Jean-Paul Sartre and Lisa Appignanesi
Click Here to Read: All in the Mind by Lisa Appignanesi on the Guardian Website.
The closing paragraph of Lisa Appignanesi’s book review essay may get you interested in her thoughtful musings on psychoanalysis’ position in the world of letters.
“Perhaps the decision of Hanif Kureishi and Salley Vickers to place an analyst at the centre of their new novels reflects a change in psychoanalysis itself. Under attack from drug therapies and versions of the talking cure which offer quick fixes, the analyst has become less dangerous to the writer. As Ian McEwan noted in On Chesil Beach, for at least three decades we have inhabited a psychoanalytic climate in which it is “customary to regard oneself in everyday terms as an enigma, as an exercise in narrative history, or as a problem to be solved”. It is time for the vying over the terrain of the imagination and the psyche between artist and analyst to cease. Both, after all, as Kureishi writes of Jamal, are “readers of minds and signs”. They work with the “underneath or understory: fantasies, wishes, lies, dreams, nightmares – the world beneath the world, the true stories beneath the false”.”
A nice piece of journalism . . . perhaps worthy of recognition? Her book on Freud’s Women, co-authored with John Forrester, is also worth a look. She has a new book that is about to appear under the provocative title of “Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors.”
Paul Brinich