality undergoing psychoanalytic treatment. The clinical manifestations and technical approach to this pathology of time experience are outlined in the context of illustrative clinical vignettes.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89, 1123-1143, 2008
The author contends that Caesura, one of Bion's last works, can be read as the equivalent of Descartes's Discourse on Method. In this compact and complex text, the dictate of ‘methodical’ and ‘hyperbolic doubt’ - so called because it is taken to the extreme form of application to the faculty of thought itself - which, for Descartes, represents the fundamental principle of philosophical and scientific research, is reflected in the formula of ‘transcending the caes