Not much is uncontroversial when it comes to the life and work of Sigmund Freud, but one thing ought to be: he was a lousy psychotherapist. Take the case of his patient Horace Frink, who Freud diagnosed with a serious …
The Sopranos is a Freudian comedy
Thinking back on The Sopranos over the years, I’ve granted a sort of holy status to the scene in “Second Opinion” (Season 3, Episode 7) where Carmela is bluntly lectured by an elderly psychiatrist. She’s expecting some gentle double-talk from …
Why CBT won’t set you free
One of the more entertaining parts of my training in Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy — an austerely philosophical style of CBT — was how tribal our course leader was about its merits. He got particularly exercised about psychoanalysts. If a prospective …
Does feminism have mummy issues?
Freud didn’t really understand women. This is not an original point: it was first made by Freud himself. According to his biographer Ernest Jones, Freud admitted: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet …
How powerful is Liz Truss?
“We will deliver, and deliver, and deliver!” proclaimed Liz Truss, sounding like a crazed obstetrician. While our new leader is taking her first gulps at the poisoned chalice of power, the outlook for those whom power likes to harass doesn’t …
Dreams can save us
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion. She was referring to our conscious selves, during waking hours, but our unconscious minds also tell us stories so that we can live. This involuntary, instinctive, subconscious storytelling occurs …
Vladimir Putin’s war on chaos
The ancient Greek word “chaos” means a chasm or void, and its opposite is “cosmos”, meaning the exquisite design of the world. Modern astrophysicists are struck by what they call the “fine-tuning” of the universe, a place which looks as …
Vasectomies won’t save the planet
When H. G. Wells imagined the end of the world, he thought of a salt dead sea under a dying sun. His time traveller, having navigated his machine 30 million years into the future, saw this: algal slime, lichenous rocks, …