Author: penwithlit

Translated by Ümit Hussein

Burhan Sönmez is a Kurdish novelist and lawyer from Turkey who is a winner of the equivalent there of the Booker Prize, and he is the recently elected President of PEN International. Notably, he was seriously injured after being assaulted by Turkish police in 1996, and received treatment in the UK, where he lived in exile for several years. He now lives and works in Istanbul and Ankara.

I read his novel Istanbul, Istanbul, published in English in 2016. The back cover of the book announces that “Istanbul is a city of a million cells, and every cell is an Istanbul unto itself”. The story focuses on four political prisoners in detention in a shared underground cell, where they are left to languish while waiting to be taken off for interrogation and torture. The prisoners come from different walks of life: Demirtay is a…

Introduction

True self (also known as real self, authentic self, original self and vulnerable self) and false self (also known as fake self, idealised self, superficial self and pseudo self) are psychological concepts, originally introduced into psychoanalysis in 1960 by Donald Winnicott.

Winnicott used true self to describe a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self. The false self, by contrast, Winnicott saw as a defensive façade, which in extreme cases could leave its holders lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty, behind a mere appearance of being real.

The concepts are often used in connection with narcissism.

Characteristics

Winnicott saw the true self as rooted from early infancy in the experience of being alive, including blood pumping and lungs breathing – what Winnicott called simply being. Out of this, the baby creates the experience of a sense of…

Here is a view of the London Television Centre, 60-72 Upper Ground, SE1. It is on the South Bank of the river Thames, a little to the East of the National Theatre and the Royal Festival Hall. It was completed in 1972 to the design of Elsom Pack & Roberts.¹

Appreciate this building while you can – it is bring demolished. Admire the variety of the sloping roofs, the unexpected angles, the terraces overlooking the river. Appreciate the unexpected finish: it is covered in tiny, white, glistening tiles.

The history of this and two other buildings due for demolition is documented in the excellent “London Inheritance” post: Three Future Demolitions. (May 16th 2021).

The planning application reference is “21/02668/EIAFUL” submitted to Lambeth Council on 5th July 2021. It says:

Demolition of all existing buildings and structures for…

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

This is a bit of a throwback post, as some of it was first posted by me in 2019, and was in fact my fifth ever review on the blog. I’m re-posting with some additional discussion of publication prospects in the West for Turkish authors, as part of my month of Turkish cultural appreciation.

Translator from the Turkish Nicholas Glastonbury, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in May 2021, noted that “In various conversations with translators, agents, and colleagues, publishers often articulate that they have informal quotas for writers beyond Europe (e.g., ‘We already have a Turkish author’)”. Elif Shafak of course is “the” Turkish female writer read most widely in the UK and other Western nations, fairly or not.

Shafak is living effectively in exile from her homeland: by writing about controversial topics, such as the Armenian genocide, she…

It is not uncommon today to meet a person in a psychoanalytic context who desires a diagnosis. And indeed, some people spend a lot of time and earn large sums of money by providing subjects with the signifiers of diagnoses. One can say that “Diagnosis” is a name of an industry and, wherever there is an industry, there are desiring subjects willing to pay.

However, I believe that those who call themselves psychoanalysts should take the desire for diagnosis with a grain of salt and always remain prudent when asked for one. Basically, the question of diagnosis in psychoanalysis has not to do with the subject’s identifications with a particular signifier but with the direction of the treatment. In other words, in terms of diagnosis, psychoanalysts must always ask themselves how does a diagnostic criteria assist in the direction of the treatment, rather than just providing the subject with a…

In the summer, feeling wistful for a holiday abroad and wanting to think of something to interest the kids now they’re not little, I signed up for a subscription service called Snack Surprise. Every month they send me a box of snacks from a mystery country.

The box that we received in September was full of Turkish treats, including Turkish delight, of course, but also a new (to us) version of Doritos, a can of mysterious fizzy drink, some chocolate, sweets. It was actually genuinely quite exciting to open up the box and found out what was inside, and what country everything was from.

There was a little booklet with interesting, possibly dubious facts about Turkey (“Camel wrestling tournaments, held throughout the Aegean region in the winter, and bull wrestling near the Black Sea, are also popular”), and a list of all the items in the box, with the option…