Has lockdown made you angry? Or angrier?

Back in the early days of lockdown, as March became April, the first articles appeared about how it might change our world. Initial thoughts were inspiring, considered and considerate. We were going to be more aware of the environment. We were going to value the utility of workers. We were going to pay some in the ‘front-line’; not merely clap for them. We were going to appreciate those doing the dirtiest labour, and be especially grateful if they had come to these shores, to escape from a war-torn home or an economic collapse. We were going to slow down, both activities and thoughts. We were going to smell the coffee and a lot else besides.

As the six-month mark approaches of a world adjusted to the impact of coronavirus, it seems to me to be a good time to take an emotional temperature check. For many, this has been a difficult time. Personal liberties have been affected. Some have been forced into unwelcome shared living arrangements. Others have been forced to deal with an imposed solitude. Still more of us, tragically, are grieving. Grief comes to us all and there is no universal approach to dealing with its impact, but forced into funeral non-attendance, and in many cases, unable to say final goodbyes, means the collective weight of this nation’s grieving seems heavier than usual, notwithstanding the sinister terminology of ‘excess deaths’.

Based on my far from large sampling, which is definitely not widely representative and appropriate for extrapolations, I sense that all that communal goodwill which seemed to be a feature of early lockdown, has become a bubbling fresh anger. An international, widespread anger. Potentially, a very disturbing anger. It may be that being at home, often alone, for longer means more time spent in social media echo-chambers, which skews moods and temperament. Nonetheless, I have been reminded that Gogol claimed that without anger ‘not much can be said,’ because ‘only in anger is the truth uttered.’

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In a slightly different context, Malcolm Bull once wrote these words in a LRB article, “Over the past decade it has become commonplace to claim that the world is divided between the passionless few in whose interests it is run and an angry multitude whose interests are ignored.” The description “angry multitude” is what has been on my mind.

I recently read about how Sweden is becoming prey to angry right wing political movements. Sweden is generally perceived as liberal and consensus supporting. It has adopted a policy to the virus that is libertarian and akin to ‘herd immunity’ that most nations have eschewed. Generally personal liberties are respected. So why all the anger? A couple of Fridays ago, a large riot broke out in Malmo after apparent far-right sympathisers burned a Koran in an immigrant suburb. Violence, race inspired or otherwise, has already been called Sweden’s “second pandemic”.

Sweden has witnessed over 200 shootings and 24 deaths as the collateral damage of this collective angry psyche. In what may be the very appropriately named Gothenburg suburb, Angered, which has a large immigrant population, criminal gangs now control people movement thanks to their own roadblocks. Interior Minister, Mikael Damberg commented “it’s not really economics or taxes that are the main sources of conflict in Swedish politics – values, identity, crime that is where the debate is”.

In the US of course, it is government strategy to fuel identity differences. We need reminding that all humans share 99% of genes and that only 1% of our genes impact our individual differences. The US President blithely talked about “great patriots” when people attacked the BLM protest rallies held after the luckless black man, Jacob Blake, was shot seven times as he attempted to get into his own car.

I am not going to identify with Trumpian patriots or BLM activists but to try to understand the intensity of the anger. Sure, group processes, as any psychologist will tell you, cause more extremes of behaviour and sentiment than any individual would feel, as individuals ‘group identify’, but where does this deep-seated and now, murderous antipathy come from? Yes, there is manipulation by political leaders for their own ends but the underlying anger and hatred is appalling, or intriguing, depending on your view. Anger is contagious. One wonders at how the participants in the rallies will react when their activity, much captured by cameras, is played back to them.

The supporters of ‘law and order’ might argue that protests inflame and incite. Alas, few people who have read any history cannot have failed to note that protesters of whichever hue, generally have history shine a favourable light upon them. And importantly, to protest requires huge courage, often putting bodies at risk of physical harm. It is not just lockdown UK that I sense has become angrier. Far more profound anger and resentment is behind most of the collective mood in Belarus and in Hong Kong.

In the UK, I watch Anti-vaccers and Anti-maskers etc. making their own protests. The “if you are not with us, you are against us” attitude that affects Extinction Rebellion intrigues me. The Times has (unhelpfully?) published a Brazilian study that suggests that people inclined to be anti-mask and anti-vaccine are sociopaths, and have the dark trinity of personality traits including narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Whatever position one takes on these issues, we should still be happy to think Voltaire-like, and disagree, but defend the right to express contra-opinion.

As I thought about whether collective anger is rising, which often leads to poor outcomes, I started to think more about what anger is and whether it was a bad thing. I am getting more interested in it. I have changed my view about the need for it to be expressed. Venting anger often allows it to subside. In many cases, it disappears. The short period of inflammation is doused by exposure, rather than given fresh oxygen. Is it a clinical syndrome, rather than an emotion linked to mental disorders? My dictionary says it is “hot displeasure, often involving a desire for retaliation”. Angrier is to be “excited with anger, to be inflamed”.

Aristotle defined it as “a desire, accompanied by pain, for apparent revenge in response to an apparent insult to oneself or one’s own from persons who ought not to insult one.” Do revenge and retaliation have a legitimate role in society or one’s personal life? Socrates insists that we should never return wrong for wrong, injury for injury. Socrates was not commanding his followers to turn the other cheek, but a thinker reminding his friend Crito of the conclusion of many arguments they had shared: the urge to hit back is demeaning and harmful to anyone who succumbs to it.

Seneca took the view (‘De Ira’ or ‘On Anger’) that anger is the only emotion that can, occasionally, impact a whole nation. ‘No entire people has ever burned with love for a woman, no whole state has set its hope on money or gain; ambition seizes individuals one by one; only fury plagues whole communities at once.’ He had in mind vengeance against an enemy. I wonder if the virus has become our unseen enemy and anger, which we recognise is a feeling that rises within us, is bubbling up. Our collective psyche is affected; we sense a change in us, a shortness of temper, an irritability.

I read about a young waitress who had returned to work and was working intensively thanks to the Chancellor’s ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme. She reflected, not on being able to earn some money, or on the pleasure of working with customers again, but on how a customer had been rude to her and complained about the speed of service. What possesses a man, alas it was a man, to be rude to a staff member rather than be grateful that the establishment was open, and happy that it was full enough for him to have to wait a little to be served?

As part of my psychotherapy work, I shall be involved in an Infant Observation seminar group. I will think about anger as expression in a neonate and infant. I think of it as innate rather than learned, so it has a purpose. We need something like anger as part of our ‘fight or flight’ stimuli. When I was growing up, children were expected to be much more ‘seen and not heard’. Tantrums were unwelcome. Anger and frustration, however clumsily and inarticulately expressed was a ‘bad thing’ and ‘bad behaviour’ and usually invited a punishment. In other words, a sanction on top of a punishment, as the original cause of the anger was still not resolved.

When I was a parent I expected my children to be ‘well behaved’ and in a post-smacking world, used whatever means I could to coerce them into behaving. I now realise that much of what drove my approach was about the desire to have other adults compliment my wife and I on our good parenting, rather than paying attention to my children’s own needs. Anger is a protest and, especially for the young, is about not being listened to. Not being heard is a key anger-catalyst, as I imagine most racial minorities, physically or mentally disabled people and non-heterosexual beings might agree. I did not read many parenting books, perhaps I should have done, but I wonder how many lead with the need to listen to your child.

If a child is not heard, they learn to internalise anger – the “what’s the point?” attitude to life, which affects all their adult relationships. It is likely to lead to passive-aggressive behaviour to “get back” at people, without telling them why, or being hostile and critical openly. Even when anger seems like an instantaneous, knee-jerk reaction to provocation, there’s always some other feeling that gave rise to it. And this particular feeling is precisely what the anger has contrived to camouflage. In other words, it is reactive, and often it is reacting to fear.

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I learned a little about the physiological effect of anger. One of the hormones the brain secretes during anger arousal is norepinephrine, experienced by the organism as an analgesic. So, we numb ourselves when confronted by the threat of physical or psychological pain. This may partly explain why our decision making is often so poor when we are angered. It seems that when we cannot comfort ourselves through self-validation, we solve by attempting to invalidate others.

Anger often makes us feel powerful, thanks to the production of epinephrine, also known as adrenaline. It raises our cardiac output and raises blood glucose levels. This helps us to address our deepest doubts about ourselves. It is little wonder that it can end up controlling us. The psychoanalytic and Freudian point of view saw that anger was frequently turned inward. Freud thought that was what depression really was, but he was less forthcoming about the sources of anger. However, he thought that aggression was an inbuilt drive. He referred to it as Thanatos, sometimes called the ‘death instinct’. It can be turned inwards, and leads in extremis to suicide, or outward to repel something that is perceived as a threat to our self.

In Jung’s “The Phenomenology of the Self” he highlighted “the shadow”, which is the unknown and dark side of one’s personality. This part of ourselves is instinctive, irrational and primitive. Its impulses are lust, power, greed, envy, rage and of course, anger. He believed that psychological health was what was achieved when one could recognize and integrate the shadow aspect of our self. In other words, living with anger, understanding it has a value, but not being subject to it, is one outcome of individuation, on the road to self-actualisation, which is the process of being our best self. Anger is often the catalyst for great deeds. As any sportsman or woman would highlight, the “I’ll show you” response to a non-selection, or a journalist’s criticism, can often be very powerfully used as a positive motivator.

So, I started this sensing that we are in an angrier place, with collective anger levels turning up. If that is true, it can lead to poor outcomes and that was my initial concern. Now, I am thinking more about the importance of anger, and also that anger expressed is often preferable to anger repressed. I think about protests in the streets, and I think about people I know, some of whom are perceived as ‘angry’ and others whose almost unnatural calm, means I am starting to see them through fresh, slightly concerned, eyes. I think about my upbringing and about how I raised my children. Anger is both an intrinsic part of human nature and an asset to society when there is fighting to be done.

The questions are:

Are you angry? Angrier? And do you acknowledge it may come from a position of fear? Are we all angrier now? And is that a bad thing?

The post-COVID world. How will it be for you? (2)

Physically constrained, with challenges to our autonomy and having our horizons narrowed might be a source of frustration. It is, though, a time for contemplation. What will happen post-COVID and more significantly, what do we want for the post-COVID world? Alain de Botton struck a defiant and an optimistic note when he said “we have never had a broader canvas on which to sketch ideas”.

Over the past few days newspaper articles and podcasts developing the very different ideas of the likes of Larry Summers, Willem Buiter, Henry Mance, Camilla Cavendish and US congressman, Dan Crenshaw, have had me thinking about what one might wish for. The elusive, intangible purpose of a life well-lived was central to the thoughts of self-actualisation in Jung’s psychoanalysis and Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. I think most of us want to believe we have a life well-lived.

Summers, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and a Chief Economist of the World Bank, is perhaps best known for his secular stagnation thesis. Given that it had no expectations of a pandemic and its resolution, it was to be expected that he would take a gloomy view of what lies ahead for us all. He thinks this particular coronavirus represents a potential “hinge in history”, and an event that will be regarded as “seminal” by future generations.

He asks if the economic losses that are being borne, and the social disruptions, will be merely “transitory”. His focus is government: “we appear to be living through a momentous transition in what governments do.” He warns that climate change and pandemics present greater threats than militarism and domestic governance, terrorism or revolution.

He is concerned by the potential of AI and information technology and that it is as likely, or more likely, to be harnessed for malign rather than benign intents. It reminded me of the recent film about Marie Curie’s life and how the outcomes of her radiation discoveries transformed both medicine and weaponry.

Summers asks if this pandemic heralds the end of “western democratic leadership of the global system”, exacerbated by the “dismal” performance of the current US Administration. He speculates, rather than concludes, that the twenty-first century will be an Asian century in a way that the twentieth was an American one. I wondered what that really meant, and if it was to be a bad thing. Korean and Singaporean influences might be very welcome, but I assume he meant more threatening Chinese or nationalistic Indian ones.

As I mulled his article I turned to another economist, my one-time Citi colleague, Willem Buiter. He wrote a piece more focused on ‘who pays?’ I particularly liked the phrase that we were moving from “just in time economics to just in case economics”. The obsession of modern economies with ‘efficiency’ will give way to the importance of having well-maintained slack in the economy and greater ‘localism’ at the expense of ‘globalism’.

And what of paying? It seems there are few alternatives to higher taxation and future public spending cuts; but what will be the tolerance for that at the ballot box? Governments will not be able to monetise massive budget deficits. Buiter mocks modern monetary theory “where fiscal bills never have to be paid”.

He believes many ‘advanced’ economies will have to embrace “profoundly altered political systems”. He sounds a little like Summers when he writes as much. He notes that huge resources are being thrown at households and workers, also at companies, but “the burden of economic pain is being distributed highly unequally and regressively.” Presumably he means to tells us that is unsustainable. In a recent book review, he was highly sceptical of Thomas Piketty’s views, but now thinks the political climate may exist for “a redistributive and more progressive tax and public spending system”.

I grew up as a Thatcherite philosophically, and as a beneficiary. With urban regeneration part of her governments’ agendas and a place at the Cabinet table for the ‘One Nation’ Toryism, I was comfortable in my tribe. I am not sure that I drifted politically left much over the years, but that the debating ground had moved to the right. Hague, Howard and Duncan-Smith led a Tory party that had no great appeal to me. I thought Theresa May calling out “the nasty party” and Cameron’s interest in “Big Society” were a time for me to revisit my loyalties, but the last several years have become so much more ideological, that I have not felt a part of the society under design.

Once, I could balance right wing economics with something more socially liberal and feel represented, but my faith in the economics ideas I grew up understanding and supporting, were damaged by the experiences of 2008/9. I think I have been trying to think what might be better ever since. The important thing in forming a view is to hear the counter arguments and to critique them, and form a newer, better-informed view. But the last half decade or so has been much more about tribalism and about emotion, than it has been about intellectualism and ideas. This crisis seems to offer a perfect opportunity to think about what is frequently described as “a re-set”. In other words, Alain de Botton’s “broader canvas”, which he described when suggesting that the virus might be “a gift”.

I suppose I think that big government is here and inevitable. I am more supportive of redistribution than ever I was, and I can see the need for radical thinking on how to tax assets, as well as earned income. My own definition, and perception of ‘key’ workers, has changed. It all feels a little uncomfortably left-wing to the guy I was growing up. The issues of emotive rants and tribalism have made it far more difficult for me to hear right wing views, or to espouse conservatism.

Fortunately, an excellent podcast, “The Economist Asks” interviewed Dan Crenshaw, a US congressman, who was badly injured on duty when serving as a US Navy SEAL, and lost the sight of one eye. Until this week, I had not heard of him. I am not convinced by everything he had to say, but he put the case for conservatism over liberalism extremely eloquently. His parents were in the Oil industry and he was born in Scotland. He certainly tore into the concept that coronavirus had heralded a new Big Government era that would rapidly come to be the new norm. Anne McElvoy, who is a fine journalist and a highly adept debater, was struggling to land her punches and, I thought, giving away her frustrations. I certainly felt that I would struggle in a one on one debate with Crenshaw, even if I did not accept all he had to say.

Where he was especially good was on risk and risk measurement, as he explained his view on the reopening of State economies. His eloquence on not allowing circumstances to paralyse our response to circumstance impressed me, as did the authority a Texan-oilman might be expected to have on carbon, energy policies, Trump and the Paris Agreement. In a world that has become un-nuanced I have found myself herded into the anti-Trump, anti-Brexit, anti-sovereignty, anti-flag waving group and increasingly deaf to the claims of any right-wing politician, persuading myself that all of it is irrational and emotional. It was good to recognise I can be just as irrational, emotional and to actually hear and appreciate good discourse.

Not all of my thinking and reading has been at the supranational and political theory levels. I am really intrigued by the smaller, perhaps more subtle, societal shifts we might see. I wrote about Dating and Desire recently, and I think it will affect people’s behaviour. I was amused by Alastair Campbell’s daughter, Grace, on their shared podcast, essentially implying that her generation, especially those who had been deprived of a lover’s contact for eight weeks or more, would go wild with sexual abandon.

It is the world of work that has been a focus for the past week. The government’s enthusiasm to have more people back at work may be the reason. As a man, not currently in employment, I take quite a detached view of this, but I am interested in the impact for my eldest, and the employment prospects and conditions for my two university-student children. The FT has published a few articles about the nature and future of the office. In a blog from a few weeks back (“A Tale of Two Cities (and two journalists)”) I first thought about underutilisation of office space and how some might be repurposed for residential capacity, but that residents might no longer feel the need to live in the cities because they did not need to kill themselves with long and daily commutes.

Henry Mance’s article in this weekend’s FT noted that in Central London, alone, more than 15m sq feet of new office space is currently under construction. I liked his “the key space where white collar workers interact will no longer be the four walls of an office; it will be the four sides of a screen”. Lucy Kellaway wrote a defence of offices, but it read more like a loving lament for a time that was passing.

The Tale of Two Cities piece dovetailed with Camilla Cavendish’s article this weekend, which asked if the era of the megacity was over. She noted the correlation with big city population density and COVID-19 mortality rates. 23% of US deaths have been in New York. 23% is the same stat for London’s share of UK deaths. In Madrid, it was 32% of Spanish deaths.

She asked if suburbia will become fashionable again (hello, Sir John Betjeman). She hints at underutilised office space, echoing Mance’s thinking, and weeks filled with more WFH days than office days. A renewed desire to leave behind inner city pollution, crime and grind. It seems highly feasible to me. She notes how birth rates are lower in mega cities because of the smaller living spaces and the higher financial cost of living. Will there be a post-COVID baby boom generation?

Even pre-COVID my eldest was telling me that she aspired to raise her children out of town, and that she intended a lifestyle-shift once she had established her career foundations. Cavendish cites a 2016 Bain report highlighting the “declining cost of distance”. She also talks about the urge for connection, which puts her in the de Botton camp: “People who moved to cities to escape the parochialism of their childhoods are now frantically building what I can only describe as villages”. Cities may need to respond with greener, more walkable centres to retain the young, wealthy and aspirant.

So, I feel sure that politics and society are going to be changed by our experience of the virus, and I am far from sure that I know how that will manifest. But it is going to be source of much debate and like all structural change, it will unnerve many, but will ultimately yield as many good things as bad. Here’s to a little optimism…

On Perspective

Gormley’s figures throw perspective and conceptions of what is normal

Last week I visited the Antony Gormley exhibition at the Royal Academy, with my favourite art historian, my eldest, for company. The week before I had seen the Blake exhibition at the Tate, with different, but equally charming and well-informed art appreciation company. I was glad to have the opportunity to share my impressions with my experts, but the more I get to observe works of art, the more I understand how personal they are.

What struck me about the Gormley exhibition was how the word ‘perspective’ kept coming to the front of my mind. It may be something the artist strives to achieve. Maybe not. I knew little of his work other than ‘The Angel of the North’, which is certainly a work of art that demands perspective. The word kept recurring in my mind as I walked through the rooms.

Perspective is defined as ‘a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something’. It may be no coincidence that I am sensitive to perspective, given several months of my own analysis as part of my psychoanalytic psychotherapy training. Art does convey meaning. Jung developed the idea of the archetype; an image or thought with universal meanings across cultures that could show up in a dream, in literature, in art or in religion. Gormley’s images and sculptures certainly scream meaning. They provoke thought. He is a sculptor who uses his own body as a place rather than an object, and attempts to explore the space of the body as a condition shared by all humanity.

I regard myself as a bit of a philistine when it comes to visual and physical art, but I have changed as I have aged, helped by having an art historian in the family. Even so, I went into this exhibition with low expectations for what I might like, but a good deal of curiosity. It starts provocatively with a small sculpture of a baby outside on the floor of the rather grand courtyard entrance off Piccadilly.

I believe it is supposed to say something about fragility and Gormley has said that “this tiny bit of matter in human form attempts to make us aware of our precarious position in relation to our planetary future”. It was created in 1999, and so pre-empts Greta and XR, by twenty years, with its central theme. When I passed it again on my way out I realised that it fitted with my impressions of the importance of perspective from the exhibits indoors.

Through thirteen rooms and forty years of work I gained a sense of the sculptor’s thinking, and his love of scale and bold materials. All the while I was being interrogated by my psyche about what it made me feel. I kept coming back to psychoanalysis, which emphasizes unconscious mental processes and is sometimes described as “depth psychology.” The deeper one goes, the more one’s perspective alters. Think of descending to the bottom of a well and how the ground level and the sky represent themselves differently as the perspective alters.

In the first room, his earliest works are displayed. I almost tripped over one, which lies down the middle of the room and in over fifty lead cases laid out in a line, exhibits the growth of an apple from first petal through ripening and ultimately to a mature fruit. Youth and age are different perspectives. Tripping is easy to do given the attention drawn to the work hanging on the walls, which attract the eyes’ attention first.

The oldest piece, a wall drawing, “Exercise Between Blood and Earth” proved to be one of my favourites, and using sliced bread to convey meaning, as in his “Mother’s Pride V”, reminded me that the best artists have a sense of fun, and can be anarchic and subversive in their approaches.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is perspective, not the truth.” – Marcus Aurelius

Over a week later and I can still see most of the exhibits in my mind’s eye, so it clearly made a strong impression. Describing them all is pointless, but having to negotiate the trapped space around “Clearing VII” which is 8km of aluminium tube that is described as a ‘spatial field’ and a ‘bundle of nothing’ in the second room, is to appreciate art’s physicality. It demonstrates that we do not need to be too deferential and awestruck with art, as we are required to be in some of the great galleries of the world that keep us a respectful distance from what we have come to see.

“Matrix III” is worth the admission alone. A hanging steel ‘cloud’ that disrupts one’s idea of what is ‘cloud like’. How can so much steel be suspended? I felt like I do every time I am at an airport, and still marvel at how planes get off the ground and then stay in the air. It is not all heavy metals and grand statements; a room full of his drawings provokes a good deal of thought, especially the use of his own blood as an ink, but I realised when seeing “Cave” in room 10, that it was ‘perspective’ that was coming back to me as my theme and also, as a series of questions.

“Cave”is described by the RA as “sculpture on an architectural scale”, where “jostling cuboid structures” are arranged above the visitors but where one is encouraged to enter the exhibit by walking through a constricted metal passageway. I came out and said to my daughter, because we had had to crouch to get through and grope in the dark, that it had put me in mind of a WWI movie set for a trenches scene. I have since heard it compared with the movement of a neonate through the birth canal, which is about as Freudian as I can imagine.

Consequently, “Cave” and “Iron Baby” demand thoughts about perspective. My work in my own analysis is about how I see myself and my perception of how others might see me, and if that should matter. If it does, why does it matter to me? According to Freud, the behaviours, perceptions, and decisions we make can be observed consciously by the ego, and are recognized as a given result of cause and effect, but are often driven by the unconscious processes of the mind.

“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water .” – Sigmund Freud

From the Jungian perspective, psychological suffering is a signal that something in us needs some attention, and certain states of anxiety and depression are no exceptions. Jung’s perspective on the concept of humanity is one that reflects an understanding that people are complex. What defines a person will often go down into the depths of the mind deeper than what can easily be explored. A bit like the perspective from the individual descending a well. In my case, it is a mine shaft that appears in a not untypical dream that I sometimes have.

Another great psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, used true self, to describe a sense of self based on spontaneous, authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self. The false self, by contrast, he saw as a defensive façade, which, in extreme cases, could leave its holders lacking spontaneity, feeling dead or empty. One’s perspective, it seems to me, defines whether one is in touch with a true, or a false self. I grew up with an image of who I was, or wanted to be, and failed to nurture my true self. I am far from alone. Sometimes it is called ambition or aspiration; at its most destructive, it is a form of perfectionism, that leads to an inability to ever be satisfied and in many cases to depression.

“The only person with whom you have to compare yourself is you in the past.” – Sigmund Freud

My earlier visit to the Tate was a complete contrast to the Gormley exhibition, but I now realise that perspective was a link. The two exhibitions could hardly be more contrasting: One is dominated by scale and the range of mainly heavy materials. The other is almost exclusively represented on paper in multiple exhibits per room, because the scale is small. It does not shout its messages any less loudly, but it is eloquent with detail and precision.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is — infinite.” ― William Blake

One artist is alive, and we can ask him what he thinks and he intended, and is representing. The other is very much dead. On the subject of perspectives, one artist’s work is physical and feels ‘of its time’, even if a forty-year-old wall drawing was amongst my favourites, whereas the other is much more spiritual. Its beauty and messaging seem altogether less bound by time. What both artists have in common is a willingness, indeed a need, to challenge convention. Blake was far from universally admired, indeed exhibiting left him with quite a financial loss, but Gormley seems to have earned financial security, even if he too is subject to vehement criticism.

Blake has been described as art’s original free spirit. He did not see it, the way others did. At times he seemed to be railing against science, and the Age of Reason, and invariably ‘the Establishment’. He would feel at home in modern London, I suspect. Guardian journalist, Laura Cumming had this to say, “In his visions, the devil may be tragic, tortured by interminable regret; and God may be violent, uprooting Adam like a weed from the earth. Horror is not always frightening. One illustration of hell shows a smoking serpent front of stage in a kind of glamorous limelight.” He was a pioneer too, he created the technique of relief etching and certainly invited fresh perspective considerations.

Whilst I was thinking about these exhibitions, about the psyche and about perspective, I went to see the film “Official Secrets”. In its way, it too is about perspective – about moral laws and legal laws; about being true to the self or being true to one’s government and nation. It is very good, and not just because I am a huge Keira fan, but because one perspective is about the smallness of the individual, against the immensity of the State. Perhaps it is related to scientific understanding, like the butterfly’s wing sensitivity and its impact. To me it reminds us not to underestimate our value, not to be overwhelmed by a tyrannical superego, to appreciate and value both ends of the scale spectrum, in both the physical word and in the psychic world.

“If you don’t like a person it’s because they remind you of something you don’t like about yourself.” – Sigmund Freud

Music, Trivia, the Unconscious and Me

Does music touch your soul? Kant thought that music was “beautiful but ultimately trivial”. My experiences suggest that it is far from trivial. On Sunday evening, I attended a fund raising event at Wilton’s Music Hall, in Shadwell. The format was led by an organisation called OneTrackMinds. On its website it makes this claim, “An entertaining cross between Desert Island Discs, The Moth Radio Hour & TED Talks, OneTrackMinds is a live storytelling event which explores the transformative power of music. (my bold) Join a vibrant selection of writers, thinkers and musicians each presenting a thought-provoking story about how music inspires the way we live our lives.” I had been to one of their events before, so knew what to expect, but this was a slightly starrier line up, pulled in by David Suchet, as part of an effort to raise funds for Wilton’s, to improve its acoustics and seating for future patrons.

The format is straightforward. A guest gives a narrative about a piece of music or a song that ‘has changed his/her life’. It is often deeply emotional and frequently amusing. After the story is told, the guest is sat on the stage alone and he or she and the audience all listen to the track. Watching people sat alone on a stage lost in thought and making the emotional connection with an important song is quite voyeuristic, but somehow pleasing. I listened to Mark Dolan celebrate his father and their Kentish Town pub, and the one-time property giant who became a ne’er do well, and pauper, that his father gave a cleaning job to. This man used to vacuum the pub at 7am, fortified by a cigarette and a rum and orange, and by firing up the juke box to listen to Sinatra and ‘My Way’.

He was followed by Tim McInnerny recalling being invited to perform on a Kate Bush video and becoming a great friend of her’s. Katie Melua shared a poignant Joni Mitchell number and Helen Lederer had us swaying in our seats to Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera Sera’. The show was stolen though, by Deborah Frances-White and then by Suchet. Frances-White was not known by me, but I had heard about her ‘Guilty Feminist’ podcast success.

Her story of not being able to have children and then giving up a room in her flat to a Syrian refugee, ‘Steve’ Ali, is apparently well known, but I was captivated by it. Even more captivated by her choice of ‘Hey Jude’. She split the audience, to compete with our ‘Na na na na’s’ and to come together to belt out ‘Hey Jude’. She explained the magic of a song that she believes everyone in the West knows and many can sing, all the way through, being heard for the first time, which she saw when seeing Steve’s reaction. And I started thinking about how music impacts us all. As I walked home I found myself singing some John Miles.

Music was my first love
And it’ll be my last
Music of the future
And music of the past.
To live without my music
Would be impossible to do
In this world of troubles
my music pulls me through

My Wilton’s evening was ended by David Suchet recounting his loathing of classical music as his brother, in a shared bedroom, force fed him Tchaikovsky as they were growing up. Suchet had long since left home and at the age of 40 was playing Iago for the Royal Shakespeare Company. As he drove to a performance he was so impressed by a piece of music on the car radio that he had to pull over as he was welling up with tears. In the pre-mobile phone era, he had to knock on a couple of front doors before he was given access to a phone so that he could tell the theatre that his understudy would have to go on.

The piece was the adagio from Mozart’s clarinet concerto. When he was back home in west London he found himself a clarinet teacher and explained that the pleasure of learning and continuing to appreciate Mozart’s genius had truly changed his life. What is more, he found himself playing Salieri in Schaffer’s ‘Amadeus’ at the National for Peter Hall some time later. Hall made him focus on his emotional reaction to the piece to channel the impotent rage that Salieri has when confronted by Mozart’s God-given talent, that is bestowed upon someone he regards as completely unworthy.

His recollection resonated with me because when I was 40, I too suddenly took up learning a musical instrument. In my case it was the piano. Suchet soon progressed to grade 5 on his clarinet, but it took me five years to get working on my grade three piano. I was sure I was ‘unmusical’ but I wanted to find out why. One does not need musicianship to appreciate music. This was before Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory had became well known. My grandmother had taught piano, so I hoped that something would have come down to me through the gene pool.

I also wanted to show my children that there was much merit in regular practise and commitment to something that did not come easily. It reminds me of the contempt my father had watching my brother and me watching episodes of ‘Top of the Pops’ and occasionally harrumphing that “they cannot even play the instruments properly”. In the end the Global Financial Crisis meant my ‘prop desk’ trading role was shut down and I was put ‘at risk’ of redundancy, and fully expected my banking career to be over. It no longer felt appropriate to be paying for lessons, or to commit to practising when my time needed to be spent seeking employment. I abandoned piano, which was a mercy for my family. But Suchet took me back to the pleasure, as well as the frustration of actually making music.

His Iago reference made me think about my favourite playwright. Shakespeare had a special appreciation for the magic that music provides and how it can play on the emotions.

Music oft hath such a charm
To make bad good, and good provoke to harm.
(Measure for Measure, 4.1.14)

What really struck me on Sunday night, though, was the emotional impact of the music. Given my current studies and interests it is of little surprise to me that I started thinking about how music can open up one’s unconscious. A key to a door usually firmly shut and locked. It was evident in the reaction of the audience to ‘Hey Jude’, especially when they were encouraged to join in. Music stimulates the unconscious. Those moments when you cannot quite explain why something has made you quite so joyful, quite unaccountably lachrymose, or physically hotter or colder. It penetrates one’s intellectual defences. Notwithstanding its ability to disturb, it is often therapeutic. Its power is long understood, hence its use in pagan rituals, shamanic ceremonies and church services.

It is why film music is so powerful, and indeed, so necessary. ‘Jaws’ without that ominous soundtrack? Not really. Films about musicians and about music seem to be very much in vogue of late. Bohemian Rhapsody , Rocket Man, and Blinded by the Light have shown reverence to Queen, Elton John and Springsteen – “Bruce talks to me”. Richard Curtis was brilliant in manipulating the best of the Beatles in his time-disturbed film ‘Yesterday’ – “well, it’s not Coldplay, is it?” However the films that have made the greatest impression on me have been ‘Inna de Hood’ and ‘Amazing Grace’.

The former is paradoxically life-affirming, with its celebration of Jamaican music heritage and the resilience of the islanders, but depressing with an unsparing look at the poverty on the otherwise idyllic island. Neither does it shy away from issues around petty crime and the ostracisation of Rastafari in the past. Listen to Ken Boothe sing his “Everything I Own”, however, and the world becomes a better place. I had to swallow hard many times during the film to cope with the lump in my throat.

For Amazing Grace, no amount of swallowing would do. I was wiping away tears repeatedly. Aretha Franklin recorded an album of gospel classics over two nights in the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church. On the second night her minister father, CL Frankin, attends. Their’s was not an always harmonious relationship but the mutual respect and love is very moving, as is the awestruck face of Mick Jagger who attended and politely stood at the back. This film captures the two concerts, but had been unseen for decades.

It is her voice soaring one moment, and then in a diminuendo to convey the intimacy of the profound sentiments in the songs, that disturbs one’s emotional foundations. Only one other performer affects me quite so much, just by the sound of her voice, and that is Nina Simone. I was very young when I first heard ‘Strange Fruit’ and had not yet made the connection with what the fruit might be. Obviously it did not take long. This song moves me, haunts me, sometimes repels me and generally affects my mood like no others.

I love theatre, but I tend to find myself telling friends that I prefer dramas to musicals. Then I think of how emotional I become when watching great shows like “Fiddler on the Roof’ and ‘Les Miserables’. I am sure I have not left any performance of either of these shows without being moist-eyed. Even the joy of ‘Mamma Mia’ caught me defenceless. As I was thinking about how music affects me in the theatre, I realised that I had seen four shows in just the past year that had me reaching for my handkerchief. It would surprise me if anyone else was not moved by at least one of ‘Come From Away’, ‘ Girl from the North Country’. ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, and ‘Hamilton’. ‘Come from Away’ an oddly joyful show about the events of 9/11 and its aftermath, was particuarly sensitive for me.

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
(The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.91-7)

Merchant of Venice was the first Shakespeare I saw and studied, and I find myself thinking of the ‘quality of mercy’ speech first, but the lines above are, I think, are particularly wise and wonderful. My favourite Shakespearian examination of the psyche is Hamlet. I always maintain that generally the play has the finest character of the canon, but that it gives its best lines to Polonius, and not to Hamlet. One exception, though, is the following speech, combining emotion, indignation and music.

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of
me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know
my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my
mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to
the top of my compass: and there is much music,
excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot
you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am
easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what
instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you
cannot play upon me.
(Hamlet, 3.2.356-65)

Hamlet takes me back to the Unconscious. Why does music disturb us, pleasantly or otherwise? It seems to me it is one of the keys to the unconscious state. It expresses emotions, especially hurts and joys that we sometimes cannot articulate, and often do not wish to recall and revisit. Not all masters of the Unconscious make the connection with music. Freud, allegedly, passionately disliked music. Some even suggested he was phobic. It has been reported that he would not permit music in the house, even played by his children. He was very moved by literature and sculpture, and “less often of painting”, he noted in 1914.

Music gave him no pleasure because he was unable to explain the effect it had on him. He seems to have been frustrated by his inability to identify what his unconscious was telling him when triggered by music. His own analysis might suggest it was associated with a repressed, traumatic episode and music triggered the awareness of the trauma in his conscious mind, and so he ran from it. Happily it is a tiny minority of people that are not positively affected by music, and some are transported to otherworldly highs.

Jung was more accommodating. He noted that music was about feelings, emotions, passions, irrationality and the soul. In that era it was associated with ‘the feminine mode’ of being. In males it activated what he called the anima. It may be that Jung embraced his feminine traits and Freud was fearful of his own. Such profound differences may be illustrative of their inability to keep working together and to maintain what had been a brilliant and close working relationship. In looking at just these two reactions of two towering intellects, but emotionally complex men, we understand that music can comfort, soothe and please, but also summon demons and anxieties.

Music expresses in sounds what fantasies and visions express in visual images. – CG Jung in a letter to Serge Moreux, 1950

Reik, an early Freud student, was more attuned to the possibilities of music to explore Unconscious. He thought that unconscious material emerged as melody; sometimes when it could not be exposed as articulated thoughts. Am I alone in having a personal, three-note hum that emerges at times of stress or deep concentration, and which I have been told I often use in my sleep? In my own analysis sessions I recalled seeing a ring of fire in a dream. It could have many interpretations and is not necessarily related to Johnny Cash’s great song, but the song does, of course, repeat my surname constantly. Despite Freud’s views, it is noteworthy that neuroscientist Oliver Sacks states that music occupies more areas of the brain than language does. It can sit in either hemisphere, and therefore be part of both ‘thinking fast’ and ‘thinking slow’ as characterised by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman.

The other reason that music has been uppermost in my mind in recent days was due to a conversation with my eldest and her boyfriend. Last Friday, I was coming home latish from dinner with friends, and I arrived to find them finishing a bottle of wine. They were listening to one of her playlists, and as I walked in she asked if I recognised the song. It was a U2 song, and they are one of my favourite bands. She did not mean did I recognise the band or the title but that it was one of ‘our songs’. When I used to drive her back to Oundle School on Sunday evenings, we would often listen to this U2 album and sing along. The song rooted something for us as a shared experience, and generated an emotional impact.

The conversation drifted to Desert Island Discs. I am a long standing fan, and all my children became familiar with it. My eldest’s boyfriend is new to its charms after she had introduced it to him. We started talking about favourite pieces of music, but also the science of selecting, of curating the list. Few people I know, who have heard the programme, do not have a list in mind for when their public recognition reaches a point at which they might be publicly ‘cast away’.

My approach has been to attach a piece of music to one of the people that I love or have loved. If one was alone on a desert island, it ought to be a comfort to be able to think of someone dear. Music can do that. Children love their parents, but also feel that parents represent authority and constraints. Therefore it is very typical that a child’s favourite person is a grandparent. Mine was my nan. She said little, but was very loving and a great provider of Bourneville chocolate. They lived in Plaistow, near West Ham’s ground, and my grandad used to queue for tickets at Upton Park, if we were staying there for the weekend, so my dad could take my brother and I to a game. Consequently I cannot hear ‘Bubbles’ at a West Ham game without thinking of them and I would see them very clearly if I heard it on my desert island.

Choosing for my dad is easy. We had little music in the house, and he had had his love for it as an art form, ruined by his mother forcing him to be a young pianist. If we were not discouraged from music – instruments and lessons – we were not exactly encouraged. But he did introduce me to jazz. He loved Benny Goodman, and I think he had a particular regard for Basie, but what I first loved thanks to him was Dave Brubeck, and especially, ‘Take Five’. It barely opens, and I feel my face stretching into a smile and I immediately think of him.

My mother’s tastes were not that obvious to me, and what record collection we had was quite modest. It did however, contain what would now be described as ‘crooners’. Perry Como, Andy Williams, a little Sinatra and above all, Johnny Matthis. With mum, it is less about the song, about harmonies, or about lyrics, but it is the sound of Matthis’s voice that makes me think of her. Almost any of his recordings would do.

With my eldest I have had many opportunities to ‘share a song’. I told her about how Phil Lynott’s ‘Sarah’ made me cry. When I first heard it, I thought it was about a girlfriend – “When you came into my life, you changed my world” – before learning it was about his daughter. My daughter is not called Sarah, but it became our song. I might choose that, but in her school years, when we first had a flat in London, she introduced me to the Crystal Fighters. Their ‘I love London’, which is anthemic, will always make me think of her.

Right now, though, I would choose Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’. Before they lit up the 2012 Olympics, they were performing at Latitude in Suffolk, and I was there with daughter #1. I did not know their music well, but was stunned by how a very sizeable crowd knew every lyric of the song and many of their other numbers. They closed the show on the Saturday night and it was one of the most magical evenings that we had had together. So for her, it would be Elbow.

Her brother became interested in a wide selection of music, including a good deal of 60’s and 70’s stuff. He played a lot of The Kinks, and it would be easy to include a gem like ‘Waterloo Sunset’. Obviously it makes me think of him, but music is for sharing and that means it is a two-way street. A few years ago he became a big fan of Loyle Carner. He introduced me to his music. Of all the tracks that conjure my boy’s face up in my mind, it would have to be Carner’s ‘Ain’t Nothing Changed’, which opens with the most moody of jazzy, bluesy backing, before introducing gymnastic wordsmithery, that leads with student loans and gets to inner city poverty. “I feel it, but can’t conceal it” is a lyric about anger, but could be about my view that music opens the Unconscious.

My youngest and I are developing our music enthusiasms and commonalities. I think that the music that I choose to think of her will go through a few iterations as she moves through university and adulthood, but right now I think of a recent night out we had together. I persuaded and half-cajoled her into coming to see a show at the Kiln Theatre. We had a fabulous night watching, but more often, absorbing, ‘Blues in the Night’, and as we took the tube home, neither of us could get “my momma done told me” and the opening bars out of our heads. It was a fabulous night, and when I hear ‘Blues in the Night’ now, I see her face.

My brother and I had slightly different music tastes. He was more interested in soul, but had the good taste to buy albums like Blondie’s ‘Parallel Lines’. One summer we thought we should each choose a concert to attend, and the other would come along and perhaps enjoy having a broadening of his individual music appreciation. My good fortune was that he selected George Benson at Wembley. I have become a big Benson fan in the many years since, but my favourite, and the track that makes me think of my brother is ‘On Broadway’. As a professional cricketer, he was a performer, albeit not a thespian.

So that is seven tracks. One more for me. It should be easy. I simply cannot do it. I find making associations between music and people, or music and events, quite straightforward, but choosing a single piece to please me alone: Too difficult. I wonder how you curate your DID list?

To conclude; even the unmusical are affected by music. David Suchet and I are much more likely to be in the majority, than the minority, when we admit to welling up at the sound of a particular piece of music. I think that one of the wisdoms that I take with me into my ‘Second Innings’ is that I need more music, where possible, in my life. Just this week, I met a good friend for breakfast and we talked about our music interests and about the curation of Desert Island Disc lists. We had ‘Take Five’, in common, in our lists. Our mutual laughter, and the joy on our faces was the perfect vignette for this blog post.

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O! it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.
(Twelfth Night, 1.1.1-7)

On reflecting: How an introduction to psychoanalytic and jungian thinking changed me

Over the past year I have had the very great pleasure of participating in a course called Psychotherapy Today. At the end of the course there is a suggestion that one might write a ‘reflective essay’. For those planning to pursue training in the field, it is encouraged. As I am about to go on holiday, and hopefully, indulge in some thinking and reflecting time, I re-read my essay. I think it conveys just how exploring the mind and perspectives of the mind, can change one. I am profoundly grateful to have been a participant and it has helped me become clearer about what my Second Innings might entail.

Psychotherapy Today: Its significance to me: A Reflective Essay: 2000 words

A reflective essay on Psychotherapy Today. How should one reflect on something that has changed one and one’s perspectives over ten months? My dictionary tells me that reflective is not just about returning an image back from whence it came, but also ‘meditative’. I shall attempt to convey what the course’s significance was to me and reflect what came my way, but also to demonstrate what having meditated on the past several months has done for me.

Unsurprisingly, I find myself yielding to feelings of sadness. One expects to have to mourn, and to process something, that provided a monthly sense of intellectual and psychic purpose. A small death, a little grieving. Also, profound gratitude. I developed strong feelings of unity with group members, admiration for Wayne Full as our first co-ordinator, and for Ruth Calland’s remarkable light touch facilitation of our group sessions. I am grateful too, for the awareness that I now see the world with a refreshed vision, which has been a pleasant outcome.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom according to Aristotle. What the course allowed me to consider was that cognitive acts and emotional responses are different, and that one is attempting to think in terms of integration. This became a key theme for me. Speaking about things and not from them, will be common to the majority, and was certainly a truth for me. Now, I think I may be understanding my emotional language. I read a paper co-written by David Bell that referred to bringing psychic materials to consciousness, and it has been a developing sense of understanding of that process that has particularly affected me.

I look back on the man who started the course in the summer of 2018. In the previous twelve months, I had got divorced and accepted a redundancy package. I found myself telling people that I was “considering psychotherapy training”, but the truth was that I did not really know what it was, or might entail. Inspired by Mike Brearley, who I knew through cricket contacts, I had applied to the Institute of Psychoanalysis’s summer school and its series of ‘Maudsley Lectures’. I had a sense that this might be preparation for clinical training, but the core truth was that I had joined the course with no real sense of where it might lead me. I was more interested in what I might learn about my relationship with myself, which was largely one of intense internalised criticism. I knew I wanted to reorient my relationships with others, and not just because of my fresh acquaintance with the divorce courts.

As this is a reflection, and meditative, I have decided to review it in a chronological format, but as I sit here now in July 2019, I find my recall is directed to the Titian ‘Flaying of Marsyas’ image that lit up our first seminar, and the seminars that were focused on trauma, on defences, and on narcissism. Whenever we role played, I enjoyed it, and despite my misgivings, I got a particular joy from our work exploring the importance of play.

Our first seminar day in October asked ‘What is a Mind?’ and we had read Hart’s paper on Titian’s ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’. The image is arresting and visceral. It was new to me, but has not left me since. I became fascinated by the themes of exposing previously unexposed layers and of getting through to the rawness of an individual. We also read Margaret Arden’s paper exploring Freud’s interest in literature. At that time, I had found myself thinking, ‘have I found my tribe?’ And this seemed to be a confirmation. The relationships of the arts to psychoanalytic thinking has been one of the great discovered pleasures for me; a means of seeking and understanding meaning. My enthusiasm was fired. It did not diminish at any point in the ensuing months.

The course moved on to ‘mapping the landscape’, and this helped us consider models of the mind. The case study familiarity had appeal for me. I had no strong sense then that I might want to train, but this was probably a moment when considering it more seriously began. There was therefore a natural segue for me when December introduced us to Observation. The wonderful film of the newborn and its mother predictably had me thinking about my own mother, but also about how my ex-wife and I had parented our three children. My sense of belonging was developing. The relevance of the Meredith-Owen paper (‘On revisiting the opening chapters of Memories, Dreams, Reflections’) has become very strong for me now that I am in my own analysis. It is a paper that invariably prompts a smile on my face as I read it.

In January, we gave space for trauma and neuroscience. This was very affecting for me. In my professional career, I had witnessed a suicide, as a young investment banker threw himself to his death in our Canary Wharf building. I realised that I had not considered that event since probably no more than two or three days afterwards. It was repressed. Now it began to have an impact. Annie Pesskin’s seminar was amongst my favourites and I have since enjoyed reading her blog contributions. It was about the time that I began my own blogging, albeit about a wider range of subjects than psychoanalytic theory, but I am working through what my unconscious motivations might have been.

As a sometime asthmatic, and a childhood eczema sufferer I was excited to understand more about the psyche and soma and so February’s ‘body in mind, mind in body’ held my attention. Some of the seminar days proved quite gruelling, and I was aware that sometimes my attention drifted, but that this also had meaning. No drifting in this month. The prevalence of language around thin and thick skins, and ‘second skins’ has always had meaning for me, without me ever truly understanding what that might be, and this was a very productive and fascinating period of the course. By now I was pursuing options to be in analysis.

It was therefore useful and pertinent that March should be about ‘diving deeper’, as I started to get a greater sense of the analyst/analysand relationship and what informs what, in the relationship. Now that we were over half way I began to understand just how effectively and cleverly the seminar days had been constructed, to move us on and to let us cope with more demanding and intensive material. This had me in a wonderfully receptive and curious minded mode for seminars on Defences. I found this the most satisfying of our monthly sessions, perhaps because it gave all of us some very personal insight. David Gardiner was thought provoking when thinking about defences, not merely as obstacles, but as guides. Intellectualisation and Omnipotence held particular interest for me.

By May, the first sense of endings loomed, not least because our exceptional course co-ordinator had to step down to handle some personal issues. His absence was felt keenly, and his departure prompted a lot of discussion on what impact it had on us all. We were looking at group dynamics at the time, which felt appropriate to dealing with a departing individual. I had the further fortunate coincidence that in my current Birkbeck Business Psychology studies I had just begun a module on Group Processes, and the pioneering work of Henri Tajfel, so this session had a powerful impact for me.

I think we all found the ability to role play in the May seminar quite liberating, but also informative, in how it affected us. In my group, it had a more profound impact than I think most of us had anticipated. Thinking about race and alternative group classifications that inspire ‘othering’ was sobering. In the realm of psychoanalysis, it was interesting to think about how, these group associations have led to the phrase ‘unconscious biases’ being adopted as common parlance.

As course completion loomed we had a day on sex and sexuality. It proved to be the most challenging for our group. I was not alone in noting that at the end of it I felt as tired as I had done at any point in the course. All of us found exploring the many issues that came up very demanding, but I think many shared my impression that paedophilia absorbed a phenomenal mount of psychic energy. That said, it gave more impetus to the candour of views and experiences shared in our group sessions, which had become the thing to which I most looked forward, and from which I think I drew most satisfaction.

Our closing seminar was on narcissism. Alongside defences, this was the seminar day when I found the use of case studies most interesting and revelatory. The understanding we give to the phrase and meaning of ‘biting the hand that feeds’ was very powerful for me, and was some evidence, I thought of my developing sense of working with imagery and word choice.

And so, it ended. I know I am changed by the experience. I have a curiosity and an appetite to train. I have found myself an extraordinary group of new friends who are remarkable in their responses, in their intellects, and in our diversity. I have had few richer life experiences. I find myself thinking much more deeply about non-verbal communications than ever before, and I find deeper connections in visual art, in playwriting and in all the dialogues that I now have; much more so, I think than would ever have been possible without Psychotherapy Today. The idea of the huge submerged, unseen iceberg image of the unconscious is very much part of how I conduct my personal interactions now.

The course met its aims, for me. I feel I have had comprehensive introduction to psychoanalytic and Jungian psychotherapy. It has reordered my thinking – about society and politics and about the arts. It has stimulated my appetite for more learning. The

reading demands were broad, but never overwhelming. My reading is constantly drawn to ideas of individuation and integration. Somehow, I feel much more alive. I think I have stirred my unconscious and it is changing me.

For future joiners of the course, I would say that it is likely to make you want to be in your own analysis and that, for me, that has been a profound and wonderful, stimulating experience, although no analysand would suggest that any of it is an ‘easy’ experience, and quite often is very demanding. I have loved how it has made me reinterpret art and drama, my experiences of which all seem significantly richer. The candour of new friends has accelerated my friendship formation. I feel able to be much more ‘open’ with people I meet after such a generous ten months.

It has deepened my sense of trust, just at a time when public levels of trust and our political discourse seem to be faced in quite another direction. I feel more able to handle ‘difficult’ conversation subjects, especially with my parents and my sibling. Other people seem to react differently to me too. Perhaps driven by unconscious signalling there are many of my long and short-term acquaintances who now seem to feel the desire to ‘unburden’ themselves to me.

To repeat, the end of the course is triggering some senses of loss, but overwhelmingly, I feel a sense of gratitude.

Breaking free, or as Jung might say, “free will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do”.

Perhaps it was seeing ‘Pirates of Penzance’ at Wilton’s that started my thoughts on this. After all, the operetta is about Frederick’s release from being indentured to the pirates, and their king, and to the attachment of Ruth. It is uproariously funny, but the point is that the audience wants Frederick to abandon his life of duty and to enjoy his freedom and find love. My experience is ‘Pirates’ is always great, but this one is exceptional. Run to Wilton’s! However, what really ticked my mind over was watching Michael Cohen giving testimony before Congress and incriminating Trumps senior and junior. He amused the audience when referring to the secrecy around Trump’s college scores and SAT score from a POTUS who identifies himself as “brilliant”. And he made many, more significant accusations. So, Cohen sings like the proverbial canary and gets lambasted for being a liar, attempting to be credible, when attempting to be truthful. I doubt many think he lies when he refers to a “racist, a conman and a cheat”. The world, though, is told it is merely to reduce his sentence. The paradox is that he is having his freedom withdrawn, but it has meant he has found himself free of obligations to an abusive employer and is demonstrating the power of new-found liberty. He has broken free, notwithstanding a visit to jail to come. Truly paradoxical.

It interested me on a number of levels. We have just got used to a very slight reordering of the political landscape in the UK, with the formation of the Independent Group of MPs. Again, freed from the constraints of loyalty to a larger institution or organisation or party, the individuals concerned have demonstrated the joy of breaking free. Anna Soubry’s dark references to “Theresa” and that she may have “a problem with immigration”, was a wonderful example of being able to say what until last week would have been unsayable. Luciana Berger’s candour about her experiences in keeping the rabid anti-Semites at bay was another good illustration of how breaking free can change someone. Of the seven who initially resigned from the Labour Party, it was Mike Gapes, who most impressed me, and whose passion demonstrated the impact of having had to repress truths for too long, as a misguided demonstration of loyalty. I was reminded of Mandela’s comment, “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others”

Indeed, the whole theme of breaking free and feeling liberated and able to behave without constraint is pervasive. It is what Brexit has come to represent to many people. Full disclosure – I voted Remain, and I am still a Remainer. This is something from which I do not feel the need to break free, but two of my best friends (and yes, we remain on talking terms!) are avid Brexiteers. I am not sure quite why they feel the need to break free, and why they cannot feel English, as I do, and European, but these are issues that have been debated by many people, far more eloquently and constructively than perhaps we do; as well as completely inarticulately, ineloquently and destructively by legions more. But the desirability not to be bound up by something bigger is clearly one of the many frustrations Brexiteers feel they need to remove.

Few people can talk politics without it giving some offence and few people who write on it succeed in persuading the readership to consider more than one perspective. It is tribal and has become more, not less so, in the modern era of effective social media data mining and marketing. So, I thought I would leave Brexit and politics right there and mention something about which few people have opinions: Football! I am an enthusiastic fan and a bit of a student of the game; at least I like to think so. What has struck me recently has been the recovery of a group of talented individuals at Manchester United into a team that is unrecognisable from its pre-Christmas shape, style and industry. It has come about following the replacement of Jose Mourinho, who never struck me as a ‘United man’ with former player Ole Gunnar Solskjear, to lead the team. It is not obvious to me that he has dome much other than to free the talents of his most mercurial, but offensively threatening players, in Paul Pogba and Marcus Rashford. It seems to me that they exhibit the same joy in their work now as the Independent Group of MPs. Michael Cohen may not be exhibiting joy, but he is certainly relishing settling scores and being portrayed as one of the good guys.

I think too, of Leicester City. The tragedy of the death of the club owner in a helicopter crash would be more than enough for a club and his supporters to bear in one season, but they seem weighed down by the approach of the recently appointed head coach, Claude Puel. Star players, much as had been the case with the likes of Pogba and Rashford, such as Vardy and Schmeichel, were some way off their peak performances and seemed to find their jobs to be unusually joyless. I will be remarkably unsurprised if the appointment of Brendan Rodgers to replace Puel, this week, does not allow players like Vardy to break free and to utilise his strengths, much as United now make better use of Rashford’s pace. Then, I think about how England coach Gareth Southgate freed up players with pace and expression for the national side before and during last year’s World Cup. One of the most recent is the exciting talent Jadon Sancho, but he needed to break free from Manchester City, where he was unlikely to play, to develop his talents in Germany, with Borussia Dortmund. What will Chelsea do with Rueben Loftus-Cheek and Callum Hudson-Odoi? They certainly seem to have little freedom playing in the Sarri structure.

This need to break free is not restricted to worlds like politics and sports. I thought about artists, specifically musicians. I am sure there are plenty of examples of solo careers that did not hit expected heights, but surely John Lennon, Sting, Robbie Williams, George Michael, Jools Holland, Michael Jackson, Richard Ashcroft and heaven knows how many more, would be judged to have produced their best work once they had left initial band structures behind them. Sometimes, breaking free is not just about leaving the team or the band but exploring new platforms, industries or geographies.

I may or may not be a typical podcast listener and twitter reader, but my experience of both is that most of the best users of these formats are people used to being in group structures, but relishing the chance to redefine who they are and being able to market themselves individually. Sometimes it is not breaking free from teams, or families like Jackson, but from convention. The writing of Truman Capote is an example as he introduced us to the ‘non-fiction novel’ when producing “In Cold Blood”. Visual art convention breakers include Picasso, Dali, Rothko and Pollock. In their day, it would have been impressionism and pointillism exponents. I recall the wonderful Shaffer play ‘Amadeus’ and revelling in the display of Mozart disturbing convention, and disturbing Salieri’s mental stability as a consequence. Generally, and it is a huge generalisation, breaking free seems to be a good thing, and often has a progressive impact on other people. Jung was clear about the profundity of freedom. He wrote that “without freedom there can be no morality”

Returning to podcasts and twitter, as modern freedoms of expression, and I think of David Lammy from politics, who seems to be able to be a member of his party but liberated from the dead hand of its leadership by his tweeting. Also of Gary Lineker, who has gone from sportsman, to broadcaster, to a man both his fans and critics seem to regard as a new voice of ‘liberal England’. I think about how Lineker has broken free from being the face of one or more of his former employers, to selling himself, even if it seems to antagonise another sporting broadcaster like Jonathan Agnew. I note how the podcast structure and format freed up and transformed the careers of each of Andrew Flintoff, Robbie Savage and Matthew Syed, who turned a highly amusing bloke chat podcast into springboards for new careers, book ideas, motivational speaking content, acting and modelling. It has given a whole new set of career opportunities and public appreciation to the ‘Brexitcast’ quartet (Laura Kuenssberg, Katya Adler, Chris Mason and Adam Fleming) from the BBC, and it has allowed a former footballer, John Barnes to demonstrate his articulacy (he speaks as elegantly and impressively as he used to tease defenders on the pitch) and become an outstanding panelist on ‘Question Time’.

A talented golfer who was little known to me was Eddie Peperell. Now I look out for his scores because he is such an amusing deliverer of tweets. Check out his response to criticisms of the tour going to Saudi Arabia for an example. That seems to be his way of breaking free of tour monotony, and the pressure of knowing every swing and every putt has a dollar value that he needs to support his family. Away from the UK, former State employees can use the media to break free from the constraints of their former office(s). In the past fortnight that has been apparent in commentary from both Janet Yellen and Madeleine Albright, who both feel able to comment on Trump and his Administration. Yellen was definitely unconstrained when suggesting that Trump did not understand the Fed’s role. And is the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs Ivanka Trump twitter spat, partly about freedoms, especially the barbed references to early working experiences? An example from the worlds of the Arts: Annie Lennox no longer seems to be a wonderful songstress, but the driver of ‘Global Feminism’. I saw her talk recently in Westminster and she relished the opportunity to demonstrate how she had broken free from the demands and expectations of the music industry to become a highly visible, politicised, spokeswoman.

Is all this a little frivolous? Perhaps I should be giving consideration to those that cannot break free. Years ago I remember being very affected by the Steve Biko film ‘Cry Freedom’, and a week or two ago I was struck again by the impact of freedoms withheld, when watching the film “If Beale Street Could Talk”. There are other things too, from which it is all but impossible to break free. For example, those with debilitating and chronic physical conditions. Or those brilliant and brave servicemen, who are now trapped by the traumas they suffered in our service, and whose futures are forever affected by what PTSD can do to a person. Perhaps too, the severely depressed for whom it is so overwhelming that suicide becomes a ‘freedom’. Or those that cannot break free, but find fresh ways of overcoming constraints. In that particular case I am thinking about Stephen Hawking.

And so it goes on. For me, it seems to resonate particularly powerfully because of what I call my Second Innings, and the basis of this blogging activity. I have certainly broken free of the oppression of the early morning alarm call and I am not missing standing at my desk at HSBC at 6.10am every morning as I was doing 15 months ago. I have been pursuing my own kinds of freedom in the past nine months, once I decided that the City might not want to value my workplace skills as generously as it had done in the past, and because the equity advisory field I left behind feels like a sunset industry. I did attend an interview this week, though, for a related field in finance, and it made me think about the pull of the role and the challenge, but also about the freedoms I would now be giving up. I have traded income for time, and exchanging time for income now, requires quite a reappraisal. (How would I fit in my yoga? !!!) I am convinced that City firms need to use their workforces much more flexibly, and to accommodate older workers in a way that has been something of anathema to them until now. Mindsets are institutionally stuck and being free of that is invigorating.

My Second Innings is about my personal as well as professional life. Divorce brings freedoms. Some are welcome. Some, less so. I understand that finding love, and sharing life with a true soul mate is also a freedom, and a freedom from loneliness and misunderstanding. However, for me, my divorce represents breaking free from something that we had found restrictive and unenjoyable, and which had, therefore, become unsatisfying. A marriage, for good or ill, defines the company one keeps and the interests one pursues. My social world has broadened, perhaps immeasurably in the past couple of years, and that has been very satisfying. Like the resigning MPs I found some joy. In my case it was in tripping around Europe with a rail ticket and a backpack, and in paragliding in Cyprus, and when I attended my playwriting course. These are freedoms that I doubt would have presented themselves to me had I remained married and employed.

As a trainee psychotherapist I am now experiencing the freedom of being in analysis, and of free associating whilst I lie on a couch. The core of it is, of course, to be and feel liberated. The freedom that comes with truly knowing oneself. It is time to leave the ego behind. I hope to feel comfortable and to be able to explore my unconscious. I need to feel unconstrained psychically. That said, I am aware of Freud’s view that “most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” His vision was to create increased “freedom of association” through the method of “free association”. He invented a relationship to facilitate this. He broke with convention. Empathy, appropriate silence, and mindfully refraining from judgment and direction would become central to the Analytic Attitude needed to maintain this relationship.

So, to finish: The Personal. The youngest members of my family are now exploring freedoms. They are either post-school or post-uni. I tell them to embrace their freedoms and resist their inhibitions. In a sporting context I would say “Free your arms”. As a cricket lover I would draw attention to yesterday’s remarkable batting by Jos Buttler and Chris Gayle. These two outstanding players have demonstrated their capacity to play at the highest level and make Test hundreds, but in batting for ODIs, they have changed convention and expectation. Theme is now altered. They have done it by liberating themselves from the techniques they were coached to use, at which they were proficient. Hitting a dozen sixes in an innings and making 150 in a limited overs contest, especially when not opening, as was the case for Buttler, is changing the game. Since the 400 mark has been breached for a ODI total, four of the five successes have been by England, and usually thanks to Buttler’s impact. So, I hope my children truly break free and discover the joy that doing so can bring

Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

The free bird leaps

on the back of the wind

and floats downstream

till the current ends

and dips his wings

in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage

can seldom see through

his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and

his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

with fearful trill

of the things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn

and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.