Bogdan Wolf
Contact Details:
Tel: 07702 166 584
Venue & Fees
The practice is located just outside Hampstead Village in Langland Gardens, NW3. The nearest underground station is Hampstead Station (Northern Line), about 10 minutes walk, and Finchley Road Station (Jubilee and Metropolitan Lines) from which buses 13, 113 and 82 will take you to Langland Gdns Bus Stop.
Fees are income related and agreed beforehand.
What Psychoanalysis Does
Analytical experience demonstrates that the difficulties and predicaments of our everyday life recur over and over again as a result of a failure to address their cause. In effect, we may feel that they invade us in some way from time to time, putting obstacles in our daily life and in our love relationships, while the past experiences continue to affect us here and now. Our everyday discontent is linked to those past experiences when the impact of others on our own lives left us without adequate means, like words, to understand them.
In the course of analytic sessions, in the conditions of trust and confidence, where knowledge to change the state of things is expected from the analyst, it is possible to approach the cause of our sufferings. The cause of the symptom is not the same as the condition of the symptom itself, just as drinking is not the cause of drinking. Which is why we start by raising a complaint, pointing to a symptom that does not go away but keeps coming back and proving it is stronger than you. It is different for everyone. I may think that my own misery is someone else’s fault or that there is another reason for my suffering.
It is possible to confront, at one’s own pace and in one’s own time, the experiences that continue to cause us discomfort, eroding into our life and shattering the expectations of how to enjoy it. From time to time these symptoms reopen half healed wounds in the present. It may also happen that having got used to the discomfort we endure, we have also got used to drawing a ‘satisfaction’ from it. This strengthens our ignorance and does not change anything. How then is it possible to break this vicious circle?
It took a long time to form the ill, discomforting and anxious condition before we started to notice it. For this reason it will not suffice to dip into a quick-fix therapy programme to undo these conditions and produce a long term change. Today’s therapies make such promises of a quick happiness and improvement. They leave the cause of suffering untouched, leaving the ordinary yet significant, common yet untold events from our lives out of the picture.
Psychoanalysis works by giving room to the truth of a discovery that is different for everyone. It creates a space for speech and for things to be said which were never said before and which cannot be said anywhere else or to anyone else. What makes the difference is that in the psychoanalytic setting things are not said merely for the sake of saying them. The enduring effect of what Freud called ‘talking therapy’ comes from the fact that words are not simply the end result but also the means of addressing and changing what has left us speechless, powerless or simply what does not make sense. The true sense of a discontent, ailment, anxiety, depressive condition or any other form of sometimes unbearable discomfort, starts first with being able to speak freely at last.
Book Online
Memberships / Affiliations:
BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy).
ALP (Association for Lacanian Psychoanalysis).
NLS (New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis).
WAP (World Association of Psychoanalysis).
Training / Qualifications:
Psychoanalyst
PhD
Publications
- Articles and contributions published in the UK (www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk), France, Poland and Spain,
- I have co-edited, with Veronique Voruz, ‘Later Lacan’, published by SUNY Press in 2006. It is a unique collection of texts on the later teaching of Jacques Lacan by leading analysts from the World Association of Psychoanalysis, Ecole de la Cause freudienne and the New Lacanian School (www.sunypress.edu).
