The psychoanalyst Money-Kyrle (1971) defined the aim of psychoanalysis as helping a patient to face the Three Facts of Life.  They are:- 1) I was conceived as a result of two people having sex, 2) Time passes and I shall eventually die and 3) I cannot get through life on my own – I need help.  Repudiate number 1 and you are a paedophile because you do not accept there is any difference between the generations.  Refuse number 2 and you live like Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations, living out your days in a psychic retreat where time stands still and the food prepared fo ..read more

There is a tension at the heart of us. A tension between wanting to know and not wanting to know; we humans have a very special capacity to turn a blind eye to the paradox at the heart of ourselves which is that under the right conditions, we are all capable of the greatest good and the greatest evil.  The truth is that we are neither black nor white in our deepest, truest parts – there are only contours of grey. Look closely enough and every border dissolves.   If you have ever helped somebody die, you will know there is no exact moment of death. Instead, there is a fairly long ..read more

The brain is a loom of mind-boggling complexity, its 100 billion neurons the struts and frets for the cascading electrical signals which ping around our minds.  The threads we select to use on this loom, woven into the fabric we call our lives, are our experiences – the books we read, the music we hear, the nature we enjoy, the places we go – but above all the people who love us and whose love we return.  I have been fascinated for many years by the task of becoming bilingual in the language of the brain as well as the language of the mind.  I have tried to learn about the brain ..read more

Wilfred Bion, one of the 20th century’s greatest psychoanalysts, asked in his 1962 work, Learning from Experience, a pertinent question: ‘When the mother loves her infant, what is she doing it with?’ In this blog post, I am following in the footsteps of psychoanalyst, Chris Mawson, who posed the distinct but related question at a conference I attended. He asked, ‘When we judge, what are we judging with?’ I think that depending on what part of our mind we employ, we can end up with a wide continuum of outcomes, from sensible judgments guiding empathic action at the one end, to extreme prejudice ..read more

This is a paper written and published at the New Associations as a response to the Conference ‘Between mind and body: Ordinary Differences’ on 2016 that I co-organised with my colleagues from the ‘Culture and Ethnicity Task Group’ and which was supported by the British Psychoanalytic Council. The paper runs through some concepts that might be recognised in some other papers published in this blog. My colleague and co-writer Annie Pesskin has also upload her paper ‘Why feeling excluded might have mighty consequences’ with her thoughts as a response to the same conference. Even though, this ..read more

Mental illness isn’t like physical illness. Mainly because you can’t see it. Humans have always verified the truth of something with their eyes. ‘You fell off a roof and broke your leg? Oh my God, poor you!’ Our eyes travel back to the plaster cast on their leg, the existence of which triggered the question in the first place. We are full of compassion. We wish them a speedy recovery. We ask them what is the most difficult thing about having one leg in Plaster of Paris. They reply. Their challenge is seen; their frustration, pain and distress are validated. Happy Days. Now try this. ‘Haven’t s ..read more

How are we shaped by the culture in which we grow? How do social, political, historical and economic pressures interweave in the individual, both at a conscious and an unconscious level, and how can we use this knowledge to help explain and bring about social change? At a conference on Mind and Culture in London in November 2016, organized by the British Psychoanalytic Council, Maxine Dennis reminded us that although ‘race’ is an empty category in scientific terms, it has a powerful hold on us psychologically. In director Paul Haggis’ 2004 film Crash, we find depicted ‘Crashes’. These can be e ..read more

In Freud’s time, the patients coming to him with problems were frequently hysterics, so his theories tended towards solving the mental phenomena he encountered on his couch. Thus repression, the Oedipus complex, infantile sexuality etc. were all attempts to figure out the meanings behind the baffling symptoms of paralysis, mutism, tics and phobias his patients presented with. Freud’s ideas were a crucial first step in unraveling the complexities of narcissism and ‘borderline’ states of mind because he posited that psychological problems stemmed from an internal conflict between different aspec ..read more

The Weinstein scandals have found me reading the book ‘The Power’ by Naomi Alderman. The book explores a world via an intriguing twist – the idea that women are the physically powerful gender. By turning the tables, she turns the world upside down. In ‘Power’, women have discovered an innate power, “their skein”, which provides them with supernatural physical powers. Men are now the physically inferior, weaker gender. She plays throughout the book with familiar life scripts but instead women are the perpetrators and men are victims. It is not my aim to provide a critical overview of the book ..read more

I would like to begin by asking you to take a moment to think about the most shaming experience you have ever had. As you reluctantly bring the moment to mind, you may feel your heart contract, a sensation of shrinking away from the memory might come over you and I wager you will want to stop thinking about it as soon as possible. Shame is an extremely aversive emotion, meaning we will do all we can to avoid experiencing and/or remembering it. And yet, for some of us, shameful experiences can come to our minds, unbidden, like a record on repeat with deleterious consequences for our self-esteem ..read more