Saturday, 31 December 2011
New Year Greetings from LE2
Domestic scene celebrating 6 years of civil partnership and 30 years of life together:
a happy and peaceful and healthy 2012
Saturday, 24 December 2011
Friday, 23 December 2011
Records reveal how Christmas was once cancelled
Documents from The National Archives reveal how the wave of religious reform that swept across England during and after the English Civil War could have changed the way Christmas is celebrated today.
Christmas banned
The Council of State Letters and Papers (catalogue reference SP 25/15) show how Oliver Cromwell and his allies in Parliament objected to the excess and debauchery that followed the traditional celebration of Christmas. In accordance with their Puritan views, strict rules were drawn up banning all familiar festivities relating to Christmas, including feasting and carolling. The restriction also meant that worshiping idols and using the word 'Christmas' became serious offences. Previous to this, in 1642, the government had declared a monthly fast to remember the famine in Ireland. During this fast, the playing of sport and conducting of trade were banned - this was to be observed even when it fell on Christmas day in 1644.
Despite the rules, later entries among the government papers suggest that the ban on Christmas and other holy day festivities were ignored. In December 1657, orders were issued to the authorities in London and Westminster to clamp down on visible traditional celebrations of festival days. An extract from the Council of State Letters and Papers, SP 18/158, f.95, reads:
'The festivals of Easter, Christmas, and other holy days having been taken away, the Lord Mayor and justices of London and Westminster are to see that the Ordinance for taking away festivals is observed, and to prevent the solemnities heretofore used in their celebration.'
Christmas restored
Sean Cunningham, Head of Medieval and Early Modern Records at The National Archives, commented: 'Although this might seem like the ultimate Christmas Scrooge story, it's no surprise that the anti-Christmas legislation was ignored by many people who continued to follow ancient traditions in secret. What is most astonishing, however, is that for almost two decades the festivities of Christmas week were officially forbidden. If the ban hadn't been publicly reversed by Charles II, the joys of Christmas might have been a time consigned to history.'
The restoration of the monarchy in May 1660 reversed the doctrine and encouraged a return to the traditional ways of celebrating. The country was once again officially allowed to mark the 12 days of Christmas.
Thursday, 22 December 2011
Monday, 19 December 2011
Grief (official) at the death of the leader of North Korea
I guess it is politic to be grief stricken sometimes.
Sunday, 18 December 2011
Psychoanalysis and homosexuality: moving on
Hat tip to Bernard Ratigan
The British are coming, the British are coming (to their senses)
--
Jack Drescher, MD
President
Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry
jackdreschermd@gmail.com
www.jackdreschermd.net
***************
http://www.psychoanalytic-council.org/main/index.php?page=15859
--
The British are coming, the British are coming (to their senses)
--
Jack Drescher, MD
President
Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry
jackdreschermd@gmail.com
www.jackdreschermd.net
***************
http://www.psychoanalytic-council.org/main/index.php?page=15859
Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality - Saturday 21st January 2012
Psychoanalysis and homosexuality: moving on
A one-day conference co-hosted by The Anna Freud Centre, Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the NHS, British Psychoanalytic Council, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, and Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships
Resource for London, 356 Holloway Road, London N7
Speakers and chairs: Malcolm Allen, Alessandra Lemma, Peter Fonagy, Nicola Barden, Jean Knox, Bernard Ratigan, Paul Lynch, Jeremy Clarke, Leezah Hertzmann, Mary Target, David Morgan, Julian Lousada, Juliet Newbigin, Marilyn Lawrence, Helen Morgan, Jan McGregor Hepburn, Trudy Klauber.
Resource for London, 356 Holloway Road, London N7
Speakers and chairs: Malcolm Allen, Alessandra Lemma, Peter Fonagy, Nicola Barden, Jean Knox, Bernard Ratigan, Paul Lynch, Jeremy Clarke, Leezah Hertzmann, Mary Target, David Morgan, Julian Lousada, Juliet Newbigin, Marilyn Lawrence, Helen Morgan, Jan McGregor Hepburn, Trudy Klauber.
A large part of the psychoanalytic community in the UK has been conspicuously silent on the issue of homosexuality for some time, a fact that has also impaired the development of thinking around sexuality in general. Whilst there has been a quiet retreat from the pathologisation model of the past, a new consensus has not been articulated. A movement that once made the fearless exploration of human sexuality its very hallmark has become a little coy.
But that is now changing. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy NOW conferences have highlighted the need to engage with this issue in a more forthright way. The December 2011 issue of the journal Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy is devoted to the subject. And the British Psychoanalytic Council is adopting an important position statement.
This conference explores the current state of mind within the psychoanalytic community on the question of homosexuality, ranging across some key scientific questions to what steps need to be taken to allow the profession to be more accessible to gay and lesbian trainees and patients. In so doing, it is hoped to renew the creative and rigorous development of psychoanalytic thought around psychosexuality and begin to reclaim the movement’s original home ground.
But that is now changing. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy NOW conferences have highlighted the need to engage with this issue in a more forthright way. The December 2011 issue of the journal Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy is devoted to the subject. And the British Psychoanalytic Council is adopting an important position statement.
This conference explores the current state of mind within the psychoanalytic community on the question of homosexuality, ranging across some key scientific questions to what steps need to be taken to allow the profession to be more accessible to gay and lesbian trainees and patients. In so doing, it is hoped to renew the creative and rigorous development of psychoanalytic thought around psychosexuality and begin to reclaim the movement’s original home ground.
9.00am to 5.00pm
Fees: Students / trainees: £50
All other attendees: £80
> Download conference programme here
Fees: Students / trainees: £50
All other attendees: £80
> Download conference programme here
> Download a registration form here
or contact the British Psychoanalytic Council on 020 7561 9240
mail@psychoanalytic-council.org
> Register online here or contact the British Psychoanalytic Council on 020 7561 9240
mail@psychoanalytic-council.org
--
Saturday, 17 December 2011
Christmas greetings
Dear blog followers,
For the second year running I am not sending cards this Christmas. Nevertheless, please accept my good wishes. I have resisted the temptation of sending a letter. They are so easy to lampoon and I am trying to contact personally for a chat on the phone everyone who would have received one.
Happy new year
Bernard
For the second year running I am not sending cards this Christmas. Nevertheless, please accept my good wishes. I have resisted the temptation of sending a letter. They are so easy to lampoon and I am trying to contact personally for a chat on the phone everyone who would have received one.
Happy new year
Bernard
Sunday, 11 December 2011
Rachmaninov Vespers in Leicester
Leicester Bach Choir's last concert of the year scaled the height and depths of the All Night Vigil written by Rachmaninov in 1915. We heard Vespers and parts of the night office (Matins and Prime). The choir had an icon of the Black Virgin and child with candles either side. All we needed was less light and incense to be in the Orthodox liturgy in Old Church Slavonic. Wonderful evening, strong singing by the choir, audience kept wrapped in attention.
An excellent evening.
Date for diary: Saturday 21st January, come and sing Tallis' 40 part motet Spem in Alium with Leicester Bach Choir at St James the Greater.. Sadly, I have to be at a conference on, guess what?, psychoanalysis and homosexuality that day. Oh to be in Leicester for that treat at St James' Church.
An excellent evening.
Date for diary: Saturday 21st January, come and sing Tallis' 40 part motet Spem in Alium with Leicester Bach Choir at St James the Greater.. Sadly, I have to be at a conference on, guess what?, psychoanalysis and homosexuality that day. Oh to be in Leicester for that treat at St James' Church.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
what's your ritual?
I need not tell readers that Christmas is near. There seems to be so many imperatives around at this time of the year what you "have to" do. The local radio station had a phone in recently about how it was possible to do Christmas for less than £185 for two adults and two children. Callers variously thought this was mad or very admirable. There was a strong sense that certain things had to be done. The Christmas meal for the family was high on the list. There was not many voices asking WHY there were such powerful imperatives at work in late December.
How have so many people fallen into the trap of having to endure Christmas, eat food they do not really like, give gifts they can ill afford and, so on....
I would be glad to learn others' views on the Christmas rituals.
How have so many people fallen into the trap of having to endure Christmas, eat food they do not really like, give gifts they can ill afford and, so on....
I would be glad to learn others' views on the Christmas rituals.
Pontifical High Mass Holy Cross Leicester
A year ago, the Bishop of Nottingham celebrated a Tridentine High Mass in Holy Cross Leicester and I have recently found the hour long video of it on You Tube. I post it for information.
Any reactions?
Any reactions?
Tuesday, 6 December 2011
Death of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Who Probed Roots of Ideology and Bias, Dies at 65
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: December 5, 2011
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a philosopher, psychoanalyst and biographer known for her lives of two influential women, Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, died on Thursday near her home in Toronto. She was 65. The cause was a pulmonary embolism, her spouse, Christine Dunbar, said.
A former doctoral student of Arendt’s, Ms. Young-Bruehl was concerned throughout her work with the psychological roots of ideology — personal, cultural, national and above all prejudicial.
Besides “Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World” and “Anna Freud: A Biography,” her best-known books include “Mind and the Body Politic,” a collection of essays on history, feminism and psychoanalysis; “Why Arendt Matters,” a brief for its subject’s continued relevance in the 21st century; and “The Anatomy of Prejudices,” a psychoanalytic study of the wellsprings of bigotry.
Ms. Young-Bruehl’s first biographical subject was Arendt, the German-born Jewish political philosopher known for books including “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” in which she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe what she saw as the utter psychological ordinariness of perpetrators of the Holocaust and other historical atrocities.
Published by Yale University Press in 1982, “Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World” explores the evolution of Arendt’s left-wing political passions; her brief, youthful affair in the 1920s with her professor Martin Heidegger, later a Nazi Party member; and her years as a refugee, first in Paris and later in New York. In a sense, the book is a study of the life of the mind in both its aspects, intellectual and psychological, something that would become a hallmark of Ms. Young-Bruehl’s work.
“Anna Freud,” published in 1988, centers on the youngest of Freud’s six children and the only one to take up his profession. Ms. Young-Bruehl argued that Anna, who became a distinguished child psychoanalyst, was born into an intense sibling rivalry with her father’s best-known offspring — psychoanalysis itself — which she could overcome only by submerging herself completely in his field.
In “The Anatomy of Prejudices” (1996), the word “prejudices,” plural, is significant: Sociological models of prejudice had often characterized its diverse manifestations as simply variations on a single theme. Ms. Young-Bruehl, by contrast, examined four strains of bigotry — racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia — arguing that each had a distinct cause.
Each strain, she maintained, was rooted in one or more of the three characterological types (obsessional, hysterical and narcissistic) described by Sigmund Freud in a 1931 essay, “Libidinal Types.” Anti-Semitism, she wrote, springs from the obsessional character, with its adherents fearing Jews as dirty and aggressive, whereas racism stems from the hysterical type and is rooted in sexual fear.
Ms. Young-Bruehl’s books were largely well received, though some critics took her to task for rejecting sociological explanations of phenomena like prejudice in favor of the unverifiable speculation that can attend a psychoanalytic approach. Others praised her as a skilled synthesist who brought a wide breadth of learning to bear on all her work.
Her book “Childism,” which argues that America’s systemic failure to spare its children abuse, neglect and educational privation is born of a deeply ingrained cultural prejudice against them, is to be published by Yale next month.
Elisabeth Bulkley Young was born on March 3, 1946, in Elkton, Md.; her mother was a homemaker, her father a golf pro. After attending Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied with the poet Muriel Rukeyser, she completed her bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York.
She went on to take master’s and doctoral degrees in the field there, doing her Ph.D. under Arendt, who was then on the New School faculty.
Ms. Young-Bruehl, who later trained as a psychoanalyst, taught for many years in the College of Letters of Wesleyan University and afterward at Haverford College.
Ms. Young-Bruehl’s marriage to Robert Bruehl ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Dunbar, a psychoanalyst whom she married in Toronto in 2008, she is survived by two siblings, Herbert Gibbons Young Jr. and Lois Young-Southard; a stepdaughter, Zoë Lucas; and two step-grandchildren.
With Ms. Dunbar, Ms. Young-Bruehl founded Caversham Productions, a company that makes psychoanalytic training materials.
As a biographer of a psychoanalyst who was also a psychoanalyst herself, Ms. Young-Bruehl had a singular perspective on the process of empathic ingestion that is essential to the biographer’s art.
“The usual, indeed, the clichéd way of describing empathy as ‘putting yourself in another’s place’ seems to me quite wrong,” she wrote in her essay “The Biographer’s Empathy With Her Subject.” “Empathizing involves, rather, putting another person in yourself, becoming another person’s habitat.”
She continued, crucially: “But this depends upon your ability to tell the difference between the subject and yourself.”
Besides “Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World” and “Anna Freud: A Biography,” her best-known books include “Mind and the Body Politic,” a collection of essays on history, feminism and psychoanalysis; “Why Arendt Matters,” a brief for its subject’s continued relevance in the 21st century; and “The Anatomy of Prejudices,” a psychoanalytic study of the wellsprings of bigotry.
Ms. Young-Bruehl’s first biographical subject was Arendt, the German-born Jewish political philosopher known for books including “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” in which she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe what she saw as the utter psychological ordinariness of perpetrators of the Holocaust and other historical atrocities.
Published by Yale University Press in 1982, “Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World” explores the evolution of Arendt’s left-wing political passions; her brief, youthful affair in the 1920s with her professor Martin Heidegger, later a Nazi Party member; and her years as a refugee, first in Paris and later in New York. In a sense, the book is a study of the life of the mind in both its aspects, intellectual and psychological, something that would become a hallmark of Ms. Young-Bruehl’s work.
“Anna Freud,” published in 1988, centers on the youngest of Freud’s six children and the only one to take up his profession. Ms. Young-Bruehl argued that Anna, who became a distinguished child psychoanalyst, was born into an intense sibling rivalry with her father’s best-known offspring — psychoanalysis itself — which she could overcome only by submerging herself completely in his field.
In “The Anatomy of Prejudices” (1996), the word “prejudices,” plural, is significant: Sociological models of prejudice had often characterized its diverse manifestations as simply variations on a single theme. Ms. Young-Bruehl, by contrast, examined four strains of bigotry — racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia — arguing that each had a distinct cause.
Each strain, she maintained, was rooted in one or more of the three characterological types (obsessional, hysterical and narcissistic) described by Sigmund Freud in a 1931 essay, “Libidinal Types.” Anti-Semitism, she wrote, springs from the obsessional character, with its adherents fearing Jews as dirty and aggressive, whereas racism stems from the hysterical type and is rooted in sexual fear.
Ms. Young-Bruehl’s books were largely well received, though some critics took her to task for rejecting sociological explanations of phenomena like prejudice in favor of the unverifiable speculation that can attend a psychoanalytic approach. Others praised her as a skilled synthesist who brought a wide breadth of learning to bear on all her work.
Her book “Childism,” which argues that America’s systemic failure to spare its children abuse, neglect and educational privation is born of a deeply ingrained cultural prejudice against them, is to be published by Yale next month.
Elisabeth Bulkley Young was born on March 3, 1946, in Elkton, Md.; her mother was a homemaker, her father a golf pro. After attending Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied with the poet Muriel Rukeyser, she completed her bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York.
She went on to take master’s and doctoral degrees in the field there, doing her Ph.D. under Arendt, who was then on the New School faculty.
Ms. Young-Bruehl, who later trained as a psychoanalyst, taught for many years in the College of Letters of Wesleyan University and afterward at Haverford College.
Ms. Young-Bruehl’s marriage to Robert Bruehl ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Dunbar, a psychoanalyst whom she married in Toronto in 2008, she is survived by two siblings, Herbert Gibbons Young Jr. and Lois Young-Southard; a stepdaughter, Zoë Lucas; and two step-grandchildren.
With Ms. Dunbar, Ms. Young-Bruehl founded Caversham Productions, a company that makes psychoanalytic training materials.
As a biographer of a psychoanalyst who was also a psychoanalyst herself, Ms. Young-Bruehl had a singular perspective on the process of empathic ingestion that is essential to the biographer’s art.
“The usual, indeed, the clichéd way of describing empathy as ‘putting yourself in another’s place’ seems to me quite wrong,” she wrote in her essay “The Biographer’s Empathy With Her Subject.” “Empathizing involves, rather, putting another person in yourself, becoming another person’s habitat.”
She continued, crucially: “But this depends upon your ability to tell the difference between the subject and yourself.”
Monday, 5 December 2011
Saturday, 3 December 2011
New video
So your unborn child is (a) male and (b) gay. What do you think of this?
to get some sense of the current state of the "culture wars" do read the comments.
to get some sense of the current state of the "culture wars" do read the comments.
Friday, 2 December 2011
Ever thought of sponsoring a Leicester Tiger?
A testimonial from a satisfied sponsor:
"We are entering our third season as a player sponsor and have been delighted with the package. We think it represents superb value for money while of course providing our customers with the opportunity to meet some of the best rugby players in the world."
- Matthew Webber, Fernox
"We are entering our third season as a player sponsor and have been delighted with the package. We think it represents superb value for money while of course providing our customers with the opportunity to meet some of the best rugby players in the world."
- Matthew Webber, Fernox
Thursday, 1 December 2011
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