Word and Deed in Psychoanalysis

Ikaros Publications has released Anna Potamianou’s book Speech and Action in Psychoanalysis, the eleventh volume in the Ikaros Publications psychoanalytic series edited by psychiatrist Athanasios Alexandridis. The texts presented in this book mark a cycle of life. Anna Potamianou shares her personal experience and understanding of psychoanalytic thought. She explores the difficulty and significance of psychoanalysis both within and outside the realm of psychoanalysts, for, as she writes in the book’s foreword, ‘…how people function, what they believe and how they act largely determines the common reality”.

As a theory of thought, psychoanalysis could not ignore the fundamental problem of man’s relationship with death, not only as a biological fact, but also as a psychological experience. Through the devastation of war, the terror of certain ideologies, and the outbursts of self-destructive acts, psychoanalytic discourse has sought to understand how the human psyche operates upon, and is driven by, forces of friendship and enmity. The harshness of a punitive dimension within us, determined by unconscious guilt; sadomasochistic processes; the action of a self-destructive impulse, at times silent, sometimes blatant, revealed to S. Freud the antinomy to which the human psyche is subject: life processes – processes that oppose life. We are called upon to think beyond this.

According to Freud, the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to accessing the unconscious. However, the dream – the theory of which the founder of psychoanalysis, as well as other leading psychoanalysts, continued to develop throughout their lives – is also a network in which physical and mental stimuli, images, words, and the dreamer’s contemporary and timeless experiences are inscribed across multiple levels of mental processing. Anna Potamianou examines the processes of dream organisation during both unimpeded and disturbed development, shedding light on contemporary understandings in psychoanalytic theory and technique. Anna Potamianou is a training psychoanalyst and the author of numerous psychoanalytic books in Greece and abroad. The processes of thought form the central focus of her work.