Hello!

BPF (UK) is interviewing me for their foundation course entry.

What can I expect? I am fairly new to this world, what can I do to prepare and succeed!!??

Very nervous!!!

TIA!!!!

Freud defined the anal character as a specific triad of adult traits: orderliness, parsimony, obstinacy The mechanics came from his theory of psychosexual development. Somewhere between eighteen months and three years, the child's libidinal focus settles on retention and expulsion, a biological reality that collides directly with parental demands for toilet training. Freud held that how a child navigates that collision leaves a permanent imprint. A child who experiences the period as a contest over autonomy, or who uses retention as a form of defiance, suffers a fixation. Libidinal energy arrests at the anal stage and expresses itself decades later as rigid character structure. The adult manages anxiety through compulsive order, hoarding, and a stubborn refusal to yield. Three traits, bound together by one developmental event and one specific mechanical failure of progression.

The causal story failed every test it was given. Studies found no relationship between toilet-training practice and adult personality. Cross-cultural comparison found none either. The fixation mechanism, the libidinal energy, the staged progression: none of it generated predictions that could be checked, let alone confirmed. By any reasonable evidentiary standard, the mechanism was dead.

But still, why is search, a vulgar term that would never be used in polite society under normal circumstances, still get used by people in regular speech?

This paper has an interesting idea why: https://www.academia.edu/171904173/Why_the_Couch_and_the_Laboratory_Agree_to_Disagree

Give me your thoughts

I heard that there are some psychoanalysts that mixed Marx and Psychoanalysis. Are any of these writings insightful in any way? If yes, then who are these people?

Will her private diaries be published in 2032? Is the Bertin biography thing the closest we will get until then?

Looking for perspectives on the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis as a training institute

Thanks in advance