“February has the air of love that breathes tragedy”
by Abhilasha
In memory of David Lynch; full-time absurdist, visionary filmmaker, and creative soul. His light, his creativity, and his empathy will be sorely missed— the world needs them now, more than ever.
01/02/2025, London, UK
My dear,
January is always an odd one; so tender, so focused on unfolding. The mellowest exorcism in the form of a month. Rodent-infestation of the heart, crawling all over you like a million little nerve-ending kisses. Or, like this newsletter: love on the brain. At an equal distance: love for the brain. Semantics, semantics. It is, really, your brain that fascinates me after all, my dear. I have to fight the urge to initiate a thousand little autopsies on it. Today, I might lose the battle.
This newsletter is a matter of inquiry, is a mind-probe, is a dying star. What it is not is invasive. You can (and should) absolutely enjoy this one from the safe cocoon of your own home, but let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you are stretching out on a sofa of my design. For several reasons yet unexplained, you came here seeking diagnosis. You might observe the clock ticking away on the wall, or the stacks of disorderly books on my desk, or the way an inquiry into the mind is really one into the heart. Either way, I can do very little but urge you to be open, to let me in. All the beautiful barriers have to come down eventually. This is a letter of psycho-analysis, of dreams, of infinite inquiry.
Now, before I would forget, I would like to take the time to announce another limited time submission prompt taking the rather whimsical form of fairytales! This simple prompt is all about the imagination, about storytelling, about parables and fables. Think about the shared cultural iconography of fairytales (the magic mirror, the red riding hood, the spinning wheel), think about Sleeping Beauty, about the love for the wolf. Think of Angela Carter’s work, especially “the Bloody Chamber” (1979), think about Perrault, and Grimm, and Andersen. Think of those local folktales that filled your childhood ears with wonder and fear. Question if a modern tale of suffering could ever be wrapped up into a delicate fairytale. Think about all little ways fantasy bleeds into our world from the outside, those storybook moments that make us wonder. What moral guidelines would a damsel in distress require today? Do the woods still brim with traitors and thieves? Could a kissed frog become a prince? Oh, what big claws you have!— All the better to create with.
“The latent content of those traditional stories … is violently sexual and violently sexist. But the reappropriation of traditional stories, however pessimistic, can also be a means of reclaiming the dark, the sensual, and the fantastic as part of female imagination”
by Angela Carter, from “the Sadeian Woman & the Ideology of Pornography”, 1979
All different types of gold-spun submissions are allowed, including visual art, essays, short stories, poems, and photography. So take a restful nap in the forest, and see what emerges from your mind. Make sure to send it in via carrier pigeon (email) before submissions close on February 28th1! As always, you can find our full submission guide here.
Now, if you would please close your eyes, we have some investigation ahead of us.
I. Archive Updates
“The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.”
by Sigmund Freud, from “the Interpretation of Dreams” (1899)
My sweet patient, before we get started, I do wish for you to briefly keep your eyes on this here gilded pocket watch as it dangles in front of your face. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Today’s letter is about psycho-analysis, yes. But it is also about sleepwalking, about sadomasochism and cruelty, about using one’s insight. And as always I have done my homework in providing you with some odd ends to read up on, if you so desire. Savour them consciously.
“Questions to Freudian Psychoanalysis: Dream Interpretation, Reality, Fantasy” - link
Any reading of Freud must in turn be supplemented by a reading of his plentiful contrarians. While his many ideas set the stage for psycho-analysis to evolve and become what it is today, it ultimately did just that: evolve. This paper discusses two main contradictions and problems in Freud’s writing at length, starting with the criticism that Freudian dream-analysis becomes a sort of meandering mixture of both free association and a guidebook of universal dream symbolism in Freud’s image: contradictory forms of engagement with the dream. Secondly, Freud also struggled extensively with the importance of whether his patients were lying to him or not (“resistance”), and whether either one option was as valid as the other. He vacillated wildly between ascribing importance to the distinct truth of “material reality”, or “psychical reality”; a place where falsehood and truth live together and form, for the neurotic, an objective memory (ie. whether a patient lies or not is not of prime importance, as fantasy is the truth to the patient), and ends up arriving at an odd combination both. These two contradictions are thoroughly explored in this paper.
“Freud's greatest discoveries-the importance of the sexual element, the dreamwork, the paths of symptom formation-land him at clinical and theoretical impasses. An internal demon of sorts is at work here. The most fully productive and most genuinely original of Freud's ideas seem also to ensnare their creator.”
“Foucault's Response to Freud: Sado-Masochism and the Aestheticization of Power” - link
Freud, who mentioned sadomasochism only briefly in his discussion of dream interpretation (as we will see later on!), tended to see it more as a symptom of building or existing neuroses; a thing to be cured of. This paper, however, contrasts the opinions of Freud with Foucault’s, most known perhaps for his work “the History of Sexuality” from 1976. Foucalt’s more expansive explanation of the phenomenon that is sadomasochism or power play sees it as a “productive” use of repression creating, ultimately, pleasure; while Freud got quite close to this idea, he never confirmed nor denied it as a major point of his theory of repression.
“In this last work on sexuality and power, Foucault not only uses the concept of sado-masochism as part of a critical strategy aimed at psychological theories based on a reductive notion of repression. He also generalizes the concept and thus privileges sado-masochism as the model for the social and the psychological in general.”
& “Power, Foucault tells or reminds us, is productive of pleasure”
“Deformities of Nature: Sleepwalking and Non-Conscious States of Mind in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain” - link
This comprehensive paper traces the cultural notions surrounding sleepwalking in Victorian Britain from being seen as proof of creative genius or otherworldliness, to being seen as proof of moral excess or an over-imaginative mind (derogatory here). “The will to intellectual improvement was admirable as long as it did not compromise virtue. The excesses of the imagination exemplified by the disorderly sleepwalker thus became a muse for explications of moral citizenship, selfhood, and comportment.” Something which we will revisit later, as well as something to think about in relationship to “Nosferatu” (2024).
“In so doing, it traces a critical yet neglected shift in understandings of sleepwalkers, who were transformed from preternatural wonders, principally embedded within discourses of Christian morality, to deformities of nature that revealed the dangerous consequences of irrational and unregulated bodies and minds.”




II. Flesh and the Mirror
“The magic mirror presented me with a hitherto unconsidered notion of myself as I”
by Angela Carter, from “Flesh and the Mirror” (collected in “Fireworks”, 1974)
Do note, my dear, that this month’s “research” section will read much more like a stream of consciousness than anything else. I had the pleasure of reading my friend Ester Freider’s thesis “I’m like a pdf, but a girl: girlblogging as nomadic pedagogy”2, and felt the concept of web-weaving sink its claws into me again. It’s a medium I’ve dabbled in- I suppose all of the White Lily Society is my grand web- but it’s returned to me once more, and more intense; like an old flame. Here’s how Ester defines this method: “Web-weaving is the practice of joining many exerpts from poetry, literature, journalism, and sometimes also visual sources such as paintings and photographs, together in one post in order to pull out a parallel.” To put it briefly; web-weaving is a multi-media collage meant to revolve around a singular theme, however ephemeral or precise you’d like.
My intention here was really more to puncture the surface of the topic, and let my conclusions flow and splatter into each other, than to present a formally structured, fully researched, academic break-down. At times, I am led solely by my wit, by my connective imagination: that is the web I weave for you today. It has many paths and entrances, and very little exits. I suppose that is my warning to you, so if you have no further objections, let us proceed.
II.I Why psycho-analysis?
“The madman is a dreamer awake”
by Sigmund Freud, from “the Interpretation of Dreams” (1899)
However hard you may try, psycho-analysis is to psychology what a second kidney is to the body. It is there to be used, but depending on who you ask, it may not be crucial to them specifically. Psychology as a whole, is the art form of understanding the human mind, but it is built up of many individual schools and trains of thought, among which is psycho-analysis. It was started by Sigmund Freud, as he sought to use direct methods of inquiry in understanding various neuroses and mental illnesses in his patients. His method of therapy was unique for its use of interaction between doctor and patient, as well as his use of avant-garde techniques like hypnosis, and his interest in the subconscious parts of the human mind. From there on, key themes emerged in his research (and thus the medium as a whole), including “the dream, trauma, seduction, reality, and fantasy” (via Archive Source 1).
The three topics I noted down that served to spark my interests for this newsletter were psycho-analysis, dreams, and Rorschach tests. The first was more a general gateway of enquiry, of figuring out the principles of psycho-analysis. The second came about in part from an abandoned copy of Freud’s “the Interpretation of Dreams” (1899) on my bookshelf, or perhaps I’m losing my mind from watching Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” (2024) three times in one month— once, on a screen so large I felt physically entrenched in the film’s layers of Gothic atmosphere, and its discussion of, you guessed it, dreams. The latter may seem a bit odd in the list, but I assure you, it has relevance for a project I’m working on. Everything has its roots in everything else, serves everything else, becomes everything else. Regardless, that is what I set out to conquer.



II.II Room To Dream
“[...] the best interpreter of dreams is he who can best grasp similarities. For dream-pictures, like pictures in water, are disfigured by the motion (of the water), so that he hits the target best who is able to recognize the true picture in the distorted one.”
by Sigmund Freud, from “the Interpretation of Dreams” (1899)
As part of my preliminary exploration into psychoanalysis, I had, at first, an intention of “picking up where I left”. Almost five years ago now, I had enthusiastically picked up Freud’s “the Interpretation of Dreams” (1899) as one of my first full-length Serious(tm) English books, and had abandoned that monstrous impulse after reading only eighty pages. Obviously, not ideal. Do not ask what possessed me to take up such a volume as kindling for getting back into reading, because in a fight of wits and willpower between me and Freud, the old man won. But that’s the lovely part about a shelf of books, my dear; it is a collection to be revisited, to be re-explored, re-divined. So, I set out to do exactly that, and got a lot further this time, as you will see (and hopefully, read).
“The Interpretation of Dreams” was one of Sigmund Freud’s first published works, and it quickly became a foundational text to the medium of psycho-analysis (despite it’s modern place with most of Freud’s other ideas as a school of thought constantly under attack). The core of this work is Freud’s insistence that dreams are “(disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed / repressed) wish” (p. 68), which crucially involve that the inherent wish within the dream essentially undergoes a process of censorship as a result of the desire within it being crystallised by suppression and/or repression, into a more “nonsensical” form that requires interpretation. This process of interpretation is, of course, an off-shooting branch of psycho-analysis: the difference between psychology and psychoanalysis hinges on the methods of enquiry. Freud’s idea is relatively simple at face value: dreams try to hide their wishful significance to us through a layer of censorship. And this is what Freud tells us over and over again over the course of four hundred pages: wish + censorship = dream.
That layer of “censorship” is essential here, as that is what attempts to mask the true meaning of our dream to us, often because the underlying wish meets with resistance in our consciousness. This is most true for anxiety-inducing, or unpleasant dreams, where a logic of the reverse often applies. What we desire gets encoded into something grotesque, something we fear, to make the strength of wanting more palatable to the senses. After all, fear is much less complex to us than desire. Where anticipation and anxiety are usually mixed with fear, desire can be both strong-armed (passion, love, curiosity) and contradicted by its secondary emotions (shame, lack, guilt). Therefore, a wish is met with friction. Often, admitting to oneself what is truly the coveted object of our desires is to contradict some fundamental of our personhood. It is an attack of the known self that we have to be shielded from, and therefore must be suppressed.
“Dreams are in part incomprehensible to dreamers, hence the need to interpret them, to find their latent meaning, and to make this available to dreamers, allowing them access to hitherto unreachable regions of their own psyches, thereby permitting them to control their own houses. The form in which the dream appears on awakening disguises its genuine signification; the dream is a game of hide-and-seek dreamers play in and with themselves (the wish versus censorship)”
from Archive Source 1
Freud argued that symbolism, (which he also largely extracted from different languages’ direct translations of certain terms and words) is a sort of universal, primal language— while at the same time disavowing the use of so-called “dream dictionaries” for understanding the individual parts that make up a dream, rather than the whole and its relation to the dreamer. Yet Freudian dream interpretation practices do in fact take a piecemeal approach to understanding the different elements within a dream, their relationships to the dreamer, and the ways in which the dreamer might have encountered them. It is generally thought, after all, that we cannot create new elements within our dreams, but that we can only reassemble and gather imagery from outside of ourselves. This would mean that dreams are a patchwork of the subconscious, not an act of wholly spontaneous creation. Everything has to come from somewhere, or so it’s believed… But there are challenges to that idea as well. No idea lives and dies unchallenged, my dear.
Carl Jung, the other elephant-sized thinker in the room that is psycho-analysis, put much more stock into the “collective unconscious”, coexisting, as it were, with the dreamer’s individual consciousness but inhabiting a plane of shared experience. This is what our beloved Georges Bataille would refer to as the “continuous”, and indeed, the practice of “eroticism” as Bataille views it is a usage of transgression to pierce the discontinuous human experience and emerge, though briefly, into the continuous, or the ecstatic, through loss of identity. This is where Jung and Bataille diverge: to Jung, his idea of a collective unconscious is a structured plane of archetypal and historical knowledge, like a shared space of origin for our further cultural symbolism, frameworks, and references. To Bataille, the continuous is a realm of absence where the self is ecstatically dissolved to merge with a chaotic, formless, dissolutive (continuous) unity.



Both Jung and Freud saw dreams as a compensation in one way or another: while Freud sees dreams as fulfilling repressed wishes of the unconscious, Jung saw them as the compensation and signalling of a conscious lack. The repressed wish, as it exists in Freud’s view of dreams, is realised through the dream itself, albeit veiled under layers of encryption and symbolism. Case closed, nothing more to be done. The itch is scratched without the need for lifting a (conscious) finger. You would think that with such gorgeous excesses and desires manifest in our dreams, humanity would cease to make mistakes outside of them! Unfortunately, that is not the case. It’s lucky then, that the Jungian dream provides us with an opposing thought, that dreams are signposts, pointing us to a lack or desire to be acted upon in the waking world. You won’t get away by simply turning over and sleeping on it, you have to eventually leave the bed you made yourself and act. It’s that simple: every dream a prophecy, every dreamer a prophet.
Dream dictionaries, no matter how much Freud crusaded against them, of course, still exist, but their methods have shifted a little bit with the times. The one that I myself covet and cherish3 has mostly done away with the individual element approach to dream symbolism, instead choosing to divide dreams according to over-arching themes, and dream “archetypes”— remind you of something? Welcome back, Jung’s collective unconscious! These archetypes include “the hero, warrior, and quest”, “the judge and critic”, “the hunter or huntress”, “the devil and trickster”, “the magician”, and “monsters, anomalies, and misfits”. Other mystical and occult-adjacent elements, like spirit animals, numerology, and tarot symbolism are also often used throughout dream interpretation.
“Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism or noctambulism, is a phenomenon of combined sleep and wakefulness.”
from Wikipedia, “Sleepwalking”
I suppose you could, now, be a tad perplexed at my pivoting of the subject, away from dreams themselves, and into the realm of sleep disorders. To analyse my sudden jump into somnambulism, or sleepwalking, true Freudian analysis would have me point out two things to you. The first, is of course my repeated exposure to “Nosferatu” (2024), in which main character Ellen’s nightly fits and sleepwalking take up a great majority of the distinct plot. It is her sleep disorders that point to a supposed otherworldliness (“You would have made a great priestess of Isis”) that Count Orlok then preys on (“You are not for this world”). Albin’s assertion that demons like those whose “animal functions dominate” is even rooted in direct thoughts about sleepwalking from the 1780s (Archive Source 3). As a lesser influence, you could also look towards the tv show I have been devouring lately, “Penny Dreadful” (2014-2016), which likewise toyed around with the idea of a “demimonde”, or “a half world between what we know and what we fear. A place in the shadows, rarely seen but deeply felt.” that certain souls have a natural link to.
Secondly, I would have to disclose my own extensive experience with over a handful of parasomnias (sleep disorders), including sleepwalking. For this, I take a traditional herbal medicine in the form of valerian root4, which near-eviscerates my restlessness. However, paranoia prescribes that I take occasional breaks out of a fear of becoming dependent and rendering the medicine ineffective. As you can assume, I’ve been having the most vivid dreams every night as a result. Not to mention my many excursions around the house, one foot in a half-awake, illusionary realm. Oh, I have so many stories to tell.
Freud, of course, at first categorised sleepwalking as being connected to sexual desire, or a fantasy of returning to the bed of one’s childhood. Later on, he connected the phenomenon with his theory of dreams, seeing the physical activity as a symptom of strong wishes buried within the dream content, spurring his patients to wander. Dreams and sleep disorders are very often linked to the mystical and the occult, and to an idea of souls that are prone to lingering on the border of the physical and spiritual world. Consider that dream dictionary of mine relating dream archetypes to tarot cards, a common occult pantheon of symbols, or most of the dialogue in “Nosferatu” (2024). In ancient and medieval times, dreams were very often thought of as messages from [the] God[s]. During the time of the Victorians, there was a certain shift in their perception of sleepwalking; the disorder went from being a sign of genius to being the result of overly-imaginative (read: morally vulnerable) soul.
Spiritualism still favoured the more mystical explanation even as it was dwindling in academic popularity. As the movement took off in the 18th and 19th centuries, they thought the unconscious to be a way to unlock hidden knowledge, whether through hypnosis or lucid trance (I suppose Freud had a bit of a spiritualist tint to him). Yet even in spiritualism, there is the fear of letting something evil in, something unwelcome, something potentially blasphemous. The fear of corruption through the unconscious, you might say. Every gift can be a curse, after all. The light and the dark are two sides of the same coin. In Dracula, Lucy’s character- the unrestrained, sexually excitable foil to Mina- is a sleepwalker, meant to alert the reader to her freely wandering moral (ie. sinful) nature. Her punishment of course, is vampirism, and eventually, death. In the Shakespeare play, “[Lady Macbeths] wanderings symbolized a divine punishment for her murderous earthly intrigues as well as the corruption of her Christian soul.” (from Archive Source 3). There’s really no rest for wicked.
II.III the New Ethel Cain album
“[…] perversions are certainly about the social constraints placed on human desire”
by Louise J. Kaplan, from “Female Perversions: the Temptation of Madame Bovary” (1999), p18
Reading Freud’s “the Interpretation of Dreams”, I was quite often struck by the masochistic intent dreams inherently carry according to his theories. If all dreams are wish-fulfilment in one way or another, even the most terror-filled ones, then that is a uniquely painful, almost cruel way of our subconscious dealing with desire. And Freud addresses this too, writing: “In the sexual consitution of many persons there is a masochistic component, which has arisen through the conversion of the aggressive, sadistic component into its opposite. Such people are called ‘ideal’ masochists if they seek pleasure not in the bodily pain which may be inflicted upon them, but in humiliation and psychic chastisement.” Of course, Freudian psychology always has to come back to sexuality. That’s the Freudian flavour of, well, everything.
The question that arises is, then, if we are not all ideal masochists simply through the self-inflicted psychic torture of our dreams?



The answer is lot more complicated than the question. As it turns out, a “perversion” like masochism is not just influenced by sexual motivators (“duh!”, you might say), but societal norms play a large role in manufacturing shame, which in turn engenders “perversions” like masochism. From Archive Source 2: “Power implies the existence of inequality, subordination, humiliation, or pain, and it is primarily the concept of sado-masochism that can account for the conversion of such an experience of displeasure, whether it is inflicted on others or on the self, into a source of pleasure […].”
If perversion is largely societal, then it is also gendered. Louise L. Kaplan, in her book “Female Perversions: the Temptations of Madame Bovary” (1999) points out that perversions show up significantly different in men and women, largely based on the restraints and weight of their respective gendered frameworks they suffer under. For example, general masochistic tendencies in sexual behaviour are pretty baseline for both genders (like our question earlier implied and Freud recognised), but repetitive, fetishistic levels of masochism are more often seen in men, and associated with the specific kinds of shame they can internalise living under a deeply patriarchal society. It goes without saying that outliers exist, of course, but statistically, Kaplan posits that male perversions are more often associated with “caricatures of masculinity, based as they are on prowess, aggression, and domination […].” (p12). The stereotypical female perversions, on the other hand, are more often pointed inward, at the self, interested more in undoing their own enforced female purity than on demonstrating virility like the male perversions.
“The perverse is based on deception. For perversions are never what they seem to be. They are the caricatures of femininity and masculinity as represented in the social stereotypes of female “purity” and male “virility”.”
by Louise J. Kaplan, from “Female Perversions: the Temptation of Madame Bovary” (1999), p18


II.IV Cruelty 4 Good
“[…] true moral complexity is rarely found in simple reversals. More often it is found by wading into the swamp, getting intimate with discomfort, and developing an appetite for nuance.”
by Maggie Nelson, from “the Art of Cruelty: a Reckoning” (2011), p13
It’s important to note that this significant skew of perversions by gender does not indicate a male tendency towards violence, mutilation, or even sadism. As much as the social order and its dependants5 like to insist the male place is on top, the ever-permanent aggressor, this is very much an association formed in response and accordance to social gender stereotypes, not embedded in genetic code. The relegation of female sexuality to purely the realm of intimacy and even spirituality, while male sexuality is selfish and violent, creates an un-nuanced divide that is ultimately harmful to everybody who has to exist within it.
There is indeed a capacity for cruelty within each of us, just like Freud’s assertion that we are all a little masochistic. To be one or the other, sadistic or masochistic, implies a frame of power in which one is taking cruelty upon themselves and one is inflicting cruelty. These are dynamics we learn in childhood, like gender roles; punisher-punished, boss-subjugate, parent-child. Children can channel cruelty through mischief or misbehaviour, it is neither easier nor harder for them to be cruel, as both play and innocence come naturally to them. Subsequently, “it is easy for a child to be good; a child's goodness is a negative quality. He is good if he does not do anything bad. A grown-up, however, cannot get away with this docile passivity. He must act out his virtue amongst an audience of others that includes himself.” (by Angela Carter, from “the Sadeian Woman & the Ideology of Pornography”, 1979)
As we grow up, goodness essentially goes from being a passive trait to being an active one. It is no longer enough to stand by and abstain from sin; we must go and seek out the strain that comes with upholding our own morals, no matter how difficult. Instead of allowing the uncomplicated torment to wash over us, we must seek out the ultimately painful, but dissolutive torment of insight. This means that our ever-lingering hidden potential depths of cruelty never need be a reason for despair, my dear. Because while goodness can certainly be a harder path to walk, it is always worth it to make the conscious choice gesture reaching towards it.
“I just think goodness is more interesting” Morrison said. “Evil is constant. You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good— and that’s complicated.”
by Toni Morrison, from an interview with the Guardian (2016)
The first time I ever encountered the concept of eudaemonism was in relation to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and an essay about its inherent philosophies (the very memorable quote “Goodness is a burden we must bear”, from a collection of essays entitled “Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnyvale”, 2003). Ever since then, I’ve been a staunch eudaemonist in many ways: I do, in fact, believe that the person consciously (and by choice) suffering the consequences of their actions is ultimately more happy than the person who got away with it. Even if the latter perhaps does not know it. Ignorance may be bliss but the end result is the same.
Pleasure and pain are intricately mixed. Punishment can have a purpose. It can be delicious in and of itself. Eudaemonism is a philosophy closely linked with masochism, I suppose. Adult virtue is largely ineffective without moral masochism, for virtue, we have seen, is a conscious choice that renders us vulnerable to pain. Bataille, too, thought this pain served a purpose, like Foucalt’s idea of repression being productive of pleasure; “Passion fulfilled provokes such violent agitation that the happiness involved, before being a happiness to be enjoyed, is so great as to be more like its opposite; suffering.” & “The likelihood of suffering is all the greater since suffering alone reveals the total significance of the beloved object.” (from “Eroticism”, 1957). The pain we willingly inflict on ourselves is the one we cherish most deeply. It is in the fight between Good and Evil that the world unfolds; simply being one or the other is a state devoid of nuance, devoid of interest, devoid of life. Choosing good induces pain, tempering out the otherwise-assumptive nothingness of the wholly positive virtue— that’s where the delight blossoms. It’s the Intersection of Love and Violence, my dear, masquerading around yet once more. Didn’t I warn you from the start that we were doomed to always arrive back at the same conclusion?


II.V a Think-Blot Test
“I want to read people....the most interesting thing in nature is the human soul, and the greatest thing a person can do is to heal these souls, sick souls.”
by Hermann Rorschach
The Rorschach test, more commonly referred to as the “inkblot” test, was created by Hermann Rorschach in 1921 as a tool for discovering the subconscious workings of his patients, as well as potential personality traits. The test itself is quite simple: the patient is presented with a succession of ten inkblots, sometimes featuring different coloured sections. They start out with a phase of free association, listing off what they might see in the blots themselves, before the psychologist intervenes and begins the inquiry stage, asking the patient to explain what made them see certain things, point out shapes, etc. Finally, the psychologist can score and interpret the patient’s answers based on a selection of structured criteria Rorschach himself developed while testing his blots en masse.
Nowadays, the Rorschach test has unfortunately (and wrongly!) been firmly shelved away in the public imagination as an ineffective tool of psycho-analysis in the physical realm, instead being used more often in film and tv as a visual representation of the supposed cluelessness of psycho-analysis. It’s a visual gag of humiliation for academia; the overzealous psych-witch doctor reaching for conclusions through their subjective view of harmless associations. Even when it is not used as a joke, the test is treated with a palpable distance, leaving it open to mockery. The modern Rorschach test is a distinctly imaginative one; it is a fantasy of psycho-analysis; it speaks purely to our cinematic imagination. Many people want to undergo one solely because they consider it a fantastical trope from the realm of movies, a realm uncanny in its synchronicities and detachment from our own.
Hollywood has little darlings when it comes to the realm of science, but the Rorschach test is perhaps the most popular psychological test to be depicted on the screen, no doubt because of its distinctly visual, amorphous nature. It showed up in “the Addams Family” (1964-1966), the opening credits to David Cronenberg’s “Spider” (2002), and Sofia Coppola’s “the Virgin Suicides” (1999) among many, many more, to the point of becoming a trope itself. To the clueless viewer, the Rorschach test is simply a game of academic hide-and-seek, a thick plastic shield between the characters of doctor and patient, a quiz with simultaneously no right nor wrong answers. A cruel game where the wrong stroke of the imagination could lead directly to the steps of a sanatorium. All of this is largely bred in a lack of knowledge about the test’s workings. Sure, emotional tone is one of the factors in the test’s interpretation; whether the broad strokes of your imagination tend to lean more towards positive, neutral, or negative emotions is of importance, but it is never the sole purpose of the test.
“Almost all subjects regard the experiment as a test of imagination. This conception is so general that it becomes, practically, a condition of the experiment. Nevertheless, the interpretation of the figures actually has little to do with imagination, and it is unnecessary to consider imagination a prerequisite....The interpretation of the chance forms falls in the field of perception and apperception rather than imagination.”
by Hermann Rorschach, from “Psychodiagnostics: A Diagnostic Test Based on Perception” (1921)

Rorschach’s test on the whole, is not actually exclusively about what you see, but rather your method of seeing. When Rorschach originally developed and rigidly tested (!) his original ten blots to get a clear guideline for using them as a psychological testing method, he was able to conclude that patients with specific neuroses largely saw similar things in the blots, and he formed general guidelines in accordance with these findings. His gathered evidence suggested the possibility of a link between contents seen and mental illness manifest, but this was in no way, shape, or form, meant to indicate the Rorschach test as an exclusively or overwhelmingly diagnostic tool.
Rather, the method of seeing betrays a bit of the personality; test-takers can broadly be constructed into two categories; those who tend to formulate an explanation for the blot based on the entire image, or those who tend to break the blot up into smaller groups, forming lots of different, sometimes in-cohesive images or scenes. If you’re the latter ratter than the former, chances are you’re more artistically inclined, and have a greater natural affinity for storytelling. Other factors measured include cognitive function; whether the patient’s interpretation is coherent enough, without worrying disorganised or bizarre jumps, and interpersonal tendencies; whether the patient’s interpretation betrays feelings of loneliness, community, connection, dependency, or hostility. All of these go into a varied assessment that could be used to provoke further research into certain psychological disorders, or could point to certain personality traits. A starting point for continuing, more definitive testing.
The Rorschach test’s success, then, is largely dependent on the patient’s willingness to participate in it. One of the major natural predators, so to say, of psycho-analysis’ general effectivity, and of that of related subjects like the inkblot test, is undoubtedly self-censorship, or “resistance”, as Freud called it. Ultimately, our ability to understand ourself relies on us clearing our repressive internal monologues out of the way, even if only for a short while. Pulling back the curtains on our own desires, wishes, and needs can be a painful process, but that is exactly what endows it with such beauty. Like alchemy, the process of transmutating our perception of pain into knowledge of pleasure relies entirely on our willingness. Historically, humanity’s main tools for understanding the world we inhabit have been limited to magic, religion, and science. Abstract thinking is not something that comes naturally to all of us, so we tend to fare better when we tether our imaginings to greater concepts, narratives, or even other people, as in the traditional patient-doctor dynamic of psycho-analysis.
Freud believed in the “id”, “ego”, and “superego”, constantly in the process of moderating one another. The id, the most primal, animalistic of our urges, and the superego, the most morally restrained part of our psyche, with the ego or our “everyday” supposedly more rational self moderating the conversation between the other two in an attempt to find a balance, though not always successful in this pursuit. Psycho-analysis, in theory, through the practice of voicing our own instinctual lines of thought to a secondary partner acting as a more rational interpreter, lets us achieve a depth of insight without necessarily urging other parts of our conscious to step in and coat everything in layers of shame or guilt. But the ego can be a barrier too, especially in the case of neuroses or mental illnesses. Freud was aware that his patients could lie, or omit, or avoid as they liked, but this “resistance” was seen as an essential part in the process of untangling. It was the doctor’s responsibility to actually get to the heart of things, but giving a voice to our precious stream of consciousness was already a large part of the work.
This is also why computer programmers are encouraged to voice the problems in their code out loud to a rubber ducky or similar desk companion; in finding the right words to explain anything we can often identify its core facets. Expression is often the first step towards the solution, or it can be the solution in and off itself. The surrealists, following in the footsteps of Freud, tried to stage a “revolution of the mind” and break free from repression to create art that was, on the surface at least, as “nonsensical” and dreamlike as possible. Like Jung, they believed in an inherent value of their unconscious and the knowledge within it, so their art was largely instinctual in order to bypass the rational mind’s pruning of it. Their unhindered creative expression was the goal. In a similar vein, the Victorians believed in “automatic writing” as a way to channel external spirit presences— something which the surrealists also practiced, albeit to set their own subconscious free.
Actually, everything is mostly about insight. No, that is not just a crude reference to my favourite video game6. Instead, insight through the method of recounted experience, of internal investigation, serves as a balm, a salve, a cure. An autopsy of desires and wants and wishes, undoubtedly bound to be messier than we bargained for. And yet the pain of it cleanses and purifies. The first step towards our desires is, as always, admitting that that desire exists. A tale as old as time.
III. Rituals for Love
“However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”
by Joan Didion, from “On Self Respect” (1961)

February is notoriously, the supposed month of Romance. All the cherubs are singings right above you; sweetness is multiplying on the cellular level. But lack of a lover’s token need not be a lack of love in the heart! There are flowers that have bloomed and died simply for the pleasure of being seen by you. Love exists not just in others, but in yourself, in the projection of the Self. So if it is hard for you, my dear, to love yourself right now, then may I suggest loving a fictionalised version of yourself? An alter ego, if you will. Proprietary blend of Jungian shadow self and the desired self. You are only ever a few steps away from closing in on them, words and intent to be tools for your divine creative wielding. So, use this mist of love to wield them.
Or, if you need yet more direction, let me recommend a few brief rituals to undertake on the dark, moon-lit nights of February, the crawl towards St. Valentine’s. On the fourteenth, a waxing crescent moon illuminates your path, rich and charged with energy. Set the stage for insight to flow through you, to reach a flow state of contentment, of excitement. Conduct a little psycho-analysis of desire. This decadent ritual as outlined for you contains two parts: the spell itself, and a recipe that, to me, embodies the warmth and sensuality of love. Feel free to take and leave parts as you like, it is meant to be a fuse, to light the spark. Not to be the sole picture of the fire.
III.I a Love Spell.
Intended recipient: The Self, extended out infinitely.
Buy yourself flowers (white lilies recommended, as always). Gather up some oranges, cloves, cinnamon sticks, dried roses, star anise. Light incense that reminds you of warmth, something sacred like amber, or sage, or patchouli. Deeply inhale Palo Santo smoke. Create a spread of everything you love, without letting sanity hold you back. Knick-knacks and words and a lock of your hair. The two-headed blackberry in your fridge. The most beautiful, or beloved pair of underwear you own. Instil in them your deepest, most soul-crushing weights of desire. Pick thirteen items and make thirteen wishes. Take a few deep breaths. Lay out crystals, instinctively. Sleep with them under your pillow, charge them in the moonlight. Listen to music that feels equivalent to plunging a dagger in your chest. Cultivate knowledge, read the most outrageously romantic things, or the most gruesomely informative. Eat chocolates in bed. Indulge in some deep red wine, and don’t hesitate to let it spill down your chin and stain, stain, stain. Give yourself an elaborate tarot reading. Put on your silk stockings, and then take them off again. Watch a horrifically dark movie, feel your heart race. Your intent for this month should just be to love. Cultivate your circumstances as much as possible to be filled with joyous delight, let it radiate through you and onto others.
This is self respect as Didion wrote about it: to use what you’ve been given and what you can make of it.
“Sun-bather, moon-chaser, queen of empathy. I give myself two seconds to be, then go back to being a serene queen.”
by Lana del Rey, from her song “Fingertips” (off of “Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd”, 2023)


III.II Recipe for Warmth.
Cinnamon warms even the coldest of hearts, and apples represent love, knowledge, and abundance. In my homeland, apple turnovers are eaten on New Year’s to welcome in the fresh, sweet, blank slate of a new year. The recipe can be traced in variations all the way through human history. In medieval times, it was believed that apple fritters, as the Romans introduced them, were indigestible and even dangerous. It was best to eat them hot and potentially burn your mouth, thereby avoiding all the other dangers they posed. Either way, the Dutch love them in a format that more closely resembles an apple beignet or a turnover. For many years, the taste was lost to me, but I’ve finally managed to find a way to make them gluten-free in a way that closely resembles the “appelflappen” I grew up with. They are the epitome of love and home to me.
Recipe for heart-warming apple turnovers:
Roll out your dough. If you are simply after love, pre-made is completely fine. If you prefer to mix your love with violence, try the agony of making your own pastry dough. As I’m celiac, and therefore cannot eat gluten, I settle for pre-made. The ordeal of making a gluten free pastry dough from scratch is simply too much for me, and there is a difference between mere violence, and agony, after all. As I, embarrassingly, do not have a rolling pin, I use my crystal glasses to roll out the dough; I find it can impress a lovely pattern.
For the filling, finely chop up a Pink Lady apple (or apple of your preference) into very small cubes, then coat the mixture in a shake of soft brown sugar, two tea spoons of apple sauce (can be omitted), and a generous layer of cinnamon. If you miraculously happen upon some Dutch “speculaas” spice (which is a mixture that contains nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cardamom, and grated orange peel) by all means include it.
Cut your dough into squares and fill a triangle shape on the inside with the mixture. You want the filling to be spread out evenly, both horizontally, and especially vertically. Fold the other side over and gently press the edges closed with your fingers— I also like to use the tines of a fork to press a simple pattern into them for a very classic look.
Finally, coat with a very thin layer of egg yolk to get that nice, golden brown colour. Bake for as long as your pastry dough requires: I’ve found that twenty-five minutes on 180C is pretty perfect for mine.
Before serving, dust the tops of the turnovers with some demerara sugar. Enjoy while hot, but be careful not to burn yourself. It would be a pity to mix such love and violence where it is not intended.
✧・゚: *✧・゚:* On the List *:・゚✧*:・゚
Exhibitions, events, and talks. The Venn-diagram of tWLS members and burlesque enthusiasts is near-perfectly circular, so Dita von Teese’s return to London must certainly be something to be announced! The queen of burlesque is set to grace London’s West End in her brand new show "Diamonds and Dust", starting this June— tickets go on presale on February 10th!
The Freud museum is once more proving the prowess of their spectacular event line-up, including “PROJECTIONS: Feminine Jouissance in Horror Cinema”- an in-house lecture discussing women’s ecstasy in films like “Possession” (1981) on February 13th- and "Freud’s 4pm Session: Viewing Death Through a Creative Lens" on the 16th- another in-house discussion between artists about death and its role in their respective creative practices.
As for exhibitions, "Tarot - Origins and Afterlives" has just started up at the Warburg Institute, ending on the 30th of April. On the 9th of February, you could come to the Viktor Wynd museum to bask in some tales of some tragic love stories, tickets £15. At the National Gallery, you can take a themed tour of the collection on St. Valentine’s Day, February 14th. Tickets are exclusive only to members, so they “cost” £20. Also on Valentine’s, you could take the chance to learn more about Lord Byron’s daughter and first ever computer programmer Ada Lovelace at the National Portrait Gallery, tickets £15.
Finally, in the White Lily Society’s sphere of connected creators and collectives, there is an immersive theatre experience adaptation of one of Pushkin’s “Little Tragedies”, “Mozart and Salieri”, taking place at the George Tavern on February 3rd, looking to be both thought provoking and baroquely excessive. It would also do you well to keep an eye out on Ethereal Maison for their upcoming artist residency events, still to be announced, but promising to be very inspiring… you might even catch a glimpse of yours truly there, if you’re lucky.
Music. It seems the HMV vinyl release for Sunday (1994)’s self-titled debut EP has been pushed back until February 28th, but pre-orders are still up. I can’t recommend their sharp blend of guitar-pop sounds and hysterical lyrics enough, so do take the time to check out some of their music, or even their upcoming tour.
Film and TV. To commemorate David Lynch, the BFI is screening his debut film "Eraserhead" (1977) on IMAX today at 18:20— do quickly grab tickets if you wish to go! In other news, the BFI’s Vampires and Other Uninvited Guests run continues with "the Lost Boys" (1987) on February 2nd, an IMAX "Twilight Saga Trilogy-All Nighter" (“Twilight”, 2008, “New Moon”, 2009, “Eclipse”, 2009) on February 15th, and "Only Lovers Left Alive" (2014) on the 16th, among others. Separate from all the vampiric goodness going on, they are also re-releasing the classic "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975) on February 21st and 22nd. But if your gnawing hunger is instead for stories of female revenge, consider buying a ticket to “Companion”, now playing in cinemas.
Obsessive Tendencies: What I’ve Loved Lately.
Marvis, cinnamon mint toothpaste, [Trust me, this “weird” toothpaste will change your life. I’m on my second tube and take great joy in initiating other people into its many wonders], £7,50
Bloodborne, complete guide 25th anniversary edition (hardcover), [All the nitty-gritty gameplay intricacies of my favourite video game; I can’t imagine playing the game now without it], RRP £49,99
Accessorize, black leather gloves, [A most superbly stylish way to stay warm], £22
Funko, Wednesday Addams keychain, [One of my favourite little companions dangling from my purse], £4,99
Glossier, limited edition “black cherry” balm dot com, [Luscious and luxurious, this is a thick lipbalm with the most seductive scent and flavour of sweet cherries], £16
Killstar, Funerary Rites Dress, [This dress is exactly what I would wear if I was Louis & Lestat’s vampire divorce lawyer on IWTV], on sale for £30
“I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force—a wild pain and decay—also accompanies everything.”
by David Lynch


And with that, I’m afraid I must retreat once again, back into the dark from where I write to you. A complex retreat that involves finding my way back through the cobbled alleyways and cobwebbed doorways of the mind. Our session is over, and the diagnosis remains… incomplete. But you’ll be back again, on the first of the month, to continue our shared efforts, no? Full comprehension is only an urban myth, my dear, but that does not mean we cannot strife to annex it as closely as possible.
The clock chimes one last time, and with you, I send my desire out into the universe, either to flourish, or to die. I’ve always believed that the latter ends of the week are for dreaming, so go and dream those rich, all-consuming, devotional dreams of love in the middle of a cruel winter. The end of the cold is close on the horizon, but we must each warm our heart a little in order to help it go along. Promise me you will seek kindling for inside yourself. I wish to see your hundreds of little fires like grounded stars throughout this city of smoke.
Affirmations for February (repeat after me)
I am a vessel of love and light, with a sacred potential for violence
All the angels are alive and well
No profane guillotine could pierce through the preciseness of my desire
Until my next letter,
With love (and violence),
x Sabrina Angelina, the White Lily Society
Currently reading: “the Invention of Angela Carter” by Edmund Gordon // Most recent read: “Fireworks” by Angela Carter
White Lily Society links // Sabrina Angelina links
After all my efforts, it is safe to say I can diagnose you with a severe lack of Romanticism in your life. Just a complete, abhorrent, bottomless pit devoid of crushing yearning. But, fret not, there is a simple antidote to your melancholies; join the White Lily Society now, and become a martyr of deliciousness! It’s the only quick fix for maladies of your severity, doctor’s orders.
Of course, you can always submit something related to these themes after those dates, but it won’t be grouped in with other themes submissions. You have been warned.
See; “the Esoteric Dream Book: Mastering the Magickal Symbolism of the Subconcscious Mind” by Dayna Winters, Patricia Gardner, and Angela Kaufman (2014)
Whatever you do, my dear, don’t start taking medicines on only my word, as I am not a doctor in anything except Romanticism. Please also note that valerian root should not be used in conjunction with anxiety medicine or sedatives.
See also; pornography.
“Bloodborne”, (2015)