On: transference, countertransference and projective identification

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In this essay, I define the psychoanalytic concept of transference and its development in the hundred plus years since Freud’s discovery. I illustrate it with a clinical example of a patient’s transference to me. I follow by using the same structure; define, historicise and illustrate, for the concepts of countertransference and projective identification. How countertransference is used differs by analytic school and I make a reference to the differences between Freudians, Kleinians and Independents. These foundational concepts do not belong to the consulting room only. I reference how they inform the psychosocial worlds, notably race, before concluding.

Transference is a process. Its key is ‘displacement’, displacing an unconscious idea, from the object to which it was once attached, and on to the analyst. For Freud, what was transferred was a window into unconscious assumptions, via feelings that properly belong elsewhere (Frosh, 2012). In his ‘Dora’ case study, Freud (1905) had defined transference as “new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies … aroused during the progress of the analysis”. Transference, then, is the “actualisation of unconscious wishes” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967) and a form of the mother-infant dyad (Winnicott, 1960), an illusion where someone, not consciously recognised, represents something, which forms the basis for a repetition of a relationship with an important historic figure (Sandler, Dare and Holder, 1973). The impulses (Freud, 1937) have their source in the earliest object relations and come forth as a consequence of the compulsion to repeat. The analyst works to strengthen the analysand’s ego, so that there is less displacement and the gap between fantasy and reality becomes better understood.

Its discovery and its evolution began with the attachment formed by a patient of Freud’s colleague, Breuer, later anonymised as ‘Anna O’. (Freud, 1893). Freud’s original frustration with transference, that it was a resistance to the analysis, shifted to recognition that it made the therapeutic alliance about emotion (Freud, 1910, 1912, 1914). Freudians consider that treatment is about recognising how the analysand’s transference is informed by an attempt to gratify drives, designed to reduce unpleasure (Lemma, 2016). Freud’s initial focus, was on erotic and romantic transference. Therapy was effected by love, and early appreciation of what is now described as positive transference. The negative transference, (Klein, 1952) when an analysand brings forth hostile feelings from developmental relationships, was not really considered until Klein’s work. Kleinians believe hostility is linked to the death instinct, and that hatred and envy are innate. Klein also hypothesised that what might be transferred on to the analyst might be parts of the analysand’s self, such as the superego, rather than historic relationships. (Klein, 1952, 1957). Transference today is more a projection (Kleinian) model than a displacement (Freudian) one. Post-Kleinians, including Winnicott and Bion, look at the transference developmentally. Just as the mother receives the projections of the infant and moderates and mitigates, so that the infant can receive them back, so the analyst behaves for the patient. The analyst needs to remain alert and thoughtful, in a state of ‘reverie’ (Bion, 1962). All of the communications from the patient “contain something relevant to the transference situation”. (Segal, 1981)

To illustrate the concept, I share an experience from my personal clinical work: I have been working with a patient, ‘A’, who was largely raised by a disciplinarian stepfather, who appears to have had little affection for his stepson. His biological father left when he was three. In the transference, I am sometimes the stepfather: ‘A’ splits an eagerness to please me, to get it ‘right’, but also an anxiety that he will draw my ire. ‘A’’s childhood in his stepfather’s home was, as he recalls it, dominated by the demands to be useful, by completing a number of chores. At the outset of the therapy, he talked about decorating the NHS consulting room, if he had the right tools. I understood A’s inner world to be shabby and neglected, and his need to show he could be useful, and compliant. This is evidence of displacement, as are other times, when I sense I become A’s father, albeit idealised, as someone who was understanding and interested. What emerges then, is A’s infantile desire to be interpreted and loved. In my countertransference, I feel something parental and am reminded of the unconscious desire many therapists have to repair, something Klein (1952) highlights.

Countertransference like mine, is unresolved, unconscious elements within the analyst (Freud, 1910), evoking intense feelings. (Carpy, 1989) The analyst has an unconscious reaction, identifies the analysand’s role in bringing it about, and then examines the effect on both parties (Money-Kyrle, 1956). Freud had regarded it as an impediment that should be resolved by the analyst developing more ego strength in their own analysis. No analyst is “wholly free of infantile dependence” (Racker, 1948) and feelings and impulses are determined by the past, meaning that aspects of the Oedipal situation are repeated in every countertransference. Forty years after Freud’s anxieties about countertransference, Heimann (1950) redefined it as “an instrument of research” into the patient’s unconscious, because the analyst’s unconscious understands that of his patient. The analyst, is both an interpreter and an object of the impulses felt by the patient. Klein (1952), although prioritising the child’s phantasy life and unconscious phantasies, held similar views to Freud, claiming that only by analysing “the transference situation to its depths” could the past in both real and phantasy be understood.  However, it is the ‘post-Kleinians’ (Bion, 1959, Segal 1975, Rosenfeld, 1987) that have been at the forefront of countertransference’s development. Currently, it is usually defined as being both the analyst’s own transference and the analyst’s response to the analysand’s transference.

Despite the significance of Ferenczi and Alice Balint’s views, that the analyst’s own feelings should be shared with the analysand (Heimann, 1950), little was written about countertransference until the end of the 1940’s (Racker, 1948). In developing Klein (1946), Winnicott (1947), had been amongst the first to grasp its significance for working with psychotic patient populations when describing hatred towards the patient. This is relevant for our contemporary understanding of issues like racism, founded upon the “irrationality of the unconscious” (Timimi, 1996). It was Heimann, though, that encouraged a more constructive view of something she felt was created by the patient; the aforementioned instrument of research. Klein (1952), who prioritised the child’s phantasy life and unconscious phantasies, rarely used the term countertransference until writing about the infantile roots for both parties in seeking ‘reassurance’ (1957). Ten years after Heimann, writing that the analyst needed to ‘sustain’ and not ‘discharge’ feelings, the word countertransference was “in danger of losing its identity” according to Winnicott (1960). He was inclined to Freud’s view and defined countertransference as “neurotic features” disturbing the analysis and spoiling the analyst’s “professional attitude.” Independents and post-Kleinians have been at the forefront of subsequent development, making it a “fertile, intersubjective field” (White, 2006). Winnicott (1963) and Bion (1965) looked at it developmentally, and Ogden (1994) has made it more about intersubjectivity, with his concept of the ‘analytic third’. More contemporary views are that the analyst should allow themselves to participate in the enactment required by the patient’s projections, in order to become conscious of the phantasy and emotion (Rosenfeld, 1971, Joseph, 1989, Bollas, 1987,1992).

In my work with a woman, ‘B’, I often find myself struggling to concentrate. I wonder if she is making me mad (Winnicott, 1960). I find myself wanting the sessions to come to an end and notice her need for attention, but how I seem to be resisting giving it. Her mother was diagnosed as schizophrenic, after ‘B’ reached adulthood. Her father left pre-adolescence and had a second family, so she has half-brothers. Everything about her world and world view appears to be influenced by splits. Her maternal care and her parents’ divorce concretised her views, I believe, and pulled her back from a developing depressive position to paranoid schizoid (Klein, 1946). I experience her as happiest when complaining about her family, friends, colleagues, and employment. I, guilty with inattention, sense a whining child, starved of gratification. Racker (1953) would suggest the patient is emotionally blocking and I am succumbing to “pampering”, initiated by my guilt at my wandering attention. By pampering, I re-focus intently and become a good Object for ‘B’, as the father was before he left. Sometimes my countertransference is paternally protective, (Money-Kyrle, 1956), but I think I often act out the neglectful mother, creating a guilt, which is a consequence of my inability to be a necessary container for her anxieties (Bion, 1959, 1962). This acting out has made me sympathetic to the Joseph, Rosenfeld and Bollas approaches.

Projective Identification, (PI), pre-dates Heimann’s constructive view of countertransference but had already transformed the transference/countertransference dynamic from a displacement to a projection focus (Klein, 1946). PI is an unconscious, omnipotent phantasy best captured by the lay phrase ‘giving someone a piece of my mind’. It is not everything that makes up the countertransference, (Heimann, 1950), but invariably seems to be the dominant feature in a therapeutic relationship; most commonly manifested as a part of the patient’s self, projected into the object (Segal, 1964) and where the projector is psychically aligned with the person into whom it has been projected. This is done, with the aim not simply of expulsion, but of using the projection to control the therapist, (Segal, 1981) inducing feelings or thoughts or by provoking forms of enactment. The object is transformed by the projection (Feldman, 2009). The projector fantasises taking over the therapist and influencing the recipient so that they think and respond in a way that is congruent with the projection (Ogden, 1982). The therapist processes what is projected, so that it can be palatably returned and the projector can introject what had needed expelling.

PI has been taken up by many theoreticians, notably Bion (1959, 1970), who adapted it by identifying what was projected as ‘beta elements’ that the therapist made sense of thanks to utilising ‘alpha function’, and then being able to reproject them. He considered that PI was understood as ‘a three-dimensional space’, into which patients projected the parts of their personality that they had split off. Klein thought that this was ‘observable’ in psychotic and borderline patients and Bion agreed with her that the ‘degree of fragmentation’ and the distance to which split-off fragments were projected was a measure of the distance a patient had from contact with reality. In his studies of the containment process (1959,1962), he observed how a mother takes in and allows herself to be affected by her infant’s projection of distress. The mother/analyst has not only contained an experience but transformed it. For some, enactment opens analytical work to “deep unconscious identifications and primitive levels of functioning” which are beyond the reach of the intellect, (Tuckett, 1997) albeit recognising one’s own feelings can be difficult (Brenman-Pick, 1985)

One of my experiences of PI came from a patient, ‘C’, presenting as depressed and unable to develop relationships. ‘C’ earned his PhD at Oxford, where his father was a fellow, while his grandfather was a celebrated and distinguished medic. He now edited a well-known scientific magazine, but felt his achievements were inferior to his family history, and he was ‘phoney’. (Winnicott, 1960). In our early work, he let me know that he thought that psychotherapy was “pointless”. Anyone working in the NHS, was probably unable to develop a private practise. He projected feelings of inferiority into me, in order to rid them from himself (Rosenfeld, 1987) and to enable him to adopt the superior status he associated with his father and grandfather. I found myself identifying with the intellectual inferiority, responding by making theoretical and technical interventions in the sessions. I became the boy he had been, desperately trying to show my academic and intellectual accomplishments to a demanding father. I was compliant and beginning a “defensive collusive arrangement” (Feldman, 2009).  I had acted out something congruent with what had been projected into me, seeking attention and admiration. Once I became aware of what was happening, we were able to think about the competitive need for superiority. Eventually, he was able to introject the split off part and to accommodate it, recognising that he was still seeking parental love.

The concepts of transference, splitting and PI are fundamental to our psychosocial world. Klein (1952) asserted that transference operated throughout our lives influencing all relationships. Transference includes other significant figures beyond the parental couple, taking in the realm of the collective social unconscious. The social world contains multiple projected and introjected transference contents. External events, such as those affecting race or gender often catalyse a regression in psychic functioning activating defences. (Hamer, 2006) ‘D’, a Pakistani male patient of mine, projected his feelings of being unwelcome, on to outbursts against the Polish builders working on his apartment block, because of their use of their native tongue. He wanted to rid himself of being identified as an immigrant Other, and identify with my white, native born status. Reciprocal projective identifications can establish a preferred element of the self in the white. (Timimi, 1996). He may also have harboured suspicions of my unconscious and unexpressed attitudes to race. Racism might be transference in a regressed state (Hamer, 2006) characterised by splitting of the self, obscuring the ‘true self’ (Winnicott, 1960) to protect it from annihilation. Splitting is the psychoanalytic basis for racism (Timimi, 1996)

I have defined and illustrated the concepts of transference, countertransference and projective identification. In my work, I find I incline more to the Freudian displacement of past relationships, than to Kleinian split off parts of the self, but appreciate the contemporary use of enactment, intellectually and affectively. I like Racker’s (1948) observation that psychoanalysts choose their work based on “the object relations of infancy” and because of its reparative nature (Money-Kyrle, 1956), which seems rather Kleinian. Her assertion that transference operates all through our lives, influencing every relationship, is why I believe we need to apply what we can learn in the clinic to the world beyond; what the IPA’s podcast characterises as psychoanalysis “off the couch”. It requires a longer essay to do justice to the great psychosocial themes of race, ethnicity, religious marginalisation, sexual identity and fluidity, as well as social constructs around ‘normality’, disability and social class, but I have demonstrated the power of the unconscious, and how something once perceived as an impediment, is now a critical therapeutic tool.

References:

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Bion, W.R. (1959) Attacks on Linking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 40, pp. 308-15

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Carpy, D.V., (1989). Tolerating the countertransference: A mutative process. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 70, pp. 227-241.

Feldman, M (1997) Projective identification: the analyst’s involvement International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78, pp.287-294.

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Hamer, F. (2006) Racism as a Transference State Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75(1) pp. 197-214

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Lemma, A. (2016) Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Money-Kyrle, R.E. (1956) Normal Counter-Transference and Some of its Deviations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 37 (3) pp. 360-66

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Racker, H. (1948) The Countertransference Neurosis. In: Transference and Countertransference. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

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Segal, H (1981) The Work of Hanna Segal New York: Jason Aronson

Timimi, S (1996) Race and Colour in Internal and External Reality. British Journal of Psychotherapy 13(2) pp. 183-192

Tuckett, D (1997) Mutual Enactment in the psychoanalytic situation. In: The Perverse Transference and Other Matters: Essays in Honor of R. Horacio Etchegoyen.

Winnicott, D.W (1947) Hate in the countertransference In: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis London: Hogarth Press Ltd

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White, J. (2006) Motivational echoes: Transference and countertransference in contemporary theory. In: Generation – Preoccupations & Conflicts in Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Hove: Routledge

On: Waiting for Godot

As a fairly regular theatregoer I think about the reasons why I choose certain plays over others. I go, frequently, to be entertained and to do something which I know I usually enjoy. Sometimes, my choice is driven by the play. Sometimes it is motivated by the director. More often, I am inspired by the casting. On some occasions, I go, aware that I might not enjoy what I am watching, but knowing it will provoke me to think, to try to understand another person’s view and perhaps, to broaden my own.

This week I was up in the Gods peering down on Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati in ‘Waiting for Godot’, at Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Recently I re-watched both of them being brilliant in the BBC’s ‘The Hollow Crown’. I chose to see this, largely to see two of my favourite actors, but also because it is such a famous play. I went, anticipating, that it would be more of an ‘experience’ than ‘enjoyment’.

I last saw it, with an equally distinguished cast – Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Simon Callow, Ronald Pickup – in 2009, at the same theatre, so this performance had been set quite a high bar, and yet, my recollection was that I had not really enjoyed that evening, because I had found it a ‘difficult’ play, and was pretty confident I had misunderstood it, notwithstanding that it is open to multiple interpretations. I went this time, believing it was existential; about purposelessness, and absurdity, and about time/temporality.

Understanding the play is perhaps not the point. The issue is more about what it makes us feel. The despair of the protagonists, the curious hope about being saved, the Biblical references, and the absurd intervention of the cruel Pozzo and the luckless ‘Lucky’. Trying to get a sense of what I might be missing, whilst appreciating that it is multi-layered, I turned afterwards to Wikipedia. The length of the entry is something of a clue in itself.

For those unfamiliar with the play, it opens with two tramp-like characters on an open bare place adorned by a solitary tree. They are, Vladimir (known as DiDi) and Estragon (nicknamed Gogo). They are waiting for a companion called Godot, but we come to learn that they are not sure of what he looks like. Their conversation is broken, formless and disconnected and yet we come to understand that there is quite a powerful friendship bond between them. They are coming back together, after Gogo has spent the night in a ditch, the victim of an assault by unnamed and unnumbered assailants. DiDi reminds him that he needs his companionship and care.

Gogo frets about his boots and about his pains and injuries and seems inclined to leave and pursue his goals alone, but somehow cannot, and accepts Didi’s instruction that they should wait for Godot, despite not knowing if they will recognise him if he appears. As they consider how best to pass the time, they are interrupted by a man carrying bags and with a rope around his neck, leading an imperious other man, who carries a whip. When they set down and introduce themselves, the well-dressed, Pozzo, as we learn he is, abuses his companion who seems to be mute, and calls him Pig. He makes him perform menial tasks and suggests he is taking him to a market to see if he can sell him.

This is uncomfortable viewing. All sorts of feelings about class, about slavery, serfdom, imprisonment, injustice, get to sweep around the audience until Lucky, as we learn he is ironically named, is made to dance and then to ‘think’. This produces a stream of fragmented, occasionally coherent, often absurd, consciousness, in an exhausting monologue that might be the best writing in the whole play. In this production, Tom Edden is outstanding givig the monlogue, and should win all ‘Supporting Actor’ awards that are on offer. For all my Whishaw and Msamati worship, he is worth the ticket price alone.

Pozzo and Lucky move on and our heroes are once more left trying to understand their roles in life, their relationship, and why they feel compelled to wait for Godot. The first Act ends with a young boy bringing a message that Godot cannot come, but will definitely be there tomorrow.

In the second Act, the heaviness of time and the sense of purposelessness return. The only difference is the tree has budded and we can see how the passage of time is often a good and hopeful thing. One hears the common phrase “time heals everything…” somewhere at the back of the mind. By contrast, Pozzo, now blinded, and Lucky, pass through on their return. Pozzo’s new dependence is a curious counterpoint to the independence that Didi and Gogo arguably enjoy.

The play ends with the reappearance of the boy, who denies he is the same boy, but has the same message. Gogo and Didi think about hanging themselves from the tree, ridiculing the idea of a ‘tree of life’, but conclude that they have no rope and the belt on Gogo’s trousers will not be suitable for the job.

A little more than a couple of hours after the play opens, one travels home with thoughts and feelings. Some critics think Beckett was sensitive to ageing and to mental health. Gogo continually forgets why they are where they are and has to be told by Didi that they are waiting for Godot. My father’s recent vascular dementia diagnosis made me sensitive to this part of the play. However, most of the play feels unsympathetic, especially Pozzo and Lucky, and yet I can see why one might be comforted by the ‘carer and cared for’, structure. Some suggest that Lucky suffers from Parkinson’s, as did Beckett’s mother.

Beckett was apparently frustrated by the link between God and Godot. He felt that there was too much religious interpretation. Nonetheless, the idea of waiting for a saviour, and of the Biblical references the waiting couple consider, meant I felt it had religious meaning.

As for psychoanalytic, I quite like the idea that the nicknames are plays on the idea that Estragon represents Ego, and the missing pleasure principle and is a man, keen to move on, seeking to avoid unpleasure. By contrast Vladimir/DiDi, represents the id, and the oppressive Godot, stands for an intolerant, never-satisfied Superego. However, I did not find myself feeling that I was watching such a representation of psyche.

The Jungian perspective is to think in terms of contrast. Lucky is Pozzo’s Shadow. Estragon, is the feminine of Vladimir, the anima. This was lost on me. I was more drawn to the idea of it being political – Beckett’s Irishness and his wartime experiences in France, mean that ideas of oppression and colonisation, of abuse, contempt and superiority are played with. That resonated with me, and was the core of my Pozzo/Lucky discomfort, I think.

The philosophical analysis, is that it nods favourably towards existentialism. In the play, this is mainly conveyed by Estragon, not sure why is waiting or for whom, and wondering if he would be better alone, and more strikingly, if he would not be better off dead. Existentialism is the question of life’s meaning, the role of death and the place of God. I find this interpretation closer to what was raised in me, especially the suggestion/question of religion’s place in a life with meaning.

I tend to prefer my theatre when it demands that I think, but when the thinking is demanding and obtuse it can mar the pleasure I get from the experience. When I saw the McKellen version, I am sure I failed to appreciate the play, but I am sure I enjoyed the acting. Here, some outstanding actors were so good, that I noticed them less and thought more about the playwright and the director. That said, I would no doubt recommend it for the acting, especially Edden’s.

When I am asked what I have seen recently and what I recommend, I will talk about this at some length, but I will temper and caveat any recommendation. I think it is a difficult play for those unfamiliar with it and the playwright. But if an evening of philosophising and analysis of oneself and one’s motives, is on your agenda – seek it out.

On: (Re)watching ‘Lost in Translation’

I am getting more and more interested in the Heraclitus-style thinking, of never stepping into the same river twice. I apply it increasingly to books, to films and theatre. This week, I went to see ‘The Real Thing’ at The Old Vic. It was excellent and although the cultural signposts (the video cassette of Brodie’s TV play) are dated, the themes in the play are timeless.

I first saw it in the West End starring Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees. I cannot remember much of the impact it had on me then – I would still have been in my teens and probably underappreciated the deceit, or the yearning that the playwright has to be validated, but I recall enjoying it and thinking that many of the lines were witty and wondering where such writing talent came from.

I have never found watching plays that I have seen before a challenge. Different casts, sets, never mind the changes in me. Shakespeare is of course the best example. Every production attempts some sort of originality and his genius as a writer means it can be found. I am not sure how many Lears I have seen, or Shylocks, or Hamlets, or MacBeths, but I know they all left different marks on me, and each of them made me appreciate something different about the play and the character.

When it comes to film, I am a much more reluctant re-watcher. There is just too many to see. As for books, even worse. I like to read some contemporary fiction, but I keep pining for how few of the classics I have read. This summer I finally broke my duck with Hemingway. How could I have avoided it for so long? The end of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ is a philosophical interrogation of life’s value and purpose. It is the novelistic contemplation of the abyss, of suicide, that only Hamlet’s “to Be or Not to Be” can rival.

So, I am becoming better at returning to films I have seen, and also knowing that I have changed, the film’s ‘moment’ may have expired, and that fresh perspectives are welcome. That brings me to ‘Lost in Translation’, for which a friend of mine was extolling its virtues very recently. It is considered Sofia Coppola’s ‘masterpiece’, but failed to register with me for years.

This is a rather sensitive film for me. A few years ago, I was dating an American woman. She was quite a bit younger than me, and beautiful. She asked me if I had seen the film. I said that I had not. She told me she would bring it to my flat. I was sufficiently analogue-male and out of date to have a DVD player still, and she had a copy on DVD. We watched it and she pestered me for my impressions.

What was not clear to me was that it was some sort of audition for the next steps of any romance we might be having. It should seem so obvious – young woman, lonely, crush on an older guy, but I was that myopic, I saw nothing. What I did see, in the film, and what I cannot see now, was a rather creepy, predatory older man and a young woman of beauty and innocence. It struck me, then, as a rather tasteless romcom. Wrong impression!

Watching it again, I can see why my young girlfriend was so unimpressed by my review. She told me that if I could not understand the messages in the film, then I would never be the right man for her and she left my flat that evening, never to return. After watching it again, I think she was quite right to move on. It reveals how emotionally insensitive I was at that time, but how my focus was on the older male character, completely missing much of what drives Charlotte’s experience.

My focus on Bob (Bill Murray) being rather creepy, was misplaced. As I saw watching it this week, it is Charlotte, the Scarlett Johansson character, who initiates things when she sends him something from her table, to him drinking alone at the bar. Once they start to talk to one another the central theme, if I understand it better now, reveals itself. It is loneliness. Specifically, loneliness inside a relationship. Charlotte has been married for two years, but already John, her husband, barely registers her presence. Bob has been married for twenty-five and is soon comically revealing what is important in his marital relationship, when he opens a parcel from his wife, sent from the States, to discuss carpet samples.

Both are displaced. Geographically, in Tokyo, and maritally. As Sofia Coppola riffs on relationships, she artfully lets us know that for all of Charlotte’s youthful innocence, she has in fact graduated in philosophy and we accept the invitation to philosophise ourselves. Again, it is her, not the ageing roue that is Bob, that drives their connection. She invites him to an evening out with her friends. Her karaoke turn and her pink neon wig transform her and we can see the seductive fully formed woman and not the innocent graduate emerge, but the evening ends with him gently putting her to bed and not taking advantage of her beauty and her husband’s absence.

She has asked him “does it ever get easier?” and he enigmatically replies “No. Yes”. He asks about her plans and she concedes that she is rather aimless and had dabbled in writing and, like her husband, taking pictures. “Keep writing”, he tells her, a metaphor for providing the material to our own personal narrative(s). She asks the same, specifically, about marriage and he marks the change in the relationship with the arrival of the first-born. “It gets a whole lot more complicated”.

This month, my youngest two have birthdays, and will both have moved into the second half of their twenties. My eldest is married. It is quite likely that one or all of them will provide me with grandchildren in the coming decade. A ‘first-born’ for each, and I will watch how their relationships evolve with interest. I remember their mother and me adjusting to new routines and sharing our little two-bedroomed Islington mews with a third person. It was joyous, but it was also “complicated”, as Bob notes.

As Bob’s time in Tokyo, picking up his $2m for a whisky commercial shoot, comes to an end, and as Charlotte’s husband is due to return from his photo-shoot, Bob finds himself once again alone at the bar. This time the jazz singer chats to him. The following morning, he wakes and looks surprised to see breakfast things in the room and evidence of her presence marked by an empty champagne bottle and two glasses. I think we are expected to deduce that he has projected and transferred the lust he has felt for the much younger Charlotte on to the other woman.

The door is knocked and Charlotte appears. She hears the movement and voice of the other woman and wryly comments “I guess you’re busy, huh?” She also adds that it is a more age-appropriate dalliance and we realise that it is Charlotte whose needs have been driving the film and that she knows that they are going to be unsatisfied.

The ending scene included an improvised kiss which seems to have entered film folklore and a whispered message from Bob to Charlotte. It is not audible, but film detectives have played with the audio and believe he says “I have to be leaving, but I won’t let that come between us”. He returns to his taxi and leaves for the States, but we can see that the pain of the emptiness of his life, and the ‘film-star-for-hire’ appearance in Tokyo has left him, and that his loneliness was replaced by the significance of his brief time spent with her.

We know that he has rediscovered what it is not to be lonely, although we also know that he is going home to try to manage a ‘lonely when we are together’ marital relationship. It might have spelled the end of it and the emotionless infidelity with the singer might be his opportunity to confess and catalyse a break.  

The critics love the film, focusing on its empathy, as Bob and Charlotte engage with what one another is thinking. I certainly saw it differently from my first viewing. The ‘Lost in Translation’ of the title is obviously linked to the location and the language challenge of the Americans, and yes, there is some unattractive patronising racism involved, but the protagonists arrive lost in their own personal difficulties. (To mitigate this, watch Wim Wenders’s ‘Perfect Days’). Meeting one another, not quite two drunks propping up one another at the bar, but two lost souls seeking being found, heard, noticed, is what translates life to each of them.

It has really excited me about all the many films and books that I can re-appreciate. My son is especially good at ensuring things gets seen or read with multiple views and considerations. One film I had seen multiple times and will always be a favourite for me was “The Railway Children”. However, it was only when my eldest got married that I realised I had never read Nesbitt’s masterpiece and I put that right. What a pleasure! So now, not only do I need to do some re-reading and re-viewing, I also need to go back to the source texts for many of the films I have enjoyed.

Just how impoverished would our lives be without writers and actors?

On: Seeing The Expressionists (Tate Modern)

I had a second visit to the Tate Modern’s Expressionist exhibition this week. My first visit, shortly after it opened had left me too little time to take in everything that was being shown, never mind to organise my thoughts about it or to get in touch with the feelings it inspired.

The show is described as “a story of friendships told through art”. The friends and exponents and collaborators formed a group known as The Blue Rider. They had the goal of transforming modern art. At the centre was Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter. Multiple forms were explored and exhibited including painting, sculpture, photography, sound and freestyle performance. Inspired by post Impressionists like van Gogh and Klimt and by the philosophical ideas of Nietzsche. Other influences were primitivism, Cubism and spirituality.

According to the Tate, Expressionism and Expressionist art refers to “the expression of subjective emotions, inner experiences and spiritual themes, as opposed to realistic depictions of people or nature”. Put another way, the art had to come from within the artist and not be an attempt to record the visual reality of the external world. Swirls and exaggerated brushstrokes were meant to convey the turmoil of the artist’s mind and inner world.

Representation was important. Individuals often placed in isolated positions emphasising the detachment and loneliness of modern, early C20 urban and cityscape lifestyles. Uses of prostitute figures were seen to be a commentary on the avaricious, valueless remorselessness of the evolving capitalist world(s). Some regard Kandinsky’s canvas “Der Blaue Reiter” as the breakthrough moment and it depicts a lone horseman riding across the landscape, isolated, possibly trying to escape something, with plenty of use of shadows, the light and dark parts of one’s mind.

Abstracts and representations made no impact on me for decades but more recently I have come to look at various art forms with a keener and more interpretive eye. Art appreciation, which was something I think I had little of, was mainly one of aesthetics to me, but now is much more about the feelings it elicits within me. It applies more broadly too, to the world around me, especially the architecture of London, but also to the colours of nature and more awareness of the changing of seasons.

Exhibitions like these invariable benefit from a second viewing. I left this time, mainly impressed by Kandinsky, whose canvases seem to evolve and take in more ideas and influences as time passed. His early paintings contain some beautiful interiors, rather van Gogh like but with an emphasis on blue-greens rather than yellows and oranges.

According to one review I read, “Ultimately, for Kandinsky, who had trained as a lawyer, experimenting freely was not enough. He was on a mission to save humanity from the slide into materialism, which he described as a black hand dragging humanity down. Painting was, he believed, a force for good that could impact the viewer directly – raising them to a higher spiritual level through a combination of forms and colours.”

It may be invidious to choose favourites, but we are relentless categorising characters and if expressionism displays an artist’s inner world, it is our own inner world that is responding. I find myself regarding a canvas and being banal and binary with a ‘like/not like’ response, but these days I now find time to contemplate. To ask myself why I do or do not like something and also to ask myself what it is saying to me and what is it making me feel.

If you get to see the exhibition I hope you will share the joy I felt seeing Franz Marc’s Cows, who seem careless, carefree and infected with the joy of adolescent dancers. I saw them and thought about freedom and joy. Marc’s ‘Tiger’, despite my regard for Kandinsky, might be the painting that leaves the strongest impression. Beauty with menace, and very evident of the influence of Cubism on the group’s approach.

Kandinsky’s partner Gabriele Munter rightly features strongly and it is her portrait of their friend and fellow artist Jawlensky, that I liked best of her work. He is listening in the portrait, perhaps to music, but more likely to Kandinsky expounding his ideas and ideals, according to the art historians. Jawlensky has an air of surprise with cartoonish facial features of brilliant blue dots for eyes and arched single stroke eyebrows.

Colours were critical, they represented the feelings of the objects in the painting. An especially good example is “Impression III, Concert”, painted by Kandinsky in 1911, to share the responses of the audience getting used to hearing the atonality of Schoenberg’s music. Audience reaction and participation is also a feature of one painting I particularly liked but failed to make a note of. I think it was called ‘The Duel’ and features wrestling figures in the ring, and the glamorously evening-attired audience.

Worth a visit.

On seeing ‘Kinds of Kindness’

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There comes a point with film directors that critical success, but more importantly, commercial success, means they get allowed to run away with their ideas. It may be that Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ was an example, and equally, it maybe that for Yorgos Lanthimos, it will be seen that ‘Kinds of Kindness’ is a bit of an indulgence.

It may be truer, that my ability to interpret these films is sub-par, and they will go on to achieve long-term iconic status. Multiple films, now revered as ‘great’, struggled to be appreciated by the audience initially and only slowly acquired iconic or cult statuses. I can see how ‘Kinds of Kindness’ might be one of those, but despite leaving the cinema feeling pleased to have seen it, and asking myself many questions about what I had seen, I think this might be a film that detracts from, rather than enhances the reputation of the director of ‘The Favourite’ and ‘Poor Things’. I should add that I loved both.

Many, perhaps all, films benefit from a second viewing, so it might be unfair to rank the films I have seen in the past fortnight, but both ‘Inside Out 2’ and ‘Joyland’ ranked higher with me than Lanthimos’s latest. That’s enough of the carping. What did it make me think and what was likeable about it, so that the audience response might be more enthusiastic than my initial reaction?

The film is really three short films combined, but not obviously common to one another, other than the use of the same actors and the mysterious presence/non-presence of a character called RMF. We come into the wonderful sound and lyrics of Eurythmics and ‘Sweet Dreams’. Dreams appear in each of the three episodes, so any psychoanalytic thinker would be drawn to what Lanthimos is portraying. Reality? Whose reality?

In the first of the triptych, Jesse Plemons (who narrowly shades both Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone for acting honours) plays a man who for reasons we don’t discover, has surrendered his autonomy to a Svengali-like figure, (Dafoe) who is also his occasional lover. He gets handwritten instructions about what to wear, when and what to eat, and when he can make love to his wife, who was selected for him by the Dafoe character.

We latch on to the idea of ‘control’ as a possible theme, and it does reappear in the other two films. But this control is about control and love. It is demonic. Plemons’s character is expected to respond to Dafoe’s every whim to demonstrate his love. It is the inequity of love relationships that is being explored. How dark can it be?

Are we all interested in exercising some form of dominance and power to test the love of our partners? The test that is a test too far, is when Plemons has to crash a car, and likely kill the occupant of the other car. He tries and fails and then refuses to try a second time.

This allows us to explore what happens when you give all of yourself to someone, or even to something (think political ideologies) and a point of no return is reached. What happens next? Without having his life controlled, Plemons disintegrates mentally. It is a destructive outcome and creates all kinds of disturbing reactions, extremes of Klein’s paranoid schizoid position.

He comes to see that his place is taken in the life of his controller, and is torn between trying to save his successor (Stone) and win her place as the primary actor of the controller, effectively usurping the usurper. His final submission is to murder the intended victim of the staged crash, who has survived the Stone attempt on his life, and to meekly and tearfully return to an autonomy-free life, sobbing like the unformed infant he has become once again.

In the second film, he plays a policeman unhinged by the disappearance of his marine biologist wife on a scientific experiment trip. When she is found and comes home to complete her recovery, he becomes obsessed with the idea that she is an imposter. Lanthimos plays gently with ideas of psychotic delusion and breakdown, but we are constantly being asked who is mad? He believes that she has been replaced by a brilliant impersonator (I thought about cloning and AI warnings here) but one small detail gives her away, and that is her feet (too big) and her choice of his favourite music.

As the tension ramps up he starves himself before setting her bizarre tests to cut off her own body parts to feed him. She complies and after a second grizzly exercise when she cuts out her own liver, he is relieved when the ‘real Liz’ comes to the door, leaving the bleeding doppelganger to suffer. Freud’s interest in doppelgangers was the focus of his 1919 paper ‘The Uncanny’, exploring the narcissism rooted in children and ideas of guardian spirits and the terror associated with thinking about death.

The third part film is dominated by Stone. She has left a marriage and joined a mysterious cult. She and Plemons combine to seek out a particular person, but for a long time we cannot be sure of what their motivation is. Curious measurements from nipple to nipple and then triangulating with nipple to navel are taken on prospective candidates. When a mysterious twin approaches them in a diner and addresses Stone’s character by name without having been introduced, we start to sense what might be important.

Stone’s character is struggling to satisfy the requirements of the cult, drawn back to the house she used to share with husband and daughter. She gets persuaded to come and visit and then is drugged and raped. Punished by the cult, she is cast out when a tortuous steam session fails to cleanse her of all her contaminations. Power and autonomy are repeating from the first film and like Plemons in that film, Stone seeks a way to return to the destructive relationship. Freudians might think about our compulsion to repeat.

She finds the person she needs (the twin sister of the girl who approached her in the diner). We learn that the quest is about having power over life and death. More powerful than doctors and veterinarians, this is about the restoration of life. The properties of the gods. Determined to please the cult’s leadership, Stone’s character drugs her target, but in a literally crashing denouement, kills her in a car accident (another nod to film one). She might have the power to restore life in others, but not for herself.

The other thing that might make an impact on the audience is the clever use of music. The joy of Eurythmics, soon gives way to ominous piano chords and atonality and it works very effectively across each episode to set the mood. A couple of days after seeing it, I wonder if Lanthimos is deriding us all for ‘meaningless’ existences and a preference for thoughtlessness, over thinking about abuses of power. It would make sense if he was making an oblique point about modern demos.

Because it dazzles with its imagery and does not attempt to provide a plot that fits a classic character’s journey, ‘Kinds of Kindness’ might leave a viewer with a strong sense of frustration, as well as bemusement, but I think I might get more from a second viewing and it might be that time treats it kindly. It is also possible that I have failed miserably to understand and appreciate it, but as a work of art it is exciting, precisely because it asks a lot of its audience. Worth the ticket price!

On: Seeing ‘La Chimera’

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I recommended Alice Rohrwacher’s, ‘La Chimera’, to a friend this week. He wanted to know if it would pass his wife’s “not slow” threshold, after I suggested it was a take on ‘grief, delusions and dreams’. I answered ‘no’, but films do not have to move at a pace to be appreciated, even loved. Wikipedia even has a page dedicated to ‘slow cinema’ and I think I would describe two of my recent most favourite films, “Past Lives” and “Perfect Days” as slow. So, he will not be seeing it, at least not with his wife for company, but I am still happy to recommend it.

Firstly, ‘chimera’. What does it make one think about? For Arthur, the film’s protagonist, it is a ‘lost’ girlfriend, Beniamina. We are not sure she is dead, he has come to find her and her mother might be in denial, but we come to understand that she probably died and that her sisters have accepted that fact.

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Chimera has multiple meanings according to the Cambridge dictionary, which is apt, given that one meaning is ‘something made up of parts that are very different from one another’. Biologically it would be an organism with cells and tissue from different animals. In Greek mythology, it has a lion’s head, a snake’s tail and a body of a goat. In the case of the film though, I think we are drawn to the meaning that it is ‘a hope or dream that is very unlikely to come true’. In Arthur’s case, the successful search for Beniamina.

I thought a good deal about Freud’s interest in archaeology when watching the film, because Arthur, (Josh O’Connor) is an English archaeologist, but has morphed into a tomb raider, unearthing Etruscan artefacts and selling them to a mysterious dealer and auctioneer, called Spartaco, (Alba Rohrwacher). Freud was fascinated by the layers that one was required to remove to get to the core of the psyche, by what got disturbed and by what was fragile. His rooms at the Freud Museum have the many artefacts he had collected for his rooms in Vienna, which were transferred with him when he escaped in 1938.

One of my favourite Freud papers is “Mourning and Melancholia”, (1917), in which he famously asserts that in “mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself”. Arthur, appears to be trapped by his melancholia. Despite the flirtatious attention of a woman called ‘Italia’ and the attempts by Beniamina’s sisters to find him work, he returns to his criminality and to a resignation with the hopelessness of life. Freud’s distinction for melancholia was that it was invariably the aftermath after the loss of love. (my italics).

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When we meet Arthur, he is travelling ‘home’ by train and we learn that he has been released from jail, with the help of a payment by ‘Spartaco’. He is taciturn and suffering from a persistent cough. When he reaches the increasingly derelict, dilapidated home Beniamina’s mother keeps, he discovers that she has taken on ‘Italia’ as a singing student, but more usefully as a housekeeper and companion. Italia is attempting to hide and care for her two children, who are eventually discovered by the sisters, who force her out.

Italia does not realise how ‘the Englishman’ and his local friends earn their living, but after an exuberant night of Epiphany celebrations it becomes clear to her. She is shocked and threatens to expose them all to the police. She seems to be redemption, and a container for all of Arthur’s guilty feelings about his former girlfriend and about his lifestyle. She almost pulls him out of his melancholic stupor, with some flirtation, but he resists.

Nonetheless, inspired by her, he eventually deprives ‘Spartaco’ of the great prize of the head of Artume, which she wants to reunite with the body (it was severed by Arthur’s companions when being discovered) and to sell. Arthur flings it into the sea. Italia’s name, of course, suggests that she is a representation of the director’s love for Italy, the country. The film is a hymn of affectionate praise, I feel. She seems to say that the country might be impoverished, crime-ridden, but underneath lies beauty, honesty and integrity.

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The film ends with Arthur having transferred his allegiance to another tomb raiding gang. On his first discovery and dig with them, he becomes buried in a tomb but we cannot tell if it is the result of an accident. I think we are intended to think it is by design.

The film has played with the theme of a thread connecting the past and present. A chimera – parts that are very different from one another. One might also apply that to life and death. Arthur, it seems to me, has been working through a living death (melancholia) and now is able to confront death in the face – his and Beniamina’s. Perversely, as he contemplates his fate, his dream appears to have come true.

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When I left my local cinema, I asked my film companion what she thought. She is also a student of psychoanalysis and I have always been impressed by her gift for interpretation. Both of us felt that there was a great deal of ambiguity in the film, which would be consistent with a chimera. We wanted to know more about Arthur’s background in England and that of the elusive and corrupt, ‘Spartaco’.

That might be one of the points, though. Life is not about tidying up loose ends, it is not about neat interpretations and solutions; it is about tolerating not knowing, and about how ‘good’ people can do ‘bad’ things and vice-versa. The contrast between innocence and guilt is exemplified by the way that Italia finds a home in a disused railway station and it becomes a sort of commune with other displaced women and their children.

Arthur spends a night with her, but cannot stay, and I think we are supposed to understand that his guilt is overwhelming and he recognises he cannot and has not properly mourned Beniamina. He leaves innocence and innocents, and resumes his attempt to find an end to the thread. Ultimately the end for everyone is to die.

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I have just re-read this and it seems to me that it sounds rather depressing and intense. Fortunately, the camaraderie of the gang, the optimism of Italia (hoping to be a singer, despite being described as ‘tone-deaf’ by her teacher), the partying of the villagers, the combined protection that the women afford one another, and the gorgeous Italian scenery, all provide the necessary contrast to the darkness of the tombs and of poverty and crime. When Arthur finds what he is seeking, we don’t feel depressed. Slow, maybe, but layer upon layer of meaning and fascination. Recommended!

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You talking to me? True and False Selves.

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The skill of an actor in being able to persuade the audience that they are someone else is one of the things I most admire. And yet, we all act, some more than others. The trope of the comedian making people laugh through his depression, is another way we might think about presenting an altered self. We act to disguise, or often, to protect something of ourselves. I have often prepared myself for social or for professional occasions by assuming a mask. I look back nearly seven years after leaving my City career, and I wonder how much of what I displayed was the “real me”. In other words, how much was character and how much the actor?

When I was a little younger I often found myself commentating, in my head, on my life. I looked at myself from some other perspective and described myself, my actions and my thoughts like a novelist writing about somebody else. I was looking at myself as a character. Not all of this is healthy. I had split something off from myself and I was losing touch with my core.

Professional roles sometimes require an adoption of a false self. It can be unhealthy. The most extreme professional examples are well-known in the literature of organisational or business psychology. Most oft-quoted is that of the air crew staff on long-haul flights. The need to maintain a smiling, reassuring and welcoming face and attitude, in the face of often rude, demeaning, sexual comments and attitudes, from sometimes over-refreshed, occasionally inebriated customers, leads to something called cognitive dissonance, when all the exterior signals have to confound what is happening to someone’s inner thoughts and feelings. It is exhausting and is an accelerator to burnout and breakdown.

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Paediatrician turned psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott wrote a very fine paper about the True Self. I have read it a number of times. At times it can be dense, but at others it seems very clear to me, and it also describes a phenomenon that I recognise in myself. Given that he notes that it is a defence – in more Freudian terms it is a means of protecting the ego – I wanted to understand it better. The False Self is often a high functioning identity and appears to be someone with few issues to observers, but the inability to be ‘whole’ generates huge psychic strain.

The great novelists and dramatists understood this. Seeking one’s identity is a familiar plotline. Oliver Twist is forced to adapt and adopt different personae, but the point of Dickens’s story is that his true self triumphs. Why? Because of love. More interesting are the dilemmas that trouble characters who become slaves to their false selves. I think that is why Mad Men’s ‘Don Draper’ aka Dick Whitman, was so compelling. The true self cannot be lost, however submerged it becomes. In a slightly different storyline, we watch Breaking Bad’s ‘Walter White’ become a slave to his ‘Heisenberg’ self, and it contrasts with Draper, who instantly reinvents himself, whereas White suffers as he shifts selves.

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In the brilliant film ‘American Fiction’, the protagonist, Monk, adopts a writing identity to appeal to the publishing industry. He intends it to parody what is being published and bought, but becomes dizzied by the success of what he produces and then the need to be faithful to his false identity. His false self literally overwhelms his true self. It tortures him. The author, Percival Everett, of the novel on which the film is based, ‘Erasure’, has just written a new novel, based on the world seen through the eyes of Huckleberry Finn’s companion, Jim. It too, is about protecting a True Self.

Jim becomes James, is well-read and familiar with philosophy, and is an extreme example of the phenomenon of ‘code switching’. In reality, code switching is unfunny. It is a conscious defence adopted to protect someone from being attacked for their true identity, invariably linked to ethnicity. It is quite usual for all of us in social or professional fields to want to present our best selves, or a version of our self that we think will be most attractive to the company we are keeping. I do not think of this as deceit, or malign, but a wish to be accommodating and engaging. That comes from a positive intent, whereas code switching is a linguistic attempt to fit in with a dominant culture and avoid negative attention and hostility. One might concede that this is negative selection.

It was listening to Everett on a recent “Private Passions’ interview with Michael Berkeley on Radio 3, and reading a review of his latest book in this month’s LRB, that made me revisit Winnicott, and also to think about how much, or little of my True Self, I reveal. Winnicott begins, by acknowledging that the concept of a true self appears “in certain religions and philosophical systems”. If a false self exists, he asks how it arises, what its function is, why does it often become exaggerated, do people exist without a false self, and if so why, and finally what could be named a True Self.

He compliments Freud’s early work dividing the self into that “powered by the instincts”, which I take to mean the id, and “a part that is turned outwards and is related to the world”, which I think means the ego. In his opening clinical example, he writes about a middle-aged woman who had a very successful False Self. It is not clear what he means here by “successful”, but it made me think about a number of former colleagues and clients during my City career.

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This woman, despite and also because of her “successful False Self”, “had the feeling all her life that she had not started to exist”. When I read that I thought of my internal commentary on this character called Ian Burns. He writes that “she had always been looking for a means of getting to her True Self”. I admire the work of a former JP Morgan employee called Lucy, who left the industry to teach yoga, breath work and to expand her own self-development and now helps other young professionals to escape the cage they have built for themselves, sometimes unknowingly, and to seek their True Self. (At least that is how I interpret the brilliant work she does). Look her up.

Winnicott continues, by noting that he found himself analysing someone who he thought of as her “Caretaker Self”. This was the self that understood the loss of something true and core and had at least taken her to analysis, and slowly became able to hand over “its function to the analyst”. It was the evolution of the case that allowed Winnicott to understand that a False Self is defensive, designed “to hide and protect the True Self”.

Back to my experiences of life in the City, it is important to appreciate that a False Self can often be a high functioning individual. Outward appearances are of a ‘success’. Something however, let us call it a ‘Whole Self’, is lacking and professional and personal relationships begin to fail. Winnicott thinks these are extreme cases – the ‘True Self’ is hidden.

In less extreme examples, the False Self defends the True Self, but the True Self is “acknowledged as a potential and is allowed a secret life”. He describes it as a clinical illness “as an organisation with a positive aim”. Recovery, or perhaps development would be a better word, comes from the False Self finding the conditions to allow the True Self to come into its own. Failure can lead to suicide because it “is the destruction of the Total Self in avoidance of the annihilation of the True Self”.

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Nonetheless, the False Self can sustain and not necessarily seek destruction and annihilation. What does it look like in this apparently healthy manifestation? It is “represented by the whole organisation of the polite and mannered social attitude”, which is what I believe I saw frequently amongst my erstwhile colleagues and clients. Winnicott also highlights how intellectual individuals have a tendency for the “mind to become the location of the False Self”, developing a “dissociation between intellectual activity and psychosomatic existence”. I believe this is relevant to my burnout experience in 2012.

When I look back to the self I was at the time, I now believe that my error that precipitated my career crisis was a form of self-sabotage initiated by my unconscious. I was enjoying a period of professional success and status, but in his paper Winnicott refers to “the very real distress of the individual concerned, who feels ‘phoney’ the more he or she is successful”. Such individuals “destroy themselves in one way or another, instead of fulfilling promise…”

So, where does the False Self come from? What is it defending? Right at the beginning of life, Winnicott refers to an “unintegrated” infant, yet to distinguish between itself and an Object, and so working with what he calls the “environment mother”. Anything, gestures that the infant makes ‘spontaneously’, are the True Self, but if the mother fails to meet the omnipotence of the infant repeatedly, the infant can only note the substitution of the mother’s gesture and comply with it. This is the foundation of a False Self.

Ask yourself if you have a tendency towards being compliant? “The True Self does not become a living reality except as a result of the mother’s repeated success in meeting the infant’s spontaneous gesture or sensory hallucination.” Instead, the infant builds a set of false relationships “so that the child may grow to be just like mother, nurse, aunt, brother, or whoever at the time dominates the scene”. The False Self’s compliance with environmental demands hides the True Self. Compliance often develops into skilled imitation.

A True Self allows for reality, but the “existence of a False Self results in feeling unreal or a sense of futility”. When does it appear? “The True Self appears as soon as there is any mental organisation of the individual at all, and it means little more than the summation of sensori-motor aliveness”. He cites an example of a woman who felt that the first fifty years of her life had been “wasted” and sought a sense of “aliveness”. She was not in touch with her core, her essence. When I used to commentate on myself, I did not know what I was doing, but now I think that I might have been observing something that was not truly alive.

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Winnicott believed there were degrees of False Self application, from “the healthy, polite aspect of the self” to the more damaged and damaging, “truly split-off compliant False Self”. It is this that is mistaken for the “whole child”, or the ‘real’ adult. He thought that it led to “a poverty of cultural living”, which leads to a lack of appreciation of a cultural life and instead, “extreme restlessness, and inability to concentrate”.

In the final analysis, one asks of both oneself and of others “Who are you?” The greatest privilege is being seen, and accepted for who we are. It’s love – the sort that a parent has for a child – and what an adult seeks in a partner. Showing our true selves means being vulnerable like the neonate, it means accepting dependence, and it is of course, very uncomfortable, which is why there is a psychic need to defend it from any sort of attack or what Winnicott called “impingement”.

The fictional characters I have highlighted all find themselves becoming detached from the person they believe themselves to be. They also feel that revealing their True Self would have awful consequences. I understand the point about annihilation and suicide that Winnicott made. Not being a “phoney” is much more difficult than it can seem. For couples, when one partner has not been able to be honest and fears revealing a whole self, it leads to despair and a sad void where something is sensed but cannot be discussed or understood. My own analysis is, to reference another psychoanalyst, Wilfried Bion, introducing me to myself and recognising the years of defensive self-deception.

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What if I am wrong?

A few things came together for me in the past few days which made me think about what I thought; why I sometimes choose not to express my thoughts; why I sometimes feel sensitive and defensive about what I think; what do I fear will happen if I am truly open and candid, and how it relates to who I am, that is, my sense of identity, what is my ‘self’?

I think it begins very early. We are brought up to distinguish between ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ and we are rewarded for being right. Sometimes if we are wrong, or do something wrong, we are punished. So, the fear of getting something wrong, of being ‘in the wrong’, develops from infancy.

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Two books I have been reading, and two conversations recently, as well as some work in my analysis all seemed to come together. The conversations began on Sunday. The previous day I had seen the ‘Women in Revolt’ exhibition, with my daughter, at the Tate. I liked it. It stirred up some feelings and memories when I looked at the photographs of the women supporting the miners, or the Greenham Common protests, and the snaps from various punk concerts and venues. I recalled that it tended to produce some contemptuous harrumphing in my home when it came on the early evening news.

I liked the exhibition, not least because it made me get in touch with a period of adolescence, but also for reminding me of a time of forming political and social views. Back then, with the confidence of youth, perhaps that should be ‘arrogance of youth’, I had little doubt that my opinions were ‘right’; they also tended to be ‘Right’. I did not expect to have to defend them, but was sure that I could.

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My Sunday conversation was with one of my fellow training candidates, who told me she had seen it too, and I was lazily assuming that she would have enjoyed it, but I was taken aback by the vehemence of her response. To be fair, it was not the content that she objected to, but the way the exhibition had been curated, but I was surprised. Not that it was a difficult conversation and certainly not uncomfortable, which is what this piece is really about.

A couple of days later I was with two Jewish colleagues and friends. The responses to Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards has garnered a great deal of attention, much of it unfavourable, and was one moment that had started me down this road of thinking about my thoughts, and especially, my willingness to express them. Deep down, am I rather cowardly? Or just conflict-avoidant, or more generously, thoughtfully trying not to offend? I did not think it was really about not offending, it was about avoiding a Glazer-outcome of being attacked.

These two gentlemen comprised an Israeli, who has lived here for a handful of years and did his three years of military service when in Israel. The other, might be characterised as a representative of the diaspora. Good English public school education, and a mixed Arab and European background. They started to talk about Gaza, then about Israel, the West Bank, many of the historic events post-1948, what ‘self-defence’ meant, colonisation, rights, entitlement. I listened intently and with fascination.

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What was striking was that though they disagreed, and the passion in their responses, was the fact that they kept talking. I thought at one point that one of them might get up and walk away. I think about how I might have responded. In Stephen Frosh’s book “Anti-Semitism and Racism”, he writes about Jewish culture and a particular capacity for debate, discourse, dialogue. He suggests that the Torah is riddled with ambiguity, precisely so that it generates debate. The importance of arguing over points of history, of law, is fundamental to co-existence.

We were interrupted by someone wanting the room we had been in, and so we walked on. Despite the contra-opinions and the vehemence with which they had been expressed, we did not part, but all went and had a cup of tea together. It was only then that I joined the conversation. I said how I admired their determination to go on talking. That things were not reduced to personal insults and antipathies. I explained that since the Hamas atrocity of October 7, I have tried very hard to read as much as possible, to educate myself about the politics and the history of the region. As well as Frosh, I have read Jacqueline Rose, Susan Neiman, and Adam Schatz and I feel that I have educated myself sufficiently to be able to express an opinion. However, I had not wanted to. Why?

I think it was because I did not want to be seen by either of my colleagues to be taking sides, one against the other. So, it was not about the subject of the debate, it was about my fear of being aligned, and more unimpressively, the thought that it might lead to me being attacked. Perhaps I thought that Jewish voices have priority over mine in this debate, but more likely it was my anxiety of drawing attention to myself, to my opinions, and of fearing that if I was attacked, that I was not sufficiently well-armed, by intellect and associations, to fight back.

It comes up in my analysis. I find ‘free associating’ quite difficult. What gets in the way of “saying whatever comes to mind” is my inner authority figure, censoring and policing what I have to say. What do I fear? What can I say? Words have power. With misuse, they become weaponry. What do I avoid? Scorn, attacks, contempt, ostracisation, perhaps.  Some of my friends tease me about my ‘wokery’, but that does not feel threatening. What I think I fear, when I take care over choosing what I want to share, is to avoid being wounded.

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I attended a brilliant meeting recently with Alessandra Lemma, reading a paper to our psychoanalytic association’s Scientific Committee. It was about use of photographic images in therapy. Much of her work in the past couple of decades has been with transgender youths, and she was talking about the “natal body” and what photographic images do to, and for, the psyches of young people working through the pain of thinking that they might have been born into the “wrong body”. I thought about her, when she had said that writing about her experiences, and doing the work she has done, required the armour to deal with the sure knowledge that she would be vilified, “from all sides”.

I sometimes discuss the various trans debates with my children. One has a very developed sense of thinking around these issues, two tend to regard their sibling as “attention seeking” and perhaps with a misdirected focus on what they think are more important issues. Lemma, full of poise and demonstrating empathy, analysis and intellect gave a superb example of expressing and holding views that are likely to lead to attacks. She is so much more advanced down the road I am thinking about – candour, empathy, honesty, expression. I admired her a great deal.

I think this is one of the reasons that I love theatre and cinema so much. I can let artists speak for me and then decide whether I appreciate or share their sentiments. Seeing plays like ‘Grenfell’, or ‘For Black Boys who have considered Suicide when the Hue gets too Heavy‘, last year, helped me shape my thinking, about minorities, injustices and oppression. Recently, watching ‘Nye’ helped me think about the importance and significance of the welfare state and the NHS in a way I would once have let go by. The revival of ‘far-right’ movements and attitudes is brilliantly captured in the subversive ‘Nachtland’, or the imaginative ‘‘Merchant of Venice, 1936‘ and ‘Cable Street’. Thinking about mistreatment of Jews, and then about Jewish oppression, and being able to form robust views that I could share with men like my two colleagues, is what I am trying to consider.

Religion was one of those topics I was discouraged from opining about when I was younger. In truth I learned little and would have been hard-pressed to debate. Apart from the murderous clashes of the extremists who claim to represent their faiths, most religious fervour and debate is more muted these days and in many people, like me, it arouses little by way of emotion. However, I am reading Iain McGilchrist’s “Master and His Emissary” at the moment, and concurrently, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters from Prison”, and on the same day found myself reading about Luther, Lutherans, Protestantism, and the Reformation.

Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents during his incarceration in 1943 on Reformation Day. He mused upon Luther’s doubts about the value of his work toward the end of his life and wrote “He wanted a real unity of the Church and the West – that is, of the Christian peoples, and the consequence was the disintegration of the Church and of Europe; he wanted ‘freedom of the Christian man’, and the consequence was indifference and licentiousness; he wanted the establishment of a genuine secular social order free from clerical privilege, and the result was insurrection, the Peasants’ War, and soon afterwards the gradual dissolution of all real cohesion and order in society.”

McGilchrist, who develops his left hemisphere overwhelming its ‘master’, the right hemisphere, hypothesis, felt that there was a shift away from metaphor and right hemisphere dominance at the time of the Reformation, and observed that though Luther was a tolerant and conservative figure with a concern for authenticity, and a return to experience, he was a “tragic figure” because his attitude to images in worship and in churches themselves, whilst “balanced and reasonable”, unleashed “forces of destruction that were out of his control, forces which set about destroying the very things he valued, forces against which he inveighed finally without effect”. He catalysed a period of fanaticism which led Erasmus to note about the crowds, “I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an evil spirit”.

On being misunderstood, or misinterpreted, wilfully or otherwise, McGilchrist writes this about Luther, he decried “the emptiness that results when the outer and inner worlds are divorced. But his followers took it to mean that the outer world was itself empty, and therefore authenticity lay in the inner world alone”. They took to decapitating statues. I found myself thinking about the Colston statue , here in the UK, and especially, of the ‘Christian Right’ in the US, when reading Erasmus’s observation.

One last long quote from McGilchrist, because it made sense to me, and because his academic breadth and depth in his extraordinary book requires he gets all the promotion I can muster:

“There are several ways in which the Reformation anticipated the hermetic self-reflexivity of post-modernism, perfectly expressed in the infinite regress of self-referral within some of the visual images which Koerner examines (pictures which portray the setting in which the picture stands, and contain therefore the picture itself, itself containing a further depiction of the setting, containing an ever smaller version of the picture, etc.) One of Cranach’s masterpieces, discussed by Koerner, is in its self-referentiality the perfect expression of left hemisphere emptiness, and a precursor of post-modernism. There is no longer anything to point to beyond, nothing Other, so it points pointlessly to itself. Rather paradoxically for a movement that began as a revolt against apparently empty structures, it is in fact the structures, not the content, of religion, that come into focus as the content. But such is the fate of those who insist on ‘either/or’, rather than the wisdom of semi-transparency”

This brings me back to my feelings. Why do I feel the need to censor what I say? I think it goes back to the fear of being ‘wrong’, but maybe the thing is about a deeper search for ‘the truth’. I think about so many issues where I feel wary of sharing my opinion, one for risking offence, but two, for fear of having my sense of being right destroyed by someone else. I realise in my vanity I fear ‘losing the argument’.

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More McGilchrist, “Whereas for the Enlightenment, and for the workings of the logical left hemisphere, opposites result in a battle which must be won by ‘The Truth’, for the Romantics, and for the right hemisphere, it is the coming together of opposites into a fruitful union that forms the basis not only of everything we find beautiful, but of truth itself”. Perhaps, I am mentally structured as a Romantic?

Opening a conversation with “I am not convinced I am right about this, and I look forward to hearing the contra views, but this is how things have formed in my mind thus far” – thereby inviting opinion, but not setting up something adversarial, is a possible way to approach this. Seeking synthesis. A desire to be educated. A way of overcoming a fear of being ignorant, or worse bigoted, and thoughtless. I want to be better at this. I recall my polarised thinking in 2016, regarding Brexit, and I regret not thinking harder about why anyone might have a different view to mine. I was amongst the worst of Remainers for being dismissive and patronising towards Leavers.

I recall the thought that to understand something means to be able to explain it, to teach it to another, and I sense that my reluctance on many issues is that I am not confident that I could explain or teach them to another. I would then be exposed for having built an idea-set that, in truth, I could not defend. But the issue is my need to defend. Perhaps if I saw my opinions less as the vulnerable castle, and more as an open space where listening better to alternative views would allow something better to be built in common…or is that rather idealistic and too hopeful?

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Anyway, what if I am wrong? The sun will rise again…

On: The charms of the reunion

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Last week I attended a reunion. The link was a broking firm from the 1990s. I joined it right at the end of the decade and had barely located the office canteen and loos before it was being sold to a large US banking conglomerate. I had joined for something creative, entrepreneurial and innovative, and was becoming part of an industry behemoth.

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When the deal was announced many of my then colleagues looked disconsolate and disappointed. I had to excuse myself and go for a walk because I felt elated. I had felt within days of joining that it was punching above its weight and could not sustain a competitive place in the evolving investment banking universe. I might be fearful of making a place for myself in this large US, faceless new employment home, but I felt I had a better chance of meeting my professional and personal goals as part of the bigger organisation.

Most of my colleagues became part of the ‘merged’ new entity, and London developed along the lines of the ‘reverse takeover’. The management and drive of the US business largely came from within the organisation I had joined, and I was one of the lucky ones whose career developed and whose pay increased.

This is not about that particular firm, though. Or those colleagues, although reunions are about people; especially about how they have changed and how they have not changed. The following morning the WhatsApp on my phone was showered with messages from attendees, thanking the organisers, but often commenting on how good it was to see so many people, and to be reminded of what fine people they were. It was almost as uplifting as Tracy and Joni at the Grammys.

My previous experience of reunions, which I define as numbers of attendees at least in the tens, was restricted to the players of my Witham Town footballing days and a school event. Why do we go to reunions? Why do reunions (need to) happen? If I think about the football gang, I think there was something about all of us, a good ten or fifteen years since our playing days, of wanting to hold on to some of our youthful vitality, as well as to enjoy one another’s company.

School reunions are quite different. Then, I think attendance is about a need to detach from something rather than re-attach. We want to confirm we have left behind our playground selves and our immaturity and naivety.  Inevitably, we discover that is not really the case. I think there may also be a less edifying need to measure oneself against the school peers. Has one enjoyed a change in social status, or converted limited classroom prowess into post-school intellectual or material gains? And, critically, how does that compare with the school group?

For events like last week’s, it is much subtler. There is an interest in comparison with the group; who has prospered, who has not. Who has fulfilled the potential one saw at the time; whose peacockery has been exposed for what it was. However, I think it is also a need to explore something that might have been left behind. If the workplace also provided friendships, then those flourished outside of the office and will have continued. Attending a reunion is not about seeing genuine friends, that can be done easily and frequently. It is about re-engaging with people one liked professionally, but with whom did not develop deeper friendships. In other words, the friendships that might have been, the undeveloped and under-developed.

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What else do we want from a reunion? A reminder that one is part of something, still, and a sense of value and worth in the company one used to keep. I think it is inevitable that the unsociable games of measurement go on, but with so much professional competition behind us, it was a pleasure to share in anybody’s successful lives and careers, after leaving the firm.

Does anything unexpected happen at a reunion? And, is that one of the reasons to go? My experience of the school event was that whatever people had become, and wherever they had moved to live, that the same small groups, cliques, senses of superiority and inferiority that featured in the playground and the classroom, reasserted themselves. One of the rules is that when you see the cast list, you mentally think about people best avoided or limited to thin slices of time, and start to build expectations of those whose time, presence and conversation you expect to most enjoy.

Inevitably you are barely over the threshold and are greeted by someone on your ‘prefer to avoid’ list and minutes later, talking to a couple of people one likes, suffer the group being broken up by the intrusion of another ‘prefer to avoid’! You reach the bar and are shoulder to shoulder with someone you had hoped not to see, but who greets you like a long-lost pal. Or was that just me?

The unexpected comes when the passage of time and the change of venue combine to allow someone you thought you knew, or knew that you knew very little about, comes and tells you as much about what has happened to them personally, as about professionally, in the intervening years. That is a real pleasure. I worked alongside one man, an insightful analyst and a warm personality who clients liked, and I thought I knew him well. I recall us going to a ‘Cast’ concert in Camden and having long debates about football.

Last week he told me about a decade of his private research into ‘consciousness’ and a burgeoning enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s plays. He shared his own writing ambitions. We had a conversation that was quite unexpected and one of the thrills of my evening.

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The reach and appeal of social media, in this case mainly LinkedIn, meant that career developments for each of us, were often not a great surprise. There were authors, CEOs, CIOs, life coaches, entrepreneurs. For me, my change of direction seems to have been widely noticed, and I think that there is a pull to anyone who works with, and might have an understanding of the human mind.

People invariably ask if you are analysing them, but after some slightly uncomfortable laughter, then often tell you intimate details of how they were raised, or the state of their marriages, drawn moth to flame-like, to see if they might be a good subject for analysis. It does not come from a narcissistic place, but from a vulnerable, open, often sensitive place.

In the football gathering, that connection and re-connection manifested in the endless repetition of the dressing room ‘banter’. Tired out jokes and small humiliations that reminded everyone of the unspoken hierarchies, even in a group where the team functioned well precisely because we had different skills, styles and attributes to bring to a combined effort. My experience, again though, was of slotting into the place and the role that I had filled all those years ago – still the younger guy, not from the town but a commuter, whose football position, on the wing, occasionally exciting but not the most influential, reflected my position in the dressing room. Fringe, useful, but not very influential. Unless you give him the ball. In the broking reunion, the ball was the personal stories.

What is unsurprising at reunions? School or work, based on my very limited sampling, the girls you once fancied are still the ones you most want to be with. As for male company, the issue is about ageing and changing. In any relationship, ageing and changing does not have to be mutual for a relationship to change, but change happens. Like my consciousness conversation. I think both of us had changed and found the new direction and level of our exchanges welcome, but our relationship would have been altered by just the one of us having found time to consider the world anew.

One other reunion needs considering. On the day of the event which I attended, a good friend called me to give me the sad news of the death of one of our contemporaries. We had all worked together in the early 1980s. The death was unexpected. Funerals are reunions too, albeit with a very different purpose. We attend not just to “show our respects” but to have a reunion with the mourners, many of whom we know well. We are also there to consider the fact that we will not be enjoying a reunion with the mourned. He or she has moved beyond our reach. What the funeral does, though, is to remind us to get as much pleasure as we can from the living. Reunions are part of that.

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In the room last week, were three people who had interviewed me, after we had moved on from working together. One, gave me a job, and rebuilt my then-damaged confidence. Another, who was at the most prestigious and elite US investment bank, accepted my decision not to pursue a second round of interviews. The third, decided not to hire me. A fourth man was one of the people I most admired when we all worked together in 1999. He went on to become a player in the hedge fund world and a potential, and often quite challenging, client. In a way, therefore, he too interviewed me.

I wondered about what would come up between each of these very personal reunions for me. Perhaps, that is the point of reunions and what we are drawn to, people come around again. Interestingly, the James Redfield book ‘Celestine Prophecy’ came up in conversations at the event, and my recollection of it, is one key message that whenever we meet someone, it is for a reason. We may not recognise it, but they will simply reappear at a later date, and once again, if necessary. Seeing everyone as potentially significant is quite uplifting and means that reunions are not, after all, rooted in the experiences of the past, but also give some direction to futures.

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On: Women and the body; Marina, sisterhood and a play. Something going on?

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I spent Saturday evening at the National’s Dorfman Theatre watching Infinite Life. It was sold out. The play is a bit of a curiosity in that it embraces very little action and is about pain. Hot ticket? If so, why? Although there is a male cast member, and he is in pain, the focus is the assorted pains suffered by five women, who are attending a fasting clinic in hope of relief.

The play throws up a number of intriguing thoughts as the lack of action encourages the women, mostly, and occasionally the man, to swap broken bits of conversation as they lie on sun loungers and contemplate their circumstances. It did occur to me that part of the point of the pay was to mock men. I wondered if it was asking if we understood pain. Obviously, none of us undergoes childbirth, but the man thinks his pain is more intense and worse than anything any woman has suffered.

Writing about women and their bodies, as someone perfectly unqualified and unable to share their experiences, is probably partly what the play despairs of in men, and yet, here I am, prompted and perhaps provoked by it. The reason it made me need to get some thoughts on paper, was I wonder if there is a ‘something going on’, which might be a new chapter in feminist history and yet another wail of despair at the incomprehension and lack of understanding of males. Men, like me, basically.

In 1925, Freud was honest enough to write that the sexual life of women “is still veiled in impenetrable obscurity” and in 1926 he made his (in)famous comment that “the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology”. These were the sorts of feelings I noticed as I watched. I asked a close female friend about her thoughts on my feelings and she laughed, and told me about the sorts of exchanges she and her girlfriends had about male ignorance of female physicality, sexuality and inner worlds. Apparently their coffee mornings and book clubs are wild!

When protest and cultural change gets underway, and leaves an impact, it is most often expressed through the arts. Artists can often, usually in a somewhat coded, interpretive way, open up things that need discussing, reconsidering, appraising and reappraising. Examples such as Russian composers, writers and painters subtly undermining the State message in the Stalin era, or something much less subtle, but as important, such as Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam.

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As Nina sang,

Can’t you see it? 
Can’t you feel it? 
It’s all in the air. 
I can’t stand the pressure much longer. 
Somebody say a prayer.

What I wondered, as I watched Annie Baker’s play, was if there was a cultural message gathering momentum, and that perhaps it was linked to Roe v Wade in the US, and to the headscarves protests by the very brave Iranian women. In the US, the GOP might have found a policy designed to consign itself to electoral defeat. Going after women’s right to choose; imposing a male control over those bodies, not understanding female physical and psychical pains, is going to remind MAGA watchers, that actually America was not that great not so long ago in the past.  

I associated the Baker play with a film I saw recently, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, and with the extraordinary Serbian, Marina Abramovic’s exhibition at the RA currently, which looks at pain in a way that cries out for understanding, and that it is not understood, not least her ability to inflict pain on herself as part of her performance art. It is an astonishing exhibition but is a very unsettling experience.

In Baker’s play, the more the characters reveal their infirmities, the more their characters become known to us. I thought of the famous text by van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score” and Rothschild’s “The Body Remembers”. Freud was clear that the mind and body are one, and I have a strong conviction that the physical discomforts we suffer are invariably manifestations of unrelieved mental, psychic pains. They are unresolved tensions, traumas and they have been so successfully repressed, that in the end the only way they get to be expressed is somatically.

Infinite Life goes on to explore the link between pain and that of desire. We know some people find pain to be exciting as part of the sexual experimentation, but also that pain inhibits desire, rather than diminishes it. Part of Baker’s message, I felt, was that I as a man, just could not quantify what pain a woman could tolerate, but also how much she might desire a man. Women’s sexual agency gets examined when the main character thinks she could “fuck the pain away”.

The pain is all too present in Anna Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood. An Estonian/Icelandic film it examines what happens as a number of mainly middle-aged women come together to share sauna and icy dips in the forest. As the steam cleanses their bodies, the women cleanse their minds by sharing experiences of being raped, assaulted, giving birth, or not being able to give birth. Everything, is contained by the sisterhood. How could men understand?

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What else is happening that made me think that women are finding new ways to shout out at tin-eared men, to listen to them, to understand them better? One was a piece in the Guardian by Sonia Sodha, who was reviewing an exhibition of feminist activism. Her opening is not about Afghanistan or Iran, or right-wing US politicians, but Argentina’s newly elected president who describes women in favour of abortion rights as “brainwashed by a homicidal policy”. UN data that she quotes suggests that one in five girls around the world is married before they turn 18, and that 250 million per year suffer a physical and/or sexual assault from an intimate partner. I had to re-read the “per year”.

I am not sure why I am surprised. In the work that I now do; I am already all too familiar with women dealing with the outcomes of their trauma from sexual predation, often at very early years. It manifests itself in deep rooted shame, in an inability to trust, a theft of any possible pleasure in sexual encounters and frankly, a pain, the like of which is very difficult for me as a male  therapist to properly comprehend, never mind share.

Sodha’s exhibition review is for “Women in Revolt!” – feminist art and activism 1970-90 at Tate Britain. Fifty years ago, ‘second wave feminists’ wanted equal pay, free contraception and abortion, wages for housework, and 24-hour nurseries, so that shift workers were not marginalised. What is it that we boys think will fall apart if we do not accede to these demands? How can we not understand our relative privilege? When I look at the world my daughters are being offered, am I happy with their lot? It is because of the modesty of the progress made since the 1970s that I think there might be some signs of movements amongst the artistic communities. Our minds are going to be prodded and provoked, again.

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When it comes to issues of gender, sexuality and empowerment, it seems inevitable these days, that the issue of transsexuals will come up. What I rarely see covered by the media is the pain that these people are suffering in order to be the person they believe they need to become. In my last role in banking, one of our colleagues transitioned to becoming a woman. I cannot begin to imagine quite what that must have been like, a tormented inner world, a hostile outer world, and the constant threat of othering. When she returned to work, she hosted a drinks party of celebration in one of the Canary Wharf bars. It was one of the most joyous occasions I can recall, and I think joy is often a response to despair. She had joy to share, only because of the despair she had known.

A couple of final thoughts. Gender-blind casting in theatre is hardly new, given the fact that boys had to play women’s parts in Shakespeare’s era, but now we are seeing more women playing roles written with men in mind. A week ago, I saw Tracy-Ann Oberman’s extraordinary version of Merchant of Venice, in which she took on the role of Shylock. It made the betrayal of Jessica, her daughter, seem even more painful than betraying a father. Shylock is proud, then broken, by a horribly aggressive anti-semite, Portia, but what Oberman does best is to show us pain.

Finally, one of modern culture’s exemplars of nuanced relationships, and of women managing and masking pain is Polly, in Peaky Blinders, played exquisitely by the late Helen McCrory. She is impulsive and suffers depression, cursed by a ‘second sight’ attributed to her gypsy heritage. A jealous neighbour tore her own family from her, and so she is the great matriarch, but to other people’s offspring. Her losses, her pains, are played out in every episode in which she appears, and I wonder if she was a beginning-part, of a cry from women to be seen and heard. She becomes, for all her tough defiance, a rape victim, and so shame settles on her pain, a salt rubbed into very open wounds.

I am not sure where I wanted to go with this, but I felt something strong about my identity and my sex, when I saw the play, and it helped me make these other links with recent cultural offers. I am sure that I should be dismissed for having a patronising, patriarchal view of how it might be to be a woman, but, to my daughters, I am trying to understand. This all might have begun a few years ago; I recall watching and wincing at Michaela Cole’s “I May Destroy You”, but in perhaps typical male response, I did not quite see and hear.