The Papers
1
What Can I Do? This is a slightly revised excerpt from a talk given by George Blair in 1998 to the AChP Annual General Meeting on the subject of boredom as a natural phase in a healthy maturational process. Where, however, boredom has become endemic, associated with falseness and a sense of alienation, a gap is postulated which represents a break in the continuity of an individual's psychic development. A sense of finality and hopelessness may be a sign of the emergence of that gap into consciousness. My argument is that to find means to enter this timeless gap is a step towards recovering one's lost authenticity.
2 Waiting For The Bus:The Sensuous Experience of Dimension. The article presents two distinct modes of boredom against the idea of an internal space. The contrast is determined by whether this imaginal space has been sustained by the sensory faculties of the infant (felt in a 'raw' manner, that is, prior to being perceived or being able to be thought) either as open-ended towards meaning or operating as a prison. It also looks at the difference between boredom and being boring.
3If The Time Is Ripe: Illusion and Association. The idea of illusion in relation to the perception of reality is traced in this short paper through the presentation of a dream in an analytical setting to indicate how illusion can be viewed as vital to enhancing a sense of reality for the self.
4Screen Memories This short piece concerns a certain sort of image that belongs in a person's memory and holds a peculiar fascination for them which appears totally unrelated to the content of the image. It touches on the particular value of such phenomena for the psychoanalyst and the artist respectively.
5The Thief of Time: This paper explores the idea of taking time in the sense, both of taking one's time and having one's time taken, in relation to the notions of fate and its polar opposite destiny. It touches on the notion of trauma as prophesy in both optimistic and pessimistic aspects with reference to the field theory as developed by some analysts in the course of their work with patients, in particular Donald Meltzer and Wilfred Bion.
6
The Undergrowth of Thought: The paper will take the notion of the location of a thought as a starting point in considering how when a thought surfaces it carries with it traces of a dark interior, which can often be followed to the point of discovering a detached part of the sense of self. Examples from dreams, coincidence, and the New Testament story of the Gadarene demoniac are used to suggest a purpose hidden in these traces while providing evidence to establish that the surface thought may be skewed, a delusional vertex, and here the Quai brothers' masterpiece, the stop-motion animation short The Street of Crocodiles is taken to be a instance of such an encapsulation.
References to works quoted included after Part 3
The Undergrowth of Thought: The paper will take the notion of the location of a thought as a starting point in considering how when a thought surfaces it carries with it traces of a dark interior, which can often be followed to the point of discovering a detached part of the sense of self. Examples from dreams, coincidence, and the New Testament story of the Gadarene demoniac are used to suggest a purpose hidden in these traces while providing evidence to establish that the surface thought may be skewed, a delusional vertex, and here the Quai brothers' masterpiece, the stop-motion animation short The Street of Crocodiles is taken to be a instance of such an encapsulation.
References to works quoted included after Part 3
Part 1 Point of Departure follows a series of associations in the form of occurrences that lead to an awareness of a gap elided in habitual modes of thought. This ‘gap’ is conceived of as coterminous with the phenomenon of ‘location’ of thought with the difference of being able to bring into sharper focus a sub-process that may expose self-deceptive tendencies.
Part 2 Point of Convergence pulls the focus. It looks more deeply into Schulz' writing both from the point of view of the 'waking dream' and manifestations of self-deception. It contemplates the degrees of imperviousness and susceptibility of defensive structures to the influence of the undergrowth of thought. It continues to follow a train of dream-thoughts to discover where it leads.
Part 3 Shortcuts is an exploration of the idea of misconception in relation to mental problems.It looks at the special meaning given to the words 'preconception' and 'concept' by Roger Money-Kyrle and how the related term 'conception' relates to the notion of reverie as developed by Wilfred Bion, and works through an example of an a fragment of dream-thought breaking through a concrete state of omnipotence. 7
The Eyeball of the Mind: the need for a fantasy of some thing: This paper takes its name from an analogy used by Danilo Kiš to refer to the dropping out of consciousness of some nightmarish perception or, as may be, the reversal of a vital conception. The great Serbian writer, who died in 1989, and most of whose family were murdered in Auschwitz, makes the comparison with the occlusion of an image where it coincides with the blindspot on the retina. Kiš goes on to express with his particular poetic genius how the excluded unbearable thought remains in another compartment of the mind - the province of dreams - where it is linked to that, the absence of which, constitutes the nightmare. To put it another way, dreamlife (so often ignored) preserves a representation of the fate of what had been or would have been the most cherished. I will try to argue how, in the experience of such lack, the urgent need is for a substitute - a soterial (saving) something or other - and will endeavour to show, with reference to mental disturbance and the history of collective brutality reflected in the literary works of Kiš, and the Slovenian writer Slavoj Žižek, how the great universal dread may be that of nothingness.
The Eyeball of the Mind: the need for a fantasy of some thing: This paper takes its name from an analogy used by Danilo Kiš to refer to the dropping out of consciousness of some nightmarish perception or, as may be, the reversal of a vital conception. The great Serbian writer, who died in 1989, and most of whose family were murdered in Auschwitz, makes the comparison with the occlusion of an image where it coincides with the blindspot on the retina. Kiš goes on to express with his particular poetic genius how the excluded unbearable thought remains in another compartment of the mind - the province of dreams - where it is linked to that, the absence of which, constitutes the nightmare. To put it another way, dreamlife (so often ignored) preserves a representation of the fate of what had been or would have been the most cherished. I will try to argue how, in the experience of such lack, the urgent need is for a substitute - a soterial (saving) something or other - and will endeavour to show, with reference to mental disturbance and the history of collective brutality reflected in the literary works of Kiš, and the Slovenian writer Slavoj Žižek, how the great universal dread may be that of nothingness.
