My aim in this paper is to consider the suggestion, made in an unpublished paper by Peter Hobson, a psychoanalytic colleague, that psychoanalysis is a form of life. Hobson is impressed by the peculiarity of psychoanalytic thinking, by its specialness, by the fact that its concepts are embedded in a system of practices and beliefs such that an outsider to all this may be unable to understand what the analyst says, whether to his patient or to another analyst. Hobson uses (...) Wittgenstein's notion of a form of life to refer to this system of practices and beliefs, but he does not criticize or examine the notion itself. (shrink)

In this paper I have tried to clarify some of the differences between on the one hand ordinary doubts and uncertainties that are part and parcel of the psychoanalytic process, and on the other hand the sort of doubt that Socrates called ‘aporia’, that is, philosophical and conceptual. I have described one point at which philosophical doubt may creep into psychoanalytic thinking on body/mind issues. I presented a psychoanalytical model of the mind, based largely on Bion and Anzieu, in which (...) mind is seen to be emergent from a body–mind nexus, to which we may, under pressure, regress. I elaborated this by reference to an example of my own somatisation, and to Anzieu’s theory of a skin ego. Finally I made some comparisons between philosophical solutions to anxieties arising both in the mind/body area and in general epistemology, and psychoanalytic approaches to similar anxieties in life. (shrink)

What is the point of sport? For those to whom sport doesn't appeal, it seems futile, pointless. Yet a small child takes pleasure in his or her bodily capacities and adroitness. Gradually the child achieves a measure of physical coordination and mastery. Walking, jumping, dancing, catching, kicking, hitting, climbing, being in water, using an implement as a bat or racquet – all these offer a sense of achievement and satisfaction. Sport it seems to me is an extension of such activities.

As we reported in the April issue of Philosophy, Renford Bambrough, the editor of Philosophy from 1972 to 1994, died on January 17th, 1999. During the memorial service at St John's College, Cambridge, on the 24th of April, 1999, the following extract from Renford Bambrough's Sermon at the Commemoration of Benefactors, 1968, was read: I know that you know all this, or you would not be here. But I also know, from some things that some of you and some others (...) have said and written, that some of you need to be reminded of what you know. (shrink)