Making Sense

A literary masterpiece from world-renowned psychoanalyst and distinguished writer, Professor Martin Stanton that picks up the baton from R. D. Laing. Spanning a novel, travel-guide, documentary, self-help book, play, photo album, film script, and work of art, Making Sense is a cultural phenomenon - a long overdue wake-up call - railing at society’s idealisation and narcissism. Martin Stanton has created a guide for a postmodern world that is constructed through social media, and communicates principally through tweets, texts and selfies.

Like Homer’s Odyssey, this is an epoch-changing classic that takes a timely quantum leap from a cognitive world of straight-line argument and causal interpretation, into a parallel unconscious universe of uncontrolled feeling, which traps fragments of fantasy in the retreating tides of reality. Making Sense collects together a group of major and minor characters, some real, some imaginary, who set out to make sense of life together by opening the social media gate between Reality and Fantasy. A survey of Martin Stanton’s own thinking and feeling on his original psychoanalytic odyssey across becalmed seas, random conversations with a therapeutic parrot, stranded for a while with Socrates on the black sandy beach of Paradise, he explores how a bezoar stone, a caddis insect, and a karaoke moment can linger through his life, and make sense for him as a primary source; as unconscious effects which sustain, enlighten, and entertain him through darker times.

This book scrawls a message of hope in the sand once the outgoing tide has retreated. ‘Enjoy life’, it says. ‘Celebrate it in yourself and in others.