“If you already do the Sunday crossword puzzle and it’s not challenging, pick up something new, find that exercise regimen that you’ll adhere to,” she says, “and if you can do it around people, that’s even better.” Langbaum notes that socializing is one of the best ways to keep your brain young. (NPR)
In 1911, Sigmund Freud addressed his followers gathered at Nuremberg, where he restated the import of his practice: “the task of psychoanalysis lies not at all in the discovering of complexes, but in the dissolving of resistances.” A formal antipode to political resistance, psychoanalytic resistance dams up desire and obstructs traumatic knowledge. It is conservative, allergic to change, and aims for the kind of frictionless normativity against which the unconscious drives rail. Meanwhile, we associate political resistance with change itself, with a blockade that pushes for revolution—rather than a blockage that censors its very possibility. If we read Freud as urging his followers to help their patients move through their resistance, psychoanalysis is a project on the side of material and political reality by bringing patients out of isolation and into social struggles.
“Your love goes to the centerline of the branch But you desire all the water. There is no way of knowing What I tell you about love is true. Go by the signs.”