R D Laing- Glasgow, The Centre of Reality

It’s difficult to know what to believe. Was R D Laing a thoroughly humane figure driven to ruin by the inhumanity he found in the world around him? Or did he ultimately betray the early brilliance he showed in astoundingly original early works like The Divided Self by lapsing into the role of lazy charlatan in the hippy sixties and seventies?

Is it even possible to believe in the ‘two-cultures’ dichotomy in a virtual post-Freudian cyber age? No-one embodies, and operates from all the positions implicit in such an age more comprehensively than Pippa Goldschmidt.

What is it about that New York rhythm of intellectual engagement that mesmerises, convinces, becalms, and at the same time energises us? Lorens Holm has it in spades

Isabel Millar is probably the world’s first virtual public intellectual. Watch this: an Englishwoman on Russian TV, speaking about a French psychoanalyst in Spanish language. That’s as neat a laying out of the cards as you might ever see.

Freud aimed at working out the ‘topographical’ aspects of mental processes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle . By ‘topographical’ means, might indeed be the best way to approach the interdisciplinary complexity and irrepressible joie-de-vivre that we see in Professor Laura Gonzalez’ work

And what a tie! If you want to see the Symbolic Order in action then here’s Jacques Lacan fiddling with his decorative apparatus at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1972.

2020 marks 100 years since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s landmark text Beyond the Pleasure Principle.The publication of this work marked a significant moment in his theoretical development: it is within these pages that Freud formulated the dialectic between Eros and Thanatos within the human psyche.

The publication of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle seemed to represent a sinister turn from his views of mental processes as dominated by the Pleasure Principle to the overall domination of the Death Drive.