The best in my area

If I'm allowed to make the supposition that psychoanalysis is a part of the psychological area of knowledge to which I formally belong as a student being member of an institution which divides Knowledge into areas and calls "Psychology" to one of those areas (a supposition which goes against psychonalysis itself, since this discipline could be said to consists in the knowledge about the unconscious while Psychology is defined as the science of consciousness) then I would be obliged to say that Sigmund Freud is the best in my area.

First thing: contravening every philosophical and psychological tradition he defined the human subject, the psychical space, as a fundamentally unconscious one. A space composed of a knowledge which we don't know we know and which determines our very subjective position. Second thing, I would say (specially through the reading Lacan makes of him) he provides a theory that allows us, future psychologists, to think a clinical practice which does not consists of a mere normalization of patients, of their domestication by means and with regard to a socially shared norm, the arbitrariness of which is the signature of its functional value for the maintenance of the power relations that constitutes our very cotidianity (and ruins it).

And that's the best in my area, if I'm forced to put it that way

My carreer

I'm not so sure you can know why exactly you have chosen anything. So it's surely not true what I belive: that I chose Psychology because there was Lacan in it. I know well it's not true but I also think that I didn't chose Psychology the day I matriculated on it, but, in a sense, very recently in third grade after reading him. So best thing is Lacan, and by Lacan I mean psychoanalysis in general and critical thought and marxism (and all the things one could inscribe in this series on non common sensical, non-social reproductive, thought).

So you can see this last element would be the worst of it for me: Common sensical abundance when it comes to think the subjectivity or the psychological problems.

But for common sense, I think, we already have common sense, we don't need a second, academically legitimated, verbally reformulated, common sense. Why would we want this? Why, if not for the social function it might fulfill?

And that's why I chose it and what I like and dislike about it.

A photograph I Like

A picture I like (I really don't like pictures very much, I might get to find a photograph to be nice or pleasant, aesthetically I mean, but it will never get to provoke me in any way bigger than that) is the picture of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's ex-president-heroic figure.

I'm cheating, because it's not a particular picture of him that I like, it's rather the photographied as such, albeit his many concrete photographied forms (angles, lights, gestures, scenarios, etc.). What I like about him, about this man as the 'photographied' content of reality, is something of a political courage his images inspires on me, a courage for being able to take the loser's side, in the wider sense of the term -one friend of mine once told the definition that facism consists in taking always the winner's side.

And that's a picture or a picture's content I might say I like (I had to exaggerate my sentiments though, but just a little)

My most precious possession

I have a very beatiful set of plastic-made statues of Freud's six children (50cm tall each). It was a gift, for my 23rd birthday, from one of my cousins who is a very gifted amateur sculpturer (he is only 17). He din't really know what that group of people looked like, so he shaped them according to what corporal images the children's names evoked to him. In fact the red and white statue named 'Anna F.' ended up looking like the real Sophie, Anna's sister, and that's the only similarity one could find between the real brothers and their plastic representations, except of course, the fact that there are "six names and six things named by them", as my cousin put it in the birthday card. Indeed they are almost amorphous masses (faces are pretty well structured though) with names as designations, and these names, in their arbitrariness, represent the pure intention of the given gift, which is supposed to be the most important part of giving. That's what he explained to me, I think -and something about taking this common sense content to an extreme. I just like the shapes/colors of it.

And that's my most precious possession, if I'm forced to pick one.