Psychoanalytic Therapy Wins Backing
The New York Times Health section publishes a rare insightful account of the “talking cure” pioneered by Sigmund Freud over a century ago, which has (rightfully and wrongfully) found itself under attack from the medical establishment, psychology, neuroscience, and biopsychology, just to name a few of the usual suspects. Benedict Carey writes:
In a review of 23 studies of such treatment involving 1,053 patients, the researchers concluded that the therapy, given as often as three times a week, in many cases for more than a year, relieved symptoms of those problems significantly more than did some shorter-term therapies.
There’s quite a lot of evidence that psychodynamic therapy is making a comeback, largely as a reaction to CBTs, which research suggests only make short-term progress on unconscious symptoms. Yet the mere fact that psychoanalysis might be re-entering the mainstream is one that should not be taken as in itself a good thing: what is important is precisely how it will manifest itself. It’s up to informed psychoanalysts, particularly in the Lacanian field as opposed to ego psychology, to ensure that the path psychoanalysis takes in its ostensible resurgence is one that places the unconscious, and therein the signifier, at the center of analysis. What this amounts to is the proper re-politicization of psychoanalysis.
Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?
Now, apparently they’ve only run the first test on the particle accelerator so far. They haven’t initiated the high-energy collisions yet, which would be the hypothetical instance in which the earth is destroyed. This won’t happen until October, but luckily they have an RSS feed. (Via Daring Fireball.)
Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes.
As Johnnya says, it’s about time that “mainstream” science finally catches up with basic psychoanalytic concepts. The mirror graphic in the article is also worth checking out.
In fact, the investigation has been the no doubt crude, but fundamental element in the constitution of the empirical sciences; it has been the juridico-political matrix of this experimental knowledge, which, as we know, was very rapidly released at the end of the Middle Ages… The great empirical knowledge that covered the things of the world and transcribed them into the ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the ‘facts’ (at a time when the western world was beginning the economic and political conquest of this same world) had its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition — that immense invention that our recent mildness has placed in the dark recesses of our memory.
—Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 225-226