A central claim of much social-scientific critique of psychiatric nosology is that psychiatry too often naively adopts a (let's-call-it) realist perspective on psychiatric illness categories, whereas in truth we'd do better to see a diagnostic category like 'depression' as one, optional, sometimes useful, sometimes not, way of framing human distress / problems in living. It's the second part of this claim that I'd like to focus on here. What do we mean when we talk of framing? Regarding that talk, what's it's value; what are it's limitations? The first useful thing to point out ..read more

Soul Introduction Do you know, it’s almost every day that we talk of soul? It matters not whether you’re a ‘believer’. It matters not whether you’re inclined to talk of something called ‘life after death’, or whether you find any ready use for Epictetus’s notion that, as a human being, 'you are a little wisp of soul dragging a corpse about with you’ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book IV, XXXI). No; as novelist Jeanette Winterson said, you don’t have to believe in God to know that you’ve got a soul. We know what we mean when we say, ‘This is soulless’ or, ‘I’ve sold my soul’ and we know wh ..read more

I was introduced to Schopenhauer's fable of the porcupines by Deborah Luepnitz in her lovely work on the psychotherapy of intimacy and its dilemmas. In her book she follows the poet Molly Peacock who wrote of how 'there must be room in love for hate'. Their point isn't that love itself somehow involves hate, but that a relationship which is deeply loving is one that will inevitably sometimes anger or otherwise trouble us (unless we stifle the anger and become depressed). In Luepnitz's capable hands the fable helps us tolerate and normalise the inevitability of our dissatisfactions with both i ..read more

 I read in today's Analytic Philosophy journal that it's better to be alive than otherwise. I confess that, whilst I'm intuitively thankful for my life, and whilst I believe it right to be so, I find it hard to make out a cogent argument. Why so? Because it comes intuitively to me to think that I need to exist in order for there to be situations that for me are sensibly considered better or worse. If there is no me, then there's no situation or predicament or state of affairs to be talked of. This is akin to Kant's claim, right-headed in my view, that 'existence is not a predicate ..read more

Shaun Gallagher In a new paper Shaun Gallagher takes issue with the very concept of such loneliness as is putatively existential - i.e. an ineliminable, defining, aspect of our being. Against this he pits not only Heidegger's Mitsein but also Trevarthen's primary intersubjectivity. Along the way Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's conception of paper Loneliness receives a psychological critique. Gallagher's principal conclusion seems sound to me, but I'm dissatisfied with some of the steps he took to get there, so thought to write a little about it here. The high priests of existential lon ..read more

Did my mother or father love me? This is a question all psychotherapists will, at some point, have heard a patient ask. The patient presents with some confusion, perhaps having taken the fact of their parent's love for granted much of their life. And yet, on recovery of their personal being, on dismantling of the adaptive self-presentation which they'd instinctively concocted to manage their parental relationship, they start to wonder. "That I ever so much as needed to concoct thus; that I was so stifled by a barrage of parental intrusion and control ... how could a loving parent have so radic ..read more

Awais Aftab and I have been having a discussion, via our respective blogs, about the intelligibility of certain notions in cognitive science. This stemmed from our opposing valuations of Anil Seth's book 'Being You'. Here's his latest post; below: my response. Orbits and Explanations What's an orbit, and what in a celestial system is properly said to orbit what? Well, take your pick: i) What's properly said to orbit what (the sun orbits the earth, or the earth orbits the sun) depends purely on a decision as to what we set as our reference frame. (This was the 'geometric' conception I was ..read more

I don't know about you, but the reason I often make notes after psychotherapy sessions is because I need aides-memoires. I've about 18 patients - in my private psychotherapy practice - at any one time; most of them attend just once a week. And sometimes they'll say something, or I'll think of something during or after the session, that I want to make sure I hold onto for later lest it should then prove relevant. ... Or they'll share the first name of their new girlfriend or pet tortoise or arch enemy, and I'll think it a good idea to jot that down since, truth be told, I'm not always very cle ..read more

A while ago a friend told me that, before he had his hip replaced, he wasn't experiencing discomfort - yet that, after he'd had the replacement, he was so much more comfortable! This, from a philosophical point of view, is an interesting experience. We typically use here phrases like 'aware of', or 'habituate to', (the pain) here to try to explain what was going on, to make good an apparent contradiction, but it's not obvious that they get us very far. To make the explanation work we construe discomfort on the model of our awareness of an object ... but since, well, since discomfort and our aw ..read more

on it 'looking as if' the sun goes round the earth Anscombe and Wittgenstein       by Dave McKean A gloriously pithy little dialogue between Wittgenstein and Anscombe goes like so:  Wittgenstein: ‘Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth turned on its axis?’ Anscombe: ‘I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the Earth.’ Wittgenstein: ‘Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the Earth turned on its axis?’ On this, in chapter 4 of his 'Being You ..read more