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The Triumph of the Therapeutic
from Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn’s 2006 introduction to Philip Rieff’s seminal work: With nothing shared beyond a commitment to the self, which turns out to be a commitment to nothing, the individual lacks...
View ArticleAvoid all assemblies of bishops…
For my part, if I am to write the truth, my inclination is to avoid all assemblies of bishops, because I have never seen any council come to a good end, nor turn out to be a solution of evils. On the...
View ArticleTrammelled by the otherness of the others
My last post was Gregory of Nazianzus’s advice to avoid assemblies of bishops. Carl Jung was even more pessimistic. He thought we should avoid all assemblies of any kind: When a hundred clever heads...
View ArticleChange and the Brigadier Belt
How do we experience change, in society and its groupings? Wilfred Bion, with his experience as an officer in the First World War, and his training as a psychoanalyst, had some ideas: Change can take...
View ArticleThe delights of group working
In its search for a leader the [small therapeutic] group finds a paranoid schizophrenic or malignant hysteric if possible; failing either of these, a psychopathic personality with delinquent trends...
View ArticleOn Returning to England
Let me sing of thee, my Lionheart, O England, of my dreams Where sodium lights from oil-slicked roads On factory walls doth gleam. Where mardy proles speak scabrous prose In snugs and pub saloons;...
View ArticleA Socio-Economic Theory of Justice (and good leather boots)
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair...
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How to preach, how not to tell the truth
The Independent Press Standards Organisation has had to make a judgment against that scholar, statesman and all-round paragon of civic virtue, Boris Johnson. In a column for the Daily Telegraph (for...
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Advice to a young man
Ignore everything your father says to you now. He’s an idiot. But be prepared to be amazed about how much sense he’s talking in five years’ time. (It’s not that you’ve grown up enough to understand...
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Why is writing so damn hard…?
It had never really progressed, it had simply fallen apart into a series of fragments. And out of two years’ work that was all that he had to show — just fragments, incomplete in themselves and...
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