MAKING LINKS: PSYCHOANALYSIS ON THE WEB

In this new series, IMPULSE links you to online resources to satisfy your appetite for psychoanalytic enrichment.

A world of psychoanalytic talks, interviews, commentary, and other audio content is just a link away, waiting for you to turn up your computer's speakers and dive in. Through a proliferation of both podcasts (downloadable files to either listen to on your computer or put on an MP3 player, like an iPod) and streaming audio files (which you must listen to while connected to the Internet), a vivid connection to psychoanalytic ideas is becoming accessible in a new way. 

This month, we offer an assortment of intriguing audio on the man Vladimir Nabokov called "the Viennese quack," but whom most of us more affectionately consider the father of our field: Freud. The International Neuro-Psychoanalysis Centre offers adownloadable file of the charismatic Mark Solms speaking on "Sigmund Freud Today" at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Hear Solms explain what he means when he provocatively asserts, "Psychoanalysis is not important."

The BBC's website boasts an awe-inspiring wealth of psychoanalytically related offerings. Of note is novelist Lisa Appignanesi's series, Freudian Slips, which revisits five of Freud's works with help from Adam Phillips and Susie Orbach, not to mention a comedian and the editor of a fetish magaine. The first three programs lightheartedly look at Three Essays on Sexuality: sexual abberationinfantile sexuality, and puberty. Next, it's hysteria and the case of Dora, and finally wit and humor as analyzed in "The Joke Book."

Finally, the Center for Jewish History has an impressive multimedia archive from its 2006 conference Freud's Jewish World. For a potent sample, listen to Harold Blum's talk, "Antisemitism in Freud's Case Histories."

Next month, we'll take a look at audio analytic explorations of religion, dreams, Jung and more. In the meantime, we encourage you to send in your suggestions for future MAKING LINKS features.

Cate Corcoran, M.A.
IMPULSE Features Editor