There, but for the grace of God; a perspective on psychosis.

You’re driving me mad, I’m going crazy, I’m losing my mind, he’s just daft, it just doesn’t make sense!  How many times a day do you hear such sentiments?  How often do you express them yourself?   Our lives are so complex, so pressurised that we have to work very hard... Read more »

Ghosts in the Nursery

Henry James leaves his stories open to his readers interpretations.  That is the source of their intrigue.  The ‘Turn of the Screw’ is his most famous and most chilling novel,  but why?  Is it because it explores, albeit obliquely,  that most horrific of topics, the loss of innocence.     The governess... Read more »

Was Dr Johnson mad? Aren’t we all?

He was a most strange looking man, much bigger than average and rather stout.  Slovenly, dishevelled, deaf, almost blind with myopia; he slobbered, he dribbled, was host to all manner of people, and his personal cleanliness left much to be desired.  In truth, he stank.  And he had a variety... Read more »

Running from women with reindeer and other obsessions.

The U boats lay in wait for us as soon as we rounded North Cape.  There was only a narrow passage between the tundra and the ice, and as they closed in on the convoy underwater,  Stukas from their Norwegian bases, dive bombed us from above.  It was hell!   The... Read more »

The dread of feeling too much; Edvard Munch and his women

‘I was out walking with two friends.  The sun began to set.  Suddenly the sky turned blood red.  I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence.  There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue black fjord and the city.  My friends walked on  and I stood there... Read more »

Theo van Gogh; holding the lonely madness of genius.

Vincent van Gogh is all too often seen as the mad genius who created masterpieces while in a state of ecstacy and infatuation, the man who cut off his ear in despair and took his own life, but that is a distortion.  He was more an intensely driven man,  awkward... Read more »

When the orchestra is mad, who can be sane?

Tom Stoppard is of my generation.  Although, of course, I never knew him personally,  he has been part of my growing up.  I took Marion to see ‘Jumpers’ in the nineteen seventies.  It was the play that I remember best.  I still have the script somewhere.  It inspired a love... Read more »

When the dream fades, kill it off!

Frank and April Wheeler had it all.  They were a charmed couple, or so it seemed to their neighbours and friends.  He was virile and handsome, a whizz in the city, she was beautiful and an actress.  They owned a pretty clapperboard house in the leafy suburbs.  They had two... Read more »

Haunted! ‘Trauma’ and McGrath’s ghosts.

Charlie is a psychiatrist, an expert on trauma. His marriage to Agnes broke up after her brother, Danny, committed suicide.  Danny was a Vietnamese veteran whose buddy was killed by a booby trap device right next to him.  He was also Charlie’s patient.  He blew his brains out after Charlie... Read more »

Of daughters, damage and destruction; is that the legacy of Mrs Klein?

Melanie Klein might be said to have founded the British School of Psychoanalysis, though it was never as formal as that. There was a never a ‘concrete school’ more a movement dominated by the ideas and interpretations of Mrs Klein.  Psychoanalysis was (and still is) very incestuous.  There were not many... Read more »

Dr Haggard’s Disease

It was 1937; and there was trouble on the horizon.  They recognized each other at a funeral. There was a spark.  Then they found they were sitting next to each other at the Cushing’s dinner party.  He was Dr Edward Haggard, house surgeon at St Basil’s and a bit of... Read more »

Madly in love

When her husband, Max, is appointed director of an asylum in Essex, Stella is not overjoyed.  She is bored; ‘dying of chronic neglect’.  She resents the restrictions of her position and the limited perspectives of the other wives.  To relieve the monotony, she develops an attraction to Edgar, a handsome... Read more »

Spider

He is the last off the train. He looks lost, wary, an alien from another world.  He stops,  picks up an object from the edge of a puddle, examines it and puts it in his pocket.  Everything about him is strange. He doesn’t so much walk but shuffle, keeping close... Read more »