Biography Page This site has been set-up by Rob Weatherill. His background is in science education. He has been a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice since 1978 and teaches psychoanalysis in Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and the Milltown Institute. He has written for psychoanalytic journals in Ireland and abroad. He has contributed articles to The Irish Times on psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and culture. He is a full member of all the psychoanalytic groupings in Ireland (APPI, IFPP, IPAA, CPI). He is the author of Cultural Collapse (Free Association Books, London, 1994). He is a co-contributor to Living Together, edited by David Kennard and Neill Small (Quartet books, London, 1997), author of The Sovereignty of Death, (Rebus Press, London 1998), editor of The Death Drive (Rebus Press 1999), author of Our Last Great Illusion (Imprint Academic, Exeter, 2004). He is a member of the four psychoanalytic associations in Ireland. He holds the European Certificate for Psychotherapy. Our Last Great Illusion. A Radical Psychoanalytic Critique of Therapy Culture. (2004) ISBN 0 907845 959. £8.99. 144pp pb. Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK. Tel. +44 (0)1392 841600 Fax. +44 (0)1392 841478. www.imprint.co.uk Street address: Robins Nest, Chapel Road, Brampford Speke EX5 5HE, UK ‘Psychologists and therapists will find the thesis challenging but well worth the engagement with the author’s deep understanding of postmodern trends’. Network. ‘A very important book. Deserves to reach a wide audience’. John Waters. The Irish Times. ‘Dramatic insight into the spirit of our contemporary reality’. Professor Svetislav M. Jaric (Serbia) ‘Illuminating and witty….Weatherill's use of Freud to draw a radical distinction between the agonistics of loss and intimate experience in the crucible of family life, and the futile blandishments of therapy, is particularly compelling’. Patrick Turner. CultureWars. ‘…radical, uncompromising, and brilliantly intelligent - someone who habitually thinks outside of many boxes (often all at the same time)…Perhaps the nearest comparison to Weatherill's quarry is in the work of the prolific Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek’. Richard House, author of Therapy Beyond Modernity. ‘Therapy may be mad,’ declares Rob Weatherill in this outspoken volume. Therapy here means particularly psychotherapy and counselling, but can be taken to signify the whole therapeutic culture of well-being. More and more people believe in therapy who have lost belief in everything else, but their faith is misplaced. ‘For a long time now it has been punching above its weight.’ Counselling and therapy yearn to bring about integration within and between people. The dominant ethos is a holistic one. This book aims to refute, primarily through the prism of modern psychoanalysis and postmodern theory, the notion of a return to nature, to holism, or to a pre-Cartesian ideal of harmony and integration. Far from helping people, therapy culture's utopian solutions may be a cynical distraction, creating delusions of hope. Yet solutions proliferate in the free market, to the precise degree that there are no solutions. This is why therapy is our last great illusion. The Death Drive. New Life for a Dead Subject? (1999). ISBN: 1-900877-14-7 pb. Edited by Rob Weatherill. £19.99 258pp Rebus Press. Available from Karnac books,118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT. www.karnacbooks.com email: trade@karnacbooks.com This book forms a volume (No. 3) of The Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis, being developed by Rebus Press, concerning the more neglected areas of psychoanalytic theory. This particular book will be of interest to mental health professionals and anyone else who has ever questioned traditional consoling notions of therapy and human nature. Can we really afford to ignore the death drive, which formed such a crucial "second reference point" in Freud’s thinking? The contributors to this volume focus their attention on the death drive and explore the wide-ranging implications of the theory across diverse fields, from biology to literature, from addiction studies to popular culture, from philosophy to ethics, as well as within the discipline of psychoanalysis itself. The death drive concerns extremes: on the one hand, an impossible excess of pleasure and pain, and on the other an ineluctable, morbid repetition of the Same; impossible excitement and zero stimulation. The death drive appears as an alien force at the heart of life. Freud realised that there was indeed something beyond the pleasure/reality principle that constitutes our human normality. We ignore it at our peril..... The Sovereignty of Death (1998) ISBN: 1 900877 11 2. pb £19.99 230pp Rebus Press. Available from Karnac books,118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT www.karnacbooks.com email: trade@karnacbooks.com This work brings Freud’s most neglected, yet radical, concept of the death drive into sharp focus. Without this concept psychoanalysis loses all its power and rigour. The book begins with the Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, then takes us through the work of Klein and Bion, coming up to date with contemporary work in biology as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis and the postmodern cultural theory of Jean Baudrillard. What is the death drive? Is it just another word for destructiveness, which good therapies or drug regimes might be able to dispose of? Is it a response to the failure of early parenting? Is it an excess at the core of human subjectivity? Is it a biological given, or should we ever consider the death drive outside the context of the twentieth century - our culture of unbounded positivity haunted by its own deferred death? This book takes the death drive theory to be fundamentally destabilising at the level of culture and psychoanalysis itself. It is exciting, apocalyptic, challenging and provocative.... Cultural Collapse. (1994) ISBN: 1-85343-320-9 pb £16.95. 209pp Free Association Books, 57 Warren Street, London W1P 5PA, www.fabooks.com email: info@fabooks.com The concern of this book is the levelling out of meanings and values in contemporary culture. We seem preoccupied with survival at the expense of human suffering. The paradox running through this work is that increasing riches and abundance creates inner weakness, impoverishment and loss of control. Internal reserves are being depleted at the same rate as external ones. Alarm is expressed about relationship breakdown, sex abuse, hard porn, addiction and violence. There is nothing new in that, except that this work attempts to create a rigorous psychoanalytic commentary on these critical issues. The loss of a religious dimension and the rise of the new therapies, the crisis in parenting and education, feminism and the collapse of male narcissism, the loss of privacy under capitalism are all explored in the context of the breaking of social bonds which is loosening the social fabric world-wide, creating dislocation and fragmentation. Psychoanalysis, outside the clinic, has much to contribute here, turning, as it does, around the themes of transgression, repression and liberation and so on.   Forthcoming: FORGETTING FREUD? PSYCHOANALYSIS AND INDIFFERENCE. With the rise of Neuroscience, the increasing popularity of CBT, the deployment of the new explanatory powers of Genomics, and healing techniques of all kinds, why not finally forget psychoanalysis; why not forget Freud? ‘To reconnect psychoanalysis with the Night’ is the response of the author in this penetrating new collection of essays that seeks to ground psychoanalysis outside its by now exclusive preoccupation with the unconscious and desire. The vital connection between the WORD and the REAL was progressively severed during the twentieth century with dire consequences. Psychoanalysis was a necessary part of this deconstructive process but has failed to take responsibility for the wholesale losses involved, not least the losses to the movement itself. Where has the sense gone that at some point in our analysis we come upon the inhuman? Where is the struggle with values and ethics beyond our playful self-authorisations in a world without the Other, a world that abandoned “depth”? Where is the objective which breathes life to the subjective? These core questions are addressed by the author in an attempt to get beyond the relativism that bedevils psychoanalysis and cultural theory generally. Written by a practicing analyst and drawing on the work of key analytic figures, Freud, Klein, Lacan and others, the author dramatically illustrates his argument by reference to Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy, Baudrillard and Laplanche’s differing returns to seduction, Holbein’s suffering Christ, Steiner’s real absence, Bataille’s excremental sacred, Nabakov’s Lolita,  Borsh-Jacobsen’s understanding of the affective roots of the ego as other, Heidegger on language, Lyotard’s differend, Grossman’s opus Life and Fate, Dostoevsky’s low-life, as well as many other contemporary references, from McEwan to Albahari, from Festen to The Pianist. This book will appeal to those who want to rethink the ethics of psychoanalysis and the nature of the suffering of the subject. It also should be read by sociologists, philosophers and those interested in politics and cultural studies.