Irvin D. Yalom – The Gift of Therapy

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Book Review, Irvin D. Yalom, Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, The Gift of Therapy

Absorbing reflections reaching more widely than merely the ‘new generation of therapists and their patients’

I admire the wisdom and compassion expressed in the writing and the thinking behind the writing of existential humanistic psychotherapist Irvin Yalom

Now in his late 80s, Yalom inspires not just those who practice psychotherapy, counselling, psychoanalysis or psychiatry. He is a philosophical thinker, rather than one who focuses on human ‘lesions’ or pathologies. Or, as he simply, profoundly says :

A diagnosis limits vision; it diminishes ability to relate to the other as a person. Once we make a diagnosis, we tend to selectively inattend to aspects of the patient that do not fit into that particular diagnosis

He has written books which tell the stories (anonymised, given narrative structure, and with permission) or particular encounters with patients over his decades of practice. These do not read like dry, clinical, case histories. Yalom inhabits the understanding that what is happening in the psychotherapeutic encounter is what happens in any human encounter – relationship. The therapist, though they must strive to understand their own subjective agenda within the client/practitioner encounter, can never be a robotic observer, but always brings themselves into the field of encounter with the client, as much as the client brings themselves into that field. And the connection itself will shape outcomes.

Yalom also, as to some extent here, writes books which are perhaps a little less geared towards the lay-person, but which might serve as useful guide or instruction to anyone engaged in holding any kind of therapeutic space, whether one to one, or with groups

He also writes a third kind of book, one where he turns deep thinking about philosophy and the questions which surely we all return to, across our lives, the attempt to understand primal ‘whys’ into the form of dramatic narrative. For Yalom is as much a writer, an imaginative, dramatic, shaping one, as he is someone working within the pursuit of emotional, integral healing and wholeness for individuals seeking this in the psychotherapy field.

Something I absolutely appreciate with Yalom is his acknowledgement and laying bare of his own errors, challenges and difficulties in his work. Perhaps this is one reason is so genuinely admired, so genuinely an inspirer – he shows his failures, reveals how the journey of practice goes wrong.

I like the central idea, expressed in many different ways in his books, of holding fast to the idea of the wholeness within the individual, however broken they might appear :

As a young psychotherapy student the most useful book I read was Karen Horney’s Neurosis and Human Growth. And the single most useful concept in that book was the notion that the human being has an inbuilt propensity towards self-realization. If obstacles are removed, Horney believed, the individual will develop into a mature, fully realized adult, just as an acorn will develop into an oak tree

Yalom is always revealing far more than the ostensible subject matter of his books, and, is always writing about meaning with wider reach

I underlined page after page, as being useful to return to, whether thinking about my own professional requirements, or, those deeper thoughts about the ‘whys’

Here is an example, ostensibly Yalom is cautioning against the fashion for shorter trainings, shorter interventions, and the following of rigid single patterns of thought in psychiatric evaluations and treatments, but more is opened out

In these days of relentless attack on the field of psychotherapy, the analytic institutes may become the last bastion, the repository of collected psychotherapy wisdom, in much the same way the church for centuries was the repository of philosophical wisdom and the only realm where serious existential questions – life purpose, values, ethics, responsibility, freedom, death, community, connectedness – were discussed. There are similarities between psychoanalytic institutes and religious institutions of the past, and it is important that we do not repeat the tendencies of some religious institutions to suppress other forums of thoughtful discourse and to legislate what thinkers are allowed to think

The Gift of Therapy UK
The Gift of Therapy USA

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Julian Daizan Skinner – Practical Zen: Meditation and Beyond

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Book Review, Julian Daizan Skinner, Meditation, Practical Zen, Zen Buddhism

A helpful, de-mystifying and practical approach

I was delighted to receive this as a digital ARC from Singing Dragon. The fact that this book is published by them, almost guaranteed its excellence for me. Some publishers of books which fall into a loose ‘New Age’ category can be a little goofy, sensationalist and flaky for my tastes. Singing Dragon specialise in good writers in the field, knowledgeable in their various disciplines, excellent communicators

And so it is here.

Julian Daizan Skinner writes clearly about a subject which can be a challenging one for those of us unversed in the traditions and concepts of Zen Buddhism. You don’t need to have spent years on a spiritual path in order to understand what he explains. This author offers guidance for beginners in a meditation practice, without being so full of difficult and detailed instruction that the would-be meditator gets a headache from trying to remember too many bullet points.

we don’t need to particularly change ourselves into something else. We don’t have to go on painful courses of practice or force ourselves in any way. This is about acknowledging the truth of who we are , who we were and who we will always be

The author finds simple language, useful images to explain some complex concepts, and to offer routes by which the meditator may be able to glimmeringly grasp something as a signpost. It does not feel like something simplified and reduced to unlovely bare bones of ‘do this, do that’ either. More like being shown an open door to a room full of boundless fascination. You can stand outside the room, and look in, or you can choose to enter and really explore at depth, and journey onwards. Perhaps through further rooms whose doors are as yet unknown.

This book is inviting, simple, guiding the reader to explore this particular meditation practice in a built on way : an 8 week process of 25 minute sittings per day, plus a 5 minute journal keeping of what arises. There is also plenty of additional support offered, via the zenways website. This includes details of sitting groups, intensive 1 and 3 days meditation retreats, yoga trainings.

Even better, the book gives a password protected entry to the on site material – information and the guided meditations laid out in the text are available as audio downloads, and also a video of one of the meditations which involves specific movements to energise belly and legs linked with the breathing. This is useful for those who might prefer a guided session.

There is also plenty for those who might want to explore the subject more deeply – many cited texts, discourses on the philosophy and history of different approaches to Zen, so though this is, in essence, a practical guide, it offers more.

What really ‘got’ me about this excellent book, even more than its clarity in communication, is the kindness and compassion it radiated

Practical Zen: Meditation and Beyond Amazon UK
Practical Zen: Meditation and Beyond Amazon USA

John Marzillier – To Hell and Back

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Book Review, John Marzillier, Psychiatry, Psychological Therapies, Psychology, Psychotherapy, PTSD, To Hell and Back, Trauma

A wise, thoughtful, compassionate and skillful book about PTSD revealed through the words of those who have experienced this.

It’s funny how synchronicity works. Because I read Noel Hawley’s highly recommended Before The Fall, which I highly recommend, and which features a small boy who suffers a profound traumatic event, and clearly would be diagnosed with PTSD, and because I have a professional interest in the subject, I was reminded that John Marzillier, a British clinical psychologist and later, psychotherapist had written a book on the subject.

I had been moved and beautifully taught much in another book by him, The Gossamer Thread, where he explored his wide journey of development as a practitioner, and the deep exploration, refining, and ambiguity in human relationships that happen throughout all our lives, within and without any kind of formal therapeutic setting, simply because human beings are complex, and so each and every encounter between self and other is fraught with – an endless possibility.

Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry: Promoting the charity Heads Together to open up discussion of mental health issues

So, I started to read the in some ways, more geared towards the practitioner, slightly more left brain, slightly less poetical/metaphorical To Hell and Back: Personal Experiences of Trauma and How We Recover and Move on. And during my reading and reflecting period, mental health, particularly linked to the experience of dealing with psychological trauma, suddenly became positive news, due to Prince Harry, and also Prince William, speaking openly about the deep, hidden effects caused by their mother’s death. Public figures speaking out in such a way, honestly, – particularly public figures who are, not being rude, part of the Establishment rather than famous for flashier, sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll lifestyles, not to mention ‘reality TV’ famous only for being famous ‘stars’, will be listened to more seriously.

Expression of emotion is more common, and I would say, generally a good thing, with the exception of the artificial stimulation of emotion in reality TV shows!

But, he also cautions against those who assume it always IS the right approach to bare the suffering soul:

Is avoiding talking about feelings always wrong? I do not think that one can or should make such a categorical statement. So much depends on the context and the person, not to mention their relationships with family and close friends and on timing

Focusing on a wide range of traumatic single events – Marzillier in this book is exploring the kind of ‘out of a moderately clear blue sky’ unexpected and traumatic event, rather than, say the trauma of repeated brutal events from early childhood – the author looks both at the unpredictable horrors caused by acts of deliberate chosen malevolence, and the impersonal ‘being in the wrong place at the wrong time’ of major accidents like train crashes due to mechanical failures. Marzillier was, for many years, employed by Thames Valley Police, working with those who have to deal with traumatic events, which arise out of the nature of their work – police, firefighters, army personnel, ambulance personnel. The professionals have to maintain a distance from their own natural ‘alert! Danger! I am under threat! autonomic nervous system response of flight, fight, freeze or dissociation which is our physiological survival response. The fact that they are trained to do this, and have techniques to use, cannot ever completely over-ride that ancient animal response, and this kind of ‘trauma is my 9-5, day in-day out worker’ may well find health problems which arise out of the continual overriding of the normal response to danger – get out of here!

How people feel and behave once they are out of danger and the traumatic event is over is a product of the intensity of the experience itself, the nature of the person and the context – that is, what their life is after the event

As in his previous book, what most blazes out, necessarily and importantly, is Marzillier’s artistry, his compassion, his flexibility and his open-ness to meet each individual he interviews for this book, making space for a joint exploration of their stories. Time and again he cautions against the single fix-it approach to PTSD – and, indeed, to the single, fashionable diagnosis of the condition. There may be other mental and emotional health issues experienced by someone who has been in a ‘traumatic’ situation, and other approaches, other diagnoses may need to be made. Don’t jump to a PTSD conclusion, he cautions.

It is a mistake to sweep all post-trauma psychological reactions into one simple category, or to assume that if someone shows PTSD symptoms then nothing needs to be done but treat the person’s PTSD

At the heart of this book, is the often stated central idea that whatever ‘the diagnosis’ says, that it is a unique individual with all their individual personality, history, belief systems and social networks who is receiving the diagnosis, and there CAN be no ‘one way’ of treatment. As in Gossamer Thread, Marzillier stresses it is the relationship between practitioner/clinician and patient/client which actually matters MORE than any ‘specific’ method. Sure, the practitioner must have relevant skills which can work in this field, and preferably, the flexibility and skill to acknowledge that ‘their’ skillset may not be the right one for THIS client at this point. Marzillier even acknowledges that treatment approaches which lie outside his particular belief system and training, DO work for some people, – with the right practitioner. He is extremely open-minded, whilst being at the same time, a scientist by training.

This book has a lot, highly relevant, to say to both the clinical psychologist and the ‘energy worker’ working in this field.

It is a marvellous book, serious, analytical, warm, open minded and hearted – and, always important, beautifully written, and authentic – he has allowed the individual voices of the many people he interviewed in this book – those who had experienced events, and been diagnosed with PTSD – to recount their stories, and the different treatments and outcomes. These are not, in the main, ‘his clients or former clients’ . They are people who chose to respond to a general request made ‘public’ when he was planning on writing a book on this subject.

To Hell and Back Amazon UK
To Hell and Back Amazon USA

Irvin D. Yalom – The Spinoza Problem

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Book Review, Irvin D. Yalom, Pantheism, Philosophy, Spinoza, The Spinoza Problem, The Therapeutic relationship

Novel ‘form’ used to explore ideas and the personalities which subscribe to them

Reviewing The Spinoza Problem is more than a little challenging, it is not quite successful as a novel, but is a far better way of educating the reader into grasping facets of Spinoza’s philosophy than any of the ‘Dummies’ type guides might be, because the information is woven in a more dramatic, narrative, human way

Irvin Yalom is a much revered humanistic psychotherapist. He is also a marvellous writer/communicator about these matters, and his non-fiction writings are rich, meaningful and informative, to practitioners and to those interested in our very human nature, and all the ethical and philosophical ideas which might arise from consciousness, and self-consciousness. He has written other novels, using a semi fictional framework to explore ideas.

In ‘The Spinoza Problem’ there are two parallel journeys happening, separated by nearly 300 years, and both stories, of real people with a strange, cross-time connection, are explored using a similar device, that of presenting the central character in each time, with a kind of analyst figure, a wise, self-reflective listener who can be trusted to explore how who we are, and our formative experiences, often determines how we think

God did not make us in His image – we made Him in our image

Baruch, later Bento Spinoza was a Portuguese Jew of extraordinary intellect and a rigorously independent, questioning nature. The Netherlands, where he lived and died was, in the 1660’s, a markedly tolerant society, where religious freedom, and different religions, were able to live side by side. Great things were expected of Spinoza within his community, where his understanding of religious texts and analytical mind seemed to indicate he would become a highly influential rabbi. This was not to be, however, as he began to question religion itself, and dismissed the forms as created by man, not God. Extraordinary thinking in those times, and brave to voice those thoughts : religious intolerance and fundamental beliefs were rather more the bedrock of the times, and dissent, in some cases, led to death. He had an extraordinary certainty in his own belief system, but also a tolerance towards others of different beliefs. He was, however, uncompromising in his insistence that he could not live untruthful to his own beliefs. The result was that he was cursed, excommunicated by his community, for the rest of his life. This was a man who hugely valued his community, but valued adherence to his own understanding of ‘truth’ more. Where I found his uncompromising adherence to that to be even more laudable, is that he did not feel the need to force others into his thinking. A rather unusual combination of uncompromising adherence and toleration. Often, those who hold most fiercely to their own ‘right’ seek to deny others theirs – where we are talking the systems of beliefs

nothing can occur contrary to the fixed laws of Nature. Nature, which is infinite and eternal and encompasses all substance in the universe, acts according to orderly laws that cannot be superseded by supernatural means

The shadow side of belief lies in the second figure, the one who searches for the solution to ‘The Spinoza Problem’ : Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, who was chief ‘theorist’ of the Party. Rosenberg, committed Anti-Semite, had a major problem with Spinoza – that he was a Jew, and was admired, hugely by the ‘good German’ Goethe, whom Rosenberg venerated. Here is a clear mark between mature and immature thinking, feeling, being – the inability to hold any kind of nuance or conflict between ‘this’ and ‘that’

You attempt to control the populace through the power of fear and hope – the traditional cudgels of religious leaders throughout history

Where the book particularly fascinated me is through Yalom’s own background as a psychotherapist, and one with a view which is both ‘narrow focus’ – this person, this story of theirs, and ‘broad focus’ – the overview, the wider issues. So, our own beliefs, which we generally believe are rationally driven, whilst the beliefs of others, with different opinions, we are more likely to believe spring from ‘personality and individual psychology’ than fact, are always driven more by ‘who we are’ than by rationality.

Yalom teases out, in the ‘invented’ encounters, giving Spinoza and Rosenberg people whom they can trust to have meaningful dialogue with, of the kind that happens in the best-run psychotherapeutic encounters, known history and personality traits. Obviously, more is known of the man Rosenberg through his writings, sayings, deeds as his is a more recent history – Rosenberg was one of those brought to trial, at Nuremberg, and executed for his war crimes, and his crimes against humanity. Yalom traces this aberrant personality and psychology, which the wider events of the times fitted so horribly well – when external political/economic systems hurt ‘the common man’ the easiest, and most terrible solution is to make some massed ‘other’ the cause.

This is what we are of course seeing, nascent, in the rise of what is being improperly named – ‘the alt right’. Let us name it – certainly there is proto Fascism as a driver : the so called ‘alt right’ leaders are using the terrible, dangerous language of Fascism, before it became powerful enough to translate word into action,  and the terrible, dangerous, ‘feeling thought’ is gaining credence.

Reason is leading me to the extraordinary conclusion that everything in the world is one substance, which is Nature, or, if you wish, God, and that everything, with no exception, can be understood through the illumination of natural law

To return (and how we need to) to Spinoza. There is a wealth of quite complex writing – which Yalom has clearly studied at depth – which can be used, with historical background about his life, and what has been said about him by others, whether at the time, or later students/researchers into his life an writing – to create an idea of who this man might have been. Certainly there is an enormous intellectual and emotional intelligence at work here, a visionary, positively inspirational individual. He may not have been an easy man to be around in some ways – those who are ‘greater’ in a kind of moral, ethical way than most of us, those who serve as ‘inspirers’ to our feebler selves to orientate towards, can easily inspire our fear and our dislike – through no fault of their own, but because they make us uncomfortable and uneasy with our own shortcomings. ‘Dead heroes’ of history may be easier to read about and be with, than the person better, more humane, more morally fine, who lives next door!

It is the fall from grace of the most highly placed that has always most excited crowds: the dark side of admiration is envy combined with disgruntlement at one’s own ordinariness

So, not quite fully satisfying as ‘novel’ Yalom, as ever, invites the reader to engage with themselves, and with ethical ideas, educating without standing dryly outside what is being explained

You can see I have categorised it as both fiction and non-fiction. I am trying to hold the ‘this AND that’ idea together, rather than this OR that.

I keep coming back in my mind, to that idea of ‘one substance’ in the quote which starts ‘Reason’ . Right there, is the idea of wholism, communality, community, respect towards other – including towards our planet itself. Not a splitting, not a division. Spinoza grasped the spirit of matter. Spiritual materialism, not the split, mechanistic version that is merely consumerism.

All quotes  come from the Spinoza section, and are either from his writing, or from a clarifying/ distillation/explanation of his philosophical framework.

Quotes from the ‘disordered thinking’ Rosenberg section do not bear repetition, and some of the current political leaders are espousing modern versions of them, daily, by spoken word and by tweet

The Spinoza Problem Amazon UK
The Spinoza Problem Amazon USA

Olivia Laing – The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

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Alienation, Art, Attachment Theory, Book Review, Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

“Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive”

I’ve been a keen reader of Olivia Laing, since discovering her first book, To the River, an account of a walk along the length of the River Ouse. Laing inhabits a new kind of academic writing, which to me seems to warrant the epithet ‘holistic’ It also seems somehow to be a particularly feminine approach, though not all female academics employ it, and there are also male writers in the canon.

To explain, this ‘holism’ is different from the kind of distancing, objective, detached ‘scientific’ approach which has been part of, for example, literary criticism. The ‘scientific’ view of literature divorces the writer from the writing – ‘the biographical fallacy’ and dissects text, or history, or landscape or whatever is being analysed and assessed, as if there is an 100% objective reality to what is being observed. The fact that the viewer themselves has a subjective response, a subjective viewpoint which influences what they see, that they have a relationship with the observed, is ignored. Subjective response is always in there. Sometimes we are prepared to acknowledge it, and I must admit I like a writer who owns their bias, where they come from, as Laing always does.

What writers like Laing are doing as they engage with their own particular field of interest and enquiry, is to enter into their relationship with the material. This is poles away from arm’s length. Other writers in this kind of territory include Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk, Kathleen Jamie in her nature writings.

                   Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, 1942

Laing’s writing is deeply, sometimes laceratingly, personal and revealing. However it is much more than mere autobiography or confession. Subjective experience and objective analysis flow in and out of each other. Laing’s subject – whether her walking along the Ouse, exploring the landscape, history, geography whilst walking out a personal emotional time and place, or her second book The Trip To Echo Spring : Why Writers Drink, which looks at 6 American writers, has, for me, an extremely satisfying result. Because Laing does not distance herself from her subject matter, rather, she holds the relational space between the other, and herself observing the other, I find myself drawn close into relationship with the examined life she is observing.

Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of a nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. Nor, unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, can it be shared via empathy. It may well be that the second person’s empathic abilities are obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person’s loneliness

Henry Darger

In The Lonely City, taking as a starting point her own sense of being an outsider, of loneliness, acknowledging this uncomfortable feeling, part, surely of the human condition, she explores how this sense of loneliness, isolation has been a particularly profound springboard for creativity in the work of a group of visual artists. She has particularly focussed on American artists, mainly painters – Edward Hopper, but also mixed media artists – Andy Warhol – and into the work of photographers, film makers, performance artists. She is particularly looking at work in the second half of the twentieth century.

what Hopper’s urban scenes also replicate is one of the central experiences of being lonely: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with a sense of near unbearable exposure…………an uncertainty about being seen – looked over, maybe; but maybe also overlooked, as in ignored, unseen, unregarded, undesired

Nan Goldin – Dieter with Tulips 1984

I was struck by the prevalence of a sense of being ‘aliens from another planet’ in the artists she was exploring – some of whom were familiar to me, such us Hopper and Warhol, most of whom I was introduced to, for example Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz. Unsurprisingly, a different sexual orientation, ethnicity, or even an outside the norm family structure, a tendency to introspection and reflectivity when society is functioning in at out-there, high achieving jockish way, can lead to this. Of particular interest to me is her exploration of how some of this sense of not belonging and alienation arises very early in childhood – and some would say can begin in the womb. She weaves in some of the work by John Bowlby on attachment theory, Melanie Klein’s work on infant psychology, and some account of the distressing scientific experiments done on infantile attachment with rhesus monkeys and other mammals.

It might sound as if leaping around from her own loneliness following a relationship breakdown, to exploring the strange world of countertenor Klaus Nomi, unfortunately having a beautiful operatic voice a decade or so before countertenors became loved mainstream opera stars, to analysis of AIDS and the attitudes towards gays in the eighties, political activism, psychoanalytical theory, not to mention the analysis of particular artworks in the framework of all this, might be a hotchpotch. Be reassured, it isn’t. Think instead, a remarkably rich and glowing tapestry, a strong, flexible web.

And, talking of webs…………..I do think a book like this could not have been enjoyed and savoured so satisfyingly more than about a decade ago. The ability to go and search for artworks, you-tube clips of interviews, performances, added immeasurably to the experience

David Wojnarowicz collage

One might think that this would be a depressing, despairing read, accounts of lonely, (even if visible and famous, like Warhol) misunderstood (though highly creative) creative lives. In fact, Laing reminds us how often creative works, perhaps born out of rage, despair or suffering, or from the riches of an interior life of the imagination, totally at odds with what the creator presents to the world (Henry Darger) can illuminate and enrich not only the creator themselves, but those of us who see, or read, or hear and receive that felt, shared, awakening sense of ‘meaning’ that the arts can give. Art itself as a kind of healing, whole-ing not just to the makers.

This is a strange story, perhaps better understood as a parable, a way of articulating what it’s like to inhabit a particular kind of being. It’s about wanting and not wanting: about needing people to pour themselves out into you and then needing them to stop, to restore the boundaries of the self, to maintain separation and control. It’s about having a personality that both longs for and fears being subsumed into another ego; being swamped or flooded, ingesting or being infected by the mess and drama of someone else’s life, as if their words were literally agents of transformation.

This is the push and pull of intimacy

(from a section examining Warhol, and examining the author’s response to Warhol’s life and Warhol’s work)

This is a book which touches on many ideas, feelings, and disciplines of study. I suspect each reader will find individual aspects of it specifically speak more or less loudly to them. It’s a very rich book indeed :

There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd, negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly

And that, to my mind, is just one stunning example of gold, bread, water, diamonds. Rich, rich, needed

As you can probably guess, I was almost overwhelmed by all this book contains, and wanted to include visual after visual of every discussed artist. However, readers must, as I did, find their own immersive journey.

The Lonely City comes highly recommended by me!

I was delighted to receive this as an advance digital copy from the publishers, via Netgalley It is available, according to the Amazons, 3rd March in the UK, and 1st March in the USA

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone Amazon UK
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone Amazon USA

Olivia Laing – The Trip To Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink

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Alcoholism, Book Review, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Berryman, John Cheever, Olivia Laing, Raymond Carver, Tennessee Williams, The Trip To Echo Spring

“spiritus contra spiritum”.

The Trip to Echo Spring : Why Writers Drink, by British author Olivia Laing, is partly a biographical exploration of 6 American writers and literary criticism of their works in reference to the influence addiction played.

It is also an analysis of the physiology of addiction, and an exploration of treatment protocols, particularly those based on the Minnesota Model (AA and 12 Step programmes)

And it gets much more personal than this; the analysing writer inserts her own journey into this critical assessment, in the guise of the story of the road trip Laing took across the States, in the footsteps of the writers she examines. Along the way, Laing, a fine writer about the natural world also inserts herself and her own family history of addiction into the mix, as what is referred to as an ‘Adult Child of Alcoholic Background’ – her mother’s partner was, whilst Laing was a child, a suffering alcoholic.

Anyone with any history of alcoholism in their family, anyone who works with alcoholics or their families, knows that alcoholism is a condition which profoundly affects the family and close friends of the alcoholic, perhaps none more profoundly than the children in an alcoholic household.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Laing is an excellent, thoughtful, reflective writer, but whilst I was utterly enamoured by an earlier book of hers, a story of another journey, one taken on foot the length of the River Ouse, with Virginia Woolf as a theme running through it, Echo Spring had me part fascinated, part frustrated, not always sure whether the sum of the disparate parts quite worked or not.

Firstly, with some experience working in this field, with all the useful research Laing cites about these particular alcoholic writers, it didn’t seem to me that writers-who-are-alcoholics are much different from non-writers who are alcoholics (nor do I think Laing was particularly claiming this) Denial, a certain grandiosity, a certain hypersensitivity and terror is pretty well in the picture, writer or no.

It was however the I assume publisher’s blurb which hinted at that hoary old chestnut link between the terrible pain of creativity itself and alcoholism:

“The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert”

Raymond Carver

This is the Romanticised myth of the suffering artist, which can lead to an indulgence and ostentatious acceptance of bad behaviour, which would never be allowed in bank tellers, nurses, shelf-stackers and the like. I’m actually with the pragmatic George Orwell, when he says:

The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist

There are artists who are not addicts. There are non-artists who are. Life contains a lot of suffering and pain (and also joy, delight and serenity) We pretty well all try to avoid pain as best we can, and develop coping strategies; some of these are helpful, some a kind of suicide.

Ernest Hemingway

Would these writers have written differently had they not been alcoholics? No doubt, particularly when their addictions formed the subject matter of their writings. Would they have written better, would they have written less well? Unsure. Would they have had less pained and destructive lives? Most probably. Would their families? Undoubtedly.

There were a couple of obvious omissions in Laing’s book – she focuses, despite mentioning early in the book some female writers with serious alcoholism – Jean Rhys, Patricia Highsmith, Marguerite Duras, – on 6 male American writers – Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Raymond Carver and John Berryman. Personally, I was more interested in the female writers as this was a story in some ways more hidden.

John Berryman

Certainly, an excellent acquaintance with all those American writers would I’m sure add to the reader’s appreciation of Laing’s work. I am reasonably or pretty well familiar with Fitzgerald, Williams and Hemingway, have a slight familiarity with Carver, and no prior knowledge of Cheever’s or Berryman’s work, though I will no doubt rectify that, so I’m sure a lot of the literary criticism of the last 3 was something I had to take completely on trust.

At times, Laing’s wandering off on her own musings and memories about her cross-States journey was absorbing and enjoyable, at times, I rather wanted her to stick with those writers. She is an extremely interesting, intelligent, thoughtful and observant writer. It is just, unlike that earlier book walking along the Ouse –  To The River – the slightly shaggy dog story structure (so typical of an alcoholic tangential ramble that I wondered if this was a deliberate stylistic reference) did have me, despite the beauty and precision of her writing, slightly cross, at moments, and wanting her to steer a straighter, less devious path to her destination.

And then, the pertinent, thoughtful analysis, the arresting image, would wheel me in once more:

Tennessee Williams

the startling co-existence of good and evil, the shocking duality of the single heart

a quote from Tennessee Williams

And on the power, and the grace and the healing, in narrative itself, which this patterning species is so drawn towards:

We are told stories as children to help us bridge the abyss between waking and sleeping. We tell stories to our own children for the same purpose…………..I tell myself stories when I am in pain, and I expect as I lay dying I will be telling myself a story in a struggle to make some link between the quick and the defunct.

John Cheever

An excerpt from John Cheever’s writings

I wanted to source photos of the 6 American writers before the pain, despair, and ravages of life and drink had bitten too deeply : this was easier for Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Williams, who became ‘golden’ quite young, with the photos of those at an older age, their acclaim came when their lives were clearly etched upon them. The pictures of all of them, as alcohol progressively took its toll, were, for me, unbearably heart-breaking, the darkness, terror and despair which alcohol gets used to escape from, starkly revealed.

Photo of Olivia Laing by Chris Boland

The Trip To Echo Spring Amazon UK
The Trip To Echo Spring Amazon USA

Jon Ronson – The Psychopath Test

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Book Review, Jon Ronson, Psychology, Sociology, The Psychopath Test

Well written and engaging; could have gone so much further

Jon Ronson is one of those investigative journalists who gets down and dirty with his subject matter, rather than taking himself out of the equation and writing with a overview, an all-seeing eye which suggests ‘objective truth’ Of course, the writer will always have an opinion, and be part of what is being observed, whether they make that subjectivity overt or keep it covert.

The initial premise of this well-written book starts out looking like something far-fetched from The Celestine Prophecy – a mysterious manuscript which has been sent to various academics, one of whom asks Ronson to investigate where it came from and what it means. These investigations lead him into looking at the sort of personality which might be inclined to want to manipulate others, and quite quickly he gets drawn into that journey, looking particularly at psychopathic behaviour, what a psychopath is. Most of us probably consider psychopaths to be people who commit horrific crimes such as rape and murder, but as Ronson discovers, there is a continuum in reaching the diagnosis, and there are many ‘normal’ people in society, who do not rape and murder, but nonetheless have certain character traits and behaviours which may be part of the check-list of a clinician who is trying to ascertain ‘is this person a psychopath?’ Ronson’s journey takes a look at some of the history of psychiatric medicine – including some of the excesses of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 60s and 70s, and the backlash of overdiagnosis and that checklist of the DSM – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There is also the teasing throwaway that though psychopathic tendencies may exist in about 1% of the population at large, there are a statistically larger number of these ‘members of the general population’ with psychopathic tendencies to be found as CEOs of major organisations. Makes a horrid kind of sense really, given the cultivation of ruthlessness which seems to be required, fostered and encouraged in programmes like ‘The Apprentice’

Ronson making his own journey a central part of this exploration of mental health and psychopathy in particular, has both great strength – but also weaknesses. The strengths are an immediacy of having an engaging, articulate, witty companion as your guide, as you read the book, who asks some of the questions which you, the reader might have, as you try to gain some understanding of what a psychopathic personality might be. The weaknesses are that there are interesting questions raised,which don’t really go anywhere, and he doesn’t really follow through with them. Such questions as: what ‘normal’ is; why both ’empathy’ and its lack, might exist; the strengths and the weaknesses of having an ‘artist’s’ view of mental health (analysis, therapy, allowing the story/the gestalt of a person to happen ) versus the scientific/statistical ‘observed’ presentations of the DSM. There’s a teasing nod to this in his account of a partial conversation with his friend Adam Curtis, the documentary film maker, who is critical of the direction Ronson is taking in his investigations for this book – looking at how inevitably the investigator gets drawn into investigating the ‘on the edge’ peculiarities, the weirdly extreme, so that the investigator (and the reader/viewer) can feel safely superior, without really looking at aspects within oneself. I probably wanted Ronson to be closer to Curtis, and to look more at what all this means for society at large – how the attempt to over-diagnose mental illness has led to a flattening of what it means to be human, a tighter and smoother and more conformist view of ‘normal’, and mass medication, via the pharmaceutical industry, of normal, human variation. Perhaps the difference is that Curtis is a man with an agenda, and Ronson may not be. Curtis’s libertarian stance may give him a certain blinkered vision, but it also brings focus and cohesion. Ronson is more scattergun, not quite following through.

I also would have liked to have seen something about where cultivating ‘lack of empathy’ may work to society’s advantage – for example, within certain branches of medicine. It strikes me that the surgeon, if he or she allowed themselves to really engage with the pain and suffering of the patient, might be too overwhelmed to make that healing incision. There are professions where the fostering of empathy is crucial – nursing for example, and professions, like surgery, where it is most helpful if a certain ability to ringfence, or even inhibit, empathy is present

The Psychopath Test Amazon UK
The Psychopath Test Amazon USA

Oliver Sacks – The Mind’s Eye

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Book Review, Neurological Disorders, Neurology, Oliver Sacks, The Mind's Eye

Looking out on the world

Oliver Sacks looks at sight and disorders of vision in this book. I was pleased to find that his customary relating of his patients’ stories,and the differing and intriguing ways in which they are sometimes able to compensate for neurological damage or malfunction, seemed somehow more engaged and less dry than his book on the perception of music ‘Musicophilia’

However it wasn’t until I was a way through the book that I realised why this might have been the case – it was whilst he was writing that previous book that he was diagnosed with a tumour in his eye, and was writing and correcting this book whilst not knowing if he was going to lose sight in that eye – or indeed, survive.

For me, the most fascinating ‘stories’ were Sacks’ own, as of course the understanding that any disorder is much more than an interesting piece of medical history, but is LIVED by the person who experiences it, comes clearest when the sufferer describes it from the inside.

Deviant Art, Wiki Commons. My Mind’s Eye, Wyldelyfe22

The chapter on ‘faceblindness’ , prosopagnosia, which Sacks also suffers from, is particularly fascinating. It is a more common condition than is realised. Most of us, if someone repeatedly failed to recognise us, might either think that person totally self-obsessed, or fear that there might be something terribly lacking in ourselves, that we are so unmemorable. Either way, it might make us regard the person who doesn’t recognise us a little less warmly. Conscious of their difficulty in remembering and recognising faces, and perhaps being slightly shunned or criticised for this, its possible that many cases of extreme ‘shyness’ may in fact not be a personality disorder at all – but a neurological disorder.

The Mind’s Eye Amazon UK
The Mind’s Eye Amazon USA

Olivia Laing – To The River

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Book Review, Nature Writing, Olivia Laing, River Ouse, The Natural World, To The River

Walking the river flow

Just as some people have perfect pitch, which they can then learn to tune even more finely, and some have eyes which are attuned to see ever finer gradations of tone, colour and shade, and can then further train and refine this gift, some, I believe, resonate with a precision and refinement towards words, language itself, and are capable of conceptualising and describing the world new-minted, fresh, present. And will also then further refine this resonance.

Such a one is Olivia Laing, as this marvellous book effortlessly demonstrates. When I say ‘effortlessly’ I don’t mean that its construction necessarily came trippingly and fully formed for the writer – maybe it did, I don’t know – but that the reader has no sense of affect being striven for, no sense of ‘my, what beautiful writing’ in terms of showy flashness in description. It isn’t that I read with a sense of ‘what a beautiful description of a sunset’ – more, I read without effort, slowly, presently, observantly. Sentence followed sentence, and both the parts and the whole just WERE. This is authentic writing, and from first to last I just had the sense, which might often come with music which is balanced, and somehow winds the listener more deeply into itself, that ‘this is the moment; and this; and this’

Laing has written a walking journey the length of the River Ouse, which effortlessly weaves the long history of the planet, of geological time and evolution, with recorded historical fact, with the industry of place, with social history – and with the short lives of individuals, and how they connect to place. She renders all fascination, and the powerful presence of her writing had me reading with a kind of breathlessness, heart and lungs almost afraid to move on, so much did I want to ingest and inhabit each step of the journey, each sentence of the book.

Presiding over all, for Laing, and moving through the feel of the book, is Virginia Woolf, who, as we know, on a day in 1941 walked out into the Ouse with a pocket full of stones. Woolf was a woman perhaps too finely calibrated for the world, sharing with some other writers with an exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, a feeling too attuned to unsheathed nerve endings, unmyelinated. But what such writers can do is perhaps to waken and unwrap those of us who are too tightly sheathed AGAINST perception.

Laing solidly walks the journey, feet well on the ground, noticing, noticing.

I could have taken virtually any and every sentence from her book to illustrate the harmony, perception, reflection of her writing. I did start underlining, but quickly abandoned, as the book itself needs underlining.

The path spilled on down a long lion-coloured meadow into a valley lined with ashes. There the river ran in riffles over the gravel beds that the sea trout need to breed. I crossed it at Hammerhill Bridge, running milky in the sun, and climbed east again into Hammerhill Copse.The land had lain open to the morning and now it seemed to close up like a clam. There was a woman’s coat hanging over the gate to the wood, the chain padlocked about it like a belt. Who drops a coat in a wood? The label had been cut out, and the pink satin lining was stippled by mould

Reading this book, I feel invited, constantly, by the writer, to both inhabit the presence of the time and place of her journey, and, in an echo of Robert Frost’s poem, stay aware of the other paths and possibilities that might have been taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other,

I too am left wondering the story of that coat…….and other snags to possibilities she uncovers and suggests, on the journey. She is being compared to W.G. Sebald in her writing and her subject matter, winding the reader in, still further in, worlds within worlds, to the source. I don’t think this is mere marketers puff.

To The River : A Journey Beneath The Surface Amazon UK
To The River : A Journey Beneath The Surface Amazon USA

Nathan Penlington – The Boy In The Book

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Book Review, Choose Your Own Adventure, Edward Packard, Nathan Penlington, Terence Prendergast, The Boy In The Book

The undoubted charm of the obsessed and the shy

Nathan Penlington is a poet, magician, writer, comedian  and performance artist. He also suffered prolonged ill-health as a child, and has an introspective nature prone to obsession. Perhaps, or perhaps not, caused as a reaction to months off school, away from normal peer socialisation

 “Depression could be understood as stemming from a feeling of lack of control and obsession as about regaining control over your environment. For me obsession was a preventative cure that has since become a personality trait”

He is also a compulsive collector – whether of facts or objects. As a child, he amassed, as children often do, various collections. One of these was a series of interactive books by Edward Packard called Choose Your Own Adventure Books, where the reader has the choice of a multiplicity of outcomes, leading to further choices and more.

As an adult in his late 20s, briefly living back at his parents home after a relationship break-up, Penlington buys a collection of 106 of these from eBay, revisiting his childhood. He discovers parts of a diary in the pages of one of the books, kept by the then owner, a boy called Terence Prendergast.

Some years pass, and Penlington becomes obsessed with tracking down the original owner of those books and the diary.

This book is about that search, and also about the performance piece he and others created about the search, and about the ‘Choose Your Own……’ making it an interactive piece for the audience, depending on their choices. This show won a Fringe First award, was highly praised, and Penlington has toured it more widely.

All the above is just the bare facts, but can’t begin to describe the hilarious, heart-catching, intelligent, compulsive, absorbing, tender, painful, enchanting mix of this book.

Questions and doubts occurred to me as I read, and may occur to other readers, but I can’t even voice them, because they would/might interfere with your own journey through this delightful mix-up, often darting down side-trails, journey of a book. Anyway, Penlington will answer your questions in the fullness of time.

Along the journey you will be exposed to never-sent love letters written by Nathan Penlington to a girl he had a hopeless crush on, when he was 11. Girls (and boys) might cry with a mix of laughter and Awwwwwwwwwwww at the letter. You will meet a chatty graphologist, psychologists specialising in children, the author of those books, a band of middle aged men who still play Dungeons and Dragons in a shop in Birmingham, presided over by the owner, who perches, cross legged and magus like, on his counter. You will get a blow by blow account of films you never wanted to watch but might now feel curious about. You will get to know some of Nathan’s other obsessions – including Uri Geller. Thrill to the emails of a German Heavy Metal band called Prendergast, contemplate booking a retreat in the Prendergast Caravan park, out of season, follow the trail to Kerrang! Radio DJ Johnny Doom, wonder about the curious disappearance of a photo of astrologer Russell Grant, and more…….

Penlington is quite odd, very charming and weirdly funny

He bares his tender heart, his inquiring mind, his sense of playfulness, self-mockery and his interest in EVERYTHING. You, like the author himself, will absolutely get caught up in the fascination of the quest to find Terence. Does he? Will he? What happens? Why does it take so long for Nathan to decide on the journey at all? Why did he do it? Would you? The book makes the reader ask the questions you might be burning to utter, if you knew Nathan. And Terence. As you will feel you do.

You will also be determined to go and see the show, which, if the book is anything to go by, will bring tears to your eyes as you howl with self-mocking laughter, recognising aspects of your own, weird, quirky, individual humanity.

The You Tube link is a trailer of the show before its Edinburgh dates last summer, but a visit to the website, below, will give you the 2014 dates which are to come

I now need to see if I can track down what the remarkably thrashy and ear-blasting Prendergast band sounded like. Maybe not, I can tell from the lyrics to one song this is not going to be my kind of music.

You can visit chooseyourowndocumentary.com website to find out more.

A lovely and life affirming, questy experience!

The book will be published on 22nd May – I gratefully received it as an ARC from the publishers via NetGalley. Early posting of the review means you can go and check if the show is coming to a venue near you between now and then!

The Boy In The Book Amazon UK
The Boy In The Book Amazon USA