When Freud first invited patients to lie on the couch and say whatever came to mind, he created something revolutionary-not just a "talking cure," but a living space where unconscious processes could be experienced and observed, in moments of heightened awareness and through fog and defense. Psychoanalysis remains one of our most profound ways of understanding the mind, not through detached observation, but through the intimate, professional relationship of two people speaking freely and listening openly.
Atlanta-based painter Alic Brock has developed a practice that merges digital manipulation with painterly precision. Brock creates compositions that explore spaces between waking and dreaming, recognition and estrangement. Each work begins as a collage of both found and personal imagery that is intentionally altered and translated to canvas using airbrush acrylics. Fragments of Americana, cultural icons, and private memory mingle in peculiar scenarios where narrative and meaning surface only in retrospect.
Who was Nietzsche? Philosopher, psychologist, poet, madman, provocateur-these names orbit around him but never settle. He is the "strange German," dismissed by some as the father of nihilism and amorality, revered by others as the prophet of self-becoming. No thinker has hovered so closely to the abyss or beckoned so many to peer into its depths. Fewer still have so haunted the origins of the psychoanalytic revolution, both as inspiration and as fateful warning.
A maths lecturer, convinced his wife is cheating, will not check the CCTV footage that might confirm his fears but instead keeps a private tally of the number of pubic hairs she sheds in her underwear. One hair is OK, acceptable, more is evidence that she has been having it off, he says, unaware that he uses these delusions of her infidelity to protect himself from the dangers of intimacy.
Freud first described the fort/da game in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" after watching his grandson repeatedly throw a spool out of his crib and out of sight, allowing him to manage the anxiety of his mother's absence.
Parallel Lines deftly weaves a narrative that explores the complexities of personal relationships and psychological fragility amid broader social issues like environmentalism and mental health.