Category: Critical Ideas

[This brief essay was originally published in “Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa” volume 19(2) 2011, 121-133.] As many people now know, Professor Ignacio Martín-Baró was a radical psychologist, prolific...

[This paper was originally presented at a Psychoanalytic Symposium, University of Witwatersrand as long ago as 2011.  Despite being superseded by more recent writings — particularly  “Oedipality and Oedipal Complexes...

[Published previously as a blog for the London Review of Books, reprinted here with the personal permission of Dr. Zaretsky] Since the Republican primaries in the USA of 2015-16, some people have turned to psychiatry in an...

Despite several worthy efforts, we have yet to grasp, adequately or sufficiently, how the politics of oppression are ideologically encoded in the bodymind of every participant in the collectivity or polis. This month I...

Sometime in 2015, the government of Gauteng Province (which surrounds Johannesburg and is home to over 25% of South Africa’s population) decided to save money by deinstitutionalizing a substantial portion of the inpatient...

I’ll cut to the chase.  My sense is that most therapists and counselors accept without question their clients’ particular goals, whether they be to heal from trauma, overcome depression, improve a relationship, become more...

As a psychoanalyst, I often try to understand psychosocial phenomena from a psychoanalytic perspective. For this brief overview, I will discuss the current state of our socio/political climate from a developmental viewpoint as...

Published in South Africa’s Mail and Guardian, January 5th to 11th, 2018, page 15. South Africa is a worldwide frontrunner in rape and domestic violence.  The international news is now also focused on powerful men’s mistreatment...

Exactly fifty years ago, in July 1967, a group of scholars and activists gathered in London at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm for a now famous Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. It was a powerful moment, just a year before...