I am the sound of a tree falling in the forest

Once upon a time, I was a philosophy student. Now I might be somewhat biased, but in my opinion, a philosophical training is an optimum preparation for psychotherapy training. This is no surprise when you consider that philosophy originally arose as an expression of humanity’s need to answer exactly the kinds of Big Questions that [...]

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Pathological politics – the good, the bad, and your mother

Theory. For me, theoretical concepts are like this special collection of toys that I can take with me wherever I go. The particular toy I’d like to play with today is Melanie Klein‘s concept of splitting (or rather, her development of the concept). I’m going to explore this with reference to the current coalition Government, [...]

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What is the purpose of emotion?

It seems to me that there is a bizarre fascination in our current age of explaining present day behaviour by reference to a wholly imagined pre-historic past. Considering the hyper-adaptability of human beings to present situations, it strikes me as odd that one would attempt to explain current behaviour as an evolutionary adaptation to an [...]

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The psychopathology of boredom

Psychopathology is a great word. It has three parts: ‘psyche’ (the soul), ‘pathos’ (suffering), and the suffix ‘ology’ (the study of). If you’re ever writing about something in the context of its impact on human suffering, you can’t go far wrong by dropping in psychopathology (incidentally, given those meanings, that makes the meaning of ‘psychopath’ [...]

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