This August 2024 I will celebrate 27 years in which I have worked in psychology and a psychotherapy practice. I help people help themselves to move towards a brighter long term future emotionally, cognitively, spiritually or existentially. I practice from as a psycho-dynamic existential perspective and philosophy, and try and take a broad minded clinical position. I have been hugely influenced by the imaginative creative work of Dr Carl Jung and the psychological and pragmatic writings of William James.

I have degrees in Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and have had in depth training in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), Group Therapy and more experiential models.

I was fortunate to have trained with some of the most eminent clinical psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists of our post war era. All were rich with ideas that over many years helped me formulate my own ways of working that will be unique to each individual.

I trained for ten years in psychology departments and continued voracious reading and workshop attendances for years and still do. I still do supervision weekly and have engaged in psychotherapy as a patient with different ‘schools of practice’. However I have no allegiance to one professional body or school of psychotherapy. My position is a more Eclectic and Integrative Model towards my patients and clients well being and future. An open minded approach is what I strive to give people.

I work a lot with young people from aged 16 to 25, and all ages and cultures. I focus on the process of pain and their hope for the future. I teach and encourage, coach and mentor those usually from youngest at 16.

Psychotherapy is hard work once or twice a week when the person starts. Yet if the patient truly commits then our hard work is well rewarded and for twice a week results seem to show far greater efficacy.

Although life is often difficult to accommodate therapy time, lots of patients use zoom and other new technological wonders and get their life to where they want it!

What have I learnt in 27 years? I feel psychotherapy and psychology departments have become over theoretical and bureaucratic and too political with less on experiential practice. A PhD doesn't mean you will be a good therapist. Equally there are those with good 3 year training are naturals! As the great Philosopher and Psychologist Dr Eugene Gendlin put it "if you go to a Freudian clinician you’ll get a Freudian answer, a Jungian and you’ll get a Jungian diagnosis" and I add a CBT session and you’ll get a fixed number of sessions, a manual and a lots of forms! CBT is a useful educational therapy and helps hugely with negative thinking. Yet like so many models of treatment they split and now there are so many numerous schools of CBT as there are in Psychoanalysis and Analytic Psychology. No therapy model is better than another. (See Luborsky, Fonagy & Roth, Malan et al). As Jung famously said "Thank God I'm Jung, not a Jungian"!


As a clinician I need more than ever to continue to work on myself and trust not the theories or books as much, despite my love of them, but my experience in and out of the consulting room. I can safely say that I have never ever regretted this vocation in psychology and therapy. It is so stimulating and as impressive as ever to see the will of the human spirit striving to heal seeing horizons anew during our brief sojourn in this extraordinary world.

John Stewart 2024.

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I wrote this book review a while ago. A great privilege. It was an extremely demanding book to analyse, but amazingly rewarding, as it is quite unique, though the ideas were later picked up by Dr Jean Knox in her similar, exciting work. This is just an edited version I've done from the back of the book. It is a gripping brilliant work.

"This is a very welcome new edition twenty years since the first edition. The new publication is not only a new edition of the original work combining Jung's theory of Archetypes and John Bowlby's Attachment Theory where we have the pleasure of reading an update at the end of each chapter. Dr Anthony Stevens' excellent ideas within this book I hope will become a standard text for all budding psychotherapists, clinical and counselling psychologists as well as Jungian analysts in their training and beyond. More than that it could be used by all academic psychology and all psychiatric practices and attempt to open the minds and traditions of what is all too often a doctrinaire and dogmatic education. I cannot recommend it more strongly".

John Stewart, Psychologist and Psychotherapist in Chelsea SW3 and Knightsbridge SW1. Harvest Journal. International Journal for Jungian Studies.

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Hard times. Uncertain. Scary. Intense. If you are struggling with relationships at home in lock down, want to call me to see where and what I can help you with. I am speaking with all my regular patients, on Skype, WhatsApp or mainly phone.

We need to be careful to avoid getting down and depressed even, by maintaining routine, having regular healthy meals...and I take an hour's walk every day and Pilates stretches! Books, writing one, seeing David Hockney's work in spring in France on his iPhone! It's all tough but bearable. However I'm aware it's a massive health...AND wealth matter and for some a matter of finding food for their children. So gratitude helps, even writing a list of the simplest things down. And read to your children. Whatever age! Keep trusting and we all hope for an improved situation soon.

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JOHN STEWART You
PSYCHOLOGIST PSYCHOTHERAPIST 24 YEARS experience.

Response to Dr Duff Gordon's post.
At last...not Nora Volkov but more about Edward Khantzian's self medicating hypothesis and NOT George Vaillant's disease model. The 'proof' is in the pudding..at some point the still 'diseased', hijacked, affect dopamine flooded brain DOES make a conscious decision to surrender, to give recovery a go and hopefully more. I backed the brain disease model for 15 years. But it's time for us to realise these snippets of neuroscience research, are really just seductive distractions, especially for young inexperienced clinicians - away from treating the human being, seeing choices, acceptance, the spirit (-uality) of the human being, and we must STOP being puppets of pharmaceuticals, big PHARMA, insurance companies, social care dogmatism, and recognise, as Dr Cosmo Duff Gordon wisely implied, that neuroscientific reductionism feeds the brain disease theories, rather than seeing the patient as self medicating feelings, as very ill, misunderstood, in need often of accessing creative unconscious impulses and help the patient find their path...and not the pathway! (edited)

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Professor Sir Roger Scruton died earlier this month. A brave courageous man who fought for a common sensical conservatism, whilst being threatened and abused by the majority of other university academics on the extreme left of the political spectrum from the 1970s to 1990. I shall be writing over the next week why Scrutons ideas often repulsed me, whilst I was being philosophically seduced by Lacan, Satre, Derrida and above all Foucault. But with the overwhelming threatening behaviour of the moral relativists, or the political correctness that swamps our free speech to a kind of near political totalitarianism, I began to see the resentment and bitterness of the left and liberal intelligentsia of the middle class pontificating about 'working people' and how down trodden they were. This was post the collapse of the Sovet Union when the West were meddling in Iraq and borrowing in the U.K was allowed to reach new heights that eroded any cushioning to soften the market horrors that were to come. Through to today and our mass social media addiction and lifting oyrselves into an all or nothing thinking, all seen so ashamedly in Brexit debates and family feuds about so often Europe and not the EU.
It was over this and Scrutons bravery in showing his determination for liberty and an open society by working underground in Czechoslavakia, printing,teaching and encouraging those under appalling Soviet occupation-more courageous than any other academic in the UK. His fight for liberty in his books, or as a lecturer at Birbeck College and in America and above all his idea that conservatism wasn't just about what Thatcher preached. It was more than just Hayekian free market economics. It was the realisation of the importance in conservatism to literally conserve. Not to rip apart, deconstruct, tear down large parts of our Christian heritage, our Roman Laws and our language that is the envy worldwide through the poet's and playrights from Milton and Shakespeare to Dickens and T.S.Eliot.//
PART TWO on Scruton, ABOUT WHY TRUTH CAN BE ATTAINED IN UNDERSTANDING THAT DEATH IS THE PRICE WE PAY FOR LIFE IS COMING SHORTLY.

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Once again...there is no evidence at all that accurate research shows that chemical imbalances ‘cause’ mental illness. See below an article reviewed by a number of psychiatric and neurological researchers. It does NOT mean dopamine and serotonin and all the other neurotransmission systems don’t play a vital role, but research doesn’t exist to prove an imbalance. It’s just far far too complex to measure through blood and urine samples. As stated in this journal website:


“Is there a test to identify a chemical imbalance in the brain?
There are no reliable tests available to find out if you have a chemical imbalance in your brain. Tests that use urine, saliva, or blood to measure neurotransmitters in the brain likely won’t be very accurateTrusted Source.
Not all neurotransmitters are produced in the brain. Currently marketed tests won’t be able to distinguish between neurotransmitter levels in your brain and neurotransmitter levels in the body. In addition, neurotransmitter levels in your body and brain are constantly and rapidly changing. This makes such tests unreliable”


Big pharma and big Psychiatry still pull this old trick over our eyes. Let’s keep waiting for their proper reliable replicated studies and I will accept this 1950s TV advertisement hypothesis about the cause of depression, anxiety and other terrible afflictions.

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Once again...there is no evidence at all that accurate research shows that chemical imbalances ‘cause’ mental illness. See below an article reviewed by a number of psychiatric and neurological researchers. It does NOT mean dopamine and serotonin and all the other neurotransmission systems don’t play a vital role, but research doesn’t exist to prove an imbalance. It’s just far far too complex to measure through blood and urine samples. As stated in this journal website:


“Is there a test to identify a chemical imbalance in the brain?
There are no reliable tests available to find out if you have a chemical imbalance in your brain. Tests that use urine, saliva, or blood to measure neurotransmitters in the brain likely won’t be very accurateTrusted Source.
Not all neurotransmitters are produced in the brain. Currently marketed tests won’t be able to distinguish between neurotransmitter levels in your brain and neurotransmitter levels in the body. In addition, neurotransmitter levels in your body and brain are constantly and rapidly changing. This makes such tests unreliable”


Big pharma and big Psychiatry still pull this old trick over our eyes. Let’s keep waiting for their proper reliable replicated studies and I will accept this 1950s TV advertisement hypothesis about the cause of depression, anxiety and other terrible afflictions.

Meanwhile let’s all keep finding out what on earth a chemical means!

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Catch them before they fall. AAA - Attachment. Anxiety. Addiction.
Three A’s that only if required will incorporate two A’s - AA!

The intensity and experience needed these days of working with those with traumatised personalities is very demanding. Prince William on television last week, said on working through the death of his mother that he knew he would never experience pain like this again. So those with severe trauma, PTSD or on the verge of psychotic breakdown, especially when they are more often than not using or behaving addictively, is an even greater challenge. Clinicians and sponsors in AA or NA alike often let the patient whom is...willing, but not
....ready to get well, to find their own path and not be enabled by a clinician. And until ten years ago that was my philosophy, "do not enable"! Let them drink more and come back when they are ready!

Yet I often ask myself what has happened to all those whom were willing to engage in psychotherapy or groups but whom were not ready to sacrifice time and pleasure and never did come back. Introspection into the unconscious, allowing oneself to let go through dreams and fantasies, therapeutic breakdown of displacement, projection, intellectualisation, denial and projective identification. These overused crumbling rigid defences.....are what brings us to therapy.

Yet when all start to crumble then we have a breakdown coming. Patients then need intense care. Inpatient in NHS or private rehabs, or with well researched treatment methods I use to help people over an intense 3-5 day period discover much more about themselves and for them to have someone to listen to them, and make concrete suggestions. However it is not CBT or DBT. I work with the patient very closely and judge every complex case by their uniqueness. I cannot cure them, I have no quick fixes, and I hope I know my limitations. My course has GP’s, psychiatrists, coaches, 12 step sponsors, yoga and other ‘body’ practitioners and nurses on hand. It may be treatment. It may an intervention. It may be a leg up to groups. But my AAA Course leaves no stone unturned and starts the ball rolling at the very least.

But one thing I hope to do is to try to catch them before they fall. Falling into a psychotic breakdown is not just breakdown of defences. As clinicians we must make every person feel they have us completely to listen to help them stop before they fall, and rebuild their cognitive faculties once the feelings have been worked through, post the fall.

Its very challenging, especially using very intense psychodynamic psychotherapy. But others on hand (psychiatrists, nurses, nutritionist, coaches if required) make it another option in our mental health field to help others to peace and serenity. And above all love of self and others through containing and providing a transitional process and holding environment.

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The 7 Rules for Psychotherapists.

Having studied psychotherapy for fifty years I have concluded that there are seven rules for successful practice.

1 Say to yourself before each session ‘I am not Winnicott, nor Jesus Christ. I am Joe Soap, so help me God, and I know bugger all.’

2 All you have got is this person in front of you. He is your
only hope. Perhaps he can tell you something, so listen. He is probably more intelligent than you. At least he is not so stupid as to be sitting in your seat.

3 Silence is not golden. After a while say something, if only telling the patient the cricket score.

4 If you get into a rage, don’t hit the patient. He might sue you. Just say ‘I need a pee’ and go out and meditate for a while. This rule is particularly important if the patient is a Turkish wrestler with homicidal tendencies.

5 The patient’s money is precious, you mustn’t be.

6 Do not worry if you find you are more screwed up than the patient. This is quite normal. It is called the Inequality of the Therapeutic Relationship.

7 Remember that you can never get it right.

These rules never fail. But if they do you could always try beach volleyball.

With thanks to Jon Lomas, who read out Peter’s rules at the celebration service on January 25th. 2010

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How lucky am I?! A trip this week - for my birthday in late April, to Russia where I have always wanted to go since I was a small boy. I know not why~ though books and seeing Russian films and later aged 13 on a summer holiday my late father instilled in me the horrors of the soviet system. He was reading The Gulag Archipelago, which was Alexander Solzhenitsyns three volume history of the labour camps where tens of millions of people died in. I do wish we had with our Russian friends a world Remembrance Day for all those lost in the camps. And the greatest psychologist? Accordingly to most great psychiatrists and psychotherapists...Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Yes. See what Freud thought of him.

Yet for whatever it’s faults the management today of Russia is remarkable compared with the shocking mess the UK is in. Well here I come to Peredelkino to Boris Pasternak’s house where he wrote Dr. Zhivago...plus others, and in Moscow itself Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, the Kremlin, Bolshoi, Lubyanka Square, Basils Cathedral...more and more. Not forgetting two truly great Soviet Psychologists- Lev Vygotsky a stunning developmental psychologist and a Alexander Luria one of the greatest Neuropaychologists whom inspired our very own Oliver Sacks.
I truly long for this trip and what a present for a 59 year old psychologist and therapist!

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I am in two minds about scientific studies of psychotherapy. My old academic supervisor Peter Fonagy from UCL and CEO of The Anna Freud Centre has written with Tony Roth a “What Works for Whom” two books and two editions, showing three therapies and which ones work for what condition. Well in very short term therapy like 6-10 sessions, then manualised therapy must be of some use and valuable experience as so little time is available. I am thinking of the greed of most insurance companies, and the chaos of the NHS bureaucracy where Clinical Psychologists spend more time typing in notes than seeing patients and sessions are cruelly strictly limited. In 1997 BUPA used to fund me for as long as it takes to get them better. The psychotherapist research are to put it sparsely: Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy and Interpersonal Therapy. But having worked with Fonagy for 5 years as a MSc and PhD student, I know he has doubt about this way but is ethically devoted to finding the best way for patients, and that is our duty and job to do unequivocally.
My late clinical supervisor Dr John Heaton, a psychologist and psychiatrist and former eye surgeon, believed strongly that such enormous differences in each one of us, despite showing often similar traits and symptoms, are too different and our minds too massively complicated for them to be broken down into reductionist quantitative studies. Qualitative case studies show more, as his main approach was an existential phenomenological one. He used Wittgenstein as his approach and the great philosophers notes on culture, Freud and the human condition in general. Adam Philips said recently in a workshop I attended that psychotherapy was more like poetry than science, and I kind of agree. How can we know what’s best for a patient if they don’t know, which is usually the situation, otherwise clients wouldn’t be coming to our office.
This is just basic food for thought. It’s a PhD thesis x 10 that makes Brexit look simple, but the most vital matter of the attachment to the therapist much be coupled with agreed starting points. I say let’s see how you feel after six sessions. But so many can’t afford or can’t access more than 6 sessions. And then what? Revolving doors? Like Governments and Parliaments world wide, Psychotherapy is misunderstood and widely disagreed with, with loads of charlatans practicing with sparse if no qualifications.
The forgotten prophet Dr Alfred Adler asked the patients he saw after a symptom check - what do they think it would be, like once they were cured. It’s a question that if answered, would be very different in session 10!

But I value my ‘drop in’ patients, but working short to long term with people is still after all these years a rich rewarding and experientially responsible profession, that I feel blessed to be engaged in.

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A very Happy New Year to you all.
This year I hope 2019 will be able to show people greater preventive measures before anxiety or rage for example, strikes. Social media, and prescription drug addiction, behavioural addictions, are all in need of more research and greater treatment options, within the crux of all psychotherapy treatment, that being a strong and secure therapeutic clinical attachment. Whether CBT or psychodynamic models, no model is more effective long term over another. The shorter dynamic therapies are being developed by Peter Fonagy et al. at The Anna Freud Centre, as well as by Allan Abbas's and Patricia Coughlin Della Selves in Canada and the USA. Long term twice a week for 2-5 years can often change a whole persons being in the world. For despite the cost of longer therapy, it is more effective than just symptom relief therapies, which often sees patients returning by not dealing with relationships, unconscious material and emotional process work. All from psychodynamic experiential and existential research. Lets work together and get it to work either way.

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I recall asking a very distinguished psychiatrist what sound mental health is. And can he give me a good example. This man, left of centre politically, surprised me enormously when he said The Queen. The Royal family in my profession is usually seen as quite the opposite. Stuffy and repressed with a pull your socks up attitude. Mental health, or in my books a better term - mental well being, is a clear definitive balance about your own wants, needs and desires, thoughts, emotions, perceptions and attending to the needs of others. When any of these become excessive such as wanting too much alcohol or chocolate cake, that become a habit, or a genetic trigger. Equally needing a partner so much that a mere glance at the opposite sex can trigger neediness and jealousy, can destroy relationships. And desire that becomes excessive in many areas, is often a way to deal with unpleasant thoughts and feelings and the desire becomes an agent for driving behaviour such as all addiction, crime,self harm, sexual abuse and just everyday over indulging in our own lives at home.
I am certain Her Majesty The Queen ( HMQ) is as human as the rest of us, but I would challenge anyone to be able to have done what she has in 70 plus years, and follow a role of immense complexity, that she never asked for. She is Stoic and more in touch with her emotional life as can be seen publicly how she processes an array of being cross, sad, excited at the races, moved by paintings, empathic to the millions of old and young, sick and dying she has visited. The Queen never asked for this job. Yet she has sacrificed her life for the Monarchy and has been a woman, a mother, wife, daughter, grandmother, great grandmother, aunt, etc etc. Her roles are too complex and long to list here, but her psychological health is not just a pull your socks, as the royals are so often portrayed. She is a stoic and a sceptic, often taking two steps back and suspending judgement before decisions and actions. Her own traumas she has weathered privately. ‘Sharing’ as in group therapy in a dangerous thing to do in the world outside therapy. Critics say the Queen is the mother of three divorced children, and therefore reduce this to insecure attachment in her relating to her children. But look at the photographs of her with her children. A wonderful smile and warmth in cine films, show this attachment would be secure in my very humble opinion, no more. The problem, if there was one, was her absence. Yet it is quality of attachment not quantity, so I still stick by this woman has excell not maternal skills. Prince Philip May have been a very different school. And yet how could she possibly have fulfilled her maternal role in Winnicotgian, Brunerian or Bowlby terms? HMQ know exactly what she likes and has to do in this world, and exactly what she doesn’t like to do! Music and tennis are clearly not favourites but racing and art are. I can hear the republicans huffing and puffing about how easy it is when you have all the trappings of a Queen that she does. But the Queen has never been one for being lured into luxury and a life of only fun and frivolity, a life that perhaps could be attributed more to Princess Margaret. And each to their own. But HMQs sense of duty, her unbelievable loyalty to the crown and her people, of all backgrounds and race is remarkable. She gives and gives and gives more and more throughout a fascinating and brilliantly balanced life of 92 years. When Diana Princess of Wales was killed the Queen was mercilessly attacked for not being in London. Well, anyone with an ounce of sense would realise that she was looking after her two grandsons, who had just heard the shocking news their mother had been killed in a car crash. She stayed with the princes. Her grandsons. Empathy I call that. Family first in a major crisis. And she came to London and showed appreciation when she bowed at Diana’s cortège when it passed the gates of Buckingham Palace. The Queen is tough, kind, boundaried, empathic, sympathetic and very very hard working. She never really has a day off and has travelled the world with extraordinary boldness and with her extraordinary supportive husband Prince Philip. She has never wanted or asked for any more than she has, and when asked to pay tax she agreed. She rides still, drives and has an endless stream of meetings and appointments all day and night. And she is 92. Her Christian faith has sustained her and she is clearly healthily in touch with her own mortality by her immensely skilful handing down one duty after another. She will die in the next ten years one assumes, and the again highly underestimated Charles will take over, followed by an even more emotionally in tune person Prince William. The Queens character is of a highly functioning emotionally and spiritually intelligent and stoic person. She is frugal and yet is on top of everything that goes on. And she dares to go as far as she did with 007 in the London Olympics! She is clever but not an intellect. She has a passion for doing the right thing. And she does her job and duty to perfection. When HMQ does leave the throne, trust me, not only will this country be shattered but the whole world. It will be an enormous shock when she dies. And all this...from my 89 year old republican psychiatrist! Yes. We can be open minded and push our politics to one side to see truth and dedication. And hopefully learn from Her example.

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More people are coming into my clinic as family rows are erupting. Some of these rows may be overt, and be just heated discussions and then rows about Brexit, Trump and bodies. How thin and fit can we get. The lunacy and bestialiality of Trumps remarks, and the desperately boring Brexit polarisation of right and left, the ins and the outs. But it soon becomes more covert when one family member storms out of the room. The 14 year old boy storms out of the room. “I knew Strictlys not for him”, uttered Mum. Sister knows best and follows. The father is oblivious to the family, and the TV, bar gazing at a few shimmering sequinned costumes of the “more glamorous women dancing quite gorgeously” for Craig, Bruno and Shirley. How Darcy B puts up with it all is a mystery. Yet Dad loves Darcy and SCD secretly. Mum does too, when she’s not on Facebook or ...whoops...sister heard running upstairs. Her brother is genuinely in tears because he has strong feelings for an elder girl at school and he had seen her receive 100 hits from her followers, of a photograph of her with another guy. Jealousy. Envy. Rage. Hurt. Sister comforts brother only to come down, literally, in withdrawals, grabs her phone again, and sees that she - has now upset a friend by commenting on how lewd and tarty her snap chat retorts were! The father has bad news on the business front and Mum votes for George and Katya, only to get a pop up to tell her that her best friends chemo hasn’t worked. She feels her anatomy with trepidation.

Family is about talking, sharing, cohesion and assimilation and togetherness. My sentimental simple example above is about splitting and the start of a cracked world of families and people dysfunctioning, introjecting and projecting all their fears into each other via their drugs of choice - being “on-line”.

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I have never been a fan of Melanie Klein. I studied her theories and clinical work at UCL, and had a Kleinian analysis with a lady whom was more distant and cold than Mrs Danvers was to the new Mrs Max de Winter. But because a lot of Kleinians do practice in that way and perhaps personalities of that type are attracted to her rigid thinking, I fear that I must not fall into the trap of lambasting all Kleinians. So 21 years later, I have decided to revisit her new found clinical writings on technique, put together by John Steiner, a wise and very broad thinking Kleinian of huge experience.
The task is too big for me to tackle in depth, but question two to three matters

1.Why was Klein, a child analyst pioneer, as well as an adult practitioner, so dogmatic about her way, and despite reports of her being a pretty nasty force to contend with, she is now being painted as gentle and kind?
2. The Anna Freud-Melanie Klein Wars have been documented in a colossal book by Riccardo Steiner (no relation to John Steiner) ad nauseam. But they still seem split with The Anna Freud Centre which is carrying on Freud’s daughters remarkable work, as well as up to date research in mentalisation and even CBT courses incorporating mentalisation (see Peter Fonagy),whilst the Tavistock, known in the game as the “Tavi”, is Kleinian in its approaches. Yet at the same time The Tavi have and still train groups and individuals in systemic therapy and organisational psychology. Many of the greatest psychoanalysts who are also psychologists or humanists such as Neville Symington and Christopher Bollas all has training in the Adult Psychotherapy Training programmes of their day. And Kleinians such as Dr. Elliott Jacques are exceptional clinicians who was a GP, psychologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and the original leadership coach and Organisational Psychologist of exceptional notoriety, and also analysed by Klein herself. As was Dr Roger Money Kyrle PhD., PhD., (yes, whom had two PhDs!). Money-Kyrle worked with the founders of Logical Positivism (Moritz Schlick) and before meeting Klein had an analysis with Dr. Sigmund Freud himself. And Hannah Segal was a great clinician and trul enthralling writer.
3. A lot of Kleinians dodge empirical questions that independent practitioners such as Fonagy, Bateman, Holmes do not. Or is analysis, which is my real feeling not compatible with social scientific methodology? See Bollas and Symington and Casement.
4.Lastly, but by no means least is the language the Kleinians use. It’s seriously verges on pornographic and I feel quite unnecessary. One extraordinary example of this is Dr Donald Meltzer, “whose language and word usage in explaining childhood phantasy or the child in the adult is for quite another genre”. Yet is it uncalled for? The dirt is still a mystery to me, and I hope to be more open minded in my approach in re-reading a few Meltzer papers.
5. The students and followers of Dr Carl Jung split off just like the Freudians and apparently said they needed a more in depth child development model for their clinical work. They chose Kleins work sadly, and to the horror of die hard Jungians such as The Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists and more individualsthan I would care to mention we’re horrified and aghast. Jung himself was not best pleased and refused to see the culprit again, that being Dr Michael Fordham, a Jungian analyst and child psychiatrist. Many today would put Jung neatly together with Bowlby’s work, as in the internal working model and Jung’s theory of archetypes. It’s all still heavy schooling, and despite so many courses in Integrative Psychotherapy, not a lot has seemed to change in this particular area.

Psychotherapy and it’s wars in the analytical world, is best compiled in a very short book by a more Jungian slanted psychiatrist called Dr. Anthony Stevens, also a psychologist and analyst/psychotherapist. His book is called “An Intelliegents Person’s Guide to Psychotherapy”, and is a short gem of a book, compiling from Freud teachers through to Carl Rogers and the humanistic school. But his book is predominantly an academic, not personal critique on Freudianism, especially Kleins followers. However it is a book for the public and not for academics!

Dr Anthony Stevens became my supervisor and taught me that an open mind is vital or it is shut! And although his book recommends an approach of evolutionary Jungian attachment based therapy, many with a post modernist psychoanalytical mind, may well see the dirt in his camp and not in Donald Meltzer’s. if I succeed in a little light Kleinian research, I shall report back, but in the meantime, let’s hope for a lighter blog next time!

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Catch them before they fall. AAA. Attachment. Anxiety. Addiction. Three A’s that will, if required, incorporate the more famous AA.

The intensity these days of working with those with traumatised personality problems, is very severe. Prince William on television last week, said on working through the death of his mother that he knew he would never experience pain like this again. So those with severe trauma, PTSD or on the verge of psychotic breakdown, especially when they are more often than not using or behaving addictively, is an even greater challenge. Clinicians and sponsors in AA or NA alike often let the patient whom is willing but not ready to get well, to find their own path and not be enabled by a clinician. And until ten years ago that was my philosophy, "do not enable"! Let them drink more and come back when they are ready!

Yet I often ask myself what has happened to all those whom were willing to engage in psychotherapy or groups but whom were not ready to sacrifice time and pleasure and never did come back. Introspection into the unconscious, allowing oneself to let go through dreams and fantasies, therapeutic breakdown of displacement, projection, intellectualisation, denial and projective identification. These overused crumbling rigid defences.....are what brings us to therapy.

Yet when all start to crumble then we have a breakdown coming. Patients then need intense care. Inpatient in NHS or private rehabs, or with well researched treatment methods I use to help people over an intense 3-5 day period discover much more about themselves and for them to have someone to listen and make concrete suggestions. However it is not CBT or DBT. I work with the patient very closely and judge every complex case by their uniqueness. I cannot cure them, I have no quick fixes, and I hope I know my limitations. My course has psychiatrists, coaches and nurses on hand. It may be treatment. It may an intervention. It may be a leg up to groups. But my AAA Course leaves no stone unturned and starts the ball rolling at the very least.

But one thing I hope to do is to try to catch them before they fall. Falling into a psychotic breakdown is not just breakdown of defences. As clinicians we must make every person feel they have us, to listen to help them stop before they fall, and rebuild their cognitive faculties once the feelings have been worked through, post the fall.

Its very challenging, especially using very intense psychodynamic psychotherapy. But others on hand (psychiatrists, nurses, nutritionist, coaches if required) make it another option in our mental health field to help others to peace and serenity. And above all love of self and others through containing and providing a transitional process and holding environment.

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Dr John Moorhouse Heaton, who has died, was an incredibly inspiring man for those whom got a chance to know him. Otherwise he could come across as cold, straight talking almost to the point of rudeness and someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly. I first met him at the end of his career, and in need of a supervisor but also someone with whom I could discuss other matters in relation to psychotherapy, psychiatry, philosophy and theology, he took me on. I learnt so much from his encyclopaedic mind, that one left each session very often that the Myth of Sisyphus was alive and well within me, or that I could conquer the world.

I once had to bring my then ten year old son along to sit next door in an empty consulting room. At the end of my session Dr H told my son stories of how he helped RAF pilots get over their fear of landing with their new post war satellite screens. He managed to help the pilots but it was a lovely moment for a child born in 2006 to hear tales from a psychologist in the RAF born in 1925.

In our sessions he helped me hugely with personal matters, and although had very different views in addiction for example, we both were on the same page with regard to our distaste for Kleinian practitioners (though never personal), psychiatric reductionism and dogmaticism even in CBT trials. Therefore Dr H's knowledge in methodology would enable him to shred 'bias' trials as a matter of course, not only because Dr H was a psychologist whom studied under the pioneer of Cognitive Psychology Professor Sir Frederick Bartlett, but as well as in logic and philosophy studying under the great philosopher Bertrand Russell. So as a scientist and a mathematician, this psychologist turned to medicine. He immediately wanted to study the mind and become a psychiatrist. However on interview he made a cardinal error and mentioned Kierkegaard or Heidegger or Nietzsche and the interviewer accused him of having schizophrenic leanings for such beliefs! This pushed Dr H to ophalmology and eye surgery, which he once said to me was a "doddle compared with mastering psychotherapy"! I was left feeling he was being modest, but on reading Henry March's books on brain surgery, much the same statement arose. The horrendous skill in brain surgery or in Dr Hs world eye surgery, was decision making that made it such a frightening profession. The procedures ones learns like the piano, said Dr H. But the thought of making a person blind by taking out too little or much of what the obstruction was, shows what he meant.
Yet despite his experience in the RAF and at Cambridge as an Experimental Psychologist, the mind and its research and practice was what still rivetted him. In the late 1950's he met the famous and infamous R.D.Laing or 'Ronnie', as Dr H referred to him. Laing suggested he got in touch with a certain Dr Eric Howe. Howe an almost esoteric but most certainly an integrative psychotherapist and belonged to a school rare for those days promoting both Freud and Jung as well as philosophy east and west. It was clearly an important collaboration and lead to Dr H becoming a Psychotherapist for over 55 years. He was open minded, brilliant with language, spiritual in the Kierkegaardian sense of the word, and very practical. He liked aphorisms and after my first session suggested I read or dipped into Lichtenburg's book. It was an eye opener. As were his suggestions to read Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Tolstoy, many philosophy texts and he kindly let me read chapters from transcripts of his brilliant two recent Wittgenstein books on psychotherapy. I feel sadly the books will never be on the reading list of training courses, wrongly, bar odd chapters, to be seen as too logical, intellectual, philosophical! When reading them I frequently referred to his Wittgenstein for Beginners written years ago, an animation book that makes the great philosophers thought easier to digest by Dr H. Yet these two last serious dense but very readable books, should be read and see from a very clever perspective just how far wrong the approach of psychotherapy has gone and has failed to help people as much as it could.

In the early 1960s Dr H was one of the pioneers of The Philadelphia Association, a wonderful organisation helping those with psychological distress to find refuge in residential houses not hospitals and receive psychotherapeutic help. It was pioneering, and still exists and training psychotherapists, the section Dr Heaton was responsible for setting up.

In his last years when I knew him, our sessions were a mixture of his telling me of him being 'taught' by Hans-Georg Gadamer, the great pupil of Heidegger and writer of hermeneutics, also how much he missed great therapist friends of his like Dr Peter Lomas and Dr Charles Rycroft, and of course the tragedy of the life of Ronnie Laing, whom he said he missed very much, warts and all. And all this with his teaching at Regents University in the Existential Psychotherapy course, and still writing books of huge significance, and supervising and treating patients and therapists alike along the phenomenological-existential approach and more. I leant him a book once and he read it in a week. He knew of the writer well, a Russian philosopher but he had never read "Self Knowlege. An Essay in Autobiography" by Nicolas Berdyaev. "Quite interesting....not bad!" Is what I got back in impressions!

A session was never boring with Dr H. Once he didn't move in a session for about 15 minutes. Allowing for his then age of 88I thought it not impossible for him to slip away during a session! But a sudden movement from him made me jump and Dr H to say "Well times up now. Same time next week." And he retrieved his tiny pocket diary, entering the appointment.

Dr John Heaton was a remarkable healer. He loved anthropology and therefore would not have disliked healer as a term for all his various talent from psychology to eye surgery to psychiatry to therapy and writing. He once said he had just finished War and Peace for the third time in his life. Every reading having a different meaning and understanding to him. He was a quiet giant of the post war era of psychotherapy mainly, with a staggering psychotherapy alone career of 57 years. I just hope that his long life will one day be fully appreciated with his ideas about psychotherapy. Making the so called impossible profession, conversational, kind, strong and with clinicians knowing they do not have the answer. As Dr H would often swear in our session "
"For god sake you must f**king know better than me". A certain irony within a certain charm with a wink. My deepest condolences to Barbara and all his children and grandchildren.

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A life well lived would be an understatement to the sad news that at the age of 92 Dr John Moorhouse Heaton has died. He was primarily a thinker of that refreshing sceptical school of Montaigne, Sextus Empiricus and above his hero Wittgenstein. So when we first met, I said I wanted a mentor. An all rounder!

Psychotherapist, as a psychiatrist, supervisor, philosopher and someone I could talk to about my patients, literature, philosophy, general institutionalised news, so would he take the role of mentor. He didnt hesitate after a session or two and Dr H helped me with patients, writing, personal matters, health, spirituality, books and music. He would often say what good films he and his wife has seen recently. And there was no idealising as he was often cold, grumpy and bored of my clearly not getting what he was alluding to! I am no where near as bright as he was or even a fraction as well educated. So I had six years of very precious weekly meetings, which I can never ever forget.
So my next blog will be a tribute to show what a splendid remarkable man he was. The remarkable mentor.

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I run courses that give people something to take home. Practical stuff. Not just theory. Part of the course is to prevent whatever is causing distress to my clients from happening again. But what if they knew this in the first place? It is so sad that so many families have so little understanding of the mind and body. Why is it sad? Because most of what I teach seems to come as a thunderbolt to them, whilst at the same time patients all giving that ‘ahaha’ look or sound. Perhaps it is all inherent. And anyway what do I mean by understanding the mind and body?

Firstly it is crucial to understand that running your life on rational thought alone misses 50% of being a human.

Secondly what thoughts we have we must pay greater attention to and realise that our thoughts are too often in the past, the future and we miss so often the real wonder of today. Hence anxiety and depression.

Thirdly we must understand that distress comes from the body (our brain has no pain receptors) and is a result of negative thinking or unconscious powerful feelings that we must learn to use creatively or just sit with. Emotion and strong feelings fizzles out if we let it go. And 95% of our mental life is unconscious (in long term memory) anyway.

Fourth, leads me to defence mechanisms or coping strategies that no longer work, or were learnt destructively in the first place (projecting or displacing rage: sadness to depression. Or an addict in ‘denial’). Lastly nearly everyone who comes to see me comes about their symptoms, are feelings or perceptions triggered by not being able to manage their relationships with others, past and present.

Perhaps the greatest master of understanding this in psychology was Eric Berne in Games People Play. And the master who tried and tested where it all these ego states Berne refers to comes from was the founder of Attachment Theory John Bowlby. Both psychologists were also psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, and became disillusioned with both. Both truly understood the impact of how we play roles and how emotionally we pick up habits from the moment we are born, if not in gestation new research suggests. We need to work through these, yet I also teach clients how transactions with others work with diagrams and pictures.

Of course this is a silly summary of what Aristotle, Jesus, Buddha, Montaigne, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Herman Melville, Freud, Adler, Jung and the world all have grappled with. Yet if you listen to present day brilliance such as Bessel van dear Kolk, you will hear not mind brain talk (reason, logic, analysis, left brain) but mind body (reason, intuition, feeling and thinking, acceptance, creativity, calm, empathy and altruism from a greatly accessed right brain). And happiness. See his study on Medication v Yoga.

Sounds all so simple. I am a fool to think it is. But it doesn’t stop me lecturing about psychology education, as well as doing emotional processing and promoting good sound reasoning and logic. But most people whom come to see me are very logical and usually very talented people functioning very well in that area. It’s not the logic being replaced by touchy-feely bit that I promote. It is about what Charles Darwin called “The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals”, written over 150 years ago. A balance and learning to live with reason and emotion and encouraging this romance not to separate and so often divorce by suppression, repression or hysteria, but to celebrate life!

Nothing is really new. Acceptance, Courage and Wisdom is given to us all. We just need the key.

Staying in our heads doesn’t work. Swim. Pilates. Yoga. Tai chi…meditation and only then are we more likely to be in better psychological shape to do well in science, linguistics, engineering, applied mathematics, art, music, gardening, banking, philosophy and experimental psychology! So…I’m off for a swim.

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My absence has not been noticed. Well certainly no one said “we miss your blog”. The fact that a few people do comment on it at all is very flattering. But one years on? For my own prosterity, let me hope absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Too much has happened in the past 10 months since Ranulph FIENNES book came out (I wrote the appendices for him and advised him on FEAR). We have a new government again. And a new President in the USA. As I write it feels like the nuclear deterrent, (or as Richard Nixon called it “the mad man trick”) has been around for so long without thankfully any nuclear war, that we have gone into denial. Everyone seems unconscious to the fact that in psychological terms two worlds leaders, whom both probably have severe personality disorders, are going to have to be restrained. The ego will go to any lengths to protect and therefore project itself. And this is no exception particularly in ruthless dictatorships. Say no more. It’s a strange eerie time. I am off to an island in a week to be with my family. I hope. The selfish gene. No Dawkins meant something different. However it is important to note that TV News do not talk about these leaders volatile personalities, but just about the same old political ‘ratchet it up number’. In other words the world is not safer by using such threatening language. It is more dangerous. Or am I being genuinely too paranoid. Sadly I think not. The last time this happened was in 1973 with Israel and Egypt, and therefore Brezhnev and Nixon (or Kissinger) on their respective ‘buttons’. But this feels less ‘protected’ in terms of the nuclear deterrent, if you do take that stance. The older I get and I am still a determined 50 odd year old, the more I see the other sides point.

So after reading this gloom and doom, I will not expect your hearts to be remotely fonder. Maybe next time I shall write on the neurobiology of rat puppy giggling in praise of the late and great JAAK PANKSEPP 1943-2017.

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Le Carre and Greene. Tip off from one great spymaster from another.

In his new stunning memoirs John Carre’s “The Pigeon Tunnel”, Le Carre (David Cornwall) quotes Graham Greene:

“Before I finish for the day I make sure I’ve left something under my belt for tomorrow. Sleep works wonders”

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NOTICE : Appointment: Director of Alcohol Unit and my Private Practice reaches nearly 20 years and still flourishing.
Posted on 09/21/2016

I was asked to help the distinguished Professor of Psychiatry Prof. Dr. Oscar D’ Agnone, to set up an alcohol unit in a new clinic in BELGRAVIA. The alcohol programme is for those whom don’t quite fit the abstinence model and see AA as something they cannot identify with and feel it is not right for them.

I and colleagues have noticed that abstinence is not for everyone except those with the alcoholic traits and nature we are all very familiar with. We shall OF COURSE treat people with 12 step methods and counselling should their needs be chronic. But at present our Behavioural Alcohol Moderation Programme are for those whom wish to moderate their drinking and have an intense month of ‘tools’ to help them using CBT and Solution Focused Therapy, Mindfulness and other methods.

MY PRIVATE PACTICE shall remain as busy as ever dealing with non addiction problems, relationships, adolescent troubles, anxiety, over thinking, depression, grief, motivation in either short term therapy or long term. In long term I use a psychodynamic existential and gestalt model.

Either way contact me for my private practice on 07884 312 842.

And for the new clinic The OAD Clinic please call the clinic direct and speak to Anna on the website address http://www.theoadclinic.com

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ON October the 6th next the above book will be released.

I was kindly asked to contribute to the book, writing the two main appendix’ on the psychology of FEAR and Ran kindly mentioning me in the book.

Bias would be an obvious cognitive feature, but I can say hand on heart, it is a wonderful read and the bit before the appendix is a lot more exciting! One of his best books. Without Fail or Fear.

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I am a huge supporter and user of trying to be mindful through my daily action thoughts and feelings, and daily meditation…just a little night and day and sometimes In Buddhist societies and Christian churches during the day. But the commercialisation and consumerist smash and grab about what most of them know sod all about, is depressing. Too much money being made out of people’s misery by coaches and mentors and witch doctors all over London and the UK. That, after ten years study is what I struggle with.

Silence is what I need. Quiet and peace. And then breath. A new academic book has just been released about the psychology, spirituality, physiology, philosophy of breathing has just been published and it is is excellent. And it’s called…BREATHING!

BREATHING. I’ve seen enough dead bodies to know what NOT breathing is like. So cherish it tomorrow. Every Second…mindfully….DAMN…fallen into the commercial trap again…
Edit
Fear? Face? False or F***
Posted on 05/09/2016

1. Face everything and recover.

2. False evidence appearing real.

3. …..f**k everything and RUN!!!

stick to 1 and 2 !

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“The most successful cases are those that allow oneself to be taken by surprise…” Dr. Sigmund Freud. 1912.

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We are often so marginalised by such limited education in psychotherapy training. Psychoanalysis, CBT, Humanistic models, Existential and group. And integration not eclectic models,which are meaningless as they just soon turn into school isms themselves such as CAT, IPT etc. But we need not to forget some great pioneers, known well in their day but almost forgotten now by most psychotherapists.

A philosopher turned Jungian analysis and then researcher into Brief Therapy Research with Milton Erickson, the greatest hypnotherapist ever, the polymath anthropologist and psychiatric researcher the great Gregory Bateson and John Weakland, Don Jackson and other communication, linguistic and systemic pioneers of family therapy and brief therapy research at Pall Alto. The man’s name was Dr. Paul Watzlawick, a tall, elegant Austrian whom went from philosophy, long term analysis to pioneering NOT Short Term Psychotxherapy 16 sessions to 40 Approx (see C.A.T., Short Term Dynamic Models and CBT…but BRIEF means being pragmatic and use what works. Avoid using problem words, and perhaps don’t even ask what the problem is, just what solutions the patient have in their armnaments.

This model Strategic Therapy, is also the back bone of such effective models in experienced hands such as Medical NLP, and Brief Solution Focused Therapy.

Although I believe Socrates’ maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living, I also believe that Watzlawick was right that Insight may cause Blindness.

In today’s world, there is NO POINT trying to adapt the global world always to our somewhat archaic psychotherapy long term models, but to also be aware that BRIEF THERAPY from one session to 6 to 20 may be appropriate. It’s is entirely up to the patient to find the solutions within them, and not the therapist questions or interpretations, however valid in some cases.

Paul Watzlawick was a great pioneer, writing such titles as “situation desperate but not serious” and “Insight may cause Blindness”! It’s so very often what’s needed in this 21st century of rush and riot.

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Jerome Bruner dies. (1915-2016).

Jerome S. Bruner, Who Shaped Understanding of the Young Mind, Dies at 100


JUNE 8, 2016
Jerome S. Bruner, whose theories about perception, child development and learning informed education policy for generations and helped launch the modern study of creative problem solving, known as the cognitive revolution, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 100.

His death was confirmed by his partner, Eleanor M. Fox.

Dr. Bruner was a researcher at Harvard in the 1940s when he became impatient with behaviorism, then a widely held theory, which viewed learning in terms of stimulus and response: the chime of a bell before mealtime and salivation, in Ivan Pavlov’s famous dog experiments.

Dr. Bruner believed that behaviorism, rooted in animal experiments, ignored many dimensions of human mental experience. In one 1947 experiment, he found that children from low-income households perceived a coin to be larger than it actually was — their desires apparently shaping not only their thinking but also the physical dimensions of what they saw.

In subsequent work, he argued that the mind is not a passive learner — not a stimulus-response machine — but an active one, bringing a full complement of motives, instincts and intentions to shape comprehension, as well as perception. His writings — in particular the book “A Study of Thinking” (1956), written with Jacqueline J. Goodnow and George A. Austin — inspired a generation of psychologists and helped break the hold of behaviorism on the field.

To build a more complete theory, he and the experimentalist George A. Miller, a Harvard colleague, founded the Center for Cognitive Studies, which supported investigation into the inner workings of human thought.
Much later, this shift in focus from behavior to information processing came to be known as the cognitive revolution.

“He was a psychologist of possibilities,” said Howard Gardner, a professor of psychology at Harvard. “He opened one door of the mind after another, and then moved on to something different.”

Dr. Gardner added, “He was the most important contributor to educational thinking since John Dewey — and there is no one like him today.”

Dr. Bruner’s work made him a sought-after expert on development and education. In the late 1950s, after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite in space, officials and prominent educators called for a deeper commitment to education, particularly in the sciences.

In 1959, federal science agencies convened a meeting of top scholars at Woods Hole, in Massachusetts, to brainstorm about possible reforms. Dr. Bruner, who ran the meeting, summarized participants’ views in “The Process of Education” (1960), a book that quickly became a landmark text in education reform and theory.

“We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any age of development,” Dr. Bruner wrote, in what would become one of the most widely quoted lines in education circles.

One idea that emerged from the meeting was the “spiral curriculum,” in which teachers introduce students to topics early, in age-appropriate language, and revisit the same subjects in subsequent years, adding depth and complexity. Many school districts have incorporated that approach, beginning in grade school.

Later, Dr. Bruner drew on his experience at Woods Hole to help design Head Start, the federal program introduced in 1965 to improve preschool development.

In 1972, Dr. Bruner took a position at Oxford University, where, always intellectually restless, he began arguing that cognitive psychology should be broadened to include narrative construction and culture, which also shape the strategies people use to make sense of the world.

“Through Jerome Bruner, the cognitive revolution hit educational thinking, in the United States and around the world,” said Patricia Greenfield, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a former student of his.

Jerome Seymour Bruner was born in Manhattan on Oct. 1, 1915, the youngest of three children of Herman and Rose Bruner, who had immigrated from Poland. His father worked as a watchmaker, among other jobs, and his mother managed the household. He also had an older half brother.

Born blind because of cataracts, he had an experimental operation to restore his vision at age 2. The memory of that explosion of sight and color never left him, friends said, and guided his later thinking about how the mind shapes perception. So, too, did social adaptation: His father died when Jerome was 12, and his mother moved the family to Florida, where he attended a series of high schools.
Dr. Bruner graduated from Duke University with a degree in psychology in 1937 before entering a doctoral program at Harvard, where he met his first wife, Katherine Frost. The marriage ended in divorce, as did his second marriage. His third wife, Carol Feldman, died before him.

Besides Dr. Fox, a professor at New York University School of Law, Dr. Bruner is survived by a son, Whitley, and a daughter, Jane Bruner Mullane, both from his first marriage, as well as three grandchildren.

Dr. Bruner wrote or co-wrote a dozen influential books and won a long list of awards in psychology and education. In the 1990s, he became an educational ambassador of sorts, working with preschools in Reggio Emilia, an Italian town near Bologna, and elsewhere. A number of preschools around the world use the Reggio Emilia approach, inspired by Dr. Bruner’s work there.

He finished his career at N.Y.U. as a law professor, using his ideas about thinking, culture and storytelling to analyze legal reasoning and punishment. He retired in 2013.

“He was an anthropologist, really, never comfortable in one field or with one theory,” Dr. Fox said. “He was always looking for broader connections.”

Correction: June 10, 2016
An obituary on Thursday about the psychologist Jerome S. Bruner misstated, in some copies, the number of times he was divorced. It was twice, not three times. (His third marriage, to Carol Feldman, ended with her death.)

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