Making Sense

Martin Stanton is a writer, teacher and psychoanalyst. He studied at Dartford Grammar School, St Antony’s College, Oxford, the University of Sussex, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He founded the first Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Kent in 1980. He has been a Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and an Associate Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He founded and directed the Staff Counselling and Mediation Service at University College London in 2000, and has held senior clinical posts as a psychotherapist, counsellor, and mediator within the NHS.He has published numerous books and articles including Outside the Dream (which was reissued in 2014), Sandor Ferenczi, and Out of Order. A review of his life and work is available on Wikipedia.

• AcknowledgementsAbout the authorSeatbelt sign(Pre)conceptionIn the beginningLearning curve: how to start to make senseMirror stageNo direction homeMuseThumper bumperJewel in the crownTrauma timeFish out of waterThresholdFirst footChanging tracksLife classOutside beauty: Helen explainsLiving dollSirenBird of paradiseBackground musicIn tuneKaraokeSomeone like youSwansongSwallowBlind dateDreamerPedestalEnding (up or down and out)

Are we being taken for a ride? Certainly. Martin Stanton audaciously unzips and spills the traditions of radical psychoanalytic thought into the contemporary moment, unleashing lines of flight into the vital forces of art, dream, imagination, and wit. This book will be an inspiration for all those who feel dismay at their role in a society that is increasingly out of order. Caught as we are on the narrow rails of the neoliberal rollercoaster, where science and reason are applied as the desperate brakes on the psychosocial ravages of economic individualism and ruling class power, this book switches the tracks. It unfetters the liberatory vision of a therapeutic education that acknowledges the beauty and terrors of a search for freedom beating at the heart of the therapeutic enterprise. Whether looking at Facebook or works of art as bearers of a benign gaze or as a trap, this vital book challenges all professional talking heads to stop making sense and to start sense making in our practice.