At 83, a year before he died in 2007, the iconic North American writer Norman Mailer completed a questionnaire in the magazine Vanity Fair. The interrogation was called The Proust Questionnaire, and Mailer answered it with same respect for language and ideas that he bought to his novels. His responses are refreshing to read, not […]
Depression
October 29, 2012 By
WHO KNOWS what pushes us over the edge? A middle aged woman I once interviewed said the depression that stole her life was a mix of childhood and genes. Parents who did not show her warmth or cuddle her set the scene, but it was not until she lost her job that she entered a […]
What do We Mean When We Talk of Mental Illness?
October 26, 2012 By
Stand outside a psychiatric ward and you’ll find the markers of madness. They lie in no particular order, and convey no message, except a kind of covering up. Fag ends for forgetting. Maybe the drugs dispensed inside spur nicotine craving or maybe cigarettes are the only solace when society turns away. Whatever, butts are the […]
Geography of Meanings Book Review
October 24, 2012 By
Apart from Freud, whose back catalogue must rival that of The Beatles for value and continuing relevance, psychoanalysis has seldom troubled the keeper when it comes to publishing success. Sure, there have been some big-hitters among the early generation of analysts, notably Melanie Klein, Bion, Winnicott and Bowlby, but while they have had profound things […]
A Massacre 20 Years On
October 21, 2012 By
I have a favourite photograph of Tiananmen Square. It is a horizontal shot. A man rides a bicycle in the foreground – behind him there are serried rows of upright figures – thousands and thousands of figures. The photograph was taken in May 1989. The figures are students celebrating their occupancy of the famous square. […]
Loss as Part of Life
October 19, 2012 By
Many depressions are the effect of a wounding shock to the soul. The soul may seem to recover—like the body does after a bruise—but it is only like a bruise which slowly deepens into a terrible ache. As the writer, D. H. Lawrence puts it: ‘When we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is […]
The Danger of Asking the Wrong Questions
October 17, 2012 By
We live in an age of experts. From the ‘refrigeration engineer’ who gasses up the air-con, to the garden guy who is now a ‘landscape designer’ skills close to home tend to be specialised. Some may haunt hardware aisles, dreaming of a new drill, but that has more to do with cool tools than getting […]
What is Seen and Heard
October 14, 2012 By
“What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal an inhuman wakefulness. Might not they be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives. By what right to we close our ears to them?” JM Coetzee Foe. Nearly 10 years after her death, […]
Memory takes us where we need to go
October 11, 2012 By
As a young army conscript Ari Folman watched as heavily armed Christian Phalangists massacred Palestinians in two refugee camps, ‘Sabra’ and ‘Shatila’. It was 1982 and Israel had invaded Lebanon. The Phalangists, an Israeli ally, were supposed to weed out terrorists, but instead murdered up to 3,500 Palestinian men, women and children. Neither Folman nor […]
What Do You Want?
October 9, 2012 By
The question that appears to most personally address us is the one we find hardest to answer: ‘What do you want?’ It sounds like an opportunity; but speaking your heart’s desire is not simple, nor easy. There is something elusive about longing. It is better, in a way, to keep looking; then you won’t be […]
