Mainly about psychoanalysis and life, by John van den Berg

  DEPRESSION (a short excerpt from my psychoanalytical essays) Depressed and anxious people often don’t know why they feel that way, or why others needlessly seem to hurt them, and make them feel wounded and miserable. The reason why we feel that way – leaving aside our genetically inherited temperament – is that we may unconsciously be reliving a situation that goes back to our childhood. We involuntarily do so. It is a fixation. Without insight about where it started, we really can’t help it. Our perception of others – and of our world, for that matter – is to some extent coloured by our youthful experiences and the way those experiences once made us feel. We unwittingly repeat those scenarios over and over. Hence the psychoanalytical truisms that under stress we unwittingly regress (return) to the past, and relive it, or recreate it, without being aware that we are doing so. Analytical insight may bring this to light. The unconscious compulsion to repeat can be so strong, ...

  AGGRESSION AND LOVE The alleged suicide by drowning of two thousand pigs possessed by evil spirits, reported by the evangelist Mark, as well as many other Scriptural accounts of demonic possession, is instructive regarding man's aggressive instincts, particularly about the way our forebears interpreted its nature and origins. We are born with an aggressive instinct, basically to be able to defend ourselves, but it also makes us, or drives us, to attack others, to use Freud's original term, "Trieb," which has a more subtle meaning than the word instinct. History is in fact a record of man's unending wars. Many of those wars were, and are, actually pointless. Aggression manifests itself in many ways other than in warfare, and it is often causes neurotic feelings of guilt, as well as causing morbid depression. In certain religious denominations the exorcism of evil spirits is still practiced, based on the notion that our behavior is influenced by invisible be...

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED and the PUTATIVE TRIUMPH OF SIN As an example of the struggle by obsessional people to prevent their secret and sinful ideas – i.e. ideas that had been repressed [rendered unconscious] from becoming conscious again, Freud drew our attention to the nature of repression by inter alia referring to Felicien Rops's notorious painting, called "Eros" that allegedly shows us the triumph of sin. Readers who are familiar with psychoanalysis will be aware of the concept known as "the return of the repressed." Obsessional neurotics are often engaged in a debilitating struggle to prevent the repressed material from becoming conscious again. The struggle is usually futile, and Freud quoted a relevant homily by Horace that says, "Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret – You may drive out nature with a  pitchfork, but she will always return." It cannot be helped, Freud says, "What is repressed will usually prove to be the victor....

 TRANSFERENCE AND  PROJECTION Transference is the process by which a client/patient displaces onto the analyst/therapist the feelings and ideas which derive from previous persons in his or her life (or objects, as those persons are referred to in psychoanalytic jargon) and by which the client relates to the analyst as though analyst were that former person. Such transference feelings are normally resolved towards the end of a successful analysis. Projection differs from transference in that it refers to the way a person projects parts of his or her own character onto someone else, i.e. a dishonest person may tend to believe that others are equally dishonest.

 ARCHAIC MEMORIES AS SEEN BY FREUD AND JUNG Every so often someone claims that Jung discovered the "collective unconscious." I'm afraid that claim does not stand up to close scrutiny. As early as in "The Interpretation of Dreams" of 1900, (1) Freud observed that dreams may contain ancient motifs that do not refer to events in a patient's personal past, but rather appear to be about situations that must have occurred in mankind's distant, primeval past. (2) He did not, however, coin the phrase "the collective unconscious," and he would only broach such archaic material once he had dealt with a patient's personal past, including memories that had been repressed. Nor did he regard such material as being of a mystical nature. In that respect, i.e. about mysticism, Jung had rather a different approach. Almost right from the start this son of a Protestant pastor would encourage his patients to tell him about the unusual visions they had seen ...

  – ELSE NO ONE EVER WILL – ( Altrimenti Mai ) When my diaries and photos and grey hair conspire to tell me my life at sea is now over, I'll remember … and I alone shall know the truth … - Capt Harry Grattidge, ‘Captain of the Queens’ - A ll day long the sky had been oppressive. A hundred miles to the north of the MS Antares a tropical storm had cut a swathe through the Solomon Islands. At nightfall a rogue wave reached the forty-thousand-ton liner. The cruise ship trembled as the mountain of water smashed into her bow. The lookout, Able Seaman Jim Hardy, disbelievingly felt himself being carried away by the breaking wave when it sluiced over the foredeck. He struck a bollard, broke his arm, and ended up in the scuppers. Seconds later, up on the boat deck, the Chief Officer’s face was stung by a shower of spray. Chris Stuart wiped his eyes and with the back of his hand brushed the drops off his uniform. He habitually went for a walk after dinner,...