Psychology & Anthropology

The disk of Edheduana

On Enheduana

Anna Della Subin

8 February 2024

The Sumerian priestess Enheduana managed the complex affairs of the temple and wrote poems, among them a collection of temple hymns that sought to accomplish in verse what her father, Sargon of Akkad, did with axes and spears: to unify the resistant cities of the new empire into a coherent whole.

Read more about Wreckage of Ellipses: On Enheduana

Looking for Indraprastha

Raghu Karnad

8 February 2024

According​ to the Mahabharata, the legendary city of Indraprastha was founded by the five Pandava brothers for their queen, Draupadi. Its wide streets and orchards surrounded a palatial hall, built by . . .

Inca Mummies

Erin L. Thompson

4 January 2024

The Spanish​ garrotted Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor of what is now Peru, in 1533, but their control over their new territory was far from certain. One way they tried to solidify their claim was to . . .

‘You made me do it’

Jacqueline Rose

17 November 2023

In response​ to the destruction of Gaza, it seems to be becoming almost impossible to lament more than one people at a time. When I signed Artists for Palestine’s statement last month, I looked for . . .

Dictionary People

Daisy Hay

19 October 2023

In my teens​ I walked to school each day past a red pillar box on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English . . .

Where on Earth are you?

Frances Stonor Saunders, 3 March 2016

We construct borders, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are; and we cross them in search of who we might become.

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Against Self-Criticism

Adam Phillips, 5 March 2015

Lacan​ said that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves. Or you could say that, given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves.

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Ghosts of the Tsunami

Richard Lloyd Parry, 6 February 2014

I met a priest in the north of Japan who exorcised the spirits of people who had drowned in the tsunami.

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Sinking Giggling into the Sea

Jonathan Coe, 18 July 2013

Boris Johnson has become his own satirist, safe in the knowledge that the best way to make sure the satire aimed at you is gentle and unchallenging is to create it yourself.

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Among the Flutterers: The Pope Wears Prada

Colm Tóibín, 19 August 2010

In 1993 John McGahern wrote an essay called ‘The Church and Its Spire’, in which he considered his own relationship to the Catholic Church. He made no mention of the fact that he had,...

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The Uninvited: At The Rich Man’s Gate

Jeremy Harding, 3 February 2000

Refugees are not necessarily poor, but by the time they have reached safety, the human trafficking organisations on which they depend have eaten up much of their capital. In the course of excruciating journeys, mental and physiological resources are also expended – some of them non-renewable.

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Dynasty: Lacan and Co

Sherry Turkle, 6 December 1990

Freud believed that psychoanalysis was so deeply subversive of people’s most cherished beliefs that only resistance to psychoanalytic ideas would reveal where they were being taken...

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Fortress Freud

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 18 April 1985

Psychoanalysts have had good reasons for considering themselves beleaguered, but for the past twenty years at least, the world, being less interested in them, has been less interested than they imagine in finding them out. ‘No decent analyst would let his picture appear in the Times,’ one New York analyst snapped at another, as if he had caught him sneaking his image into the temple of Baal.

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Is Michael Neve paranoid?

Michael Neve, 2 June 1983

‘Paranoia.’ ‘He’s paranoid.’ ‘The student movement took such a paranoid view of Nixon.’ ‘Nixon was a paranoid.’ ‘Don’t be so paranoid.’ ‘You’re so oversensitive, Neve, so paranoid.’

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Smoke and Lava: Vesuvius Observed

Rosemary Hill, 5 October 2023

While the Romantic view of Vesuvius saw it as a unique phenomenon, a spectacle, for the scientists it was a specimen, a comparator for investigations into the nature of volcanic activity. Newtonian physics...

Read more about Smoke and Lava: Vesuvius Observed

Short Cuts: Orca Life

Francis Gooding, 21 September 2023

We may understand less about orcas than they do about us. The example of Twofold Bay suggests they are able to understand human desire and intention, at least when it overlaps with theirs.

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Chumship: Upper West Side Cult

James Lasdun, 27 July 2023

Where Freudian orthodoxy called for analysts to work scrupulously against the effects of transference, Saul Newton and his colleagues taught their followers to do precisely the opposite, i.e. exploit the...

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On Marshy Ground: Fen, Bog and Swamp

Fraser MacDonald, 15 June 2023

Peatlands are wetlands, the argument goes, and wetlands disturb us; they’re the abject backwaters of modernity – marginal and malarial, disavowed and despoiled. We’ve ruined them and now they’ll...

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Europeans were eager for Native Americans to tell them the location of precious metals and the source of beaver pelts. But less practical Indigenous knowledge needed either to be assimilated into the existing...

Read more about In-Betweeners: Americans in 16th-Century Europe

When Thieves Retire: Pirate Enlightenment

Francis Gooding, 30 March 2023

It isn’t just that the story of the Enlightenment needs amending to reflect its true complexity, it’s that conventional approaches to global history are in need of profound recalibration. The Malagasy...

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In the Mad Laboratory: Invisible Books

Gill Partington, 16 February 2023

We’re increasingly comfortable with the idea of a book in virtual rather than physical form, but what happens when the content disappears too? Inevitably, we’re left looking at the frame around it....

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Coiling in Anarchy: Top of the Lighthouse

Rosemary Hill, 16 February 2023

It is one of the curious qualities of the lighthouse that while its raison d’être is to be visible, durable and stable in the most adverse conditions, it is often seen as a site of ambiguity and insecurity.

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In ancient Egyptian culture, images and words were in a state of constant oscillation between letters, sounds and things. Hieroglyphic letters require as much typographical standardisation as the letters...

Read more about At the British Museum: The Phonetic Hieroglyphic Alphabet

The postwar welfare state, with its implicit recognition of human need, produced public domains and clinical spaces in which the state was cast as maternal surrogate to a population of child citizens....

Read more about Two-Year-Olds Are Often Cruel: Maternal Ethics

Like a Bar of Soap: Work, don’t play

Bee Wilson, 15 December 2022

It wasn’t that Maria Montessori believed imagination served no purpose, but that its purpose was to bring about things that were real. Why did adults waste so much time getting children to imagine the...

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Church, Chief, Cat, Witch: Confessed Sorcerers

Chloe Nahum-Claudel, 3 November 2022

The Yagwoia​ people, who live in the remote Angan region of Papua New Guinea, on the sparsely populated, forested fringes of the highlands, are notable among their neighbours for their staunch adherence...

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LRB contributors

LRB Contributors, 21 July 2022

Elif Batuman, Edna Bonhomme, Hazel V. Carby, Linda Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque,

Read more about After Roe v. Wade

Diary: Shanghai Shelf Life

Mimi Jiang, 21 July 2022

New group chats have sprung up to share the latest intel on which spots are secretly open. The best coded advertisement was for a badminton gym: ‘Due to Covid restrictions, our gym is not open to the...

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Diary: The Plutocrat Tour

Iain Sinclair, 7 July 2022

Silence is the defining quality of wealth. Private security operatives whisper into their fists while patrolling a zone of distrust. Silence repels unexplained outsiders who dare to trespass on the shaved...

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EastEnders is not, or not only, a slice-of-life drama. Like all soap operas, like all operas, it repeatedly oversteps the limit. The idea of ‘digging the dirt’ is given a whole new meaning, as if the...

Read more about You haven’t got your sister pregnant, have you? No Secrets in Albert Square

The demarcated ring on the grassy plateau was from its outset about heaven, in the sense of afterlife. Was it always also about the heavens, in the sense of sky-watching? Can we rediscover how Stonehenge’s...

Read more about At the British Museum: ‘The World of Stonehenge’

That Ol’ Thumb: Hitchhiking

Mike Jay, 23 June 2022

‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ was always the first question you were asked by those who had never done it, but I don’t recall the issue ever coming up with fellow travellers. It was in everybody’s interest...

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