So art changes as the social environment changes.  But the artist also helps to create that environment by conceptualising aspects of culture in images and structures.  So art is a medium to help people gain insight and understanding of their culture as expressed through the expressive perspective of one individual.  

Of course, the creation of the artist says as much if not more about them as it does about the culture (though they are still a representative of the culture).   Successful artists can be and often are self centred to the point of obsession; you might say they have to be.  And in a narcissistic age,  some art has self indulgent to the point of boredom.  Do we really want to know so much about Tracey’s soiled bed, used condoms or how many men she fucked in her tent?  Are we interested in the relationship with Louise Bourgeois’ father and her governess?   In as much as it informs us about aspects of culture and psychology we are.  Louis Bourgeois depicted a whole psychoanalysis in her art.  Joseph Beuys went one stage further; he invented a fantastic personal narrative through his art;  catapulted from his crippled Stuka when it crashed in deep snow in Crimea in 1944, he claims to have been rescued by Tartar tribesman, who kept him alive by wrapping his broken body in felt and animal fat and feeding him milk.  His art reflects aspects of that incident as well the boundary between fantasy and reality.   

Other artists use their experience to express something wider, more general, while maintaining the  template of their formative life experience to fashion a recognisable identity-in-style.  Henry Moore drew large female figures with holes in them to represent his fixation on the beloved, though at times distant mother; there were gaps in their relationship. . 

Some artists are more blatently commercial in their adherence to culture; they generate shapes, ideas that people want.  Anish Kapoor creates large reflecting surfaces, bulges, wax installations, that people enjoy.  ‘Art is not meant to be controversial’, he recently declared.  He likes to be liked.       

 Art doesn’t so much create the object, it creates the environment, the mental space through which the rest of us can think about their own existence.  In doing so, it both represents the culture and helps to create it.  The process can be transformative, but for some artists it can become iterative and hermetic, the unending scratching, etching of an itch until something changes to change the focus; war, famine, love.  

Some art will travel; either because it expresses a universal theme, like love, or because its meaning is so meaningfully abstract, so that people from different cultures bring their own meaning to it.   Shakespeare travels and so does Turner.   Is this what makes art great?   Is this the function of art; to create the space for the thoughts of others to enter.  In our instant, media culture, people are often considered clever because they say what everybody else is thinking and wish they had said it.  They re clever because they make everybody feel clever.   Is that what artists do; set down a challenge that makes the rest of us feel clever by gaining insight?  If so, they don’t necessarily do it deliberately.  

‘They tell me it’s great art.  To me, it was just another scribble’

It’s always good to talk to my brother; he is an artist and gets me to think out of the box!

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So what is it that changes us?  The simple answer is experience; the things that happen.  If the environment changes, then we either adapt and grow or we stay put, stuck in the past. Not all events change us, of course; most of what happens can be accommodated within the confines of our experience and serve only to reinforce our view of the world.  But occasionally, we encounter someone or live through some situation that so outside our experience that we are forced to adjust our whole way of thinking to incorporate it.   

Change is an emotional interaction.  Things that are different challenge, excite, shock, frighten and even depress us.  If we engage with them, we may feel envious, guilty, ashamed or angry.  Sometimes we may be able to change the situation, but more often than not, we can’t; the only thing we can change is ourselves.  Working through, coming to terms with, are the processes of change;  the reconstruction of the personality that develops out of emotional crisis.   So if something affects us, makes us think and feel, then we are changed by it.  Change is instigated by emotion.   We fall out with somebody, argue, disengage, fume, but then later, sometimes much later, we pause, start to see it from their point of view, and reconcile our differences.  We are changed by what has happened.    

‘Love changes everything’, wrote Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Such a deep emotional identification with another human being results in coalescence, a  blending of experience that changes both.  Change requires an interaction, an exchange.  We are social beings; other people change us.   Conflict and love; we are changed by sharing of intense emotional experience. 

 But it’s not just direct emotional experience that changes us.  We can be adjusted by culture.  Art, literature, science, technology, religion, politics are all agents of cultural change.   They facilitate change in ourselves by altering the emotional environment.  They can rearrange the way societies perceive their existence and influence the choices they make.  Somebody proves that God no longer exists or that world is finite, and suddenly the restrictions of people’s behaviour are lifted and they change.  The ability to communicate instantly with somebody at the other side of the world, the way we experience war, earthquakes and tsunamis in the comfort of our living room as they are happening, the way we can shop, pay bills, book holidays, conduct our jobs without leaving home; all off this has altered the way we are. 

Governments, yes even Conservative governments, are agents of social change; they change the social environment by legislature and the people have to move into it.  

Architects also change the social environment.  Geoff Cohen said on Radio 4 last week that good architecture must not only be functional, it has to create hope and space for emotional development.   Jaume Plensa (currently at The Yorkshire Sculpture Park) creates  environments for peace and meditation as well as exciting spaces where change can happen.  His sets for opera create such dramatic possibilities.   

Change the environment, change the meaning.   If we move away, get another job, we mix with a whole new social group and we are changed.  If we separate from our partner,  move on, marry someone else, we become a different person.  Relationships change people, probably more than anything else. Parents and teachers create the environment/space in which children can grow, but eventually the child has to separate.  A good teacher or parent equips the child to take advantage of the opportunity. By the same token, psychotherapy can expands perception and creates possibilities for change, but only the individual can change.  You not only need space to change, you need courage to take advantage of the opportunity.  And the good enough parent, teacher or therapist, must facilitate a safe environment for the person to develop with confidence and not seek to overprotect and confine through selfishness and fear.

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The medical term for madness is psychosis, which essentially implies having beliefs, attitudes and behaviour that are antithetic to social convention.  Psychosis is not the only category of mental illness; there is also neurosis.  The old adage captures the distinction nicely.  A neurotic thinks that 2 and 2 equals 4 and is worried about it.  A psychotic just knows that 2 and 2 equals five.  So neurosis is a disturbance of doubt while psychosis is a condition of certainty and conviction.  They are styles of being, different but not immiscible.   Although people may try to evade the torment of neurosis by developing  delusions , they can still be tortured by convictions  of victimisation, devastated by fears of fragmentation.  Life for somebody who is psychotic, can literally be hell!  Even when things are calm, there is no peace from their internal thoughts and voices.  No wonder so many people who have a psychotic breakdown, chose to end their own lives. 

The problem is not so much how we can distinguish between neurosis and psychosis but how we can we distinguish each from so called ‘normality’.   ‘Normal’ is a social construct, defined by reference to the culture a person comes from.  The Christian notion of God, his reincarnation as Jesus Christ, the virgin birth and the resurrection, is considered quite normal in the United States of America and much of the western world.  But as Richard Dawkins has emphasised, what is God but a massive delusion?   The only reason a religious conviction is not  considered mad is that the same delusion is shared by others.  Falling in love is another delusion that is widely encouraged by society even though it has such massive potential to shatter a person’s private web of meaning.   

Psychosis is a distortion of meaning and as such,  a logical consequence of being human.  We can all go a bit mad at times.  Human beings are creatures of meaning, compelled to find reasons for their existance and what happens.  They have a big brains that can see into the future, and a deep seated fear of what might exist in that void.  They have the imagination to invent stories and can be both comforted or tortured by the delusions they create. 

Meaning develops  through relationship with others, initially our mother, father, brothers, sisters, grandparents and later, a wider circle of family and friends , teachers, mentors, books and television.  It is conditioned by society, represents society and maintains us within that society.   Therefore, if we regard psychosis as an alternative or distorted state of meaning, it is a social disease.   It stands to reason that those who grow up isolated, conditioned by  perceptions that are incompletely normalised by others, develop their own fragile belief structure  that can set them apart from others.  Alone in a black and white world, where people are either idealised or denigrated, they can tend to be suspicious and blame others.   All the good stuff is located in themselves while the bad stuff is projected out though the opposite may attain.  

But there are shades of isolation. People who live on the cognitive borders of society are able to function quite normally for much of the time, but may exhibit uncompromising and paranoid ways of thinking when their meaning is challenged.  Mental illness might be regarded as a defence against the loss of meaning induced by change.     

As  creatures whose identity is created from meaning, we are all vulnerable to change.   Any of us can be overwhelmed and devastated by an event that is completely outside our experience,  and most of us, especially the more solitary, adopt strategies to prevent the devastation caused by a breakdown of meaning.  Some may assume an idealised persona, a special identity that offers a role and purpose.  This may be reinforced by special musical, literary or artistic talents perfected through the years of isolation.   Others may mould themselves to their environment, sensing what others want and adapting to it. Women are said to be better at this, readily adapting their personality to the needs of a new partner.  And finally some keep it all together by encapsulating themselves in an all consuming interest, an obession for work, a dedication, a faith.   

We can see examples of such behaviours in our colleagues, friends, family and in ourselves, but some people are more fragile, more susceptible to change and more clearly defended against it.  But fragility is no reason for segregation.  Society needs to achieve a democratisation of belief and thought.  People with conviction and creativity can be exciting and inspiring.  Most effective politicians have some spark of madness in them.  They can be dangerous unless reined in by their civil servants.  Society advances, not by the most stable, healthy members of society, but by those independent thinkers,  who may at times be considered mad by their colleagues.  Darwin, Einstein, Newton, and many of the great writers, artists and composers have all been considered mad at times.   Ignaz Semelweis, whose hygeinic principles saved the lives of millions of women from puerperal fever, spent much of his life incarcerated in mental institutions.

Some of the ideas in this article were inspired by a talk on psychotherapy and the psychoses given by Darian Leader at the Biennial Conference of the Hallam Institute of Psychotherapy on October 2nd.  

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Chaos is evident in all aspects of life.  Weather forecasting is an exercise in probabilities because we can never be sure of the starting conditions.  We can’t factor in  all the variables.  This is why it is said that a butterfly flapping its wings in West Africa will result in a typhoon is south- east Asia.  It’s not meant to be taken literally, just a mathematical possibility to illustrate how small unconsidered variations can cause enormous effects.   

And take sport.  They said England had a good chance of winning The World Cup this year, but what went wrong?  Could a glance across the table by a teammate’s wife have set in train a sequence of events that unsettled the captain, led to a players revolt against the coach and culminated in a catastrophic collapse of confidence?

And what about politics, computing, and the stock market?  Somebody can’t sell his house in Wisconsin and we end up with a global recession.   Or the rail network.  The wrong leaves on the line in the Home Counties and business in the City of London slithers to a halt. Small variations can have massive effects.  A tiny wobble in the orbit of an asteroid could destroy all life on earth. 

And in medicine, a small change in environmental conditions, a particular event, can so easily bring about illness.   Perhaps a tune on the radio could revoke a memory that could upset the gut and result in an argument that ends a marriage.  With no chance at resolution the gut upset persists as unresolved IBS.   When scientists do trials of treatment, they try to hold all the conditions constant.  This is what is called a controlled study.   It relies on certain  assumptions about which factors are important.  Age and gender may be controlled,  diet might be in a few studies, emotional factors almost never and yet these may be crucial.  So they can never really control the outcome.  If they make the same measurements 100 times in the same patient and they will come up with a hundred different results.  So what do they do?  Employ a statistician to tell them an answer they might (or might not) be able to rely on!  But  they still might be ignoring certain crucial factors because they don’t think they count or they are impossible to control.  As Albert Einstein declared, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted.  And not everything that can be counted, counts.’  

Irritable Bowel Syndrome is an idiosyncratic disease.  It is more an expression of the personality, life experience and life style than those variables that can be easily measured.  Moreover it can’t be easily defined because there is no identifiable change in body structure or chemistry.  It is whatever doctors say it is.  No wonder treatment is so variable and so personal.  It’s an exercise in chaos; a bit of a lottery.  What works for one person may not necessarily work for another.  But you can cut down the variability by reading the self management programme and getting to know about your illness, yourself and with some guidance managing your own symptoms.

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Rude and opinionated, he didn’t mind what he said to people and was given to blurting out his opinions in a way that seems to resemble what we now know as Gilles de la Tourette’s disorder but his utterances were snatches of sayings or prayers,  the preoccupations of a man who  lived in his head rather than the blasphemies and vulgarities associated Tourette’s.  Dr Johnson knew how to behave when he had to.   

Yet, for all his oddities, he was one of the most respected men in the country. His prose is lucid, insightful and reads well  two and a half centuries later.  His compilation of the first English Dictionary was an amazing feat of intellectual achievement.  During his lifetime he was admired by the most intelligent and creative in the land; Walpole, Pope, Defoe, Garrick, Reynolds, Fanny Burney; anybody who was anybody.  They provided much needed recognition and meaning to his life.  He enjoyed conversation immensely

But it wasn’t just the great and the good that he befriended.   People of all walks of life called on him and were guaranteed an audience.  His compassion for the underprivileged was legendary.  People were drawn to him; he looked after them and they in turn took care of him. 

Dr Johnson feared madness all his life.  He had good reason to; his behaviour was, to say the least, eccentric.  Nowadays, his idiosyncrasies might be considered features of severe obsessive compulsive disorder, while his dedication to his dictionary, his habit of always making lists, might suggest Asperger’s Syndrome.  But how much of his strange behaviour, especially touching railings, counting paving stones and leaping over the threshold a consequence of severe visual impairment and deafness? As a child, he was so severely myopic that he once crawled all the way back home in the gutter.  After that his friends would give him piggy-backs home in return for help with their work and protection from bullies.  Children with severe sensory deficit from birth can be extremely gifted, artistically and intellectually.  Was Dr Johnson such a person? 

But was there also an emotional reason for his strange personality? Did young Samuel inherit a melancholia along with a love of books from his father?  Did his mother’s snobbery and grievance play its part in creating an unhappy home environment?  It appears that she may have suffered post partum depression; she found it difficult to bond to her son, who contracted scrofula from his wet nurse and was once taken to London to be cured by Queen Anne (Scrofula, tuberculosis of the lymph nodes in the neck, was also known as the King’s Evil and was reputed to be cured by the touch of the monarch).  Another son, Nathaniel, Samuel’s brother, died in mysterious circumstances.  So did Samuel compensate for the emotional deficiencies of family life by finding meaning in words and writing?  He was a child prodigy, so far in advance of everybody at his Lichfield school that he got a place in Oxford, but he didn’t fit the Oxford scene.  Unable to pay the fees, he left after a year.  For a time he thought he could become a schoolmaster, but his strange behaviour distracted the pupils and undermined his authority.  

Dr Johnson always had a deep dread of loneliness.  He needed human society desperately.    Without companionship, he was all too vulnerable to guilt and melancholy, the black dog that stalked him all his life. 

Many of his friends were also marked out by their idiosyncratic genius.  James Boswell, his biographer and travelling companion, depicted the Hebridean Johnson in a brown travelling coat with pockets so deep they could hold the two folio editions of his dictionary.  On the face of it, there could hardly have been two such dissimilar friends.  Boswell was a man of great appetites.  He could not manage without casual sex, which he would procure from prostitutes, and suffered chronic gonorrhoea throughout his adult life, dying early from  urinary retention and renal failure.  Johnson was, it seems, somewhat sexually repressed but shared Boswell’s desperate need for human contact.    

Another close friend was the artist Joshua Reynolds, founder president of the Royal Academy.  Like Johnson, Reynolds had problems with perception and communication. He was deaf all his life and had a hare lip, making his speech difficult to understand.  Later in life, he suffered from  cataracts, but wore glasses and carried on painting.  Reynolds was, for a time, linked romantically with Fanny Burney, a witty, amusing woman, who wrote the Bridget Jones novels of their time, but Fanny wisely noted that Reynolds had already had two ‘shakes of the palsy’, and she herself had survived a mastectomy without anaesthetic and  wasn’t prepared to take him on. 

But Dr Johnson need people around him all the time.  When Hetty, the wife who was 20 years older than him, died, he filled his house with waifs and strays, like blind Annie Willamson and her eccentric father and his black servant, Frank Barber, who inherited his estate.  He also developed a strong attachment to the blue-stocking,  Hester Thrale, and was so devastated when she fled to Italy with Senor Piozzi, the opera singer that he refused to communicate with her ever again.     

Perhaps Johnson could never abide solitude because he was not at peace with himself. Life, according to Johnson,  was to be endured.  He always considered himself unworthy. He prayed to God to forgive his slothfulness and selfishness.  He feared that if he became too self conscious, it would cut him off from God and then he would be truly mad. He even gave Mrs Thrale a padlock to chain him up with if he went mad.  

In his dictionary, Dr Johnson defines mad as ‘disordered in the mind, broken in the understanding, overrun with any unreasonable or violent desire’.  But over the years, madness acquired social connotations. People are considered mad if they don’t fit in with the accepted conventions of society.  As Boswell wrote, madness discloses itself by deviation from the ways of the world. The Soviets incarcerated writers, who dared to criticise the system in state asylums

From a social perspective, Johnson might well be considered mad.  He just didn’t fit in.  he didn’t dress or behave like others in the intellectual society he might have belonged to. He was strange, bigoted and politically incorrect.  Johnson didn’t just behave like other people; he didn’t think like them either.  People came from far and wide to listen to his unconventional take on life.  It is the same now.  Those who express their ideas freely and with confidence are given an audience.  We celebrate their ‘madness’.  We might think of Grayson Perry or Alan Bennett or even Stephen Hawking.  Johnson was  regarded as a national treasure in his day.  His oddness was recognised to be the mainspring of his creativity.

Compiling his dictionary provided a whimsical outlet for his idiosyncrasies and probably  kept him sane.  Under the entry Oats, is written, ‘a cereal which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people’.  Horse is defined as ‘a quadruped that neighs.’   The definition of a Lexicographer is – ‘a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge!’  Surely not! 

Johnson has a touch of the Edward Lear about him, but he was no dangerous lunatic.  He wasn’t disordered in the mind or broken in understanding.  On the contrary, it was his mind, his struggles to discover the meaning of things that made him one the sanest people of the age.   

An unshakeable faith in the existence of a man who was born of a virgin and sprang to life again after he had been murder could be regarded as a severe psychotic delusion, but for the society in which Dr Johnson lived, not to believe in that would have marked him out as mad.  Perhaps Johnson thought too much.  Perhaps he had too many doubts. He genuinely feared he might go to hell for his beliefs, but although the guilt of it all threatened to drive him mad,  his struggles for meaning kept him sane. 

Johnson debates the nature of madness in his allegory, ‘Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia’.  In it, he does not disavow a person’s beliefs as long as those as the meaning of those beliefs can be explored.  Anxiety, guilt, remorse, frustration is how we react to unliveable situations.  They are the drivers of change.  Life exists in the striving after meaning.  If melancholy is your situation, poetry is your deliverance.  Writing the dictionary saved Johnson from the purgatory of his indolent thoughts and slothfulness. Prince Rasselas had to escape the Happy Valley of CBT,  in order to find the real world. 

When patients in a mental home cease to rail against their incarceration and begin to comply, they may seem less mad,  but they have relinquished  their sense of self and the meaning of their suffering.  To get over a crisis, people have to see things differently and that takes courage.  You have to risk madness in the pursuit of meaning. 

Adam Phillips (Going Sane), as ever, goes one stage further.  He writes that madness is a moral obligation.  Too many people are trapped by convention.  They cannot take the risk.  The dangers are too great.  Nevertheless, it is the possibility of change, the frisson, the anticipation, that makes people happy and for that they must risk madness.  It was all too painful for Lear; he did indeed become disordered in the mind to escape from his own intolerable reality.   But when change is impossible, people can only manage.  Freud did not claim to bring happiness into people’s lives; just to help them change misery into everyday unhappiness.  

Towards the end of his life, Johnson couldn’t see and he couldn’t afford candles.  He gave way to the madness that he’d struggled with all his life.  He burnt all his papers, diaries everything; he fed the fires of hell so they would consume his guilt.  Then he stuck a knife into his painfully swollen leg to release the poison.

The Madness of Dr Johnson was the topic of an Inner Circle seminar convened by Dr Anthony Stadlen at Dr Johnson’s house in Gough Square on November 8th 2009.

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Add an external force like dropping a pebble in a bowl and water will adopt a natural frequency of vibration depending on the configuration of the container.  Vibration may also be imposed by wind or obstructions to flow, creating ripples, that can be recorded on sand and rocks.  The gravitational effect of the moon exaggerates natural rhythm of water around the globe.  

Waves in open water are created by the wind on the surface or a rising sea bed close to the shore. Although the wave moves, the water in it just circulates. Rays and other fish swim like a wave through the static circulating water.  The wave ‘breaks’  when wind accelerates the top and causes it to overbalance or when the rising shore line slows down the base.   This creates a horizontal air/water vortex that churns and oxygenates the water. 

In contrast, the standing wave generated by the fall of water in a weir is static and water flows through it.   So the wave is a feature of water, but does not necessarily relate to its flow.  

An obstruction in a river or the flow of a stream of water into a static pool,  creates vertical vortices; paired boundary areas where fluids of different pressures coalesce and mix.  

Multiple sources, sinks and currents combine to create more complex fluid structures that has been compared to a symphony in which different instruments have their own entries and rests and are brought together by an invisible conductor.  Flow must be turbulent for exchange to  occur.  If it is channelled through a straight pipe, or settles at the bottom of a deep pool, it cannot form vortices, transfer of material cannot occur and water stagnates .

Water is a complex, sensitive medium that can respond to the environment to create a multiplicity of forms.  Living creatures start their live as suspensions of cells in water.  They must therefore be  influenced by flow patterns of the medium of suspension and develop out of these patterns   So simple multi cellular organisms living in water often adopt spiral forms.  Snails have a spiral shell.  The muscle fibres of the heart adopt a spiral arrangement with compartments forming at the junction of different flows (oxygenated blood from the lungs and deoxygenated blood from the rest of the body).  Movements of fluid are incredibly sensitive; they respond to minor change.   Nerve cells seem to line up at the boundary zones where the effects of those changes have most effect. 

Now if we imagine that the world and everything in it was initially composed of fluids initially, then we can see how solid forms in nature conform to a vortex configuration.  Vortices are consolidated in rocks when they cool.  Jellyfish are 96% water and resemble complex vortices.  When their mantle contracts, they produce mirror images of themselves in the vortices they leave behind.  And look at other vortex forms, the cochlea of the ear, the semicircular canals, which in the lamprey are still fluid vortices, the turbinate bones of the deer, the intestine of the lungfish is spiral in form, the intestine of the cow circular. Even the embryo starts off as a complex vortex of cells, whirling boundaries where things occur, cells are laid down, nervous connections are created.   We might even envisage organs being created out of paired vortices).     

Water cannot just be understood by its chemical properties.  It is the stuff of life, the circulation that runs through all living things.  Sensitive Chaos; creation of flowing forms in water and air was written by Theodore Schwenk (1910- 1986), anthroposophist, engineer and director of The Institute of Water Research and Flow Science in the Black Forest.  It is a remarkable, thought provoking book that escapes the stagnation of research protocols and methodology and allows the imagination to flow unimpeded; the sort of book that makes us reflect on what might be so.  That, surely, is the  essence of science.    

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This is a magic book; the story is not carved on tablets of stone or even inscribed in ink on vellum, it is scrawled on shifting sand and the tide keeps coming in and erasing bits so it has to be written again.  It’s like a personal website, that is constantly updated.   Throughout life, we update our internal website, we adjust the emphasis, create new links, introduce new characters, rewrite the plot.   

Consider those stories we told ourselves years ago in those early drafts; what we were going to do, the adventures we would have, the success we would achieve, the celebrity, the power, the glory, how we would fall in love and live happily ever after, have children who would make us proud. Those exaggerated tales of ‘derring do’ encouraged us to take the more awesome risks and made all the striving worthwhile.  We were indestructible then; the plots we devised then were so adventurous and always worked; triumph over adversity, good vanquishing evil, falling in love and despite difficulties and separation, being together at last.  They were tales of hope, life and death, but life always won; the hero would be back next week to survive another adventure. 

But for most of us, life does not turn out to be an adventure story, neither is it always happy or successful. Your career is not as exciting as you thought it would be.  The endless meetings are boring; you lose interest and lose out on the expected promotion.  The woman you fell in love with, beautiful, charismatic and kind, the embodiment of all your dreams, now leaves dirty underwear around, makes smells in the bathroom and can be totally unreasonable. Your son, the apple of your eye, fails his exams, cannot get work, and takes occasional drugs. The trick is to live with the disappointment. She is human just like you, part of you and you are attached; you love her with all her minor irritations. The narrative has to change to a story that is less exciting, more to do with  overcoming adversity, building a steady career, providing a stable home, finding joy and happiness within the family, rearing confident and independent children.  Respect, peace and satisfaction are the new themes.     

But consider another scenario. You discover that the one you would love forever has deceived you; it takes a lot of maturity and wisdom to adapt the story and forgive.  More often than not, those chapters have to be crossed out with a red pen and redrafted.  The romance is turned into a triumph of good over evil. You eliminate a major character to protect yourself.  The one you once loved to distraction, you must now hate to destruction.   

Things rarely work out the way we thought they would and we have to adapt our story many times.  We make compromises, explain, justify, excuse and forgive. As our mountain building is eroded by time, our story changes to one that is more complex, more understanding, more modulated and forgiving, more human.  The goals we set ourselves are less thrilling, our hopes less ambitious. Experience and the mellowness of middle age softens us in reflection. And if we are to live out our life in peace and hope,  this gives us the wisdom to accept and forgive. 

Not everybody is like that. Some feel so threatened and insecure, they cannot integrate experience. They cling on to the good things and attempt to eliminate the bad. They are suggestible and so impetuous. ‘Our house is a dream. A holiday in the Seychelles will be magic.  This will be the happiest Christmas ever.  I think I am falling in love all over again.’ They inhabit a polarized story; the bright narrative is exhibited for all to admire, but dark gothic tales lurk in the shades, ready to be projected out, condemning any deserving object that happens to pass though their triumphant progression; mother, difficult siblings, a previous lover, the estranged husband, erstwhile friends, the boss, the government – always the government. And the story they tell, has to be defended to the last rampart and ditch.  Experience, the way they have to see things, is merely adapted to consolidate their position.  They are into denial and condemnation. ‘Oh, he can be so plausible and caring, but it’s just a trick to get round me.’  For some tormented souls, everything and everybody is a threat and they are the victim.  Films, plays, books, television illustrate this black and white world.  It is exciting; it creates drama. 

People who have never built up a strong narrative by which to lives their lives; those with what we call a fragile identity can all too easily come to live somebody else’s story.  This is the power of the media, the church.  It traditional cultures, it may be illustrated by the evil eye or pointing the bone.  How many of us start off in life, like Philip Larkin, living out our parents ambitions and grievances?  It is to be hoped we don’t end in the same way, but life does have a habit of consolidating the narrative that they gave us.    

Just we need our personal narrative to sustain us, so society needs its collective mythology to hold it together. Couples, families, fraternities, tribes, nations gain comfort and identity from a shared mythology.  Cultures throughout history, have been defined by their stories; the Australian aborigines had their songlines, the Norse, their sagas,  the Greeks, their myths, the Hindus, the adventures of their family of Gods.  History itself is made up of stories.  Or as Alan Bennett wrote, ‘It’s just one bloody thing after another.’ 

We have to believe in something. Otherwise we are lost.  In the past, this took the form of religious faith.  God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world!  Jesus loves us!  Allah be praised!  Now the predominant collective mythologies tend to be political doctrines, social advice, scientific evidence and the opinions of media pundits, but they’re all stories. We comfort ourselves with our imaginings and delusions.   

Our story is the cognitive backbone of our lives.  It imparts meaning and convinces us that things are known – we are known. We are ‘the rational species’.  At least that’s the story we tell ourselves!  We need to explain. As Descartes indicated; it’s the engine of our existence. The unknown is a vacuum that demands to be filled.  If life becomes meaningless, we lose the will to live. It’s not so much the reality that makes us feel good or bad, it’s the story we make up about it.  There’s nothing so good or bad as thinking makes it so.   

Our stories can be life enhancing, but they can also so easily leading to torment, melancholy and madness.  The voyage of life is never without its storms and dangers. . We suffer loss, dreadful loss, and can wander for years in a wilderness without plot or purpose.  We don’t always behave well, but instead of forgiving ourselves and letting go, we refuse to rescue ourselves from a punitive narrative and like mediaeval penitents, flagellate our souls with loathing and depression. Grief is a process of retelling the story, but when the reality of what has happened seems so dreadful and the story we try to tell  ourselves cannot console us, then we get anxious and make seek refuge in a world of make believe and fiction. But sometimes the memory is so traumatic that it cannot be processed by story telling; it short circuits the narrator and is relived endlessly taking control of the individual. Those who are mentally ill, suffer from reminiscences.  

Healing is not just about bringing about some structural or biochemical change in the body;  it treats mind, body and meaning (spirit or soul) as one. Healers are story tellers.   From the shamans of Siberia, the Amerindian medicine men and the sangoma of Southern Africa to the exponents of state sponsored evidence based medicine; they all try to replace the embodied tale of woe with an enlivening message of hope. 

Psychotherapy is a subtle form of healing.  For me, it is about understanding the person’s narrative, where it has emerged from, what it represents, how it may limit and entrap and then helping them adjust it to one that gets them out of their prison into a form of reality that is happy and healthy.  But this is a subjective reality,  it is about working with the patients truth.  Different people experiencing the same event will have different truths; everything is filtered through an individual’s own life experience, and changes with time and what happens next.

I try to get at the basic theme of a person’s narrative, the story that defines them and lasts through life, and forms what we call their unique identity,  because that theme will influence through what analysts call transference, every aspect of their attitudes and behaviour.   Every situation can be a suitable screen, every person a suitable vehicle for projection.  I need to know what presses their buttons and why.  I need to know what memories and meanings lies hidden away in the shadows and gullies of their shame and guilt. I need to understand the dark underbelly of their unconscious.  Only then can I help to ease their sentence and rediscover a narrative that is more life enhancing.  To me this combines essential elements of analytic exploration within a framework that attempts to change a person’s narrative perspective.  This does not have a particular affiliation with regard to doctrine, but is more a blending of the most useful aspects of psychoanalytical and cognitive behavioural aspects of therapy within a context that encourages sufficient confidence to explore a different attitude.     

We are a cognitive species; we try to make sense of what happens, learn from our experience. The way we think affects who we are.  So when our thoughts, the stories we tell ourselves, are making us unhappy or ill, then peace can only be obtained by engaging with darker, hidden, human aspects of our common narratives, the things we are ashamed of, and seek to integrate them into a story that is honest to ourselves.

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We live in an uncertain world.  We can never be sure of anything, truth, fact, reality, faith; they are all illusion. Nothing is absolute; there are contexts, conditions, caveats and excuses.   Alter the perspective and the conclusion changes. We can never know the right course of action; all we can do is weigh things up and make a decision, that seems best at the time. 

From the dawn of civilization, people have needed to invent myths to explain the things they didn’t understand; day and night, the weather, the changing seasons, the migration of animals, the growth of crops, family relationships, love, anger, grief, madness. These ‘certainties’ were ascribed to the deities, who alone understood the ways of the world and  required appeasement.      

But man is restless and curious.  There have always been the neurotic ones, those who would challenge the elders and question the collective wisdom; the ones who noticed the missing stair in the double helix.

Man’s neurosis has made him successful. Curiosity has generated the knowledge that has turned men into Gods; Gods who knew how to grow their own food, create their own shelter, and migrate to every corner of the globe. The first revolution in human society, agriculture and the settled community, was followed some thousands of years later by the industrial revolution and the growth of massive cities, but now we have been taken over by the third wave; the electronic revolution, further disconnecting us from the tangible traditions of home and tribe. This new artificial world is based on belief and expectation.  Money, property, occupation, marriage, family can no longer be relied on. There is no absolute security.  What we regard as our wealth, our security, is more a matter of collective trust than any real commodity.  What sustains us as family and home is the faith that it is so. We are consoled by our illusions, up to a point.  

But there is a paradox; the more illusory and insecure our existence, the more we demand absolute certainties.  Our need for security permeates all aspects of our existence.  Daily administrative concerns domesticate an existential insecurity by providing the illusion of control. This is not so much a lust as a fundamental human need for shelter; what psychotherapists would term containment.  We need to know that our savings will be secure, that we will get effective treatment, that our children will get the best education, that we will be promoted, that our wife will love us forever.  These are our certainties. But all too often we worry about whether it will rain tomorrow, whether the rubbish will be collected, the mail delivered, the roads gritted.   We are panicked by a glitch on our computer,  enraged  by transport delays,  devastated by the loss of our mobile and tyrannized by regulation.   

To provide the reassurance to calm our fears, we demand more information.  We need to know what we can never know.  So we build glass and concrete temples dedicated to science, create multinational corporations to look after our money and service our existence and construct whole cities dedicated to treating the incurable, unexplained malaise of a society, that is sick with worry about being worried.  These are all illusions.  The reality, as we have seen all too clearly, is that our money can never be safe, the basic services, energy supplies, water, food, are finite, our shelter can be destroyed and life is an incurable illness.  But how desperately we need those illusions,         

In our uncertain, artificial world, try as we will to distinguish reality from fiction, truth from lies, right from wrong, the good from the bad, we fail. And this failure leads to regulation, because regulation provides the structural illusion of certainty. So we regulate every aspect of our existence – banks, hospitals, schools, transport and food.  So just as our ancestors never questioned their deities, so we put our trust in the God of  Science, the mysterious divination of evidence, the Rule of Law, the Oracle of Psychology, the Security of the Bank and The Power of Government.  Not to do so invites chaos or so we fear.  And our collective psyche abhors tension and chaos.    

We need to know where we stand, what will happen. So we look to our leaders to guide us.  Our politicians have to appear certain, lawyers trustworthy, businessmen reliable, doctors omniscient and efficient.  They all trade in absolute truths. We make Gods of them.  We have to believe that when our politicians tell us they will cut taxes, improve medical services, increase the state pension for old people and get us out of recession, that this will happen. But politicians are false gods. Certainty for a politician is at best what seems to be the optimal solution at the time and at worst sheer deceit and manipulation.  To be certain is to appear to have control and control is power.  And we need to know our leaders have the power to look after us. The media, the watchdog of an insecure public, demands certainty and will destroy those whose predictions fail to happen, whose promises are unfounded.      

It’s a game of pretence, a case of keeping one step ahead of disaster. Politicians are theatrical exponents of deception. Lawyers conjure truth out of doubt.  Businessman are skilled manipulators. Doctors trade in reassurance.   But they are only giving us what we want; the semblance of certainty in an uncertain world! 

Far be it from me, a lusty sinner, to take issue with the good archbishop, but I think that lust for certainty is less a sin and more a sign of insecurity.  Lust implies the need to own, to have power and control and that makes us feel secure.  It is what this desperate need leads on to, what it justifies, that are the sins; the deception, division and conflict, war, even murder. Doesn’t religion, in preaching a doctrine of certainty generate sin as much as any other conviction.  God save us from those who have conviction!         

Certainty forecloses discussion, precludes compromise, stifles creativity and promotes division. It inhabits a world that is split; right or wrong, black or white, good or bad.  The illusion of certainty  requires deception, suppression and secrecy.  It denies the real world and leads to conflict. There must be winners and losers.   

Uncertainty is freedom and life. We need to accept uncertainty if we are to understand the nature of things and change them.  Knowledge is not written in stone, but on shifting sand and the tide keeps coming in.  We should marvel at what we don’t know, engage with the fascinating complexity and the stimulus for understanding. Curiosity is one of the greatest joys of life. 

If we are to live together in harmony, we need to acknowledge there are no absolute rights or wrongs; only what we decide is so. Everything has its contexts and conditions.  Laws are there to be broken if conditions dictate that is the greater good.     

But society has to deal in absolutes, otherwise there is no society.  And the bigger society is and the more complex, the more the individual needs to be regulated.  No man is an island … Society determines that we make decisions, obey conventions, laws, that our word is our bond.  Doubt and inconsistency could lead to chaos and disintegration.   But society is too large to trust or to understand. It is an artifice that must be accepted advisedly not absolutely.  .   

But there is a third way; that is to acknowledge the necessary regulations of society while at the same time realizing and understanding the complexities and uncertainties of human existence.  (Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s ……….).  Decisions should not be imposed by obligation but arrived at by creative compromise.  Accept society’s necessary regulations, but retain the personal uncertainty, because it is out of uncertainty that we derive identity and meaning.   Too much regulation will breed fear and stifle life; too little threatens distintegration.  Decisiveness can lead to sin, but indecision may slide into chaos.  As ever, we need to find the golden mean

Day will follow night

and life will last forever,

but the watchman spins his coin

and the way it lands is never.     

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