Show Notes
In this episode, Dr Carveth discusses Donald Winnicott's wish to 'be alive when he dies'. Implicit in Winnicott's quip is that many people are not fully alive - they are walking dead. Psychoanalysis is about the ways we deaden ourselves as defences against the terror of being alive.
More from Psychoanalytic Thinking with Dr Don Carveth
Correction: not a one-way progression from knowing to being but a dialectical integration of knowing and being. Although my technique has always been relational (vs. still face, cold fish, abstinence, neutrality, non-self-revealing), Freudian and Kleinian work on enhancing self-understanding remains essential, as does the conscientious critique of the superego. In liberating conscience one is emancipating the true self.
First as a Freudian, then a Kleinian, the technique was "enlightening." With Winnicott, Kohut and Bion it shifted from knowing to being.