The Shallow End

This week we will mainly be trying to talk about love in a way that doesn't make us sound like my mum’s ‘pinions of the impact of Facebook on Western Society. This is not as easy as it sounds. Talking about love is a challenge, a decline into the puerile even for the sophisticated minds clustering around the Freud Museum this Friday. Nothing like talking about intimacy out loud to make you feel like a bit of a wronger. Because I find talking about love so hard I am a big fan of social media. Limited in numbers and characters, favouring images and music - a technological negative capability to communicate the deep. The necessary shallow end of our thoughts where we can explore the deep without drowning. I am of the firm belief that Freud would have loved twitter. 140 characters the approximate length of a psychoanalytic interpretation, deep and lite at exactly the same time. Freud said that love and work are the ‘cornerstones of our humanness’, two connected attempts to be in the world with other human beings. Whatever our relationship with work, we do it as human beings full of libidinal urges and the desire for intercourse with others.  All over the world, attempts are made to produce things with others, involving hard work, slaps and tickles and the hope of ending the day with a bit of mutual satisfaction. Join us in the shallow end at #LoveAmateurs.