Psychotherapy as Farming – The Story of Anna Hazare and the Healing of a Village
If you google ‘Anna Hazare’ on www.bbc.co.uk , the most prominent picture which might bob up would be that of a slightly-built Indian farmer called Anna Hazare (in Marathi “Anna” is an honorific term meaning “village elder” or “father”), sitting in the shadow of Mahatma Gandhi’s large picture while embarking on a hunger fast against corruption. But few know that the man who sat humbly in Mahatma Gandhi’s large shadow in BBC stories and pictures was the sort of man Gandhi had himself imitated a long time ago before he became the famed freedom fighter dressed in a loincloth. After studying law, the young, suited and booted M.K. Gandhi gave up his western clothes and adopted the garb of the Indian farmer/peasant, so as to better identify with the Indian farmer, such as Anna is, to lead the Indian freedom movement.
My book, Freud and the Buddha: the Couch and the Cushion, aims to explore what two traditions dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering, psychoanalysis and Buddhism, can learn from each other.
Models of the Mind, and Models in the Mind
“In every writer on philosophy there is a concealed metaphysic, usually unconscious; even if his subject is metaphysics, he is almost certain to have an uncritically believed system which underlies his specific arguments” (Bertrand Russell).
Myths of Mighty Women: Their Application in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
It is the premise of our book Myths of Mighty Women, that the Oedipus myth which was all-important to Freudian analysts in the twentieth century is only one among many myths that can embody the unconscious fantasies that shape women’s hearts, minds and behaviour, and we explore aspects of these ancient mythic, biblical, and folk stories that have implications for contemporary women’s lives and for treatment.
Retrieval, Recovery, and Renewal
“What have we done to you – poor child?”- Sigmund Freud (1897)
There is an important irony in psychoanalysis that our book, Analysis of the Incest Trauma: Retrieval, Recovery, Renewal, attempts to address.
Technology, teleanalysis and teletherapy
How does technology impact the human mind? Developmental, neuroscientific research and clinical experience confirm our personal impressions that all-embracing communication technologies are reshaping our ways of thinking and relating. Some of us worry about the widespread use of the internet changing our capacity to connect, create, and love. We have seen young adults who would rather interact on text with many people via a hand-held device than relate intimately to those who are present at the dinner table. They find others with shared experience and perspectives, indulge in sexual fantasy, and find a space for belonging. Has undivided attention lost its value?
The Interpretation of the Other: An Analysis of Love
‘Oh, yes, I’ve been in love before alright but though violently not to a hundredth this degree. For I do not believe that one can more than once lose one’s identity … If I am cut off from you … there is nothing of me surviving,’ the art critic, Adrian Stokes, told his beloved sister-in-law, Ann Mellis.
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