How to Find Great Papers, (Post-)Kleinians, and Hugging Minimalists

PEP-Web, finally…

I finally got access to the hall-of-wet-dreams in the land of psychoanalysis: PEP-Web. After a short celebration, I felt massive overwhelm. What do you mean I can browse through 100000s of papers - unsupervised??

And then I found that I could find everything, which means… I find nothing. I type in “envy“ and get ten thousands of results. I add “Klein” and still get thousands.

So, I looked up how to improve my PEP-Web search and here is what I found:

1. Turns out PEP-Web themselves made a video about how to search effectively. At first, I thought it might just be the kind of corporate tutorial that tells you how to log in for seven minutes but it’s actually useful. You can watch the PEP-Web search tutorial here.

2. The other helpful adivce I didn’t know before are Boolean operators. You can specify a search with AND, OR, NOT, or “” to search for an exact phrase. The MIT has a little written guide that walks through how to use Boolean operators. It’s written for general databases but it seems that it also works on PEP-Web, you can read it here: The Boolean search guide from MIT.

3. Sort your search results by “Search Score” and not in the standard alphabetical order.

(Post-)Kleinians

Now that I can actually find things on PEP-Web, I’ve been dipping my toe more into the (post-)Kleinians. With the launch of my Melanie Klein course coming up in July, August, September (it’s tough ok 😅), I thought it would be fun to explore papers by Betty Joseph, Hanna Segal, and John Steiner in future YouTube videos.

Betty Joseph is first on the list. She seems to be another one of those bad-ass, fascinating women in psychoanalysis. I hope to learn more from her on how to analyse the moment-to-moment (inter-)action in session. Plus her papers on “Envy in Everyday Life” and “Addiction to Near-Death” (are you kidding me, how interesting?).

Hanna Segal next, especially her work on symbol formation. Phantasy and symbol formation are two Kleinian concepts that are very hard to grasp and I hope that Segal can help out.

John Steiner wrote a very interesting paper, later turned into a book, about the flight from both the paranoid-schizoid and depressive position. Which results in a therapy that is as stuck as it gets.

Alain de Botton, Christopher Bollas, and the Minimalist Who Needs a Hug

I watched an interview with Alain de Botton on the significance of architecture (you can watch it here). Not my usual forte but, of course, de Botton weaves in psychoanalysis and I’m back on board.

He was talking about what the spaces we build for ourselves say about us and what unconscious functions they serve.

De Botton says that a minimalist home with clean surfaces, little furniture, and no clutter, rarely belongs to a calm person. Rather it’s the home of someone whose inner world is terribly agitated and the clarity of their house provides the holding function they need.

(I never felt so relieved looking at my own cluttered desk. But who knows what that says about me 🙄)

His conclusion was: Minimalists need a hug.

All this reminded me of Christopher Bollas and what he says about selecting objects to create a certain self-experience in his book Being a Character.

Bollas talks about how we choose objects to evoke particular states of self: The music you listen to, the breakfast you make, the book you chose to read, the poster you hang on your wall… We can use all of those to reach or defend against a certain self-state.

“A day is a space for the potential articulation of my idiom. Do I select objects that disseminate my idiom or not? For example, do I pick up a novel which I don’t like but think I should read–but through which I shall not come into my being–or do I select a novel which I like, into which I can fall, losing myself to multiple experiences of self and other? Do I have a sense of this difference of choice? What if I don’t? If I don’t know, then my day is likely to be a fraught or empty occasion.”

Being a Character, p. 24

That’s it. I’ll go back to typing away on the Melanie Klein course now. It will be awesome that I know! 😎

Best wishes,

Alina