Public Knowledge: Parapraxis present Overidentifications

In Defence of Leisure

Akshi Singh

The celebrated psychoanalyst Marion Milner lived for the entirety of the twentieth century. By the age of ninety-eight she had written nine books revealing how free time and creativity are vital for a fulfilled life.

Akshi Singh was born ninety years after Milner, in Rajasthan, over four thousand miles away from where Milner lived and worked. At first glance, the worlds of these two women seem entirely separate. Yet when Singh found herself standing at a crossroads in her life and grieving personal loss, she realised the questions and preoccupations Milner was exploring were her own.

All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance

Hannah Zeavin

All Freud’s Children tells an alternate history of psychoanalysis by centring those closest to the practice: the children. People associate psychoanalysis with the couch and the lecture hall, but the origin of psychoanalysis is the nursery, the family home. The story I surface is one of how the children of analysts came to play a major but forgotten role in the most decisive theory of self in the 20th century. The most famous psychoanalysts studied, treated, traded on, and theorised their own children; those same children, in turn, found themselves raised by a theory and as evidence for it, becoming bound to an intellectual discipline—a fate—they never quite had the freedom to choose. Psychoanalysis proceeded, across the next century, to redescribe the family from within its families both biological and of the practice, patients and children mixing to form a braided genealogy. I’ve set out to recover the history of that experimentation, exploitation, inheritance, and destiny by following the children of psychoanalysts from their ghostly presence in the pages of texts, from the margins and the footnotes, back into their early homes and subsequent, often troubled, lives.