MEANJIN BACK ISSUE

SHRINKS: ON PSYCHOLOGY
Vol. 63, no. 4, 2004

GUEST CO-EDITOR (COMMISSIONING): ROBERT REYNOLDS

’Tis the season to be jolly. Yet according to some reports, Christmas is also a time when the suicide rate leaps and the appointment books of the ‘psy’ professions (or shrinks as we fondly call them) are full to bursting. Meanjin always aims for a blend of the astringent with the convivial, so it’s in keeping that our season’s greetings to readers this year should take the form of a psychoanalysis, or rather psych analysis, in which we put the shrinks on the couch and examine their competing schools of psychological thought and therapeutic practice. At the same time we seek to shed light on the full range of maladies among their individual clients: madness, mania, depression, neurosis, trauma, abuse, love and pain and the whole damned thing. We probe collective manias, too, from Aussie Rules to attention-deficit, and we consider an array of alternative therapies and guides to self-exploration when you can’t face or can’t afford a shrink: communing with your friends (dogs included), learning from literature and art (which shrinks themselves have much to learn from in practising their own form of art).

FEATURED AUTHORS INCLUDE: M.J. HYLAND, RUSSELL MEARES. SIDNEY BLOCH. ESTHER FAYE, R.W. CONNELL, GRAEME SMITH, ROBERT REYNOLDS, ELISABETH HANSCOMBE, JOHN CASH , JOY DAMOUSI, JANE ADAMSON, STEVEN ANGELIDES, JOHN RICKARD

Contents

R.W. CONNELL Blowing in the Wind

How the Left has become more accommodating to psychotherapy

RUSSELLMEARES From Neurosis to Trauma

Charting the currents in psychotherapeutic thinking from the nineteenth century on

STEVEN ANGELIDES Sex and the Child

In ignoring or misapprehending Freud, are modern treatments of child sexual abuse at risk of compounding the trauma?

ANTHONY ELLIOTT Therapy Culture and its Discontents

What are the prospects for psychotherapy with globalisation and the dominance of market forces?

MARK RAPLEY& ALEC MCHOUL

Paying Attention Is ‘attention-deficit disorder’ a dangerous myth?

M. J.HYLANDAsylum Elegy

Enjoying Larundel Psychiatric Hospital

GRAEME SMITH The Italian Experience

On the current crisis in psychiatric care in Australia and its origins

JOHN RICKARD Psycho In LA

Recalling the world of American psychoanalysis on the eve of the AIDS pandemic

JANE ADAMSONTalking with Oneself and Other Ostriches

Using literature, conversation and figurative thinking to identify and observe a potentially

dangerous breed: the human ostrich

CRAIG POWELL Poetry on the Brain

On poetry, psychoanalysis and neurophysiology

SIDNEY BLOCH Cultivating Empathy

A professor of psychiatry makes a plea for the role of the humanities in medical and

psychological training

CARMEL BIRDWho Am I?

The novelist explores the therapeutic power of friendship and the written word

ROBERT REYNOLDS Dangerous Sorrows

Banish depression, but not sadness, counsels the co-editor of this volume

ESTHER FAYE The Analyst’s Gift

Lacanian psychoanalysis ¾ a practitioner explains

DORIS MCILWAIN Therapists with Fur

Pets, Germaine Greer once argued, are concubines for the emotionally inadequate.

A psychologist differs

JAN SCHLUNKE The Beast in the Jungle

A clinical psychologist juggles the traumas of a road accident victim and the dictates of the Traffic Accident Commission

JULES WILKINSON Reflections of a Couch Potato

Finding the right therapist to attack depression can be a funny business

ELISABETH HANSCOMBE The Limits of Intimacy

A psychotherapist on her eleven years in psychoanalysis, conducted by another woman

IAN GRUBB A Prayer for St Dymphna

On hospitalisation in a psychiatric ward

JOHN CASH & JOY DAMOUSI Inside Footy Mania

How AFL supporters manage loss

[REVIEW ESSAY]

ROBERT VAN KRIEKEN 53 Decline And Fall?

A critique of the pessimistic chroniclers of ‘therapy culture’, including Frank Furedi’s recent book, Therapy Culture

[COMMENT]

DOUGLAS KIRSNER Psychoanalysis, Heal Thyself

On the malaise in professional psychoanalysis, particularly in the USA

[CINEMA]

BRIANMCFARLANE Mothers: Some Kids Do ’Ave ’Em

Mother–child relationships in two recent films: The Mother and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

[ FICTION]

Peter Raftos, Kate Constable, David Campbell, Karen Hitchcock, David Cohen

[POETRY]

John Tranter, M.T.C. Cronin, Kevin Brophy, Peter Minter, S. K. Kelen, Paula Green, Grant Caldwell, Kevin Murray, Stan Mir, Greg McLaren, Tony Birch, Richard Hillman, Maria Takolander