Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES
- Points of view
- Making love to my ego
- The pinball project
- Psychopolitical cults
- The wet group
- Interpersonal skills
- Learn and enjoy
- Another language
- English identity, Ireland and violence
- Racing
- Diana's subjects
- Personal response under attack
- In Disney's world
- Looking to the future, and back
- Windows on the mind
- Soap trek
- Clubbing
- E and me
- Garage nightmares
- Helpless in Japan
- Greek chairs
- Open secrets
- Passé
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTH TODAY
The pinball project
from PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES
- Points of view
- Making love to my ego
- The pinball project
- Psychopolitical cults
- The wet group
- Interpersonal skills
- Learn and enjoy
- Another language
- English identity, Ireland and violence
- Racing
- Diana's subjects
- Personal response under attack
- In Disney's world
- Looking to the future, and back
- Windows on the mind
- Soap trek
- Clubbing
- E and me
- Garage nightmares
- Helpless in Japan
- Greek chairs
- Open secrets
- Passé
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTH TODAY
Summary
On a Saturday night in Leeds, I learnt something about pinball and psychoanalysis. By psychoanalysis, I don't mean dreaming and joking and slipping as revealing what is unconscious or the way that what happens in families affects how boys and girls develop, but rather some of the basic descriptions of thinking that were elaborated by Freud even before he used the term ‘psychoanalysis’ and that continued to underlie his accounts of how and why repression and free association work. There is plenty of pop-psychoanalysis around us now, but you will still not find much there, in popular culture, about quantities of excitation in the neurological apparatus. Descriptions of narcissism and sibling rivalry don't require us to think about neurology, but that is where Freud started speculating in his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (the title provide by the editors upon the manuscript's first publication in 1950), and if a lot of psychoanalysis was already there in that project, we need to understand how those representations of mind endured and how they are still here, still with us now.
Unlike the other more fantastic contents of psychoanalytic discourse that fascinate so many people in the media, the formal structure of the mind that Freud scribbled during a train journey in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess – in a manuscript that was not published until after his death – seems like dull stuff.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Psychoanalytic Mythologies , pp. 11 - 14Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009