March 20, 2026 On Psychoanalysis Kafka’s Misdiagnosis By Aaron Schuster Drawings by Franz Kafka. Courtesy of the Literary Estate of Max Brod, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Public domain. In a diary entry from February 1922, Franz Kafka writes of a deal he made with madness: There is a certain failing, a lack in me, that is clear and distinct enough but difficult to describe: it is a compound of timidity, reserve, talkativeness, and half-heartedness; by this I intend to characterize something specific, a group of failings that under a certain aspect constitute one single clearly defined failing (which has nothing to do with such grave vices as mendacity, vanity, etc.). This failing keeps me from going mad, but also from making any headway. Because it keeps me from going mad, I cultivate it; out of fear of madness I sacrifice whatever headway I might make and shall certainly be the loser in the bargain, for no bargains are possible at this level. The Kafkian protagonist (including the “I” of Kafka’s letters and diaries) is a loser who cannot make “any headway,” a schlemiel who secretly cultivates failure as the means of his persistence. The subject must lose, must fail; that’s the deal made with madness. Conversely, does this not imply that a successful Kafka would be not a socially well-adjusted, non-neurotic, even happily married Kafka, but rather a mad Kafka, one forced to pay a high price for not sacrificing headway in his pursuit, for going all the way to the end of his investigations? In “Investigations of a Dog,” the philosopher dog speaks of wanting to feed on the bone marrow of all the dogs, the marrow of truth—but then turns around and avows that this marrow is “no food; on the contrary, it is a poison.” Similarly, what if Kafka nourished himself on failure to avoid being poisoned by the truth he was seeking? Read More
February 27, 2026 On Psychoanalysis On Angst By Jamieson Webster Cixous with her children Anne-Emmanuelle and Pierre-François, ca. 1964. Courtesy of Olivier Morel and Hélène Cixous. In her 1977 novel Angst, Hélène Cixous names the quarter hour of Great Suffering—“straight away,” “never again”—when the mother lays the child on the tiles and does not return. Angst divides us: either to remain in unending anguish, or to move to the anguish of an unendingness. This is the threshold into which the text plunges the reader. Suddenly what we never knew is known: we are tossed out to the no place that no one ever leaves. To the unending … This is exactly what I feared, the worst. Towards which corridors were sweeping me at growing speed, and I couldn’t slow down, and I didn’t dare wake up, I was so afraid to find that what it was going to say would be forever true. We come to a woman who has lived this angst to the final hour. There was no relief for her, having lived in and through hopelessness and no-hope, a radical expulsion and the solitude of “facing a faceless wall.” Yet from either side of this fault, one can continue loving, there where it perishes again and again—this is the hand Cixous holds out to us. In her postscript, she writes: “So there was a woman who had taken women’s suffering and their fear upon her without giving way to despair; a woman capable of confronting the Law and its pawns, without letting herself be caught by their sleights of hand, their mirror games, their ivory towers.” Because she was able to be present to herself, there may be “another writing.” Read More
July 18, 2025 On Psychoanalysis For a Little Fresh Air … By Jamieson Webster James Webster flying over Mount Fuji. In a dream someone says to me, “You have been left in the dust.” An idiom for being left behind, outdone, but I hear it literally. I’m covered in dust and left there. It’s in my lungs. I am allergic to dust mites. I also remember its biblical twin: “Dust you are, and to dust you will return.” Another one bites the dust. “Let me remind you that the word pollution, with its religious and medical origin, first meant desecration of places of worship by excrement, and later the soiling of sheets by ejaculation, usually from masturbation,” the philosopher Michel Serres writes. I’ve been wondering about the relationship between dreams and trash lately as I listen to patients. What parts of ourselves do we leave lying around? Lacan was increasingly preoccupied by the residue, or waste, excreted by our will to representation. Our excessive mental efforts score the earth in both senses of stain and scratch. This thought seems to go along with the increasing volume of pollution, of trash, of civic ill will, that marks the extension, as Serres writes, “of appropriated space … and also the increase in the number of subjects of appropriation—individual, family, nation.” Either we are still animals marking territory, or we have exceeded the animal realm by attempting to mark all territory—sea, earth, air, and even outer space. My friend laughed at the idea that we were excited by a trace of water on Mars. “There’s so much water here!” she exclaimed. Serres calls for universal dispossession before the war of all wars begins. No one willingly gives up ownership of anything, I think. Sacrifice, if we are to make it, requires some kind of structure that wills us toward it. Freud, for his part, was interested in the expansion outward of the ego by day and its recoiling at night in dreams. I think of patients who have tried to tell me that dreams are just the brain cleaning up trash. This isn’t possible. Not because I believe in dreams, but because we don’t even know what to do with real trash. Better interpretation: a reaction to the act of nocturnal emission. A universal tendency toward debasement in the sphere of dreams. Read More
September 16, 2024 On Psychoanalysis The Psychopathology of Everyday Café Life in Freud’s Vienna By Deborah Levy Kalamian Walton, Silver Teaspoon, ca. 1938, donated to Wikimedia Commons by the National Gallery of Art. Licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal. Is there a single silver teaspoon that has not stirred up the memory of seduction and rage? Is there a Fräulein in the house without vague, disabling despair? Ah, the fresh and full aroma of hysteria under a constellation of coffee cups! May the waiter (calm, contemptuous, organized) please bring to the table the shivering Sacher torte with its dark, oily cacao. Observe Herr K. in his great coat lined with fur, gazing at Frau K.’s petticoats, white as frothing alpine milk. Is he still in love with his mother? Does he wish to murder his father, who regularly engaged in bestial coitus with the governess? Read More
April 16, 2024 On Psychoanalysis Prescribing Creativity: The Meta-Diaries of Marion Milner By David Russell Marion Milner, The Angry Parrot. All images from Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint (Routledge, 2010), reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group. “Before the problem of the creative artist,” Freud famously declared in an essay on Russian literature, “analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.” Our creative potential—as it is expressed in the most ordinary dream or jokes, or in the extraordinary compositions of great artists—has always been a vital theme in psychoanalysis, but it has also been an elusive one. Freud himself, although he was interested in art and literature, knew he was better at diagnosing sources of suffering than sources of inspiration. People in mental pain, whether from depression, obsession, or panic attacks, may present similar symptoms, but everyone is creative in her own way. Creativity is difficult enough to describe, let alone prescribe. Read More
March 5, 2024 On Psychoanalysis Dead or Alive By Adam Phillips Girl buried with a crown of ceramic flowers, Patras, Greece, ca. 300–400 B.C.E. From the Museum of Patras. Photograph by Fred Martin Kaaby, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. What do you have to give up in order to feel alive? To answer this question we need to have some sense of what aliveness might mean to us, of what we have to do to feel alive, and how we know when we are feeling this seemingly most obvious and ordinary thing (at its most abstract we might be wondering, as a kind of guideline, what our criteria are for feeling alive). It may seem odd to think that feeling alive is not only an issue—is something that needs to be assessed—but requires a sacrifice of sorts, or is indeed a sacrificial act; that to feel alive involves us in some kind of renunciation. It is, of course, glibly and not so glibly true that in order to feel alive one might have to give up, say, one’s habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself, the anaesthesias of everyday life that can seem to make it livable. At its most minimal, after all, it is not unusual for people to feel profoundly ambivalent about being fully alive to the climate of terror and delight in which we live. In order to answer this question you would, of course, need to have some sense of what aliveness means, if anything. How do you feel alive, and how do you know if you feel it? Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist literary critic, wrote in his famous essay “Art as Technique” of 1917: Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war … And art [through its defamiliarizing practices] exists that one may recover the sensation of life … The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. It is, perhaps, an ironic inevitability integral to what Shklovsky proposes that art as a process and practice of defamiliarization is now all too familiar to us. Whether or not we agree with Walter Pater’s remark that “our failure is to form habits,” when Shklovsky invokes the whole idea of recovering the sensation of life, he reminds us—and clearly we need reminding—that the sensation of life can be lost. And he implies, without making this as explicit as he might, that we also want to relinquish or even sometimes attack the sensation of life; as though, as I say, in psychoanalytic language, we are ambivalent about the sensation of life and can happily, as it were, dispense with it. Read More