What if I am wrong?

A few things came together for me in the past few days which made me think about what I thought; why I sometimes choose not to express my thoughts; why I sometimes feel sensitive and defensive about what I think; what do I fear will happen if I am truly open and candid, and how it relates to who I am, that is, my sense of identity, what is my ‘self’?

I think it begins very early. We are brought up to distinguish between ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ and we are rewarded for being right. Sometimes if we are wrong, or do something wrong, we are punished. So, the fear of getting something wrong, of being ‘in the wrong’, develops from infancy.

Two books I have been reading, and two conversations recently, as well as some work in my analysis all seemed to come together. The conversations began on Sunday. The previous day I had seen the ‘Women in Revolt’ exhibition, with my daughter, at the Tate. I liked it. It stirred up some feelings and memories when I looked at the photographs of the women supporting the miners, or the Greenham Common protests, and the snaps from various punk concerts and venues. I recalled that it tended to produce some contemptuous harrumphing in my home when it came on the early evening news.

I liked the exhibition, not least because it made me get in touch with a period of adolescence, but also for reminding me of a time of forming political and social views. Back then, with the confidence of youth, perhaps that should be ‘arrogance of youth’, I had little doubt that my opinions were ‘right’; they also tended to be ‘Right’. I did not expect to have to defend them, but was sure that I could.

My Sunday conversation was with one of my fellow training candidates, who told me she had seen it too, and I was lazily assuming that she would have enjoyed it, but I was taken aback by the vehemence of her response. To be fair, it was not the content that she objected to, but the way the exhibition had been curated, but I was surprised. Not that it was a difficult conversation and certainly not uncomfortable, which is what this piece is really about.

A couple of days later I was with two Jewish colleagues and friends. The responses to Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards has garnered a great deal of attention, much of it unfavourable, and was one moment that had started me down this road of thinking about my thoughts, and especially, my willingness to express them. Deep down, am I rather cowardly? Or just conflict-avoidant, or more generously, thoughtfully trying not to offend? I did not think it was really about not offending, it was about avoiding a Glazer-outcome of being attacked.

These two gentlemen comprised an Israeli, who has lived here for a handful of years and did his three years of military service when in Israel. The other, might be characterised as a representative of the diaspora. Good English public school education, and a mixed Arab and European background. They started to talk about Gaza, then about Israel, the West Bank, many of the historic events post-1948, what ‘self-defence’ meant, colonisation, rights, entitlement. I listened intently and with fascination.

What was striking was that though they disagreed, and the passion in their responses, was the fact that they kept talking. I thought at one point that one of them might get up and walk away. I think about how I might have responded. In Stephen Frosh’s book “Anti-Semitism and Racism”, he writes about Jewish culture and a particular capacity for debate, discourse, dialogue. He suggests that the Torah is riddled with ambiguity, precisely so that it generates debate. The importance of arguing over points of history, of law, is fundamental to co-existence.

We were interrupted by someone wanting the room we had been in, and so we walked on. Despite the contra-opinions and the vehemence with which they had been expressed, we did not part, but all went and had a cup of tea together. It was only then that I joined the conversation. I said how I admired their determination to go on talking. That things were not reduced to personal insults and antipathies. I explained that since the Hamas atrocity of October 7, I have tried very hard to read as much as possible, to educate myself about the politics and the history of the region. As well as Frosh, I have read Jacqueline Rose, Susan Neiman, and Adam Schatz and I feel that I have educated myself sufficiently to be able to express an opinion. However, I had not wanted to. Why?

I think it was because I did not want to be seen by either of my colleagues to be taking sides, one against the other. So, it was not about the subject of the debate, it was about my fear of being aligned, and more unimpressively, the thought that it might lead to me being attacked. Perhaps I thought that Jewish voices have priority over mine in this debate, but more likely it was my anxiety of drawing attention to myself, to my opinions, and of fearing that if I was attacked, that I was not sufficiently well-armed, by intellect and associations, to fight back.

It comes up in my analysis. I find ‘free associating’ quite difficult. What gets in the way of “saying whatever comes to mind” is my inner authority figure, censoring and policing what I have to say. What do I fear? What can I say? Words have power. With misuse, they become weaponry. What do I avoid? Scorn, attacks, contempt, ostracisation, perhaps. Some of my friends tease me about my ‘wokery’, but that does not feel threatening. What I think I fear, when I take care over choosing what I want to share, is to avoid being wounded.

I attended a brilliant meeting recently with Alessandra Lemma, reading a paper to our psychoanalytic association’s Scientific Committee. It was about use of photographic images in therapy. Much of her work in the past couple of decades has been with transgender youths, and she was talking about the “natal body” and what photographic images do to, and for, the psyches of young people working through the pain of thinking that they might have been born into the “wrong body”. I thought about her, when she had said that writing about her experiences, and doing the work she has done, required the armour to deal with the sure knowledge that she would be vilified, “from all sides”.

I sometimes discuss the various trans debates with my children. One has a very developed sense of thinking around these issues, two tend to regard their sibling as “attention seeking” and perhaps with a misdirected focus on what they think are more important issues. Lemma, full of poise and demonstrating empathy, analysis and intellect gave a superb example of expressing and holding views that are likely to lead to attacks. She is so much more advanced down the road I am thinking about – candour, empathy, honesty, expression. I admired her a great deal.

I think this is one of the reasons that I love theatre and cinema so much. I can let artists speak for me and then decide whether I appreciate or share their sentiments. Seeing plays like ‘Grenfell’, or ‘For Black Boys who have considered Suicide when the Hue gets too Heavy‘, last year, helped me shape my thinking, about minorities, injustices and oppression. Recently, watching ‘Nye’ helped me think about the importance and significance of the welfare state and the NHS in a way I would once have let go by. The revival of ‘far-right’ movements and attitudes is brilliantly captured in the subversive ‘Nachtland’, or the imaginative ‘‘Merchant of Venice, 1936‘ and ‘Cable Street’. Thinking about mistreatment of Jews, and then about Jewish oppression, and being able to form robust views that I could share with men like my two colleagues, is what I am trying to consider.

Religion was one of those topics I was discouraged from opining about when I was younger. In truth I learned little and would have been hard-pressed to debate. Apart from the murderous clashes of the extremists who claim to represent their faiths, most religious fervour and debate is more muted these days and in many people, like me, it arouses little by way of emotion. However, I am reading Iain McGilchrist’s “Master and His Emissary” at the moment, and concurrently, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters from Prison”, and on the same day found myself reading about Luther, Lutherans, Protestantism, and the Reformation.

Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents during his incarceration in 1943 on Reformation Day. He mused upon Luther’s doubts about the value of his work toward the end of his life and wrote “He wanted a real unity of the Church and the West – that is, of the Christian peoples, and the consequence was the disintegration of the Church and of Europe; he wanted ‘freedom of the Christian man’, and the consequence was indifference and licentiousness; he wanted the establishment of a genuine secular social order free from clerical privilege, and the result was insurrection, the Peasants’ War, and soon afterwards the gradual dissolution of all real cohesion and order in society.”

McGilchrist, who develops his left hemisphere overwhelming its ‘master’, the right hemisphere, hypothesis, felt that there was a shift away from metaphor and right hemisphere dominance at the time of the Reformation, and observed that though Luther was a tolerant and conservative figure with a concern for authenticity, and a return to experience, he was a “tragic figure” because his attitude to images in worship and in churches themselves, whilst “balanced and reasonable”, unleashed “forces of destruction that were out of his control, forces which set about destroying the very things he valued, forces against which he inveighed finally without effect”. He catalysed a period of fanaticism which led Erasmus to note about the crowds, “I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an evil spirit”.

On being misunderstood, or misinterpreted, wilfully or otherwise, McGilchrist writes this about Luther, he decried “the emptiness that results when the outer and inner worlds are divorced. But his followers took it to mean that the outer world was itself empty, and therefore authenticity lay in the inner world alone”. They took to decapitating statues. I found myself thinking about the Colston statue , here in the UK, and especially, of the ‘Christian Right’ in the US, when reading Erasmus’s observation.

One last long quote from McGilchrist, because it made sense to me, and because his academic breadth and depth in his extraordinary book requires he gets all the promotion I can muster:

“There are several ways in which the Reformation anticipated the hermetic self-reflexivity of post-modernism, perfectly expressed in the infinite regress of self-referral within some of the visual images which Koerner examines (pictures which portray the setting in which the picture stands, and contain therefore the picture itself, itself containing a further depiction of the setting, containing an ever smaller version of the picture, etc.) One of Cranach’s masterpieces, discussed by Koerner, is in its self-referentiality the perfect expression of left hemisphere emptiness, and a precursor of post-modernism. There is no longer anything to point to beyond, nothing Other, so it points pointlessly to itself. Rather paradoxically for a movement that began as a revolt against apparently empty structures, it is in fact the structures, not the content, of religion, that come into focus as the content. But such is the fate of those who insist on ‘either/or’, rather than the wisdom of semi-transparency”

This brings me back to my feelings. Why do I feel the need to censor what I say? I think it goes back to the fear of being ‘wrong’, but maybe the thing is about a deeper search for ‘the truth’. I think about so many issues where I feel wary of sharing my opinion, one for risking offence, but two, for fear of having my sense of being right destroyed by someone else. I realise in my vanity I fear ‘losing the argument’.

More McGilchrist, “Whereas for the Enlightenment, and for the workings of the logical left hemisphere, opposites result in a battle which must be won by ‘The Truth’, for the Romantics, and for the right hemisphere, it is the coming together of opposites into a fruitful union that forms the basis not only of everything we find beautiful, but of truth itself”. Perhaps, I am mentally structured as a Romantic?

Opening a conversation with “I am not convinced I am right about this, and I look forward to hearing the contra views, but this is how things have formed in my mind thus far” – thereby inviting opinion, but not setting up something adversarial, is a possible way to approach this. Seeking synthesis. A desire to be educated. A way of overcoming a fear of being ignorant, or worse bigoted, and thoughtless. I want to be better at this. I recall my polarised thinking in 2016, regarding Brexit, and I regret not thinking harder about why anyone might have a different view to mine. I was amongst the worst of Remainers for being dismissive and patronising towards Leavers.

I recall the thought that to understand something means to be able to explain it, to teach it to another, and I sense that my reluctance on many issues is that I am not confident that I could explain or teach them to another. I would then be exposed for having built an idea-set that, in truth, I could not defend. But the issue is my need to defend. Perhaps if I saw my opinions less as the vulnerable castle, and more as an open space where listening better to alternative views would allow something better to be built in common…or is that rather idealistic and too hopeful?

Anyway, what if I am wrong? The sun will rise again…

On: The charms of the reunion

Photo by Kampus Production on Pexels.com

Last week I attended a reunion. The link was a broking firm from the 1990s. I joined it right at the end of the decade and had barely located the office canteen and loos before it was being sold to a large US banking conglomerate. I had joined for something creative, entrepreneurial and innovative, and was becoming part of an industry behemoth.

When the deal was announced many of my then colleagues looked disconsolate and disappointed. I had to excuse myself and go for a walk because I felt elated. I had felt within days of joining that it was punching above its weight and could not sustain a competitive place in the evolving investment banking universe. I might be fearful of making a place for myself in this large US, faceless new employment home, but I felt I had a better chance of meeting my professional and personal goals as part of the bigger organisation.

Most of my colleagues became part of the ‘merged’ new entity, and London developed along the lines of the ‘reverse takeover’. The management and drive of the US business largely came from within the organisation I had joined, and I was one of the lucky ones whose career developed and whose pay increased.

This is not about that particular firm, though. Or those colleagues, although reunions are about people; especially about how they have changed and how they have not changed. The following morning the WhatsApp on my phone was showered with messages from attendees, thanking the organisers, but often commenting on how good it was to see so many people, and to be reminded of what fine people they were. It was almost as uplifting as Tracy and Joni at the Grammys.

My previous experience of reunions, which I define as numbers of attendees at least in the tens, was restricted to the players of my Witham Town footballing days and a school event. Why do we go to reunions? Why do reunions (need to) happen? If I think about the football gang, I think there was something about all of us, a good ten or fifteen years since our playing days, of wanting to hold on to some of our youthful vitality, as well as to enjoy one another’s company.

School reunions are quite different. Then, I think attendance is about a need to detach from something rather than re-attach. We want to confirm we have left behind our playground selves and our immaturity and naivety. Inevitably, we discover that is not really the case. I think there may also be a less edifying need to measure oneself against the school peers. Has one enjoyed a change in social status, or converted limited classroom prowess into post-school intellectual or material gains? And, critically, how does that compare with the school group?

For events like last week’s, it is much subtler. There is an interest in comparison with the group; who has prospered, who has not. Who has fulfilled the potential one saw at the time; whose peacockery has been exposed for what it was. However, I think it is also a need to explore something that might have been left behind. If the workplace also provided friendships, then those flourished outside of the office and will have continued. Attending a reunion is not about seeing genuine friends, that can be done easily and frequently. It is about re-engaging with people one liked professionally, but with whom did not develop deeper friendships. In other words, the friendships that might have been, the undeveloped and under-developed.

What else do we want from a reunion? A reminder that one is part of something, still, and a sense of value and worth in the company one used to keep. I think it is inevitable that the unsociable games of measurement go on, but with so much professional competition behind us, it was a pleasure to share in anybody’s successful lives and careers, after leaving the firm.

Does anything unexpected happen at a reunion? And, is that one of the reasons to go? My experience of the school event was that whatever people had become, and wherever they had moved to live, that the same small groups, cliques, senses of superiority and inferiority that featured in the playground and the classroom, reasserted themselves. One of the rules is that when you see the cast list, you mentally think about people best avoided or limited to thin slices of time, and start to build expectations of those whose time, presence and conversation you expect to most enjoy.

Inevitably you are barely over the threshold and are greeted by someone on your ‘prefer to avoid’ list and minutes later, talking to a couple of people one likes, suffer the group being broken up by the intrusion of another ‘prefer to avoid’! You reach the bar and are shoulder to shoulder with someone you had hoped not to see, but who greets you like a long-lost pal. Or was that just me?

The unexpected comes when the passage of time and the change of venue combine to allow someone you thought you knew, or knew that you knew very little about, comes and tells you as much about what has happened to them personally, as about professionally, in the intervening years. That is a real pleasure. I worked alongside one man, an insightful analyst and a warm personality who clients liked, and I thought I knew him well. I recall us going to a ‘Cast’ concert in Camden and having long debates about football.

Last week he told me about a decade of his private research into ‘consciousness’ and a burgeoning enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s plays. He shared his own writing ambitions. We had a conversation that was quite unexpected and one of the thrills of my evening.

The reach and appeal of social media, in this case mainly LinkedIn, meant that career developments for each of us, were often not a great surprise. There were authors, CEOs, CIOs, life coaches, entrepreneurs. For me, my change of direction seems to have been widely noticed, and I think that there is a pull to anyone who works with, and might have an understanding of the human mind.

People invariably ask if you are analysing them, but after some slightly uncomfortable laughter, then often tell you intimate details of how they were raised, or the state of their marriages, drawn moth to flame-like, to see if they might be a good subject for analysis. It does not come from a narcissistic place, but from a vulnerable, open, often sensitive place.

In the football gathering, that connection and re-connection manifested in the endless repetition of the dressing room ‘banter’. Tired out jokes and small humiliations that reminded everyone of the unspoken hierarchies, even in a group where the team functioned well precisely because we had different skills, styles and attributes to bring to a combined effort. My experience, again though, was of slotting into the place and the role that I had filled all those years ago – still the younger guy, not from the town but a commuter, whose football position, on the wing, occasionally exciting but not the most influential, reflected my position in the dressing room. Fringe, useful, but not very influential. Unless you give him the ball. In the broking reunion, the ball was the personal stories.

What is unsurprising at reunions? School or work, based on my very limited sampling, the girls you once fancied are still the ones you most want to be with. As for male company, the issue is about ageing and changing. In any relationship, ageing and changing does not have to be mutual for a relationship to change, but change happens. Like my consciousness conversation. I think both of us had changed and found the new direction and level of our exchanges welcome, but our relationship would have been altered by just the one of us having found time to consider the world anew.

One other reunion needs considering. On the day of the event which I attended, a good friend called me to give me the sad news of the death of one of our contemporaries. We had all worked together in the early 1980s. The death was unexpected. Funerals are reunions too, albeit with a very different purpose. We attend not just to “show our respects” but to have a reunion with the mourners, many of whom we know well. We are also there to consider the fact that we will not be enjoying a reunion with the mourned. He or she has moved beyond our reach. What the funeral does, though, is to remind us to get as much pleasure as we can from the living. Reunions are part of that.

In the room last week, were three people who had interviewed me, after we had moved on from working together. One, gave me a job, and rebuilt my then-damaged confidence. Another, who was at the most prestigious and elite US investment bank, accepted my decision not to pursue a second round of interviews. The third, decided not to hire me. A fourth man was one of the people I most admired when we all worked together in 1999. He went on to become a player in the hedge fund world and a potential, and often quite challenging, client. In a way, therefore, he too interviewed me.

I wondered about what would come up between each of these very personal reunions for me. Perhaps, that is the point of reunions and what we are drawn to, people come around again. Interestingly, the James Redfield book ‘Celestine Prophecy’ came up in conversations at the event, and my recollection of it, is one key message that whenever we meet someone, it is for a reason. We may not recognise it, but they will simply reappear at a later date, and once again, if necessary. Seeing everyone as potentially significant is quite uplifting and means that reunions are not, after all, rooted in the experiences of the past, but also give some direction to futures.

On: Women and the body; Marina, sisterhood and a play. Something going on?

I spent Saturday evening at the National’s Dorfman Theatre watching Infinite Life. It was sold out. The play is a bit of a curiosity in that it embraces very little action and is about pain. Hot ticket? If so, why? Although there is a male cast member, and he is in pain, the focus is the assorted pains suffered by five women, who are attending a fasting clinic in hope of relief.

The play throws up a number of intriguing thoughts as the lack of action encourages the women, mostly, and occasionally the man, to swap broken bits of conversation as they lie on sun loungers and contemplate their circumstances. It did occur to me that part of the point of the pay was to mock men. I wondered if it was asking if we understood pain. Obviously, none of us undergoes childbirth, but the man thinks his pain is more intense and worse than anything any woman has suffered.

Writing about women and their bodies, as someone perfectly unqualified and unable to share their experiences, is probably partly what the play despairs of in men, and yet, here I am, prompted and perhaps provoked by it. The reason it made me need to get some thoughts on paper, was I wonder if there is a ‘something going on’, which might be a new chapter in feminist history and yet another wail of despair at the incomprehension and lack of understanding of males. Men, like me, basically.

In 1925, Freud was honest enough to write that the sexual life of women “is still veiled in impenetrable obscurity” and in 1926 he made his (in)famous comment that “the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology”. These were the sorts of feelings I noticed as I watched. I asked a close female friend about her thoughts on my feelings and she laughed, and told me about the sorts of exchanges she and her girlfriends had about male ignorance of female physicality, sexuality and inner worlds. Apparently their coffee mornings and book clubs are wild!

When protest and cultural change gets underway, and leaves an impact, it is most often expressed through the arts. Artists can often, usually in a somewhat coded, interpretive way, open up things that need discussing, reconsidering, appraising and reappraising. Examples such as Russian composers, writers and painters subtly undermining the State message in the Stalin era, or something much less subtle, but as important, such as Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam.

As Nina sang,

Can’t you see it?
Can’t you feel it?
It’s all in the air.
I can’t stand the pressure much longer.
Somebody say a prayer.

What I wondered, as I watched Annie Baker’s play, was if there was a cultural message gathering momentum, and that perhaps it was linked to Roe v Wade in the US, and to the headscarves protests by the very brave Iranian women. In the US, the GOP might have found a policy designed to consign itself to electoral defeat. Going after women’s right to choose; imposing a male control over those bodies, not understanding female physical and psychical pains, is going to remind MAGA watchers, that actually America was not that great not so long ago in the past.

I associated the Baker play with a film I saw recently, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, and with the extraordinary Serbian, Marina Abramovic’s exhibition at the RA currently, which looks at pain in a way that cries out for understanding, and that it is not understood, not least her ability to inflict pain on herself as part of her performance art. It is an astonishing exhibition but is a very unsettling experience.

In Baker’s play, the more the characters reveal their infirmities, the more their characters become known to us. I thought of the famous text by van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score” and Rothschild’s “The Body Remembers”. Freud was clear that the mind and body are one, and I have a strong conviction that the physical discomforts we suffer are invariably manifestations of unrelieved mental, psychic pains. They are unresolved tensions, traumas and they have been so successfully repressed, that in the end the only way they get to be expressed is somatically.

Infinite Life goes on to explore the link between pain and that of desire. We know some people find pain to be exciting as part of the sexual experimentation, but also that pain inhibits desire, rather than diminishes it. Part of Baker’s message, I felt, was that I as a man, just could not quantify what pain a woman could tolerate, but also how much she might desire a man. Women’s sexual agency gets examined when the main character thinks she could “fuck the pain away”.

The pain is all too present in Anna Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood. An Estonian/Icelandic film it examines what happens as a number of mainly middle-aged women come together to share sauna and icy dips in the forest. As the steam cleanses their bodies, the women cleanse their minds by sharing experiences of being raped, assaulted, giving birth, or not being able to give birth. Everything, is contained by the sisterhood. How could men understand?

What else is happening that made me think that women are finding new ways to shout out at tin-eared men, to listen to them, to understand them better? One was a piece in the Guardian by Sonia Sodha, who was reviewing an exhibition of feminist activism. Her opening is not about Afghanistan or Iran, or right-wing US politicians, but Argentina’s newly elected president who describes women in favour of abortion rights as “brainwashed by a homicidal policy”. UN data that she quotes suggests that one in five girls around the world is married before they turn 18, and that 250 million per year suffer a physical and/or sexual assault from an intimate partner. I had to re-read the “per year”.

I am not sure why I am surprised. In the work that I now do; I am already all too familiar with women dealing with the outcomes of their trauma from sexual predation, often at very early years. It manifests itself in deep rooted shame, in an inability to trust, a theft of any possible pleasure in sexual encounters and frankly, a pain, the like of which is very difficult for me as a male therapist to properly comprehend, never mind share.

Sodha’s exhibition review is for “Women in Revolt!” – feminist art and activism 1970-90 at Tate Britain. Fifty years ago, ‘second wave feminists’ wanted equal pay, free contraception and abortion, wages for housework, and 24-hour nurseries, so that shift workers were not marginalised. What is it that we boys think will fall apart if we do not accede to these demands? How can we not understand our relative privilege? When I look at the world my daughters are being offered, am I happy with their lot? It is because of the modesty of the progress made since the 1970s that I think there might be some signs of movements amongst the artistic communities. Our minds are going to be prodded and provoked, again.

When it comes to issues of gender, sexuality and empowerment, it seems inevitable these days, that the issue of transsexuals will come up. What I rarely see covered by the media is the pain that these people are suffering in order to be the person they believe they need to become. In my last role in banking, one of our colleagues transitioned to becoming a woman. I cannot begin to imagine quite what that must have been like, a tormented inner world, a hostile outer world, and the constant threat of othering. When she returned to work, she hosted a drinks party of celebration in one of the Canary Wharf bars. It was one of the most joyous occasions I can recall, and I think joy is often a response to despair. She had joy to share, only because of the despair she had known.

A couple of final thoughts. Gender-blind casting in theatre is hardly new, given the fact that boys had to play women’s parts in Shakespeare’s era, but now we are seeing more women playing roles written with men in mind. A week ago, I saw Tracy-Ann Oberman’s extraordinary version of Merchant of Venice, in which she took on the role of Shylock. It made the betrayal of Jessica, her daughter, seem even more painful than betraying a father. Shylock is proud, then broken, by a horribly aggressive anti-semite, Portia, but what Oberman does best is to show us pain.

Finally, one of modern culture’s exemplars of nuanced relationships, and of women managing and masking pain is Polly, in Peaky Blinders, played exquisitely by the late Helen McCrory. She is impulsive and suffers depression, cursed by a ‘second sight’ attributed to her gypsy heritage. A jealous neighbour tore her own family from her, and so she is the great matriarch, but to other people’s offspring. Her losses, her pains, are played out in every episode in which she appears, and I wonder if she was a beginning-part, of a cry from women to be seen and heard. She becomes, for all her tough defiance, a rape victim, and so shame settles on her pain, a salt rubbed into very open wounds.

I am not sure where I wanted to go with this, but I felt something strong about my identity and my sex, when I saw the play, and it helped me make these other links with recent cultural offers. I am sure that I should be dismissed for having a patronising, patriarchal view of how it might be to be a woman, but, to my daughters, I am trying to understand. This all might have begun a few years ago; I recall watching and wincing at Michaela Cole’s “I May Destroy You”, but in perhaps typical male response, I did not quite see and hear.

On: Letters, albums and nostalgia

Photo by Viktoria Alipatova on Pexels.com

A recent Guardian review of ‘The Letters of Seamus Heaney’ , had me thanking my younger self for retaining boxes of letters sent to me, in mainly pre e-mail days. The review was published days after a beautiful Enuma Okoro piece, in the Financial Times, about ‘Family Albums’. Perhaps, the two things are pushing me into a nostalgic mindset, but I don’t think it is entirely that. I think it is more an appreciation for things that once seemed more important, conceptually, than they do now, but paradoxically, have probably gained value with time and under-usage.

I am thinking about it because Onoro describes how, for her, family albums not only were something to occasionally revisit as a family, but were often proudly shared with guests. When I was growing up my parents had pictures on ‘slides’ and these occasionally came out to be shared with the use of a ‘slide projector’. Setting it up and painfully going through many not very good pictures one-by-one, meant that this was an infrequent ‘pleasure’.

Fortunately, when costs had come down and materials improved, my father had tens and tens, probably hundreds of slides, printed as small 6×4 pictures, and these were carefully put in large albums that could accommodate six pictures on each side of a leaf. We did have some photographs, mainly black and white, that were attached to an older style album, with black pages and fixed by the use of four white little corner holders, which the image was carefully slid into, to prevent it from slipping or falling out.

When the time came for me to start a family I copied his example. Until the digital takeover a few years ago, I had an album for each year, recording how my children grew, places we visited, friends with whom we shared our time, and a handful of significant events. Christmases and holidays dominate.

In Onoro’s article, she recalls how albums were not only something the family looked over together, but how they proudly came out for some of the visitors to home. It was the same for us. I thought a little more about that when I read her words. It might have been a form of vanity, it might be rather narcissistic, but I prefer to think it was about a form of trust, respect and intimacy. By inviting an outsider (to the family unit) to get a sense of how the family functions and to be aware of a peculiar form of intimacy, was to say ‘you can see us for who we truly are’ (give or take some editing out of tantrums!)

To that end, the curation of these albums was a labour of both love, and art. In my family, I was responsible for it, from a period where the curation included taking a roll of film to Boots to be developed, to more modern technologies. Then, armed with my wallet of 6x4s, I would carefully arrange the images on the pages, aware that it was a form of storytelling, but also aware of editing out, so that some of it was about an idealisation of the family. Today the editing and filtering of Instagram stories and Tik Tok videos fulfils the same need to project a blemish-free existence to the world.

The other thing that looking at family albums does, is to get one in touch with memory. Except, we know memory is intangible and often rather slippery. What these images do, sometimes, is create memory, rather than awaken it. What do I mean by that? I can think of some of my childhood and I realise that my ‘memory’ is something constructed around a photograph we have.

My first West ham kit; my brother and I standing side by side in dressing gowns with our new (Christmas present?) boxing gloves on, and a very young me standing by a small tree in the front garden of the bungalow that my parents had bought when they moved out of London. The images make me believe that I remember these events, but do I really? What I think I ‘remember’ is seeing these images multiple times as I grew up, and perhaps creating a narrative to fit.

Not that having memories developed for us, much like a photographic negative was transformed into a picture, is a bad thing. These images, beautifully collected in albums, remain very important means of dealing with mourning and grieving processes. Although I am no longer married, I do have the wedding album. In it are the last photographs of my nan, someone very dear to me, in a state of semi-decent health, before she died a year later. Whether my memory of her that day is ‘real’ or ‘developed’ is immaterial. I am taken back to being able to hear her voice and to feeling what she was to me.

Photo by Thiago Josu00e9 Amaral on Pexels.com

It is this facility – of time transportation – that is one of the most powerful features of family albums. Often it is the clothing styles, or the wallpaper designs and furnishings, that evoke something that is transportive. We find ourselves able to let our minds inhabit another time and another space. I think that is part of their importance. When shared with fresh eyes, it is an invitation to try to visit a special time and place, otherwise unavailable. An example of this would be my parents, despite my embarrassment, wanting to share our pasts with my then, new fiancee.

The other thing that Okoro’s piece did was to make me ask what would we miss if we threw these away? The albums are heavy, and they fill a lot of space. I am now single and living in a much smaller home, a flat in London. I have decided to throw the albums away and to put all the photographs in them into a couple of boxes. Sure, they won’t be elegantly displayed, and will probably not get seen, but they won’t be lost. Or will they? The very fact of the physicality of the albums and that they are large enough for several people to gather round and look at them together, seems to be what is delaying my act of destruction.

Will I lose track of which year the photographs were taken if they just lie in boxes? Will I find it difficult to find early images of my eldest doing things like playing the violin, or her first efforts riding a pony? These are important because they have helped me think about what she means to me, and how I love her, as I get ready to deliver a father-of-the-bride speech. If I act out this destructive initiative, will it make it more difficult for me when I come to write a speech for her younger sister’s wedding?

What of the letters too? I have boxes of correspondence and they are filed neatly into four different letter blocks, so I know where to look for recipient surnames beginning A-E, and so on. I found the same thing with the letters about transportation and time. Here, it is much less about place, other than a place in the mind. When I read the letters, some a little juvenile, I find myself in a time where modes of thought – mine and my correspondent’s – were different. This helps though. Some political thoughts in pre-Blair England, pre-Gulf War attitudes and pre-9/11 sense of precarity and threat. I was a different man, but I can be in touch with him. References to girlfriends of the day and cricket matches awaken early versions of me.

Am I being nostalgic? Does it matter? The word nostalgia is derived from Greek nostos – homecoming and algos – sorrow, despair or pain. It is a homesickness, whereas I think that these albums and letters are much more about antidotes to the pain of feeling sick for a sometimes-idealised past. However, the satisfactions of this psychic time-travelling are undeniable and I know how much I enjoy it if someone is generous enough to let me see some of the albums of their family lives.

Okoro ends her piece with thoughts about memories and capture and writes “what if we thought of our present lives as embodied memories in action – and our actions in the world, from how we make space for one another to how we care for the ecosystems that nurture us, as making pages for a global family album?” Its delightfully grandiose, yet intimate as well as profoundly philosophical.

On: Celine Song’s Past Lives

Would you want to be transported back to those feelings generated in a juvenile crush? Most of us had one, and if we did, most of us can remember that deep attachment and that ‘foreverness’. In Celine Song’s exquisite rumination on love and fate, Hae Sung, the Korean protagonist, and now 36, has a flash of insight when he meets Nora, originally Na Young to him, after nearly twenty-five years of separation. He realises that her ambition is tied to her restlessness, and that both these qualities are attractive to him. She is “the girl that leaves”, and part of his fascination for her, is because she is the girl that leaves. He is returned to the aching, unconsummated love of his 12-year-old self.

Is there a soul mate? I cannot entirely dismiss it. I have three couples in my life, where they have come back together after decades apart, and have restored the connection of their teens/early twenties. In each case, I believe that they are with the right partner, now. Perhaps, they are truly soul mates. Another couple I know, managed to stay together from their teens. They have always struck me as ‘soul mates’. Perhaps romantic love is really as simple as finding that person. In Song’s film, however, the childhood loves recognise the connection, in adulthood, but also the impossibility of circumstance. The message, I believe, is hopeful – not finding your soul mate, or being able to be with them, does not necessarily exclude some happiness or contentment. Nora finds it with Arthur, and chooses to preserve it.

The film hangs on the Korean phrase “in-yeon”. Nora explains it as meaning providence, or fate. She uses the explanation of it, as part of her bold seduction technique on Arthur, the man who becomes her husband. For the filmgoer, however, it is not meant to be effective and transactional, as used by Nora, but to be what hangs over the film, as we register Nora’s sense of not being quite completed, or fulfilled, as a wannabe prize-winning writer and as a romantic partner, and in Hae Sung’s inability to let go of his childhood attachment.

Sometimes we are fated not to connect, not to achieve our first ambitions, but to live out alternative lives. This is not quite a ‘Sliding Doors’ movie, but it rests on the what-might-have-beens, that all of us are prone to recall. Even if fate, providence, circumstance conspire against a relationship, the feelings are carried through our adult lives. Sometimes, we are looking to replicate that sense of one-ness with that first love. At the end of the film, Nora breaks down in tears, as she willingly resists the temptation to kiss Hae Sung, to disrupt her marriage and as she returns to the protective embrace of Arthur.

It provokes a question. Can we love more than one person? The film is not about promiscuity but asks whether there might be different love registers. Nora’s emotional love for Hae Sung might be deeper than that she develops for her husband, but he is the man she seduces and with whom, we sense, is the man to whom she is sexually faithful. She has a pragmatic view of marriage, as distinct from love, and explains to Hae Sung that “getting married is hard for idealistic people like you”.

I think it might be possible to love more than one person, particularly if that love is distinctively different. I recently dated a woman who was widowed a few years ago. I felt that she could love her husband, his memory and something they had developed, whilst looking for love from someone else. She could carry one love, and be devoted and faithful to another partner. I am not sure that I can imagine how that might feel, but it seems quite likely. The film brilliantly portrays the ache of ‘emotional lovers’, who have decided that a sexual encounter would be too transgressive for their lives. The ego, here, has overwhelmed the id. A sort of happy ending comes when Nora returns to Arthur, and Hae Sung, having observed the trust and contentment between them, is able to shut out his own fantasy of a future with her, and perhaps, return to the girlfriend he had in Korea.

What set the film apart, for me, was the writing. Yes, the tourist ad shots for New York are wonderful, and yes, the music toys with the emotions that the images bring up, but the writing, which is often at its best by how it resists giving the characters too much to say, is wonderful. Writing and language are critical to the narrative arc, and so it is no surprise that Nora and Arthur are both writers and meet on a writers’ retreat. Language, and cultural nuance, come packaged with her immigrant story and his Jewish heritage.

The actors, Teo Yoo as Hae Sung, Greta Lee as Nora, and John Magaro as Arthur, give extraordinary performances, specialising in the non-verbal communications. Magaro, at the bar, as his wife and her Korean friend reminisce in a language he cannot properly comprehend, is deeply affecting.

I found a website dedicated to quotes from the film, and there really are some beauties, but I came away particularly liking Song’s nod to romcom, despite this not being one, by giving Nora, a “I’m just a girl” moment, and I was especially taken with the thoughts on marital fights. Nora explains to Hae Sung that she and her husband fight; she lets him know that it is part of marriage, which perhaps lies ahead for him, and that it is not a bad thing. Instead, she tells him, the married couple are like two trees, planted into the same pot and looking to establish and find room for each set of roots. Given the rootlessness of her immigrant story, this is a neat device.

Another scene that I found myself thinking about as I walked home, was Nora and Arthur in bed together. Arthur is trying to manage his anxiety about being truly loved and about whether he really knows his wife. He tells her that when she talks in her sleep, it is exclusively Korean. He thinks she “dreams in Korean” and he talks about not being able to go there with her. Dreams are the language of the unconscious. They are not the everyday tongue. They need an interpreter. Arthur’s mystification about Nora’s unconscious is something he knows he needs to be able to tolerate.

Psychoanalysts work on the way patients rework infantile feelings. How our adult relationships are invariably exercises in the “compulsion to repeat”. Quite often a sense of lost identity is part of the work. “Who am I?” This film gently explores identity by juxtaposing Korean immigrant, with American Jew, and by highlighting how the best intentions to communicate in another tongue, can lead to misunderstandings, as when Hae Sung cheerfully uses ‘arsehole’ as part of his greeting to his friend’s husband, as he is welcomed into their apartment.

The more, I think about the film, the more I recall these subtle signals and these themes-upon-themes. I think it is one of the finest things I have seen in some time, and I hope that anyone who is tempted to see it, gets as much pleasure from it as I have.

On: Destruction and what to think

Sunday morning and I am reading headlines about our latest Prime Minister’s alleged motorist love. I understand that this is not just about car ownership and driving, if it was, the roads would be better maintained and the rail infrastructure would be attractive enough to get some road traffic on the rails, to improve the lot of the motorist. This is about dragging a voting readership to align with automotive and fuel industries, and to position anything else as an opposition. Green, woke, liberal, whatever. Even so, it depressed me.

I have started to think more deeply about where my opinions come from and what inspires the way I feel and how I respond to all manner of things. What, in short, is my philosophy and my approach? It’s all very well for me to resent the Prime Minister’s focus groups and approach, but why do I think he is somehow in the wrong and why do I have any sort of conviction about how right I am?

I had dinner with my best mate last week. We don’t agree on several issues politically, but agreed that we were both more inclined to question our historic views and to how we had formed them. In short, whilst we were still pretty attached to our views, we recognised that some of them were much more emotional than intellectual, but no less valid, and that some were not especially well-informed but ‘felt right’.

Current media favourites for debate include trans issues, taxation, immigration and what might be called ‘the green agenda’. Culture wars. The environment is one area where I ‘feel’ very strongly, but hypocritically do nothing much about it. I am shockingly passive, in a way that whenever I read Hannah Arendt, I feel rather ashamed. The distinction between the ‘vita activa’ and the ‘vita contemplative’. I have a sense that ‘Big Oil’ is a threat, and is a manipulative, corrupting force, but so what? I shrug my shoulders, make a pledge not to fly by plane again (a pledge I doubt I will keep) and I recycle a bit of plastic packaging.

In that spirit, I enjoyed seeing Josh Appignanesi’s film ‘My Extinction’. It is a fun, self-deprecating film by a concerned parent, who acknowledges his own ‘climate anxiety’, but who still finds it hard to turn down work making a ‘green-washing’ film for Esso. It is the gap between feeling something and then pushing it away and doing nothing about it. Psychoanalytically, it is repression. Red Tomatoes described the film, thus, “a revealingly honest account of how to feel your feelings, act on your privilege, and get active when threatened with extinction.” Key words, as I read them, are act and active.

Tolerating climate abuses is very definitely associated with another key psychoanalytic drive. It seems to me, it is a collective death drive manifestation, a tolerance, even reverence for the excitement of destruction. Freud would have been discussing the clash as Thanatos attempting to overwhelm Eros. We are willingly putting our life drive at risk. In 1932 Einstein wrote to Freud and asked ‘Why War?’ Two months later the father of psychoanalysis replied. “Now, for the first time, with the coming of weapons, superior brains began to oust brute force, but the object of the conflict remained the same: one party was to be constrained, by the injury done him or impairment of his strength, to retract a claim or a refusal. This end is most effectively gained when the opponent is definitively put out of action in other words, is killed.” This all feels very appropriate to me now, because I watched Christopher Nolan’s extraordinary film, ‘Oppenheimer’, today. Einstein features.

Freud added “Moreover, the slaughter of a foe gratifies an instinctive craving a point to which we shall revert hereafter. However, another consideration may be set off against this will to kill: the possibility of using an enemy for servile tasks if his spirit be broken and his life spared. Here violence finds an outlet not in slaughter but in subjugation.”

Again, so what? I thought about my recent responses to the ‘Just Stop Oil’ campaign. I realised I didn’t even know what they wanted. Sure, the oil industry is their preferred baddie, but what do they want? Preventing new exploration? Preventing drilling? Perhaps shutting down the refineries? The protests they have conducted are irritating, but that is the point. Protest needs to inconvenience to get noticed, so I am not against their methods, but if I don’t know what they stand for, is it having any effect? And I imagine I am more sympathetic to giving them a hearing that many members of society.

I looked at their web site. It is an internationally co-ordinated group which uses non-violent civil resistance in order to persuade our government to stop licensing all new gas, oil and coal projects. That seems far from unreasonable to me. It does not seem to be about impacting current operations. Indeed, it seems quite a modest goal. It quotes Sir David King, formerly Chief Scientific Advisor to the government who states baldy “what we do over the next three to four years, I believe, is going to determine the future of humanity”. But, have I signed up? No. My film companion and I debated what should be our courses of action and acknowledged how undynamic they had been to date.

In his film, Appignanesi joins some groups, attaches himself to marches, makes it clear he has no appetite for protest that might see him arrested, and despite starting as curious onlooker, finds himself increasingly drawn in to organising, to activism and to researching the funding of the climate-crisis-denial sub-industry. In the end, the film leads to a protest in Tufton Street, home amid the think-tanks, of Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The protest(s) that are in the film, feature writers like Simon Sharma, George Monbiot and acting giants like Sir Mark Rylance and Juliet Stevenson. Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts like Susie Orbach and Anouchka Grose make appearances. The murky financing and the powerful lobbying that Appignanesi’s research highlights, reminded me of the dark forces at work in another film, ‘Dark Waters’, starring Mark Ruffalo, which exposed the highly questionable behaviour of Du Pont and the wider chemicals industry.

Back to Thanatos; to Freud and Einstein. It seems clear to me that the protestors, at the very least, and despite Lawson and co., ‘have a point’. But, am I willing to do anything about it? And yet, we seem to be succumbing to Thanatos, to our ‘death drive’, to our capacity for destruction and our appetite for it. Arendt believed that the right to citizenship, the right of a plurality of people “to act together concerning things that are of equal concern to each,” is not only denied by totalitarianism, as it is by every despotism, but stands opposed to the principle that guides acts of destruction.

She asked, “What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?” I suspect I am congratulating myself, smugly and complacently, for thinking about climate and about the fires in southern Europe, and the world I hope my children and grandchildren will enjoy, but still unwilling to actually move from thought to deed. I need to wake up from my cognitive comfort space.

This weekend was perfect for themes of destruction. After I saw ‘Oppenheimer’ with my youngest on Sunday afternoon, I contemplated and reviewed, the compulsion to destroy, excused by “if we don’t, they will” competitive warfare, which is writ large in Nolan’s film, as is the need to destroy the status and psyche of other men. We see it as Robert Downey’s Strauss attempts to destroy Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer, and in turn, as Rami Malek’s Hill takes down Strauss. The destructive animus inflicted on others, is also exemplified in Jason Clarke’s Roger Robb and Benny Safdie’s, Teller. What will happen because of Los Alamos? Teller tells Oppenheimer simply, that someone else will “build a bigger bomb”.

When I was young the CND was enjoying a bit of a revival. In the world in which I grew up it was treated with scorn. BBC News bulletins about Greenham Common, or about anyone associated with the 1960s Aldermaston marches tended to be treated with contempt. The link between protests then, and Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion now, is something that I found myself mulling over, this weekend. When the UN has said that July is “virtually certain” to be the hottest month on record globally, I thought about our politicians still talking about “green crap”. And me? I’m still trying to decide what I believe, what I think, and if I can decide, what is the appropriate course of action.

Whatever it is, I sense the time for passive responses needs to be over. That Arendt is right. That ignoring and congratulating oneself on being a law-abiding citizen could be a dereliction of my duty as a member of society. I doubt this will be a view with which many of my friends will concur, but a bit like Appignanesi, I sense I need to convert some passive thinking into much more physical activism, and on multiple issues. Whatever it is, I sense the time for passive responses needs to be over.

Perhaps I need to watch Barbie next.

On: ‘Grenfell: in the words of survivors’

First. Please go and see this play. This is a verbatim play, made directly from the words of some survivors and bereaved of the Grenfell tragedy. Those words are put together by Gillian Slovo, who has been interviewing survivors for several years. It will bring up a number of emotions. The audience is invited to leave at any time that they might feel overwhelmed and there are counselling supporters on hand. I did not see anyone leave when I attended, but I felt the raw emotions rippling about, even as I got in touch and tried to manage my own.

Second. What does it mean to attend theatre? What do we seek? Sure, we want entertaining, but also we want connection – with ideas, with characters, and with the audience community. Theatre is a word with Greek origins. It has a meaning; something like ‘the witnessing place’. As an art form theatre works, because it requires and relies upon the imagination. What I witness and what you witness, when watching the same play, will be different things, because of the emotional responses we have, and the memories and belief systems with which we get in touch.

For me, theatre has always been as much about being asked to think, as about being entertained. Slovo’s verbatim play has affected me as much as any play that I can recall, alongside Ryan Calais Cameron’s ‘For Black Boys who have considered suicide when the hue gets heavy’ and Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy’s ‘The Jungle’, and maybe, Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s ‘Death of England’. I can see that there is an element of ‘state of the nation’ about each of these, but I think it reaches deeper. I think these are plays about humanity, about the joy and the burden of the fact that we are social animals.

Playwright Yasmina Reza wrote about theatre as “a mirror, a sharp reflection of society”, based on something provided by the greatest playwright, Shakespeare, spoken through the words of perhaps his greatest creation, Hamlet. Hamlet uses the players who have come to his usurping father-in-law’s court, “To hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” Slovo’s use of verbatim holds a mirror up to each of us, as we digest the words, the feelings and as we catch our own reactions. I found myself hoping that Bertolt Brecht is held in mind by departing audience members: ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.’

For the performance I witnessed at the Dorfman, the cast was exemplary. Invidious though it might be to single out players, I want to mention Michael Schaeffer as Ed Daffarn, Ash Hunter as Nick Burton, Houda Echouafni as Rabia Yahya, and Sarah Slimani as Hanan Wahabi. I do it, because in a superb ensemble piece, they somehow provoked the deepest feelings within me. It will be different actors and different stories that most affect and resonate with others.

When it opens the cast walk on a bare unadorned stage in the middle of the audience, a structure and staging that reminded me of ‘The Jungle’, and they introduce themselves, and then explain the person they are representing, the person and survivor of the horror, whose words they are inviting us to weigh, and to weigh very carefully. It becomes very tender and very intimate, very quickly.

After the introductions, and talking about the pre-fire Grenfell as a social hub and a community, the players invite the audience to introduce themselves to a stranger sat close by. I was sat with two young black girls, Essaya and Daniella, who told me that they were sisters. Essaya said “ooh, it’s like church”. She then revealed, almost like a confession, that they no longer attended church, and giggled at what she seemed to think I might interpret as transgressive behaviour. It lasts barely a minute and somehow heightens audience feeling. Well, it did mine.

The performance has three parts – an introduction to the tenants and to some of their backstories, about being found a flat in the tower, and about the lives they led. Voices that are heard are Syrian, Italian, Portuguese, Ethiopian, English and we learn of romances developed, children born and raised, and friendships forged.

Alongside, is the story of the Labour councillor, an outlier on the very Tory-run Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and a reminder of the ideological struggles playing out in national politics. We are taken back in time to watch a speech by David Cameron, with the ominous messaging about the need to ‘deregulate’ and the demonisation of ‘red tape’ and bureaucracy. The word outsourcing does not come up, but we hear terms like KPI and we become aware of an evolving dehumanisation.

The middle part of the play deals with the timeline of the fire and of the calls to emergency services, the responses, individual and institutional, and a chance to consider the ‘stay put’ policy. It is interwoven with the interactions that took place in the public inquiry, initiated by Prime Minister May, which informs us about the design of the cladding, the aluminium composite that acted as a “fuel”, the timing of the ‘refurbishment’ of the tower and manages to expose the strategies of the businesses, consultancies and contractors that the Royal Borough sourced.

The final part is a filmed response from many of the survivors we have watched being represented by the actors. They talk about justice and try to rationalise what to do with the grief and trauma. Many are still marginalised and poorly represented.

So, it is a lot to digest in three hours. There is a powerful juxtaposition for theatregoers at the National right now. Next door, playing in the Olivier, is the fabulous ‘Dear England’. This is James Graham’s marvellously uplifting play that hangs on the letter that coach, Gareth Southgate, penned to and for, the nation. It is much lighter-hearted than its neighbour at the Dorfman, but themes of integration, of race and racism, of national identity, of inclusiveness and of ‘othering’, and above all, an examination of the national psyche are relevant to both.

Two mirrors. Time to reflect.

Pygmalion – Henry and Eliza, the analytic couple

On September 6^th, running through October, the Old Vic is hosting performances of Shaw’s brilliant play ‘Pygmalion’. A play studying language and class, written in 1912. It will star Patsy Ferrans and Bertie Carvel. Ferrans is already established as one of the brightest stars of her generation, with huge recognition for her 2022 Blanche du Bois in “Streetcar”. I saw her, also at The Old Vic, in 2021, when she played ‘Her’ in ‘Camp Siegfried’, and it was a remarkable performance. I am very excited about what she will bring to Miss Doolittle.

Carvel, may be best known for playing Tony Blair in The Crown, but has also shown his versatility in playing Rupert Murdoch in James Graham’s play ‘Ink’. For me, his outstanding stage performance to date was in “The 47^th”, when he played a wickedly funny, deranged President Trump. Trump and Blanche as Henry and Eliza is quite an invitation!

Pygmalion has always been one of my favourite plays. It may be because of the many hours I spent watching my nan working in her florist shop in Canning Town. I knew that my grandad often woke very early to get to Covent Garden to buy stock for the shop and somehow that gives me a sense of connection when the play opens. We see Eliza and Henry, in their different ways, sheltering from the elements in the portico of St.Paul’s, nearby what was the fruit and veg market in those days.

It is possible that this version of the play will work hard to illustrate and exemplify what has become known as the ‘Pygmalion Effect’, which is the way people tend to perform up to the level that others expect of them. It explains why our relationships can be self-fulfilling prophecies. Once you set expectations for somebody, that person will tend to live up to that expectation; for good or ill.

I hope it explores what I see as the psychoanalytic lens for the play. In my reading, and in the productions which I have seen, Shaw allows us to understand the protagonists as two people with unresolved Oedipus Complexes. We get insight to the narcissistic wound carried by Eliza, and the whole play is an example of transference, with Henry as analyst to Eliza’s analysand. I shall develop these ideas, and I also note that Shaw and Freud shared a view of the world based on that of the outsider.

One was an Irishman in English society and the other an often-excluded Jew, in Vienna. Both saw themselves as ‘men of science’ with Freud especially keen to establish psychoanalysis as a science. Freud was brilliant in considering the hostilities acted upon those who were ‘othered’, and in Eliza, Shaw creates a character ostracised merely for the circumstances of her birth. Shaw uses Pickering and Higgins to place people, in London to within two streets, and in India to regions, thanks to dialect, pronunciation and enunciation, and asks us to think about how this contributes to othering, to creating a ‘them and us’.

As Shaw completed Pygmalion, Freud was writing his Papers on Technique and about to complete Totem and Taboo. His body of work, likely very well known to Shaw, had already seen Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, The psychopathology of everyday life, from which one might attach some of Shaw’s Pygmalion thinking, as well as Three Essays on Sexuality and Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious.

Shaw had infamously attacked Pavlov, but conceded that he was “well-meaning, intelligent and devoted to science” – something one might argue as applicable to Freud. I like the fact that Shaw and Freud were both born in 1856. I can find no record of their meeting, but it seems highly unlikely that such erudite, well-educated men, with a fascination for philosophy, politics and ideas, would not have been aware of one another. Indeed, the coincidences stretch to the fact that Pygmalion is first performed in Vienna (Hofburg Theatre) in October 1913. Otherwise, the play was first produced in 1914 (London and NY).

In the directions to Act 2, Shaw gives great specificity to Higgins’s appearance and demeanour. Freud, at this time was determined to, and perhaps struggling a little, to establish psychoanalysis as a science. It is a dozen years since the groundbreaking The Interpretation of Dreams. Shaw describes Higgins as “of the energetic scientific type, heartily, even violently interested in everything that can be studied as a scientific subject, and careless about himself and other people, including their feelings”. The final part of this is the antithesis of a psychoanalyst, but we know from the work on dreams that fantasies are often represented by direct opposites.

To the play: What do I mean by the unresolved Oedipus Complexes? It is the attachment of the child to the parent of the opposite sex – in early infancy, a need ‘to possess’ the object, that remains unresolved. The infantile sexual impulses get repressed and often a fear of displeasing the object leads to aggressive or envious feelings. Hanna Segal described it as “the central conflict in the human psyche”, so it is hardly surprising that a dramatist as great as Shaw found it. Freud himself noted how whenever he discovered something, that the poets and philosophers had got there first.

Segal noted how Melanie Klein saw the father, both real, and phantasies about the father, as central to the child’s life from birth. This is why Shaw’s dramatization of the moment when Eliza has been bathed and cleaned by Henry’s housekeeper, and meets her father, who fails to recognise her, as critical to understanding her vulnerability and her wish to both please Henry, her substitute father, but also to hate him, in what psychoanalysts recognise as transference.

Her neglect, from her parents, is her narcissistic wound. I like the idea of Doolittle ‘blind’ to his own daughter because it plays with, and inverts, our understanding of the Oedipus story. Oedipus, we know, tragically comes to understand how he has usurped his father, in his mother’s bed, and puts his own eyes out.

Early in the scene, the issue of Eliza’s payment comes up. Freud (1912) had views on payment expressed in On Beginning the Treatment, which apart from “a medium for self-preservation and for obtaining power” had “powerful sexual factors in the value set upon it”. Eliza proffers a shilling, “take it or leave it” and Higgins, who Pickering expects to be insulted, rapidly appreciates that it is a generous offer. He defines it by its percentage of her income, “it works out as fully equivalent to sixty or seventy guineas from a millionaire…it’s the biggest offer I ever had”.

Money and sex is important in the play because of Shaw’s focus on morality and on hypocrisy. Eliza reminds us, almost ad nauseum, “I’m a good girl, I am”. What sex does to people, especially those damaged by infantile experiences, is emphasised by Eliza’s attempt to repress her sexual drive. Taken to the guest bathroom she finds a ‘looking glass’ for the first time and she feels a need to cover it up, so unused is she to seeing her own body naked. Later, Henry gives a nod to Freud’s understanding of the unconscious and to repression, “do any of us know what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?”

His own Oedipus resolution is far from achieved and visiting his mother, in Act three, to tell her he has “picked up a girl”, he tells us, “Oh I can’t be bothered with young women. My idea of a loveable woman is somebody as like you as possible”. As the scene progresses we get a nudge that Mrs. Higgins is more familiar with the psychoanalytic world than her apparently worldly son, when she responds to his comment that Eliza is to stick to two conversational subjects, health and the weather with “Safe! To talk about our health! About our insides! Perhaps about our outsides…”

And so, the possibility of inner worlds, her’s, Henry’s and Eliza’s is hinted at, as is the realisation of the sometimes conflicting demands of the conscious and the unconscious. She adds later to both Henry and Pickering, “don’t you realise that when Eliza walked into Wimpole Street, something walked in with her”.

After the successful outcome of Higgins’s bet/experiment, Eliza senses that he might now drop her and discard her, as her father had done many times, and it ignites the ‘murderous rage’ deep in her unconscious, which surges into the room as she throws his slippers; “I wanted to smash your face. I’d like to kill you, you murderous brute”, before wailing like any neglected infant, “what’s to become of me?”

The second psychoanalytic feature the play addresses is the narcissistic wound, specifically Eliza’s. A narcissistic wound is a form of abandonment – Freud maintained that “losses in love” and “losses associated with failure” often leave behind injury to an individual’s self-regard. We learn from her, “I ain’t got no mother. Her that turned me out was my sixth stepmother”, a perfect complement to the father who failed to recognise her. Eliza, confronted by an awareness of a lack of something, in this case maternal love, is like an analysand clinging on to their neuroses, “if only I’d known what a dreadful thing it is to be clean I’d never have come. I didn’t know when I was well off…”

It comes together with ‘orality’ – the focusing of sexual energy and feeling on the mouth – so perfectly captured in the musical film adaptation of the play, ‘My Fair Lady’, when Higgins (Rex Harrison) is placing marbles into his powerless (Audrey Hepburn) student’s mouth. The play begins with something coming out of the mouth, and this is about what gets taken in. It is no great stretch to consider the pleasure for Eliza of what she expresses in giving out, and what she appreciates in her taking in.

Later, at the peak of her achievement, winning the bet and having satisfied Henry’s ego, she notes that “I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me, I am not fit to sell anything else”. As she has told us repeatedly, she’s a good girl. She is.

Lastly, the play is set up as an illustration of the psychoanalytic concept of transference. Freud understood that transference existed outside the clinic, but that it changed shape in the clinic and acquired an intensity uncommon in more social and conscious settings.

What is transference? – Jean Arundale, in Transference and Countertransference wrote it was “broadly conceptualised as manifestations of conscious and unconscious aspects of object relationships and psychic structures within the analytic process”.

Freud had observed it initially in the work between his colleague, Breuer, and the patient who came to be known as Anna O, who famously described her therapy as “the talking cure”. Her feelings for Breuer, which he found too disturbing to tolerate, were Freud’s first insight to the concept of transference. In his 1938 paper The Technique of Psychoanalysis, he was even clearer. Transference was a “factor of undreamt-of importance”.

Freud came to understand, after initially seeing it as an obstacle to be overcome, that transference, the emotional quality of a patient’s feelings towards an analyst transferred from more developmental relationships, could be used as a tool. Indeed, it provided him with the material for understanding the way patients invariably repeat past relationships, especially maladaptive relationships.

Shaw may not have been thinking directly about Freud, but in Eliza, we see the ambivalence of her feelings to her alcoholic and rejecting father emerge in her wish to both have Higgins, but also to be able to push him away. It was Klein, some thirty years later, (1946), who developed the idea of transference as a re-enactment, as an expression of unconscious phantasy, in need of interpretation.

Klein understood how the analyst can be both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and that integrating the two feelings in one person, just as the baby does with the mother, was the most profound of feelings and that the ‘negative transference’ was especially valuable. Later still, Winnicott developed what was happening to the analyst, in my case the Higgins figure, as countertransference.

Higgins, is bemused by his feelings for Eliza – in the final act he stormily says that he “can do without anybody”, thanks to his “own spark of divine fire”, yet “I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance. I like them, rather”. When she points out that he has her voice on his recording discs and that he has photographs of her, he laments that he cannot turn her soul on.

This is consistent with Sandler’s (1976) later work on countertransference and the ‘role responsiveness’ of the analyst, who has been pulled into a role, a way of being, that he does not recognize as being characteristic of himself. Freud wrote in Dynamics of Transference (S.E 12) “it is a perfectly normal and intelligible thing that the libidinal cathexis which is held ready in anticipation, should be directed as well to the figure of the doctor (analyst)”. The transference which exceeds anything “which could be justified on sensible or rational grounds” is a consequence of both conscious and unconscious material.

He states that whilst transference is most intense in an analytical couple, it exists outside of analysis and paradoxically is regarded as the “vehicle of cure and the condition of success”, ie when we transfer our earliest sexual attractions (parental) to a new love object outside the family. The “characteristics of transference are therefore to be attributed not to psychoanalysis but to neurosis itself”. The ego has “remained in possession of infantile imagos”.

“Originally (the baby) we knew only sexual objects; and psychoanalysis shows us that people who in our real life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects for our unconscious” – this is what Pickering represents for Eliza.

Freud concludes his dynamics paper by referring to the struggle between doctor and patient, “between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won” and we sense that Eliza is seeking her mother about whom we know little, but also something of a repair to the lost love that an alcoholic father provided? She transfers her ambivalence of her father, wary affection matched with scorn and contempt, to Higgins.

The fact that transference is so tied to infantile sexuality is why Freud wrote of ‘transference love’ and today there is wide usage of the term ‘erotic transference’. Rosenberg (2011) might be describing Higgins’s drawing room in her paper Sexuality and the analytic couple, “The care invested in the setting, the quality of listening, the reliability of the analyst – all these elements enhance a process that simultaneously mobilizes and erodes repression in the analysand, and contribute to the emergence of sexual feelings”.

She also mentions how the analyst, (or Higgins) fears marking the transference with their “own sexual feelings and fantasies”. She anticipates this – Pygmalion as erotic transference interpretation – when writing, “unrecognized sexuality gives way to enactments, as, for example, the emergence of an unconsciously collusive alliance in the repudiation of an analysand’s sexual partner, or vicarious and blinding gratification derived by the analyst from the achievements of a successful analysand.”

Shaw provides this with Henry’s contempt for Eliza’s beau: “Marry Freddy, what a preposterous idea” and with his rejoicing when she wins his bet, but especially when she deceives his former protégé, the outrageous fraud, Nepommuck.

In his paper, Transference Love, Freud asserts that the patient’s attraction to the doctor is “an inescapable fate” and switches between ‘Transference Love’ and the term erotic transference; “love consists of new editions of old traits…it repeats infantile reactions”. Shaw had an answer for that in a few pages that he wrote to summarise, after the end of the play, letting us know that Eliza does marry Freddy, and they have a florist shop that adds some greengrocery. She treats Higgins scornfully, like a wounded child. The reaction of the infant unable to integrate their Object.

We can only truly love something or someone we may also hate. As Shaw understood, “She knows that Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not need her”; she was “no more to him than them slippers”.

Freud’s (1910) view was that countertransference was inimical to the analytic treatment. It should be repressed. In Pygmalion, Higgins has repressed his sexual drive, but Eliza wakens it. Towards the end of the play he notes how she has become indispensable, and he is acting out his need. Shaw, in my interpretation, pre-empted plenty of psychoanalytic literature of the past hundred years through Henry and Eliza.

As David Mann (1999) writes in his introduction to Erotic Transference and Countertransference, “As psychoanalytic thinking has been able to contemplate the deep layers of relationship between analyst and analysand so the question of unconscious eroticism has needed to be addressed by more and more authors as the century progresses. This brings analytic thinking back full circle to its origins in contemplation of the erotic”, by which he means Freud’s understanding of what happened between his mentor Breuer and his patient, Anna O.

Henry may wish to deny his sexual attraction to Eliza, but from the outset we are reminded of Eliza’s own repression of her sexuality. She sees it as something to resist, because of her sense of morals, later derided by her father as “middle class morality”, and confirmed when he tells Pickering that he was never married to Eliza’s mother. For Eliza, who may have unconsciously absorbed her mother’s shame, it is important to protest her own good behaviour and innocence, “I’m a good girl, I am”.

Nonetheless as Henry and Eliza discover and as Mann writes, “the erotic connects people at deeply unconscious levels, driving them into relationships at least at the level of fantasy”. He goes on to add, “the closer people become the greater the activation of erotic material in the unconscious”. Poor Henry, poor Eliza! Who knows what Ferran and Carvel will find in these timeless characters, but it should be memorable.

On: Masculinity

This week I shall see the adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, ‘A Little Life’ at the theatre, under the direction of Ivo van Hove. FT critic, Sarah Hemmings, wrote an excellent review last week. She also reviewed ‘For Black Boys who have considered suicide when the hue gets heavy’, after its West End transfer. I was lucky enough to see it at the Royal Court, and I think it is one of the finest things I have seen in forty years of theatre-going. What both plays have in common is a perspective on, and often, an analysis of masculinity. This is a subject appearing more frequently in the print media currently.

I confess to nowadays expecting the word masculinity to always be immediately preceded by the word toxic, and I wondered why I was thinking like that and why the idea of discussing masculinity made me wince inwardly. To someone who is a father of a son and hopes to be a grandfather, these things are important. Why do we revere warriors, and why do we need to test masculinity with initiation ceremonies or intimidating hazings?

I think it may be that I perceive that exalting masculinity is aligned with social forces that aim to undermine gender equity. As a father of two fiercely independent women, I might be associating masculinity with a regressive approach to feminists and feminism. It certainly had me thinking.

‘For Black Boys…’ addresses a kind of toxic ‘hyper-masculinity’ for six black men who are meeting in group therapy. They act, and talk out, everything from being racially profiled by police, to absorbing the trauma of an abusive father. Sex is fundamental – a need to meet an idea of performance, to finding room for a black interpretation of masculinity in a queer man. Fashion, sex, food and father-figures get examined in relation with blackness and with masculinity.

‘A Little Life’ is a dark tour through masculinity as abusive, including against the self, but also of its positive power of collaboration, support, brotherhood (usually best represented in war movies and especially good in ‘1917’ and ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’), and of the importance of the father figure. In the novel/play, the absence of a protective father as a model is critical, and the lack of it is emphasised by the appearance of the lead figure, played in the play by James Norton, being adopted by a man who represents all that is best about being masculine.

Unfortunately, his love is too unfamiliar to the abused adopted son, and of course, gets rejected, repeatedly. The rejection might also be a rejection of gentleness and love as concepts, because masculinity is often associated with aggression. Mance quotes feminist writer, bell hooks, who claimed that, “Patriarchy demands (that) they kill off the emotional parts of themselves”. Even Freud thought of masculine in terms of being active and feminine in terms of being passive.

Examining masculinity feels a bit zeitgeist at the moment, something emphasised for me by a long, and good, essay in the Weekend FT, from journalist Henry Mance, which appeared a few weeks after a piece by Susie Orbach in the Guardian; albeit it is now over ten years since writer Hanna Rosin published “The End of Men”. In his essay, Mance is focused on the difficulties for young males negotiating the online world. Both Orbach and Mance namecheck Andrew Tate in their opening paragraphs. Does Tate represent masculinity? He celebrates war, aggression (especially against women) and competition. If he does not represent me, am I somehow sub-masculine? He maintains that wives are the ‘property’ of husbands and that mental weakness, specifically depression, isn’t ‘real’.

Mance compares what boys of today, in the online world, absorb when thinking about the sort of men they want to become, with his own youth. He is younger than me so his reference points on ‘lad mags’ such as ‘Loaded’ and ‘FHM’ were not influencers to me. Sexism and homophobia were still rife, in print and especially in what passed for humour. Mance cites Frank Skinner’s routines – routines Skinner now says he regrets. For my generation, whatever was felt about skin colours, there was a general acceptance of a certain manliness about the black man. A rather unpleasant ‘slavery chic’, that paid a kind of tribute to the mute pride and insolence of a figure like Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte.

That was interrupted by the homophobic slur cast upon one of the greatest athletes of all time, Carl Lewis. Athleticism, alongside pugilism, was manly and masculine, but Daley Thomson, possibly this country’s greatest ever all-round athlete, and a man of mixed race heritage, unveiled a T-shirt at the LA Olympics, which said “Is the world’s second greatest athlete gay?” Thompson claimed the ‘second greatest’ could be several candidates, but the media and the public assumed he meant Lewis. It was a confusing time. How would I respond today?

Mance asserts that young males and youths today claim that they trust ‘influencers’ such as figures like Tate, more than newspapers or other social media. I cannot help but feel that the Gove-ish demeaning of ‘experts’ is echoed here. It begs the question of whether an intellectual, or a poet, can be perceived as masculine. Our poet laureate, in his brilliant podcast broadcast from his shed, strikes me as profoundly masculine, with his reverence for the wildness of nature, but I doubt that is a view widely shared. Would a modern-day intellectual, and a pacifist to boot, like Bertrand Russell, be revered today, or widely mocked?

Orbach wrote that “a return to a “boys will be boys” ethos hasn’t offered masculinity the pleasures of knowing oneself more fully or expanding what masculinities can be. The “crisis” of masculinity was reformulated into a new machismo”. She thought about how machismo is often aligned with putting “us women in our place”, but made it clear that “that ship has sailed”. Her wish is to promote more conversation, more thinking, something that “opens the door to speaking of vulnerability and nurture”.

I welcome that, but I want to get back to understanding why I felt uncomfortable thinking about masculinity. In short, do I want to be thought of as exhibiting a strong sense of masculinity? I know I did as a teenager, the sort of impressionable minds that Mance was considering. My worlds of television, cinema and sports exalted the masculine. Sometimes subtly, (the hero gets the girl) sometimes less so; sporting contests were about contrasts between two sportsmen, one of whom was portrayed as more masculine.

I think of Coe and Ovett, of the treatment of the Australian cricket captain, Kim Hughes, of Borg and Connors and also, the difficulty the British media seemed to have in treating outstanding sportsmen like John Curry, Robin Cousins and Christopher Dean as on a par with footballers, rugby stars and cricketers. Football-mad boys, like me, were encouraged to admire men like George Best, Stan Bowles, Frank Worthington, notwithstanding the difficulties these men often had off the pitch.

And now? I wondered if exuding masculinity was attractive, or is it now something associated with boorishness, thugishness, with an imbalance of brawn over brain? One of my daughters thought that when she thought of masculinity, she thought of physique, of a man who had a muscular body. Perhaps it is more aesthetic, than simply an aggressive psyche.

What masculinity means is not a new subject. I was fascinated to learn that my future son-in-law had written a dissertation about masculinity, a few years ago, specifically the representation of it by each different actor playing James Bond. The same character and yet different perceptions of being masculine. There may be something in this. My sense of the masculine was partly formed by two actors in old films, because of the way they represented their characters. They are Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men” and Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird”. I thought that being able to swim against the tide of opinion, to stand up for right over wrong, to accept the contempt of people around you, was truly manly.

My interest in psychoanalytic theory is usually concentrated in Freud, and his “Three Essays on Sexuality’ offer plenty on the subject of masculinity, but it is his some-time collaborator and then rival, Jung, who is especially astute about gendering, I think:-

“No man is so entirely masculine that he has nothing feminine in him. The fact is, rather, that very masculine men have – carefully guarded and hidden – a very soft emotional life, often incorrectly described as ‘feminine’. A man counts it a virtue to repress his feminine traits as much as possible, just as a woman, at least until recently, considered it unbecoming to be ‘mannish’. The repression of feminine traits and inclinations clearly causes these contrasexual demands to accumulate in the unconscious.”

What is interesting is how aggression, perceived as masculine, is often a projection against the part of the other that we do not like about ourselves. This is the root of homophobia and also of an idealisation (Mr Tate) of the masculine attitude. The more I have considered the concept of masculinity, the more confused I am about how I would define it, and how masculine I would want to be seen to be. I would reject an Andrew Tate masculine view, but I hope he is extremist and inconsequential, but I note what Henry Mance reports about the reach of online influencers. Perhaps it needs more debate. Fortunately some excellent playwrights are on the case and I look forward to seeing what gets represented this week.

I was an ‘aspirational parent’.

Rishi Sunak, our latest Prime Minister, but probably another short duration one, got himself into a testy Prime Minister’s Questions debate about public schools. Sunak attended Winchester. In it he talked about aspiration. He claimed that Keir Starmer was attacking aspiration, when Starmer was attacking Sunak’s schooling. I thought about that at some length. In the 1980’s when I had left school and was building a career in the City, I was very interested in ‘aspiration’.

It was the time of Tebbit ‘on yer bikism’, and the focus was on something called the ‘meritocracy’. I intended to be a part of the meritocracy, and by finding myself a job with the pre-eminent stockjobbing firm, I was well placed to do so. Mind you, I used to believe in trickle-down economics too, so not everything I believed in the 1980’s has survived my subsequent life experiences. Starmer must have had someone like me in mind, when he mocked Sunak for “trickledown education”.

What is ‘aspiration’? It is the hope, or ambition, of achieving something. Medically, it has another meaning. It is the action of drawing breath. That might be worth considering. Even the ambitious need to draw breath sometimes. Sunak may wish he had done so, as his ‘aspiration’ defence has been derided, for the perspective of someone hopelessly out of touch, and twisted to suggest that he was patronisingly and disparagingly suggesting that those who could not afford private education for their children, somehow lacked aspiration.

In the year (1981) before I left school, I loved, as did most of the country, the TV adaptation of Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited’. It is about many wonderful things, including faith, friendship, denial, rejection, addiction (ideas and substances) and so on, but the TV adaptation focused on the gilded lifestyles of the Oxford student class. Although it is not about private education, it was an advertisement for the refinement, social capital and networking that such an education might provide. Protagonist, Charles Ryder’s school is not named, but his creator went to Lancing College and in a subsequent short story about Ryder’s schooldays, he left enough clues to suggest that was where Ryder might have gone. I drank it in.

At that early ’80’s time, as has recurred many times since, the Oxbridge institutions were under attack for elitism. The new Prime Minister might have been to Somerville College at Oxford, but she was keener to recall schooldays at a girls’ school in Grantham as she personified aspiration and achievement. Oxbridge needed more state school pupils to be accepted. For reasons I still cannot quite appreciate, I was selected as part of an experiment, a small group of Essex comprehensive school kids who might want to attend.

We were put up in Oxford colleges (Jesus, for me) for a couple of nights, and invited to meet and interrogate some of Oxford’s finest minds, whilst spending a great deal of money in Blackwell’s on ‘reading lists’, including many books I bought but, embarrassingly, never read. I definitely had aspiration. Possibly not quite enough intellect. After a burst of intensity at my studies for a term, I realised that I might not get to the dreaming spires, and that if I went into the City, I might get to be independent and to benefit from a ‘university of life’ education. I slackened and went job hunting.

The City in the ’80’s was a curious place. It was still a place of traditions and hierarchies. Being a blue-button, as I was, was as much about deference, as it was about competence. Nonetheless times were changing. The Thatcherite Big Bang reforms as stock exchange chairman Nicholas Goodison wriggled away from the threat of ‘restrictive practices’ legislation, turned single capacity broking or jobbing, into dual capacity trading and paved the way for the advent of new capital inflows and US style ‘investment banking’. It lost many good things, but it brought with it, ambition, and a huge fillip in earnings power. I had lucked into the most exciting industry, with all the concomitant benefits that any 18 year old on the make, could have found.

It did not make me a stranger to aspiration, though. Much of mine was social. The City had a crude divide at the time of ‘East End barrow boy’ type traders and somewhat more sophisticated and elegant brokers, salespeople and merchant bankers. The divide was largely about which schools they had attended. Within a decade that division had merged and East Enders and Essex comprehensive schoolboys like me were affecting the dress codes (if not the accents) of their mainly privately educated peers in the non-trading roles. I loved the City, as a ‘blue’ on the market floor, before they took it away in ’87, and in the dynamic, nascent investment banks, finding homes in new offices built over now redundant old railways stations.

Above all, I loved the confidence that most of its workforce exuded. I lacked confidence. I watched my peers very keenly. The dress code was important. I looked forward to a time when I could buy a suit tailored for me, and not off the peg. I spent the modest profit on my first ‘PA deal’ on my first pair of Church’s shoes, and I noted which of the Jermyn Street shirtmakers my boss preferred (Turnbull and Asser), and quickly adopted double-cuffs and good cuff-links on a chain.

As I kept up my keen observations I envied the way some of these young men swanned about as if they owned the place, despite having as little experience as me. I assumed they must just be naturally bright and have an understanding of the business that I lacked. It took my years to realise that most of them had no great professional skills, but that they did have a powerful personal network, that gave them confidence. Someone always knew someone, who knew someone senior, who could help whatever needed to get done, to get done.

What has all this reminiscing got to do with Sunak? I think it is because it is in touch with aspiration. For my generation of aspirational City workers, much of that aspiration was social, rather than financial, although the need to pay for a different lifestyle was very plain. My path was eased by being a decent cricketer. Within weeks of my new career starting, I was selected to play for the Stock Exchange CC against the Bank of England CC at Roehampton. I opened the batting with MK Fosh, sometime of Essex CCC and of Cambridge University CC. Educated at Harrow. Before focusing on a City career he had made a first-class hundred. Fortunately in a winning score, we had a good partnership, both making 80’s. It meant I was rapidly accepted.

On the floor of the stock exchange was one distinguished broker, Marcus Colby, who had such a presence that meant he was treated as a sort of ‘Father of the House’. Mr. Colby loved cricket and the SECC. He had a beautiful Surrey home that backed on to his local cricket and tennis club, where he hosted a very generous President’s Day, featuring his club playing host to a Stock Exchange XI. He made it clear that he wanted me to play in this fixture and I did so for many years. Being someone, even though I was in my teens, who Mr. Colby would stop and talk to, meant that I could lose my ‘Essex boy’ identity and become something slightly different, in the eyes of my seniors.

The SECC was dominated by players from the private schools. In my first games only one other player was state educated – another Essex Schools XI product, like me, called Graham Spooner. The dressing room and after match bar conversation was dominated by chatter about The Cricketer Cup. I did not know what it was, and had to be told by Graham that we would never play in it because it was a competition for ‘Old Boys’ of these great schools.

I felt more than a pang of envy, and it will have been one of the moments when I swore to myself that any child of mine was going to have those doors open, not shut to him, or her. As I eavesdropped on the conversations and began to take advantage of the network that cricket was opening to me (playing-in as a MCC member, helped) I started to realise that this elusive confidence thing was something that could simply be purchased. It came through buying education for my offspring.

One of my best friends had been to a well-known North London private school and when we first met he had just bought a flat near Swiss Cottage. I recall being shown into it and on his small stereo system he was playing the latest recording of ‘Porgy and Bess’. I thought the whole thing oozed erudition, learning, sophistication and style and I felt more than a little inferiority. Shortly after, he invited me to ‘guest’ for his Old Boys XI, in a friendly, obviously, not a Cricketer Cup tie. I didn’t get many! It left an indelible impression, though.

I then had the good fortune to fall in love with someone who had similar views about what we needed to provide for our children. Neither of us had been educated privately, but we were both confident that somehow our state education had left us short of something. Not just quality of learning, although we both felt that keenly, but something intangible and indefinable, but somehow necessary. We aspired to have it. Sunak spoke of “opportunity, not resentment” and I think I would have concurred at the time.

This, of course, raises an important question. When I was able to pay for my children to be educated privately, and ultimately, at a very fine boarding school in Northamptonshire, was I doing it for them? I think I now accept that much of my motivation was not of the loving-parent type, but of trying to acquire something that I felt had been wrongly excluded from me. That Cricketer Cup selection! My motives were much more selfish than selfless.

With my psychoanalytic hat on I can see that there is something Oedipal about it. I had a desire to ‘kill’ my father. Obviously not literally. I love him. In the Freudian sense, though, I think that I did want to depose him. And just as I did not want to kill him in the conscious world, I did not want to sleep with my mother, but unconsciously, the idea of possessing her, is apparent. I was demonstrating that I was a better man than my father, that she could have me as the central male in her world, because my strengths allowed me to provide for children better. Look, my children will be better educated…

Why was that education so important? Why is it that parents like Sunak’s, sacrifice so much time, money, but critically, of themselves, to deliver this expensive product to the next generation? I grew up in Chelmsford. At the time it stood out in a country of shrinking grammar school education by still having two very fine single-sex grammar schools. However, I did not pass the entrance exam; the 11-plus. My parents had been to grammar schools, in London, and I think I absorbed their contempt for secondary education in Comprehensive schools.

The political mood of my household was conservative and comprehensive education had become widespread thanks to the then Labour Education Secretary, Anthony Crosland, in 1965, the year after I was born. I think I grew up feeling a sense of failure; that going to a Comprehensive school in Chelmsford marked one out as educationally second-class. Paying for secondary education would not visit that stigma on any child of mine.

Was it worth it? Was my ‘aspiration’ rewarded? Well, in many respects, it was. My children attended a prep school in north Essex and then went off to board. I was happy that I was buying a superior education. That is very difficult to measure, but it certainly bought a broader education. The boarding environment gives scope for more things to be fitted into and around a timetable. I definitely introduced my children to facilities that a state school can rarely provide. I believed that it gave them a better environment for learning about, and appreciating the Arts, as well as access to exceptional sporting facilities and extraordinary science and language laboratories.

The dreadful system of legislation in South Africa that was Apartheid, comes from an Afrikaans word that means ‘apartness’. I think that when my children first attended prep school I was aware of ‘apartness’ in the school drive. The cars were all large and usually fancy German brands. I don’t doubt that I welcomed it. I had a sense of inclusion to a world that I felt had once excluded me, because my parents did not have a great deal of wealth. I was rewarding my aspiration. And yet, even then, as I preened and adorned myself in some sort of ‘superiority cloak’, all my inner arrogance was being tested. I was an imposter, and actually did I want my children growing up feeling superior because of their parents’ spending power?

Would I do it again? This is the most difficult question. My children all are living with partners now, one is about to marry and I hope I might one day have grandchildren to think of. The subject of education is something that is periodically discussed. My sense is that in today’s world, I would probably turn away from the private system. I think that the state system offers a breadth of education that I used to not appreciate, namely how all members of society are more alike than different, to echo Jo Cox. It is not just the quality of the theatre that the school has, or the newness of the cricket pavilion, or the fact that the swimming pool meets Olympic standards, it is the opportunity to learn from playground peers that differences are to be celebrated as much as similarities. Learning is not just a classroom activity.

That all sounds a little virtuous, and some of my pals would mock me (again) for being a bit ‘wokey’, so it is only right that I think if I rewind to the period when my eldest was approaching prep school age, I recognise that I would almost certainly be pushing her into the private system. This time, though, I can see it was about satisfying my needs more than her’s. I wanted to feel that slightly exclusive social network.

I probably wanted to inhale a sense of social superiority, that preening confidence that I had observed when I first worked in the City. Wants are very powerful. Freud’s earliest brilliant work on Dreams is about understanding that the core of each dream is a ‘wish fulfilment’. Whilst, I can see I was meeting something inside me, and I suspect I would still need to for my younger self, that is no longer how I feel about life, as I approach grandparental age.

In a debate at the weekend with my brother’s partner, the subject of what we want for our children came up. Happiness was one suggestion, and we went on to become quite philosophical. I think it might be something less abstract. Certainly for me, it was about giving something to them that I had not had. Was I ‘killing’ my father, unconsciously? I am not sure, but I can see that aspiration was not just economic, and was not all selfless love for my offspring. My then-wife and I had great aspirations for the children. We felt that our job was to help them fulfil their potential and giving them the ‘best’ education was one of the critical requirements in allowing them to do so. We were from a generation, often because of high earnings from my industry, that was typically a first-generation private school parent. Classically “nouves”, compared with the ever diminishing representation of ‘old money’. Were our aspirations healthy? I think, for the most part, yes.

The public school row, of course, is not really about Sunak’s parents’ aspiration, or about mine. It is about the Daily Mail’s attempt to confect some sort of ‘class war’ and it is about the more significant issue of the charitable status of our best known private schools. It might be somewhat hypocritical to take an anti-charitable status position having benefited for my family, but my sense is that status is becoming indefensible and I shall be surprised if it survives.

My conclusions are that aspiration is no bad thing for a parent; indeed I think, in different forms, it is more common than uncommon for new parents. Channelling it into private education is something I might detour from nowadays, but I have a strong nineteenth century liberal view of the rights of the individual. I do believe that once one has earned, and been taxed, that spending money should absolutely be at the discretion of the earner. If that means paying for education, it is to be welcomed and whilst I am aware my convictions have shifted, I am glad that I was able to satisfy my needs as an ‘aspirational parent’.