The notion that the appropriate response to experiencing “symptoms” is to seek their immediate removal is a bizarre product of our time which has become dangerously ordinary. It positions us immediately against our bodies, hearts, and souls, and frames them as systems that are prone to meaningless malfunction, like an iPhone engineered to break after a certain time for no apparent reason. People with lots of symptoms, or more severe symptoms, are deemed very unwell, and by virtue, less powerful, less important and less good than those who are not symptomatic. In our capitalist economic structures, they may also be less productive and therefore less valued or successful.
Read MoreI have never found anything that summarises my experience of therapy (as both therapist and patient) quite like Garrick Duckler’s short film, On Being A Patient. His words provide two gifts: they touch the intricacies of the kinds of problems that people bring to therapy, as separate from diagnostic categories or symptoms, and they articulate the nuances of what can be frightening about the intimacy and vulnerability of a therapeutic relationship. It is nine minutes unequivocally well spent for any patient, therapist, or curious other.
Read MoreBeing a therapy patient, especially in a longer-term, more exploratory treatment like psychoanalysis, requires a certain kind of courage. Those who choose this mode of healing (arguably the most expensive, open-ended and uncertain option, in many respects, of those ‘on the market’) submit themselves to a path towards the perimeter of themselves as they have come to be known, by others and by themselves. Eventually, they must heave open the rusty gate at the edge of their familiar, conscious self, step into the overgrown grass and begin their navigation of the unmapped, incoherent, shadowy outskirts of who they are.
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