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BBC Radio 4 has a book programme called ‘A Good Read’. Living Psychoanalysis is a good read. Michael Parsons has an ear for the English language. He writes about difficult concepts, for example, Après-coup, Remémoration, Avant-coup, with clarity. A clarity that enables the reader to think about the concepts themselves rather than first ‘hunt for the verb’, an activity which happens too often in analytic writing.
The book is both a compilation of ‘articles, lectures, and seminars of the past dozen years’ (p. xxi) and an analytic, philosophical autobiography. An autobiography which has a feeling of surprise about it. That in the re-reading of his papers the author sees something about himself he has not fully known before, or, as he quotes Martin Buber, ‘All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware’ (p. xxix). I use the verb ‘see’ rather than ‘think’ or ‘feel’ because ‘to see’ or ‘to hear’ are the author's primary sense modalities. To explain his thinking about how Freud's original formulation of sexuality has evolved (p. 65) he illustrates Manet's ‘Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe’ and compares it with Marcantonio Raimondi, ‘The Judgement of Paris’ and Anthony Caro's ‘Déjeuner sur l'Herbe II’ (Figures 5.1, 5.3, 5.2).
This is a highly personal book exploring how an analyst working out of the Independent tradition practises psychoanalysis. The title itself, Living Psychoanalysis, reflects the author's focus: to give primary status to the question of how a person's aliveness is impaired. ‘Neurotic and character disturbances can be viewed … As markers of the way that people are not managing to be as fully alive as they could be’ (p. 4).
There turns out to be a dynamic running through the book, between specifically psychoanalytic thinking and existential matters of life and death. The relation between psychoanalysis and what lies beyond its own confines has always been important to me … One of the unspoken themes of this book is an exploration of the ways i