Month: October 2023

Mathew Perry’s tragic death at age 54, which is still under investigation, will have struck a chord with fans of his show, and also all those who have had encounters with addiction. He was found dead in his hot tub and whether or not he died from natural causes, his body was terribly affected by his encounters with addiction. I have visited many men and women in prison, who have been addicted to illicit drugs. Their orange case files, which seemed to weigh kilos, are a symbol of prison of addiction. Illicit drugs, and illicit activity to fund the drugs results in short term prison sentences, often for decades. But there appears to be no escape from this numbing psychic and literal prison. It is a circular route. The only exit appears to be death. On the margins the drugs of choice are heroin and crack cocaine. But alcoholism is wide spread in polite society. Drugs affect our psychic functioning. They heal inner splits. The make us whole. Jung argued that they are so powerful that only an overwhelming experience of the divine, or ego collapse at depth, could help overcome such addictions.

He wrote in his letters that SPIRIT was required to overcome SPIRIT (alcohol). He did not publicise his views for fear of being misunderstood, but historians now credit him for being one of the forces behind the creation of the 12 step movement. Rather than being obsessed in seeking wholeness through drugs and alcohol, or other processes, the twelve steps allows one to experience the sense of wholeness through contact with others, and through spiritual development.

Psychotherapy is a relatively weak medicine in my experience. It can certainly have transformative effects, but it usually falls short when faced with the tsunami of addiction. Both the therapist and the patient will be swept away. The obsession to achieve wholeness, through drugs, is extremely powerful. If life is a quest, then addiction is a dead end. Nowadays, young people have little in the way of initiation. Consumerism doesn’t offer them a real initiation, so it is often drugs that play that role. In London today, middle class teenagers will talk about taking ketamine, cross-fading. They will drink vodka neat. Surely, they are seeking some form of initiation. When the addictive part of the mind takes over, the other sections cannot function. The analyst David Schoen argues that it is a Tsunami, not a hot tub. Addiction has a malevolent aspect that is murderous. It can kill the psyche. It is not amenable to logic and reason. Yet, strangely. we might also say that many people who suffer from addictions, are seekers, mystics, who think there is more to the world than meets the eye. Surely, they are right. I am not arguing against intoxication. There is certainly a place for such things. But we need to find a route to wholeness, at least most of the time, that doesn’t destroy our psychic structures. This is easier said than done. It requires painstaking work, it requires sacrifice, and it requires a certain humility. None of these are dominant values in an extroverted and materialistic culture. We live in an age of narcissism, where we want straight white teeth, we want credit and merit for our achievements, and we want the world to bow down to our personal truth. We don’t care about experts, or partners, we want to live our best life. Of course, there is some merit in this and those who experience oppression should fight back. But there is a precarious element to modern culture. The ego is a vulnerable edifice to build life upon. As Jung said, I am just a clod of earth. There is a relief in keeping our feet on the ground, and striving for wholeness, one step at a time.

I recently fulfilled an ambition to go skiing in the Italian Alps. In my enthusiasm I snuck off from my group in the first 10 minutes as I didn’t want to be stuck on the baby slopes doing what looked like really boring exercises. As a seasoned runner and cyclist I reckoned that skiing couldn’t be that difficult. You just sort of point yourself down the slope and go. Easy. No fevered pedalling, or lung busting leg action required. I’m sure I could do this asleep. Within 15 minutes of my first ever trip to a ski slope, I had ditched my instructor (sorry Massimo) and I found myself on a Red run. It looked steep, and everyone seemed to know what they were doing; everyone except me.

Now I was up there I couldn’t see anyway down except by skiing. I decided to give it a go. Reader, I got to the bottom. Was it pretty? No. Did I spend most of it crashing and lying forlornly in the snow trying to get my skis on and off? Yes. Did I lose any semblance of grace and dignity? I sure did. Still, I managed, through a series of “controlled” crashes, to get safely to the bottom. The next day, with my tail between my legs, I made the decision to join the group. Maybe, I grudgingly conceded, I did have something to learn. As a therapist maybe I should know better? Yes, sometimes you need a guide, especially on unfamiliar territory, to show you the way. Or to learn how to get from A to B more gracefully! Although I knew this intellectually, some over inflated part of me thought I could work it on my own. I’m sure you’ll be glad to know us therapists have our blind spots too! I had to get literally knocked down to the ground, repeatedly, in order to learn my lesson. As therapists we say this day in day out. Our patients come in and tell us the ego, the “I”, can master every situation. Yet, the “I” always bumps into more powerful forces – inner and outer – and usually gets a beating. The conscious mind generally gets too big for its boots. We usually need to listen to and enlist the unconscious to really grapple with the difficulties and risks of life.

Later in the day, after my lessons, when I was practicing on my own, I found myself in the wrong lift again. The wrong lift once I could explain away as an accident, but twice? This is what Freud might have called “repetition compulsion”, when we keep recreating a situation again and again, hoping that we can figure it out this time round. Usually, we don’t. And then we do it again. This process happens without our knowledge, driven by unconscious processes. I knew something wasn’t quite right when I got on this lift, I had a feeling in my stomach, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. I had a feeling of dread and was about to bail, but ended up getting on, overriding my instincts.

To confirm my worst fears the lift just kept going and going upwards. I felt a knot in my stomach. The guy next to me looked very intense. I had ended up on another Red Run. Not all Red Runs are the same. This Red Run was really Red! Skiers jumped of the lift and floated and flitted like birds, turning and twisting and darting straight down the slope. This time I knew I was out of my league. I took off my skis, and found a small valley to the side of the carefully groomed piste, and carefully slid myself back to the flatter slopes. Various skiers stopped by to check I was ok. I said, “I’m not injured, just embarrassed…” Half an hour later I was back on more comfortable ground and I was able to put my skiis back on. Although this was a humiliation to my ego, I had surrendered and accepted defeat. A lucky escape.

Interestingly, I had found myself attracted to the higher slopes. I had been drawn to areas where I didn’t have the skills for. I somehow managed to “accidentally” repeat this. The second time, humbled and a little frightened, I had chosen to make a safe descent. On the last day I took the ski lift (without skis) up to the glacier. I was only able to go part way as I had missed the final lift cut off time. I was secretly relieved. I really didn’t want to go any higher. For some reason I felt nervous about going up to 3000 metres, even though I wasn’t skiing. When I returned to the hotel I remember feeling a little nauseous and unwell. I knew the signs of mild altitude sickness, which I seem to suffer from. It’s a useful warning signal from the body, telling I needed to get down from the mountains. So, every day, I had become more and more cautious. The unforgiving terrain had educated me.

Still, our culture often makes us feel that we can do anything, and that we shouldn’t back down. In the last few days I read about a French woman and Polish man who ascended the very dangerous K2 mountain without oxygen. The Polish man died, and the French woman took her shoes off after hallucinations brought on by altitude sickness. She has been told by doctors that her hands and feet may have to be amputated due to frost bite. Even so, she said she would be back in the mountains, because, she said, “I need this.” The climber Beck Weathers, a very driven American doctor, said he used to climb to deal with a deep depression. The total dedication and obsession required to climb, combined with the physical exhaustion, seemed to cure him of his depression. 1/6 people who climb Everest don’t make it down alive. Nevertheless, he was a man possessed. It was only a near death experience, resulting in him losing his hands, that he gave up climbing and found himself finally reunited with his family. Many psychoanalysts say it’s very important to accept our limits. In a culture that pushes us to extremes, it is very important to accept our vulnerabilities. It’s a lesson Beck Weathers has taken to heart: he no longer climbs, but is happier than he has ever been.

On the penultimate day in the hotel I got talking to a man who was a very experienced skier who enjoyed going off-piste, outside the prepared ski areas. I was impressed, but on the last day he went missing with his 13-year-old daughter. We feared the worst. His last ski pass use had been at 10.30 am at 3000 metres at the top of a glacier. The one I had turned back from because I had missed the cut off time. He hadn’t been seen or heard from since. As night fell, the helicopters and search parties returned to base. No sign of him. No phone. No signal. No flares. Nothing at all. Everyone in the hotel was in total shock; no one could sleep. The next day he had still not been sighted. This was a tragedy. At 9.30 just as I was leaving, there was news they had been found. They had got lost off the top of the glacier. Even with all that experience. They had then walked non stop for 16 hours through the night in order to stay warm and stave off sleep. They eventually found shelter, and were picked up at 9.30.

It was an incredible ending to what could have been a terrible misadventure. I wondered, what is it about getting “high”? It’s easy enough to get up there, but it’s hard to get down. Marie Louise Von Franz, the Jungian analyst worked with a lot of such cases. In her book, the Puer Aeternus, she recalls the case of young men who had trained themselves to sleep on mountains without any camping gear. The idea being that they didn’t want anything to weigh them down, either kit wise or psychologically. But mountains are extremely dangerous. They cut us down to size. The top of Everest, with its thin, lifeless air, is known as the death zone. People get up mountains, but sometimes they don’t get down. On a very minute scale, I experienced this over-inflation. Oblivious to the people being carted off the slopes in ski ambulances, I ended up on slopes that were beyond my ability. Similarly, my fellow guest, despite his decades of experience, had become disoriented off-piste, and without any back up plan. He was able to draw on inner resources, but it was very risky. Luckily, we avoided injury or worse, but both felt somewhat chastised in our different ways.

The body’s physical and psychological warning systems, such as altitude sickness, have an important role to play. Even though you can get medicine to rid yourself of altitude sickness, perhaps that is not always so wise? Watching the winter Olympics it’s easy to get carried away. However, if you watch an interview with any of those athletes, you’ll find that they are riddled with injuries: metal rods run through bodies that are broken and battered, and they have spent months in hospitals and rehabs. Still, something keeps them going back. This knife-edge existence is extremely precarious. That is why the gods can live in Mount Olympus, but not humans. We can spend a few days at altitude, but then we need to come down to sea level. When we go up, we need to carry emergency supplies, whistles, flares, and plenty of humility, or we risk being thrown down the mountain.

Addictions work in a similar way. It is maybe easy to get “high”; it seems like you can live up there forever; but then one wrong step; or just bad luck, and you find yourself caught up in avalanche. Von Franz warned of the dangers of over-inflation. It is very depressing to have to face our limitations and vulnerability. The Puer Aeturnus, wants to deny these limits. This works for a while, and can even be very heroic. But in the end the hero usually meets a grisly end. A life with no challenge or risk is dry and dull. But when a person only feels a alive when dicing with danger, that is another matter. My initiation to mountain sports has given me plenty of food for thought. The deeper I got into the skiing, the more aware of my limits I became. To be honest, I was glad to get back to earth, and place one foot in front of the other. On a more serious note, my fellow hotel guest, Gary Raine, appeared in an article in the Sun, and seemed grateful to have survived a very harrowing ordeal. The headline says, “they were lucky to be alive.” Sometimes, although very unpleasant, altitude sickness can be a life saver!

Families, in the broadest sense, are the crucible in which we are shaped. It’s not just the parents, but the grandparents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, and family friends that influence us. This truth is captured in the multi-generational Succession saga.

Succession is rich with psychoanalytical material. What great case studies! What perfect clinical vignettes. Freud based many of his theories on research on upper class Viennese women. He worked with the individual. But in reality, we are all part of sprawling chaotic groups.

The family therapist John Byng Hall argued that we are all part of “family scripts.” He meant that family life really is like a play or TV drama. We sometimes even know what each family member is going to say before they say it. We all draw on a treasure trove of family myths. Some conscious and some unconscious. We may not have a coat of arms or board room but we can all imagine what our family motto might be.

We all play roles in relationship to these scripts. We may repeat and replicate them, or we may edit and rewrite them. Or we may seek out an entirely new script for ourselves.

The Roy family is a dynasty based on an amalgam of the Murdochs, Maxwells and the writers’ imagination. Every pathology, every shadow area, every narcissistic trait is dialled up to full intensity. Perhaps that is why it is a vivid canvas for us to project parts of ourselves onto. It helps to amplify our own imaginations.

All four children crave their parents’ love and attention. The family business is central to their identity. The siblings either try and inherit the business, or take it over, or fight against it in a dynamic and ever-shifting psychic landscape.

The ending of the whole series, seems like a good time to look back to Series 1 Episode 7 when the father, Logan Roy recruits a corporate therapist to conduct some family therapy.

At the beginning of the therapy he tells the therapist “everything I’ve ever done is for my children.” The children look at each other incredulously. The father then gets on his phone “to buy a TV company.” The very double speak and dissociation inherent in the emotional weather system of the family is constellated in that very moment.

The father has gathered his children together to ostensibly talk about their feelings and in that very moment he turns away to the more tantalising world of mega business deals. This is familiar emotional territory to his children. To his credit, the therapist challenges the father to keep the therapy on track. But it becomes crystal clear that the father has absolutely no interest in delving any deeper. The whole thing is a publicity stunt to bolster the standing of his company. It’s a media circus and the therapy ruse is simply good optics for the company’s stock market valuation.

The therapist suggests taking a break. But he is seduced by the family. Does he think he’s a friend or a therapeutic butler? Is he corrupted by the family’s power and glamour? He dives head first into their swimming pool and smashes his front teeth. He has to go to hospital and the therapy is aborted. He has underestimated the danger of working with this family. Under the benign surface there are hidden complexities. He has lost his analytic stance and ending up “losing face” as a result. In the end he is a comic distraction and a casualty from the power tussles in the family.

At various points the patriarch Logan Roy has promised each child they will be his true heir. They always, in their desire to be the chosen one, fall for it. But he leaves them hanging. This sibling rivalry means that their is always a tension between the children. They are allies. They understand each other. But they are also deadly competitors.

The siblings struggle in their own lives and struggle with intimacy. The eldest son, Connor, makes a tragic attempt to run for president. His girlfriend is an escort and he pays for her interest in him. Money secures love. Kendall is ravaged by addiction, and struggles in his relationship with his ex wife and children. Roman has complex sexual involvements with work colleagues that unravel. Shiv, the only daughter, remains emotionally distant in her on/off relationship with her husband.

Like all families they have their problems. The father, Logan Roy, has visible scar marks on his back. The children all exhibit less visible damage. But it is still there in their psyches. Like all of us they have to contend with their family legacy and unconsciously or consciously decide on what to take forward and what to leave behind.

Watch this terrific psychotherapy thriller if you really want to know what it’s like to be a patient or analyst! Sure, the multi-season HBO series In Treatment is more realistic with its 1 episode 1 session format; but this work of Disney Plus fiction is more realistic in terms of capturing the emotional rollercoaster of the therapeutic relationship.

The writers behind The Patient have both had experiences of therapy and it shows in their compelling opening sequence. The Freud look alike, actor Steve Carell, plays the middle-aged therapist. He is manacled to the floor. The room consists of a bed, commode and table with a tooth brush. It’s a far cry from his book-lined consulting room.

The patient, a thin young man, has kidnapped him. He wants the therapist to cure him. What from? His compulsion to murder people. The therapist pleads with his patient to return to his consulting room. He explains that therapy cannot take place in an atmosphere of distrust. The patient refuses. The therapist is really up against this murderous and compulsive young man. He decides to try and help him. Or maybe he is trying to plot his escape?

In an early scene the therapist tries to unpick the lock chaining him to the floor. But his plastic fork snaps in the lock. The patient picks up on this. His therapist wants to flee. But he cannot. Finally he sets up an improvised office. He asks the patient for pen and paper. This represents the need to think. He has to be able to formulate his thoughts if he is to aid the patient. Or maybe he is deceiving the patient and needs the pen and paper as part of an escape plan?

Just like in real therapy the patient and therapist get more deeply involved. The therapist sets some rules. The patient has to talk to him if he is going to kill anyone before doing it. Notice the therapist doesn’t prohibit him from doing anything. He simply wants to give him a second opinion.

The patient complies. He brings a man home. Normally he would have already killed him. But this time he brings this living problem to his therapy. Just like in a real therapy the problem eventually is constellated in the field between patient and therapist.

I once attended a lecture by the psychoanalyst Neville Symington. He said therapy doesn’t depend on the room, or how many times you meet a week, or the length of the session. These are all merely technical considerations. He argued that psychotherapy existed before psychotherapists, for instance in the healing traditions of many religions. He recounted the story of a taxi driver who had a suicidal man in the back of his cab. His wife and daughter had died recently and he was about to jump off a bridge. The taxi driver locked his doors and listened to this man for two hours until he was no longer suicidal.

Similarly, our beleaguered therapist is having to perform without his technical repertoire. He is unable to make use of his analytical reverie, consult colleagues, or make profound observations. Instead he had to get under the patient’s defences, to have an emotional impact on him. He hates what his patient is doing to him, and others, and yet he has to reach over to him. This is precarious territory as the patient is highly attuned to being deceived. How can this earnest family-oriented therapist enter into the world of this brutalised and brutal killer?

We know there is also perhaps a reachable side of this patient. He is discerning about takeaways which he shares with his therapist. He seems to like his mum. He takes his job seriously. The therapist also appears amused when the patient urinates in the nearby lavatory. He seems to be thinking how can anyone possibly pee for that long? How big is his bladder? He is curious about his patient.

He even manages to arrange a cosy family therapy session including the patient’s mum. This is poignant because we know the therapist is a widower and estranged from his religious zealot son.

But is this enough? The compulsion to murder is strong. Most compulsions overpower conscious thought. As therapist and patient descend further into the unconscious who can say what will happen?

In today’s world, replete with self help books, and guides on how to be your best self, or how to have multiple orgasms, marriage appears to be out of date. A so called bad marriage certainly is out of fashion. Relationship therapists will try and help iron out problems. They will tell you have to communicate better. They will tell you to make date nights, or to draw up love maps. They will aid you in how to make bids to one another, and how to respond creatively to bids. They will tell you to avoid sarcasm, stone-walling and other destructive behaviours. Maybe they will teach you to have more sex? Perhaps they actually think you would be better off apart and you should do an conscious uncoupling.

I’m sure some of this maybe helpful. But we may wonder if this misunderstands the psychological nature of marriage. If marriage is simply a welfare arrangement, or a wellness deal, then it seems doomed. There are few happy marriages. There are lots of happier ways to arrange one’s living arrangements. Perhaps a commune, or a polyamorous set up? Or living together without marriage. But I would echo the experience of the analyst Guggenbuhl-Craig:

@In my practice I have made the following remarkable observation: the level of difficulty in a marriage, the sum of suffering, irritation, anger, and frustration, also the neurotic and perverse elements which are to be found in a marriage – all these do not necessarily parallel a tendency to dissolution of the marriage. That is to say, outwardly bad marriages are often clearly viable and actual continue until the death of one of the partners. On the other hand, less problematic marriages, those which contain less pathology, often show a tendency towards dissolution; they seem to dissolve more readily than do the more difficult marriages. The observer who sails under the flag of wellbeing has difficulty in understanding this. His tendency is to give those marriages in which neuroses, sexual perversions, twisted relationships, and similar phenomena appear, a bad prognosis.@

This is because marriage is really nothing to do with wellbeing. Just like climbing Mount Everest is not really a pleasant experience. Certainly marriage, considered psychologically, may provide solace and satisfactions, but it is also painful. So why do we do it? Because we are not utilitarians. We are not trying to constantly maximise our happiness. In the Sunday papers we are pressurised to do so. Hack this, tweak that. But we actually seek out difficulty and meaning. Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig argues that marriage involves sacrificing things we hold dear in our personality, in order for the marriage to continue. This is the opposite of the idea that we can have it all. He argues that marriage, in old-fashioned language, is about salvation. He understands it as mutual confrontation until death. I will write more about this in coming days.

Something peculiar happens in midlife. A certain realisation can strike home. That there are 8,045,311,447 people in the world…or even more…as babies are borne as I type. So in that mass, what does an individual life mean? We buy goods that are dreamt up in a marketing suite. We eat food engineered in a laboratory by a handful of corporations. We find it hard to believe in experts, or religious organisations, or the institutions that used to give us meaning. What does the life of one person in 8 billion mean? If we work in a large organisation, our employment may be terminated, and we may find ourselves without purpose. At midlife we become acutely aware of our flaws and failures. Humiliations and defeats feature large. If we look back at the dreams we had for our life, we may feel painfully aware of how few of them we were able to achieve. Even those goals we have achieved may feel without meaning. Bradley Wiggins, the Tour De France winner, and cycling champion, found himself restless when he retired from road racing. He threw out his medals and trophies. He was unable to look at his medal cabinet and simply enjoy what he had achieved. Suddenly all those achievements didn’t mean anything to him. Without the powerful routine of road racing his mind starting spinning. He tried many new sports. His mind was flooded with images. He shared stories about this violent and alcoholic father, who was also a road cyclist. He separated from his wife. This man, who appeared from the outside, in our materialistic and achievement orientated world, who seemed to have everything, appeared to have a very public mid-life crisis. As Carl Jung, the psychotherapist said,

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie

He noted that we realised that our sun was no longer rising but setting. You can watch @Blue Zone@ on Netflix and imagine you could live to 100. Perhaps you will. Times have changed and we are more vigorous, more active, more creative in the second half of life. Sure, you can complete a triathlon in your seventies. And you may not feel old. You may feel young at heart. However, this doesn’t do away with the psychic fact that our unconscious tells us that we are moving closer to dying than living. That we have less time left on our life clock, than we have expended. This is a shocking and dramatic psychic reality. It is painful. Tech billionaires track their urines and faeces, and log every meal. Some inject themselves with the plasma of younger people in the quest to live longer. But even they will have to face the truth that they will die on day.

Our orientation towards life has to radically shift. We may experience bodily symptoms. We may go to the doctor with aches and pains, and investigate the magical relief of life insurance, or medical insurance. We may become depressed and find it hard to be motivated. But Jung argued that we need to change gear in the second half of life. He based this on his own personal reflections and experiences as well as his wide reading and clinical work. He delved into the images in his mind and produced the Red Book. It is a fascinating inner dialogue populated with characters that took him to the edge of his own sanity. In fact he had to sleep with a gun under his bed, in case the exploration became too much. He would have to remind himself everyday about his own name and his address to help ground himself in reality. He came out of this period, with the insight that the second half of life is about @individuating@. Societal norms don’t cut it anymore. The ego becomes less important and one has to delve into the self, or the soul, and find out who one is one a more authentic plane. The question Who Am I Really? becomes the pressing issue. To pursue this one has to look inwards. One has to sift through experiences and images, dreams and feelings, which are unique to oneself. The importance of self-reflection becomes more and more important. This can be aided by different things by different people, such as art, reading, film, religion, meditation, sport and the list goes on. Certain activities may aid the process of amplifying one’s inner world.

Like Sir Bradley Wiggins, once we get off whatever bike we have been riding in the first half of life, be it career, raising children, building a home, we will find that we have to embark on another odyssey. Modern culture provides fewer sign posts for this section of life. It will still try and flog us answers that worked for the first half. By all means get botox, or white teeth, and make sure to keep the muscles strong. Keep active and find meaningful outer world activities. But alongside this ensure a space for personal reflections and development. In the first half of life we may choose to jump off a cliff into the water. In the second half of life we have to jump into ourselves. In order not to drown, or lose consciousness, we need aids to keep us afloat in the psychic rapids. Psychotherapy is one such possibility. The routine and container of seeing a therapist can help us explore the inner depths. We could do this ourselves. Indeed Freud never had a therapist as the was the founder of analysis, and he had to analyse himself. But surely, like any inherently exciting and perilous activity we are better off to have a guide into the underworld. This psychic guide can provide footholds, or shine a light when necessary. They may followed similar paths themselves. They can provide a reassuring word, or warn of danger ahead. In our increasingly capitalist and materialistic culture, which is heavily extroverted, everything seems to be measured by outward symbols. But this will not give the psyche lasting satisfaction. The second half is more about divesting, than accumulating. It is more about the inner quest, than the outer quest. We have a choice to either to engage on this consciously, or to be forced into it wailing and screaming, after a catastrophe.

Carl Jung said

“Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.”

You can find the full interview and Leigh’s written reflections on Welldoing.org

In the meantime here are some tips for the disorganised and overtrained athlete from Leigh’s article….

1. Be the best at things that require no talent
Before I could develop interventions to maximise my potential on the world record, I had to build a foundation that nourished growth. This required optimising my lifestyle so I could dedicate the maximum amount of time and energy to pursuing my target. I focussed on three areas:

Time management: Structuring a digital calendar to cover every activity including detail about travel time, who I was meeting and what I needed to take with me ensured I arrived on time and prepared to perform at my best. Appointments with non-negotiable times were colour-coded red, empty time in my calendar was populated with flexible tasks from my to-do list and coloured green.

Organisation: To ensure I found my files quickly, I tidied my desktop and structured the folder organisation on my laptop. I did the same for my living space at home, also ensuring I prepared equipment in the evening, ready for the following day. I took this one step further by separating my life into ‘zones’ which included different places for work, relaxing and sleep. Each ‘zone’ was optimised for its purpose.

Sleep: My performance psychologist would often say: “Sleep is the most powerful performance enhancing drug in the world and the least used.” Our record-breaking strategy was based on working smarter rather than longer, and eight hours of sleep every day ensured optimum physical and cognitive function.

I was lucky enough to catch the end of the book launch of Blake’s Job by Jason Wright.  It was held at the Architectural Association bookshop.  The room was overflowing and I caught some of the conversation from the hallway.  The central argument of the book is about moving from a paradigm of exploitation to resonance.  Jason uses the Blake’s images, as well as a range of modern thinkers, and vignettes from his clinical work, to make his point.   There is a music in the way he writes, just as in the way he speaks.  Perhaps this echoes his earlier life in the theatre.   He also includes some of his own rather good poetry in the book.  There is poem towards the end called “Blessing”.  The final three lines are

Suddenly I realise

That If I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom

What is remarkable is that alongside writing this book Jason has a very busy clinical practice, working with groups as well as individuals, and he is also an entrepreneur.  He plays a very hands on role in running the group therapy practice Number 42 located in London Bridge.  I have an unpublished interview about his memories of establishing number 42 which i will share some excerpts from soon

I was very pleased to interview world record holder Leigh Timmis recently. He has just published a great book about his experiences called The Race of Truth. It took him five years to write. The interview will be published tomorrow and I’ll post a link. What a modest and thoughtful man as well as a remarkable athlete. It astounds me where he gets his energy from. He has the world record for the fastest ride across Europe, and also the most miles ridden in seven days. These are certainly astounding physical feats. He didn’t simply take minutes or hours off the previous record, but days! His body has to be robust enough to withstand the intense training required. It has to be sturdy enough to survive the incredible pressure he puts on it during the record attempt. However, he is also able to go deep into his mind in order to find the psychological resources required to push himself beyond ordinary limits. The book goes into great detail about his struggles and difficulties and how he overcomes them. He is able to achieve a sweet spot, where mind and body are in tandem, that enables him to achieve these remarkable records. He is able to contain incredible energies without breaking down.

He is also able to use what we might term a secondary container, in the form of the team around him. His nutritionist, sports coach, psychologist, logistics expert and extended team seem to absorb many of the pressures on him. He is able to make use of his team, and turn around what could be destructive, into something creative. This secondary container can ensure he is given just what he needs, just when he needs it. This could be a phrase from his team, which resonates with him, such as “what’s the view from the balcony” which helps him to visualise his own achievement as a spectator. Or it could be more concrete nutrition, in terms of a sandwich he likes.

The team around him are interpreting all the messages he is sending. Not just the computer read outs about his speed and cadence, heart rate and tyre pressure, but all his unconscious messages. How is he speaking? What is the music of his voice like? How does his body look on the bike? How are his moods? They are constantly seeking to work together to digest and make sense of his powerful emotions and to give him back something useful. The analyst Wilfred Bion spoke of how a mother may take the dread experienced by a newborn baby and somehow absorb it, and make the baby feel safe. The mother may act to psychologically digest such experiences and give back something more soothing to the baby. Well, I wonder, given the pressures he puts himself under, such intensity, such extremity, that he may feel states of dread and hopelessness. There are times he writes about when he thinks of giving up. But he is adept at using his team, and that allows him to weather primitive and extreme emotions.

Leigh spent a great deal of time picking the right people for his team. He sought out people that he clicked with. He was attuned to the chemistry. He was also mindful of the chemistry between people. He must have intuitively known how much he would need to depend on them. And how much communication, some of it unconscious and through his body, would be going on. He had faith that his team would be able to work together to interpret his messages, and to figure out how to get him to the finish line.