Comp. 3449 invited you to psychoanalyse, in the manner of Freud/Jung etc, a 2026 phenomenon. In a small but accomplished entry, there were no takers for Married at First Sight Australia, but Ralph Goldswain deserves praise for his Naked Attraction offering. (‘The selection of a partner by staged undressing appears as vulgar exhibition; yet this is merely the manifest content. Its latent meaning lies in the managed collapse of repression.’) The £25 John Lewis vouchers go to those below.
The phrase ‘filthy lucre’ provides an initial clue, harking back on a subliminal level to the notion of bartering, let us say, a grubby pig for something else. But a renewed sense of abhorrence at the handling of money is manifested in the antiseptic and indeed entirely asexual phenomenon of contactless payment, emblematic of an asocial isolationism. The very word ‘contactless’ expresses an increased reluctance to make physical contact, to handle the pig, as it were. The emptor deliberately does not engage in actual intercourse with the vendor, thus preserving, so to speak, their fiscal virginity at each encounter, even using a ‘card’ which is not card, but plastic, and thus conceals its very identity. My colleague Professor Freud has commented elsewhere on the symbolism of cash taken from a machine which accepts insertion but, perversely in his view, then offers, rather than demands, payment. We need not pursue this.
Brian Murdoch
Your difficulties are rooted in infancy. We call it ‘oral-stage fixation’ – wait: let me explain. A baby is fed milk by its mother. But what if you want more milk, or less? Or simply something different for a change? You are completely dependent – and utterly powerless. This crisis has stayed with you into adulthood. You still live with your parents: but they do not – cannot – satisfy your hunger. The Fridge of Mum and Dad is full: but never full enough. You cannot – will not – cook (‘don’t touch the oven – it’s hot!’). But you are hungry: deeply, subconsciously, starving. And then, suddenly, the ‘mother’ you have always craved arrives. ‘She’ will feed you: anything, any time, as much as you desire. Tap your phone, and ‘she’ will provide it: still hot, and straight to your front door. This is not simply sustenance: it is finally, for your inner infant, Delivery.
Richard Warren
History: Clickbait presents as an encouraging, helpful personality. His chief complaint is that we are not quick enough to read highly interesting articles, and he has an endearing history of offering prompts. He endeavours to attract our interest by YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE IT BUT THIS IS WHAT PSYCHIATRISTS THINK OF YOU.
Current Symptoms: Clickbait is a restless, excitable individual, with some impatience evident. Here are EIGHT THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CLICKBAIT. He can be a tease, playing on the id of each of his readers, but leaving them in a state of dissatisfaction. There is an obsessive-compulsive aspect to Clickbait, a deliberate anality that encourages anality in others. THIS WILL DRIVE YOU CRAZY. DID YOU KNOW THAT FREUD DISCOVERED SOMETHING ABOUT YOU AND IT’S NOT PRETTY.
Recommended: a long course of nitrazepam. WAIT TILL YOU READ ABOUT THIS DRUG, YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT IT DOES.
Bill Greenwell
The patient, Booktok, embodies the classic Freudian conflict dynamic, id striving insatiably to acquire for consumption, as if they were indistinguishable, classics from Harry Potter to the latest romantasy, creating a seemingly infinite ‘to be read’ haul frustrating the ego’s judicious desire to balance an anally retentive desire for more books with an expressive drive to comment in videos on codices of which it has taken insufficient pains to cogitate or reflect. The superego of the patient, straining to fabricate a literary persona from the available material, augments it with hysterical emotional outbursts on the death of minor characters or chin-stroking, introspective monologues on book-adjacent social topics – gender or racial allyship – preoccupation with which is suggestive of liberal goodness. The patient obsesses over flabby, glossy, junky tomes as a smokescreen for a malignant narcissism psychoanalysis sessions will only exacerbate. Treatment: Moby Dick and Finnegans Wake to be taken consecutively.
Adrian Fry
There follows an account of a remarkable case of mass hysteria that has recently come to my attention. It affected a group of 11 individuals who fell under the influence of a charismatic figure known as Baz, the cult he founded becoming known as ‘Bazball’. Members were apparently encouraged to give free rein to their id, aggressive tendencies prioritised with no reference to the superego’s constraints of discipline and reason, and in many cases without respect even to immutable laws of physics. Their group sessions tended to be accompanied by the ritual consumption of prodigious amounts of alcohol. This tendency reached its peak during what appeared to be a missionary expedition to Australia in the Antipodean summer of 2025/26. This ended, perhaps unsurprisingly, in disaster, and the self-destructive nature of this cult seems to point in only one direction.
David Shields
The majority of MAGA supporters are men. For them, MAGA is not so much a political movement as a severe neurosis. ‘America’ is a projection of their sexual inferiority complex, a phallic symbol of the impotence they are desperately anxious, literally, physically, to ‘make great’ again. In extreme cases, this insecure masculinity is compounded by a narcissus complex, when the subject is so in love with himself that he is unable to form meaningful relationships with others, and a cognitive dissonance preventing him from distinguishing truth from fantasy. This develops into a condition known as MAGAlomania, a compulsion to expand ‘America’ into, for example, the equally symbolic, euphemistic ‘Gulf of America’, ‘Panama Canal’ or ‘Strait of Hormuz’, while slogans such as ‘Drill, Baby, Drill!’, well, speak for themselves. Oedipal symbolism is everywhere, culminating in the proposed giant ‘Triumphal Arch’. Expect a military parade with ballistic missiles entering it before long.
David Silverman
No. 3452: All kicking off
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