On A Day Spent Reading

It's been a good day so far, and it hasn't finished yet. I spent a couple of hours polishing off Mark Brandon Read's "Chopper," his autobiography; rubbish book (though I've read worse) though the film with Eric Bana's worth a look.

Having finished that, I went into town to browse the various booksellers, and then came home via the pub and a glass of raspberry beer. Ah, Frambozen. It's expensive and arguably a little gay but for a mid-afternoon beer there's nothing finer. Whilst I was at the pub, I started reading my next book (I know, I know, I haven't finished Sophie's World yet), this one by Janet Malcolm, called Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. It's not bad so far, and with my previous post On Relationships in mind, I'd like to quote from the first chapter:

The phenomenon of transference - how we all invent each other according to early blueprints - was Freud's most original and radical discovery. The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities - personal relations - is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. "Only connect," E. M. Forster proposed. "Only we can't," the psychoanalyst knows. (Emphasis mine)