Psychoanalytic Ethics

Psychoanalytic ethics are governed by the idea of honour & dishonour, by a reverence for endurance, courage, independence, empathy, truthfulness, imagination & kindness, but not by the idea of guilt or innocence. Such notions do not have validity for us.

Our task in Psychoanalytic Therapy

Our task in psychoanalytic therapy is not to replace sickness with health. We are not aiming at a "cure" for illness. Our task rather is to exchange untenable illnesses, illnesses that we can no longer use, for tenable illnesses, that is, illnesses that allow us to move forward. We cannot escape neurosis & illusion, these are intrinsic to the human condition. But we can achieve neuroses & illusions that allow us to live fruitfully rather than destructively. But we work always in the knowledge that these new neuroses will have to be reviewed again at some point in the future, when their usefulness too has run its course.

A Coot Afloot on a Root (or a Moorhen standing on a branch)

Caesar & The Sphinx

Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar!

I have wandered in many lands seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, & the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks & pastures, men & cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day’s deed, & think my night’s thought.

In the little world yonder, Sphinx, my place is as high as yours in this great desert; only I wander, & you sit still; I conquer & you endure; I work & wonder, you watch & wait; I look up & am dazzled, look down & am darkened, look round & am puzzled, whilst your eyes never turn from looking out – out of the world – to the lost region – the home from which we have strayed.

Sphinx, you & I, strangers to the race of men, are no strangers to one another: have I not been conscious of you & of this place since I was born?

Rome is a madman’s dream: this is my Reality. These starry lamps of yours I have seen from afar in Gaul, in Britain, in Spain, in Thessaly, signalling great secrets to some eternal sentinel below, whose post I never could find. And here at last is their sentinel – an image of the constant & immortal part of my life, silent, full of thoughts, alone in the silver desert.

Sphinx, Sphinx: I have climbed mountains at night to hear in the distance the stealthy footfall of the winds that chase your sands in forbidden play – our invisible children, O Sphinx, laughing in whispers.

My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, & part god – nothing of man in me at all. Have I read yor riddle, Sphinx?

from Caesar & Cleopatra, 1898, George Bernard Shaw.

Here Comes the Sun

In Memoriam

For a Dead Lady

No more with overflowing light

Shall fill the eyes that now are faded,
Nor shall another’s fringe with night
Their woman-hidden world as they did.
No more shall quiver down the days
The flowing wonder of her ways,
Whereof no language may requite
The shifting & the many-shaded.

The grace, divine, definitive,

Clings only as a faint forestalling;
The laugh that love could not forgive
Is hushed, & answers to no calling;
The forehead & the little ears
Have gone where Saturn keeps the years;
The breast where roses could not live
Has done with rising & with falling.

The beauty, shattered by the laws
That have creation in their keeping,
No longer trembles at applause,
Or over children that are sleeping;
And we who delve in beauty’s lore
Know all that we have known before
Of what inexorable cause
Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

(1869-1935)

Spring on a Grey Sunday Morning