iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

ECPS Psychotherapy course 2, on Oedipus: seeing Freud's model as the expression within his culture of a universal challenge, that of entering into a triadic world of desire, jealousy, love and hatred. #oedipus #freud enfieldcounselling.co.uk/training/

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

ECPS Supervision course. Aim of #supervision should be to increase supervisee's capacity for insight and analytic attitude, rather than supervisor self-gratification. Gee, H. (1996) Developing insight through supervision #psychoanalysis bit.ly/47pXBqn

bit.ly

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Teaching #Freud 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'. Repeating trauma to find resolution makes sense: see #Winnicott 'Fear of Breakdown'. While a biological #deathdrive makes less sense, there is comfort in seeing death as universally inevitable, as well as individual: #JacquelineRose 'The Plague'.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Visited Vaison-la-Romaine and walked around the remains of the Roman town. Thought about those people who walked these streets 2,000 years ago and wondered who would walk around the ruins of our civilisation, whether in 2,000 years or just in 20? #AI #singularity www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Preparing to teach ECPS online supervision course bit.ly/4xYUxgo. Initial theme 'teach or treat', Leader, D (2010) 'Some Thoughts on Supervision', echoes clinical link between interpretation and relationship, Segal, H. (1987) 'What is therapeutic and counter therapeutic in psychoanalysis'

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Psychoanalytic projection similar to #neuroscience predictive processing. Projection evacuates undesired elements and predictive processing reduces surprises. Both aiming at homeostasis. Stänicke, E et al (2026) Freud’s Model of the Mind Within a Predictive Processing...Paradigm. Entropy 2026, 28

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Your AI Is Not a Tool Awais Aftab on how seeing AI as a tool misses the point, it is an environment that shapes how we see the world and relate to eachother. McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' on steroids. open.substack.com/pub/theconvi...

open.substack.com

Your AI Is Not a Tool

The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 5

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Interesting angle from Oz: while success of the ban with under 16s is limited, there may be positive outcomes in raising awareness amongst parents. theconversation.com/is-australia...

theconversation.com

Is Australia’s social media ban for under 16s working?

Adolescent health expert Susan Sawyer talks to The Conversation Weekly podcast, six months on from Australia’s social media ban for under 16-year-olds.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

open.substack.com/pub/elliotki... These are, indeed, dark days for the US. A darkness that is gaining ground in Europe, too.

open.substack.com

A Disgrace on D-Day

An Ominous Speech on Hallowed Ground

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Akhter: 'Finally, during old age, as one approaches death, a deep and post-ambivalent view of the world that one has lived in and is about to leave needs to be developed for this final transition to be smooth.'

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Delivering seminar tomorrow on object constancy, based on 1994 paper by Salman Akhtar 'Object constancy and adult psychopathology'. Useful discussion on links between difficulties in rapprochement subphase, and narcissistic and borderline personality structures.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

A dialectical idea. That AI includes the seeds of its own limits. AI trawls the output of our civilisation to supply its raw material, yet to the degree that it is replacing our civilisational output with slop, it is creating a limit to its own creativity. www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-so...

theideasletter.org

The Social Edge of Intelligence - The Ideas Letter

Simons challenges the dominant story of AI-driven efficiency, arguing that the intelligence powering today’s systems is built from accumulated human interaction. As organizations automate work and off...

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David Wearing @davidwearing.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

There'll be scenes like this (and much worse) up and down the UK if Reform get into government and start acting out their Send Them Back fantasies. A thousand acts of sadism carried out by malevolent racist thugs employed and empowered by the state. Some of you will be safe. Many of us won't.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Last ECPS Psychoanalytic Film Club, Haneke's fascinating The White Ribbon, themes: the uncanny, the return of the repressed, fascism. As with a therapy session, the film doesn't include answers. But sometimes we shouldn't look for answers, instead allow ourselves to be transformed by an experience.

Uncanny sense of threat from group of children

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

Took part as a member in the first CityLit meeting of my Nietzsche reading group. Great group of people, with interesting contributions. I've known nothing about Nietzsche, so good to continue exploring links between psychoanalysis and continental philosophy.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

Interesting reflections on a significant contemporary theorist

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

'Angels in the nursery (2005)', Lieberman et al on possible benign childhood experiences that the traumatised child can draw upon when they become a parent. Interrupting intergenerational cycles of maltreatment. As important as Fraiberg's 'Ghosts'. Good to end the term with a hopeful message.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 19/03/2025

Ego defences displayed here include rationalisation, splitting, denial, and projection.

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Prof. James Davies @drjamesdaviesbskys.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

"Of the scores of people I spoke to... all perceived their lives to be better off thanks to an [ADHD] diagnosis. [And yet, since] the diagnosis, almost all had left their job, dropped out of education & lost many old friends. Several were housebound". www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

theguardian.com

The number of people with chronic conditions is soaring. Are we less healthy than we used to be – or overdiagnosing illness?

Are ordinary life experiences, bodily imperfections and normal differences being unnecessarily pathologised? One doctor argues just that

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

From Christina Emanuel. In 'An Accidental Pokemon Expert' (2015), she encourages us to see the individual's subjective experience within autism.

Extract from Christina Emanuel (2015) 'An Accidental Pokemon Expert'

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Prof. James Davies @drjamesdaviesbskys.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) reports that nearly a quarter of the UK population now suffers 'material deprivation' (being unable to properly heat their homes or feed their families).... And we wonder why mental & emotional anguish escalates....

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Psychoanalysis and Politics @psapol-org.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Dreams under fascism, and paralysis:

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

1/ Pamela Bartram (Melancholia, Mourning, Love. 2013): Therapy with disabled adults/parents of a disabled child, disability can bring loss of ego ideal and consequent harsh superego. If melancholia can turn to mourning, then Britton's 'Rueful humour' and an acceptance of impermanence can emerge.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Next seminar: Aileen Alleyne 2007 The internal oppressor. External oppression leading to an inhibiting adaptive false self. Alleyne sees this as a specific structure, different to internalised oppression, the latter being internalisation of the oppressor's values.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Raphael-Leff's 'Absolute hospitality and the imagined baby' (2020) provided a good start to a term on human development. Our beginnings lie in the body and mind of the mother. Raphael-Leff also reminds us that a degree of maternal ambivalence is to be expected.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Awais Aftab brings his usual clear thinking and compassion to the complex and non-determining relationship between biological sex and gender identity.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

One of The American Psychoanalyst's top stories for 2024 is this useful and well-written piece by Lily Meyersohn... Revisiting Freud’s “Discrediting” open.substack.com/pub/american...

open.substack.com

Revisiting Freud’s “Discrediting”

Frederick Crews has died. Let’s lay his views on psychoanalysis to rest.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Another thoughtful post by Awais Aftab, this about risk and iatrogenic harm. open.substack.com/pub/awaisaft...

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

A great thread with a insight that continues to be challenging; but without this insight much of human life remains obscure.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Thanks for the reminder of Fairbairn. And, of course, this trauma may lead the child to believe that its own love is toxic and that this is the reason that it is not loved.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Thanks for sharing these (and other) images.

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BiteSize Therapy @bitesizetherapy.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

It is odd that so many people see psychoanalytic therapy as an endless, intellectual rehashing of one’s childhood experiences when, in fact, one of its core assumptions concerns the emotional power of the here-and-now therapeutic relationship. - Nancy McWilliams

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Frédéric Tordo, PhD @frederictordo.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

"The construction of the object leads retroactively to the construction of the drive, which constructs the object" (André Green, 2000).

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Last seminar for the term. Heidi Keller's paper encourages us to broaden our often culturally-bound understanding of attachment theory.

Article by Heidi Keller seeing how attachment may vary between cultures

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Judith Beyer @judithbeyer.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

🧵 Yesterday was Frantz Fanon's death anniversary (6 Dec 1961). I want to credit what usually gets little attention: the fact that he was a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist. And that his critique of colonialism can only be understood as being build from his clinical experience...

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Haneke's The White Ribbon, set before WW1. A feeling of threat throughout the film, the uncanny sense of the return of the repressed. In this case, the return of the adult's cruelty towards their children. Do the children enact the violence that erupts in the bucolic village? We're not told.

A group of silent children outside a window, looking back at the observer.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

1 Teaching Freud's Three essays on sexuality. His first essay, on perversion, shows plasticity of sexual object and aim, and sets scene for the second. By describing so-called perversions as component parts of everyday sexuality, he develops a concept of libido that finds expression in infants.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

One of the cornerstones of psychoanalytic therapy.

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Dr Noor Bari @njbbari3.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

They aren’t anti-science. Not at all. They are using science to promote anti-science behaviour in others, because it weakens the population and brings them under tighter control. And they are using behaviour science, neuroscience, and computer science to do it…

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Thanks, Martin, for highlighting this study, which adds to the evidence for the long-term effectiveness of psychotherapy.

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

1. Winnicott on his regret at being clever, a self-indulgent trap that I can fall into... 'It appals me to think how much deep change I have prevented or delayed in patients in a certain classification category by my personal need to interpret...'

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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

1. Here's why I'll never use AI to assist my research or writing: A. I don't want to know exactly what I'm looking for. I mean that when I start researching a topic, I want to remain open to its contradictions and paradoxes, and to the unexpected paths that might lead off it. 🧵

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Sigi Forever @sigiforever.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

The Long-Term Effectiveness of Psychodynamic and Analytical Psychotherapy in Routine Care: Preprint by Henkel, Zimmermann, Volz, Staats, Benecke 2024. AP showed greater long-term effectiveness, particularly for patients with more severe problems at baseline. osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Geoff Ferguson @geoff75.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

Technofeudalism '...a company like Meta, much of its capital stock is being produced not by its employees but by its users...by unpaid people who, like modern-day ‘cloud serfs’, come into contact with its algorithms and work for free...to attract other cloud serfs.' newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

newleftreview.org

Yanis Varoufakis, Quantity to Quality — Sidecar

An interview with Yanis Varoufakis.

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