What happens behind the closed door of a therapist’s office has long remained mysterious to outsiders. Through his groundbreaking literary work, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz is pulling back that curtain, revealing the profound human stories that unfold during therapeutic sessions. His approach has sparked a renewed interest in psychoanalysis among readers who might never have considered […]
How Stephen Grosz Is Making Psychoanalysis Accessible to Modern Readers
Category: Psychoanalysis
A Lacanian reading of Marty Supreme reveals a film structured by obsessional desire, maternal enigma, paternal absence, and the fantasy of total satisfaction. Marty’s pursuit of table-tennis supremacy becomes an Oedipal drama of deferral, humiliation, and lack, culminating in a fragile symbolic reorientation before the child he can no longer disavow.
Marty Supreme (2026): Film Analysis
At the conclusion of the recent three‑part Channel 4 documentary ‘The Tony Blair Story’, its subject stares into the camera for several awkward seconds before delivering a peculiar afterthought: “Also… very important to understand about me: I’m not into psychoanalysis. Right? I think there’s far too much of it, I think people spend far too […]
Tony Blair and the Subject of Psychoanalysis
The birth of Arthur Schopenhauer introduced a philosophical vocabulary that deepened literary English. His ideas on will, illusion, and suffering infused prose with intellectual gravity and introspective precision, enabling writers to articulate pessimism, psychological complexity, and metaphysical doubt with clarity, restraint, and conceptual authority.
Birth of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) – The Thinker Who Darkened and Deepened Literary English
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Wrapping Up
Born in 1917, Carson McCullers transformed American prose through psychological stillness, restraint, and interior focus. Her fiction showed that silence, subtext, and muted longing could carry immense narrative weight, expanding English’s emotional vocabulary and shaping modern introspective storytelling that values understatement over spectacle and inner life over overt dramatic action.
Birth of Carson McCullers (1917–1967) – The Writer Who Turned Silence into Language
I inaugurated my blog with a post about the relationship of two passages written by James Joyce, one from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the other from Ulysses, both revolving around the word ‘yes’ (which was used in drastically different ways in the two passages). I connected these passages to Nietzsche’s philosophy, […]
Joyce and Nietzsche, Take 2
The U.S. philosopher and psychoanalyst, Jonathan Lear, saw human beings as restless animals, whose defining trait was the uncontainable nature of their desire. No utopia that we can imagine will ever fully satisfy us – we will always want more. Lear’s interest in our irrepressible urge to transcend ourselves was already apparent in the first […]
Lear on Freud: the Uncontainable Nature of Desire
On February 10, 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, and English entered a distinctly Victorian register. Their union helped stabilize a language of respectability, domestic virtue, and institutional authority. Journalism, biography, and private correspondence adopted disciplined sincerity, shaping a standardized, morally weighted English for generations.
Marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (1840) – The Union That Anchored Victorian English
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