Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?

Psychosis = the Ego assailed

To say the least: I'm truly disappointed

Watched this monumentally depressing film recently which was probably in the back of my mind whilst drawing this.

Doing OK

Cock munchers

Closure

Anger management

In a week in which the collective unconscious suddenly woke up to how incredibly angry we all are, it was also revealed that Charles Bronson (the jailbird, rather than the Buchinsky) is doing an 'Anger Management Correspondence course'.

The mind boggles.

Life is a pigsty

I hate id, and id hates me

Low batties (UK)/saggy pants (USA) are my new bête noire.

There's a place in the sun, for anyone who has the will to chase one. And I have found mine, yes I do believe I have found mine.

Seated from left to right: Freud, Sàndor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs (standing) Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones (Photo: Berlin, 1922)

They do not understand the urgency of life.

(In the collection of my therapist, Brighton)

The hermaphrodite family is a happy family

"We begin by desiring (and wanting to murder) the parents; registering the horror, not to mention the impossibility of this project, we more or less relinquish it. We renounce our first desires and wait; and eventually, if all goes well, we will as adults find people who are sufficiently reminiscent of the parents to be exciting, but sufficiently different so we can consummate our desire. We want something; we realise the dangerous error of our ways; and we find the substitutes that can satisfy us. We can, in a sense, have what we want because it isn't what we really want, which we could never have anyway.

But then there is the parallel text to this story [in which] our desire is ineluctably, undistractedly, transgressive; in this life we are driven to always approach and avoid the objects of desire, and what makes us feel most alive makes us feel we are risking our lives.....In this life uncanniness is way in excess of our canniness; our actions feel at once inevitable and unintelligible (and so as shorthand we say we are in love, or we are tragic heroes, or we have made a Freudian slip).

We do not know what we are doing, and yet we feel ineluctably involved in our lives. Where once there were security operations, now there is risk; where once safety was the be-all and end-all, now fear is preferred. A sense of aliveness displaces a sense of certainty as a paramount consideration. Surprise and dread are the order, of the day. In our transgressive life it is as though there is; something - or someone - we seem to value more than our lives, more than life itself."

From Equals, Adam Phillips (2002:112)

Reasons to be cheerful

(Click on image to enlarge)

It's Richard's 40th today.

I wanted to come up with an equal number of reasons to be cheerful. But faltered after the first five.

Compare the best of their days with the worst of your days, you won't win.

This was inspired by a post on Jeannette's blog.
There was an interesting discussion about suicide on the Moral Maze this week.
But before you throw yourself out of your goldfish bowl, listen to this.

Black sun

I am haunted by this image.

(Quote from Adam Phillips' essay 'Depression')

Yes, there are things worse in life than never being someone's sweetie

The ageing Morrissey is a joy to behold.

Sometimes when my mind is full of venom and retribution, I sit for a while with buddha

The organism wishes to die, but only in its own fashion.

Virgins/raisins (click to read)

This is your life Ma

It's been a bit quiet on the Prozacville-front recently as I've focused my energies on a side project for my mother's 60th birthday (which is today).

It's a 60+ panel piece, with each illustration depicting a memory from her childhood - drawn, hand-coloured and then mounted on 'ash grey' board.

It has given me much pleasure collaborating with her on this Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time undertaking.

This strange eventful history will now hang on a wall in her lounge, prefiguring perhaps the 'second childishness' to come, and oh yes, the 'mere oblivion' to which we are both now heading, albeit at slightly different speeds.

X marks the spot (a state of illusion)

(Click on image to enlarge)

"The male has instinctual urges and predatory ideas. The female has a breast, the power to provoke lust, and the idea that she would like to be attacked by a hungry male. These two phenomena do not come into relation with each other till the woman and man live an experience together. I think of the process as if two lines came from opposite directions, liable to come near each other. If they overlap there is a moment of illusion - a bit of experience which the man can take as either his hallucination or a thing belonging to external reality."

(From D.W. Winnicott, 'Primitive Emotional Development', in Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), p152 - Prozacville edition

The death instinct

Dadaism is stupid

Defaced exhibition postcard

Internet dating profiles: the triumph of emotional capitalism over romance

"On the internet, the private psychological self becomes a public performance...externalized and objectified through visual means of representation and language....The internet structures the search for a partner as a market or, more exactly, formalizes the search for a partner in the form of an economic transaction: it transforms the self into a packaged product competing with others on an open-end market regulated by the law of supply and demand; it makes the encounter the outcome of a more or less stable set of preferences; it makes the process of searching constrained by the problems of efficiency; it structures encounters as market niches; it attaches a (more or less) fixed economic value to profiles (that is, persons) and makes people anxious about their values in a such a structured market and eager to improve their position in that market. Finally, it makes people highly aware of the cost benefit aspects of their search, both in terms of time, and in the sense that they want to maximize the attributes of the person found. ... The cynicism of [some] internet daters marks a radical departure from the traditional culture of romanticism and is an effect of the routinization produced by the sheer volume of encounters and by the market structure and culture which pervades Internet dating sites....I think that such cynicism is what Adorno had in mind when he suggested that in contemporary culture, consumers feel compelled to buy and use advertising products even though, and at the very moment, they see through them."

Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. (2007)

My therapist has been dipping his foot back into the blogosphere again. Enjoy the free version. Some of us pay him about 1/5th of our monthly earnings so as to benefit from his services.

"The large brain, like large government, may not be able to do simple things in simple way." (Donald Hebb, 1958)

More tips on how to lose weight without having to go on a diet

The Four Fs

Four Fs link

How to lose weight without having to go on diet

Democracy in action?

'Adi' meets the Lubavitchers

I like the idea of a Nazi Dog.

A natural history of Christianity

But don't take my word for it.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

I wanna start from before the beginning

Another one of Nadler's Perfectly Useless Machines

All the things I need and the things I receive is an ancient ocean, wide, wild, lost, uncrossed

Thanks for being part of my world in 2007.

(Inspired by Nadler)

It's hard to walk tall when you're small

King Leer

I am the last of the famous international playboys

(Click on image to enlarge)

Text from Dostoevsky's The Idiot

You just haven't earned it yet, baby

Love, peace and harmony ? Oh, very nice, very nice, very nice, very nice...But maybe in the next world

We can go for a walk where it's quiet and dry, and talk about precious things

Golden lights displaying your name

Today is Switchsky's birthday. Happy birthday Switch.

(The great thing about blogger is that you can backdate stuff so that belated birthday wishes almost seem like they were there at the right time in the right place from the start.)

'Ere long done do does did

That last line in the final panel rings a little false. Truth be told, I'm gutted. But I'm working towards feeling it's the right thing to do.

Lilliputian ego-stroking

You too can indulge in charity-lite here.

Does Queen Elizabeth II have any hobbies?

Was sitting watching this hour-long, arse-licking advertisement for The Most Obnoxious Family On Earth when I formed the query. Surprisingly, not even Google could answer this.

But it can now!

(With thanks to Jules for drawing the regina-rutting Alsatian for me.)

Cognitive conservatism

Click to enlarge

"Beliefs, once acquired, have a kind of inertia in that there is a preference to alter them as little as possible. There is a tendency to reject evidence or ideas that are inconsistent with current beliefs, particularly if they undermine central beliefs."

-Lewis Wolpert, 'Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast' (p85)

Estate agents

Had forgotten the level of underhand swinery prevalent in 99.99 percent of all estate agents.

Xvavid, 29, Romford, Essex

Text taken verbatim from match.com profile.

Who is God?

Incredible to think that this is still one of the biggest questions out there.

Especially as it is so clearly and incontrovertibly answered by those models of pedagogic objectivity: everystudent.com. Thanks guys!

CurbYourEnthusiasm, 35, London, University Teacher

Text taken verbatim from Match.com