Psychoanalysis

I am a psychoanalyst based in Melbourne.

Psychoanalysis is a body of knowledge but most of all, a practice. Every psychoanalysis is different.
For me, this is one of the facts that leads me to describe psychoanalysis as an art practice. It's important that you come to your psychoanalysis with your own notions of what psychoanalysis is and what I am.

Psychoanalysis, unlike some other approaches is non-medical (it's not about "mental health"). It is non-normative (I don't know what "health" or "a good life" is, for you). It is long-term work and it is not for everyone. People sometimes seek a straightforward answer to the question of why they are the way that they are - in my experience you are unlikely to find that answer. Others sometimes feel that in the medium-term, they run out of things to say or are repeating what they have already said. In my experience, this may indicate the start of the work of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is not intended as a cure. Cure is a suspect category - after all, colonisation is intended as a cure. Conversion therapy too. Despite not aiming to cure, you may find that some of what concerns or pains you, slips open or falls away over time.

As Natalia Ginzburg writes in My Psychoanalysis:

"I hadn't freed myself of my neuroses; I had simply learned to tolerate them, or in the end, had forgotten them."

“There is no measure I can hold on to except this scant half hour of making”
-Philip Guston

Over the past few years my psychoanalytic and counselling practice has moved closer to my art practice and vice versa. In both spaces I am here for the spark of the new. “The new” is something felt and known at the same time. It’s not stale or repeated.

As I read Freud’s papers on technique, he develops his methods and techniques and plays with different definitions of what it was for him to be a psychoanalyst. Though he often refers to himself as a scientist, when George Groddeck asks him in a letter “What is a psychoanalyst?” Freud replies, “Anyone who has recognised transference and resistance as the focal points of therapy belongs irretrievably to the mad horde”.

I sense, in these papers, Freud’s vacillations, contradictions and vulnerability. His doubts grow throughout these papers, as he demonstrates to himself, in different ways, how psychoanalysis does not “work”. In the case studies and in the memoirs of his patients, it is clear that Freud doesn’t take his own advice.

The obstacles, contradictions, resistances, doubts, transferences, and frustrations that Freud experiences and writes of, are the artistic process. He works out what a psychoanalyst is and what he, as a psychoanalyst, wants by practicing psychoanalysis and struggling with his doubts, just as an artist works out by doing art what an artist is, what art is, what they want from art (and what art wants from them). These experiences and events give surrounding form to the interruptions, gaps and spaces wherein the unconscious, the unexpected creative act or speech act arises.

Because - despite Freud’s observation that psychoanalysis doesn’t ‘work’ and the fact that the artistic act (like free association) is impossible to control, manage or even, to bear - moments of recognition, surprise and creation do occur and are known-and-felt.

I often find artistic processes more helpful than advice. Artistic processes are by their very nature frustrating and hard to pin down. But this is part of what makes them helpful for thinking through other types of artistic work, including the practice of psychoanalysis.