As the year ends this is a different kind of newsletter, one about friendship, and love, in the wake of the loss of my dear friend Paul Gordon. It has some of the same format, some of the books and ideas and films we loved but it is a tribute, a reflection for me on why friendship is important, and a kind of end of year re-affirming of what I feel is important in life. There will be another more typical newsletter probably before or soon after the New Year.

I have lost a few people recently. Good friends are rare in a life. I have had very few genuine friends compared to the multitudes of acquaintances. In my thinking about Paul, and honouring his life, saying why I loved him and miss him so much, I hope you find something for yourself that resonates.

Every friendship and relationship is unique, like every therapy encounter. Indeed in his great book The Hope of Therapy he wrote:

‘people will sometimes ask me ’have you ever seen somebody like me?” … well. I can say I have seen men and women of similar ages, ethnicities, sexualities, but beyond such banalities I have never seen anyone like anyone else.’ …

So true of Paul too, who was an amazing friend and therapist. In the same book he compared the qualities of a good therapist to that of a good friend, and who wouldnt want these?

‘A welcome, an acceptance, a hospitality, an attunement, an attentiveness, a suspension of self-interest, , ..an engagement, a faith in the other, a commitment to truth- fulness, and above all perhaps a responsibility to the other’.

I actually met Paul before I met him in person, when I read his paper ‘Souls in Armour: Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Race’, written in 1993 (click on the box below to download). I remember the excitement when I read it, nuanced, feelingful, deep thinking and well ahead of its time. It starts with his thoughts on a racial murder and how he went to the trial to make sense of the mind of the murderer. Paul had been working for the Runnymede Trust and had campaigned and written many books on Race, including the above with my neighbour Dave Rosenberg, who incidentally runs brilliant Radical East London Jewish walks. If you click here you can see the extraordinary writing output of Paul even before he became a psychotherapist.

Paul’s work deeply chimed with me. I had spent several years immersing myself in thinking about race and power, from Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice) to Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael and loads more, but I had been struggling to find a way of linking my political and psychological selves and thinking. Paul helped me with this a lot even before I met him.

We met at one of the jobs I have most enjoyed, Open Door, a psychotherapy service for young people in Haringey, North London. It was there I learnt how much real change can take place in therapy with young adults, before we knew how the brain is still changing until at least 26 years old. It was one of those rare places, full of deep thinking colleagues, where ideas could be shared and debated, including with the late and wonderful psychotherapist, Maggie Fagan before either of us did further training at the Tavistock.

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Paul and I quickly got to know one another. His first child had just been born and we spent time exploring the parks of North London, nappies in hand, as we shared passions such as the black power movement, poetry, sociology, novels, philosophy, education, and yes occasionally therapy, and most importantly, life in general.

Such conversations with a soul mate, are for me, what makes life worth living.

We shared a lot, reading books we both loved, more often than not chosen by Paul. Poignantly we grew old with Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe quartet as the character went from young man to an older one suffering from a neurogenerative illness, as Paul did at the end.

Just a few of the other writers and books we shared a love of included:

Philip Roth, perhaps especially American Pastoral and the Human Stain

Don de Lillo, perhaps especially his masterwork Underworld

E.L. Doctorow, perhaps his classic Ragtime and his late Andrew’s Brains and Paul especially loved The Book of Daniel which is one I intend to re-read over the holidays.

Raymond Carver, perhaps especially What we Talk About When We Talk About Love

There are so very many more we loved and discussed and felt awe about. Feeling awe is a precious thing to share, perhaps especially at this time of year.

In his later years he became enthralled by women short story writers, a love I did not share, short stories less my thing, but some of these geniuses include:

Alice Munro

Mavis Gallant

Lore Segal

We often had family meals together, Paul in a blue and white apron the master chef, but our main contact was always the two of us.

Here is a younger us on a family holiday a long time ago looking sunned if pretty grumpy! (but having an amazing time)

Sometimes he would give a present that blew my mind, one was the incredible novel by Jorge Semprun about concentration camps and life and hope, Literature or Life, Semprun being arrested for his resistance work in France and sent to Buchenwald.

Here are a few words Paul wrote to the Guardian to add to Semprun’s obituary here, and here is an interview with Semprun some years back here

On 10 June 2011 09:28, Paul Gordon <> wrote:

Hi, just to say in case you don’t know that Jorge Semprun died this week – obituary in the Guardian today

I replied:

thanks for letting me know, Paul, sad day. I am very grateful that you introduced him to me, a complete one-off, I found the world changed a bit when reading him
Paul wrote:

Few writers touched me more than he did, from the astonishing opening of What a Beautiful Sunday where, looking out at the Ettersberg from Buchenwald and thinking about Goethe, he hears a German officer cock his pistol to kill him. I still remember the thrill of finding Literature ou la vie in an ugly supermarket in a nondescript French village in Brittany in 1997 and then the joy of walking into a bookshop in Bastia while on holiday in Corsica in 2004 and seeing pictures of him and a display of his books as he’d just won the Prix Corse!

love

Paul

These are the kinds of things we would exchange, the kind that are irreplaceable in a life!

We used to spend a lot of time at the cinema, mostly what was once called the Renoir in London’s Bloomsbury area, and more often than not we would digest the film with a meal afterwards and think about life, literature, therapy, politics and I dont think I was ever bored once in a conversation with Paul. That’s a special friendship.

A typical email, sending me confirmation of tickets to see an Almodavar ‘’film starts at 6.30 – see you there about 6.20, oh, if you haven’t been there is an amazing exhibition at the Barbican by Lee Krasner – Jackson Pollock’s wife

Paul x

He opened up so many worlds for me and others.

I would fill a whole other newsletter with the films we saw and Paul’s favourite directors, but it is amazing looking back at how many meaningful and moving things can be digested and shared in a life, so many I had forgotten before I started this work of mourning by writing this newsletter.

Next something of Paul’s early life, and below, wasn’t he a cute kid!

Paul was one of 5 children. His mother was a speech and play therapist at the well-known psychoanalytically informed Notre Dame Centre in Glasgow. He was sent to St Aloysius school which was a tough gig , a place which had a reputation for beating the boys regularly and hard. He nearly got expelled for circulating a controversial issue of the infamous Oz magazine. Good on him!

Always a deep thinker and caring about the plight of others, he studied Jurisprudence at Glasgow University. It is perhaps no coincidence that he organised what apparently was the first ever Scottish Conference about Children’s Rights in 1978 and was then directly involved in taking a family’s case to the European Court of Human Rights, a case which gave rise to banning of corporal punishment in Scottish schools thenceforth. What an achievement, and two fingers up to St Aloysius!, there would be no more shockingly sadistic use of the leather tawse (belt). It should be no surprise that this ruling was very unpopular with both teachers, headmasters and Scottish MP’s.

This subject was dear to my own heart. I had an unhappy time at school, was also angry at the system and spent my late adolescence imbibing books about alternative education, devouring Summerhill in a night, reading Ivan Illich’s ‘Deschooling Society’ and the likes of John Holt. We both cared passionately about how children should be helped to thrive, almost definitely stemming from our own less than optimal childhood experiences.

Below is a picture of Paul the graduate, and below that a man with the dreaded leather tawse below no longer used thanks in part to Paul.

No formal book reviews this month, but this was the last book Paul read, Held by Anne Michaels, who he admired and knew personally. Shortlisted for the Booker, beautiful, poetic, not an obvious story but with huge depth and some passages which will long stay with me. eg “Invisible as the radio waves and cosmic rays that pass through us, the seiches and forces of history that restrict us, shape our assumptions, compassions, freedoms, judgements; the regrets of one generation passed down as hopes for the next, the germs and spores of limitation and expectation we absorb from the social atmosphere. How a bird struggling against the wind can appear motionless.”

book here

Paul was always helpful in the subtlest way, sending articles and ideas almost as if he did so by chance. I just found this article in the FT from 2012 that he sent me when I was researching my book The Good Life, again it was so ahead of its time in predicting the effects of screens.

I had many dark challenging painful times in the years we were friends, and Paul was always there, and always totally present and never judgemental. I always felt safe, cared for and deeply thoughts about. Whether or not this quote was actually Hemingway or not, it was so true of Paul.

‘In our darkest moments, we don’t need solutions or advice. What we yearn for is simply human connection—a quiet presence, a gentle touch. These small gestures are the anchors that hold us steady when life feels like too much’

Who Was Paul professionally?

Early on he wrote a number of papers in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, perhaps most notably in the early days about race and psychoanalysis, such as Souls in Armour: Thoughts on psychoanalysis and Racism (Gordon, 1993), and Keeping Therapy White (Gordon, 1993), as well as works linking psychotherapy and the arts such as The Celluloid Couch: Representations of Psychotherapy in Cinema (Gordon, 1994).

In time Paul became an influential and unique voice in the world of contemporary psychotherapy. Author of many books and articles, he was for many years Chair of the Philadelphia Association, originally founded by the brilliant if mercurial fellow Glaswegian R.D.Laing. There Paul developed his own philosophy of therapy.

He first trained as a psychotherapist at the Institute of Psychotherapy and Social Studies, and later at the PA where he really came into his own and developed his thinking. His first major work when there was Face to Face (Gordon, 1999), picture above, with a cover by Hugh Scully, an artist Paul loved. In it he outlined a model of therapy in which a particular kind of conversation was central, and his work was deeply rooted in philosophy and literature from Merleau-Ponty to Husserl and Emanuel Levinas. Paul’s interpretation of that great thinker is the only one I understood even a tiny bit!

In therapy he always took seriously the importance of the external world, but made a case for how authentic human presence and conversation could be transformative. He wrote

The process of therapy and being a self is one in which people come to speak from a place of authenticity, in their own words and in their own idiom – to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’.

In Face to Face he wrote

Whatever else we do as psychotherapists we wait, wait for, we wait with and we wait upon those who come to see us; we wait and we witness. …. Waiting witnessing and naming all require a lot of effort’. Indeed they do, and he could, and did, make that effort.

Paul worked for many years as a therapist in the Philadelphia Association houses. Long before concepts of ‘home’ became sociologically fashionable, PA houses were places of safety and asylum. He initially outlined his philosophy in Face to Face and chronicled the PA work in several books, notably the aptly named An Uneasy Dwelling (below), and the edited From Psychoanalysis to Philosophy The houses were, and remain. accessible to all, not just the wealthy, which was important to Paul who spent many years offering low or no cost therapy, such as at Open Door in Crouch End, and Freedom From Torture and he was one of the people behind the Free Psychotherapy Network.

His vision for the Philadelphia Association houses, and indeed for therapy, and in fact for a life well lived, was for a place where people in distress could find their own way through suffering and, as he wrote, ‘can feel recognised and come to feel more at home in themselves and in the world.’

To the end he challenged mainstream contemporary developments in mental health, particularly the juggernaut of easy diagnosis, time-limited therapies based on guidelines, rigid protocols and quick medication. He also, alongside the likes of Darian Leader, spearheaded a national campaign against the dangers of bureaucratization of psychotherapy via state regulation.

He deeply believed, as I do, that social conditions and life events were the root of most mental health issues, not some flaw inside a suffering person. He suggested that simply recognising this ‘can help people feel less powerless and alone’ and echoing Sartre, ‘can convert passivity into action’.

He wrote in the Guardian: “Behind every symptom and every appeal for medication is a story, and the silencing of those stories can be as much the cause of suffering as the details of the life itself.”

In the early 2000’s he became editor of the radical journal Free Associations, alongside its founder, Bob Young, where he linked therapeutic ideas to critical social thinking. Gordon also wrote regularly for the TLS, and occasional features in the Guardian and Independent.

That’s just a few tiny hints of his professional life, lives are so un-capture-able, huge and tiny and fragile and rich.

His vision for the houses and dwelling and the idea of home is captured in the article downloadable below in the UKCP journal

One thing that makes a good friend is if they trust you and you trust them to step outside of normal comfort zones. Paul was pretty clear about what he liked and didn’t; when I asked him to a film I liked the sound of in 2013 he wrote back ‘I think I’d find it irritating! so i think the biggest compliment he paid me was to occasionally come along on some of my weird journeys.

There was a series of events called the Lost lectures, where you did not know who the speakers were or where it was happening and to my amazement Paul came long and we loved it.

He hated most theatre .. and wrote ‘I think theatre unless it’s short and different – and not too depressing – just isn’t for me! but came with me to a brilliant (short, appropriately 50 minutes) Beckett, Watt

Paul had no love of football but he even came with me to see a Spurs match at White Hart Lane and we cycled there together. Now that’s friendship.

I feel such gratitude for the generosity and adventures. I often though wished he would take his mobile phone with him, especially when he or I were late!

I loved this pastiche of Samuel Beckett as detective that he sent to me on 20th February 2015.

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We spent many an evening at the cinema, and eating and chatting afterwards, here’s just a tiny fraction, by no means all or the best, but you get a flavour, and each was followed by food and wine and deep discussions, often heartfelt, a short list of the many .. there were a lot of films and inspiration and being moved and also dinners!

Healing the Living, On her shoulders , The Strange affair of Uncle Harry Neighbouring Sounds, Biutiful, Parasite, Happy as Lazarro, Sunset, Putin’s Witnesses, Cold war, No Assylum, Sicario 2, Soldado, Mysete de la chambre Jaune, 3 Women, Western, Sweet Country, Menashe, Myerowtz Stories, Cri Cuervas, Certain Women, United States of Love, The Commune, No Home Movie, The Measure of a Man, Dheepan, Rams, Innocence of memories, We Ar The Many,Au revoir les enfants, Diplomacy, Cycling with Moliere, Ana Arabia

Below..getting married, so much life and hope ahead .. who could have known? not long after there were emails suggesting tiredness and not feeling quite right eg

On 31 May 2014, at 11:52, graham music wrote:

> hi
>
> been wondering how you are feeling this week?

Hi

I don’t feel as bad as I was but there’s no steady progress – someone suggested finding a proper nutritionist so that’s something Im trying to do –
I’d love to see the View … so let me know

Paul x

If you click below there is a beautiful review by Paul of Sabert Basescu: selected papers on human nature and psychoanalysis, edited by George Goldstein and Helen Golden which is very Paul and says a lot about his thinking, but if you feel like just a few words:

a joy to read and an inspiration and certainly not to be pigeon-holed under any name. It seems right that Basescu should have the last words:

‘When I think of the changes in my anxieties as a therapist over the twenty-five years I have been one, the single most important change is that I am continually less anxious about being anxious. I accept it and expect it as part of my work. The more I can do that, the better able I feel I am to use my anxieties as are source for understanding and clarifying the structure of the interpersonal world in which I find myself. ‘ ( p. 46)

Another Paul review, of John Launer’s book on Sabina Spielrein for the TLS

Art: We saw a lot of art.

Paul’s writing is suffused with art, poetry and literature. He wrote:

‘Art, like therapy at its best, reminds us of and provides a space for the inherent complexity and ambiguity of life. Itchallenges any tendency to simplify, to smoothen, to flatten, to reduce.’ That’s a message the modern world needs to hear!

Some of my favourite exhibitions with him included an

Alexander Calder exhibition at the Tate

A Rothko one which was so moving

Mayakovsky and Malevich shook us to our bones

Barbara Hepworth

Photography eg Conflicts of Time at the Tate Modern

And many little forays to places like the Estorik (picture above) in Islington or Camden Arts Centre.

A typical Paul email:

I just came back from a truly amazing
exhibition at Tate Modern – by the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel. From the first room till the last – and it’s a substantial show – I was awe-struck by her endless creativity and what I can only think of as the depth of her being, palpable in virtually every thing I saw.
Don’t miss it!

And another :

I wanted to tell you about the superb Malevich exhibition I saw yesterday morning at Tate Modern. It is absolutely stunning! I am always breathtaken when I look at the sheer energy and creativity of this man and his associates. Imaginatively,
the exhibition includes work by others, people he taught or inspired including Natalia Goncharova and El Lissitsky. They even have the latter’s homage to Rosa Luxemburg, one of my favourite works of art. It’s small and easy to miss, but it’s there! And don’t miss the supermatist china, either! it’s a wonderful tribute to someone who kept on creating, even in the dark years of Stalinism.

A Malevich below

In fact Paul curated an exhibition with his dear friend Gareth Evans on the South Bank about one of his/our favourite poets Paul Celan

Here is a reference to it

And a Celan Poem, With Every Thought

With every Thought I went
out of the World: there you were,
you my Gentle One, you my Open One, and –
you received us.

Who
says that for us everything died,
that for us there the Eye broke?
Everything woke, all things began.

Vast, a Sun came swimming by, bright
a Soul and a Soul engaged, clear,
masterfully made a silence for it
a path ahead.

Lightly
you opened your Lap, quiet
rose a Breath in the Aether,
and what became cloud, was it not,
was it not Form, and for us then,
was it not
as good as a Name?

Things began to feel less than optimal quite some years ago but Paul rarely complained and was perplexed.

On 11 February 2016 at 14:51, Paul Gordon <psgordon.t21@btinternet.com> wrote:

Hi

He wrote:

I’m getting rather depressed about this business to be honest – Tuesday and yesterday were particularly bad in how I felt physically – I’m going back to the GP soon as the 12 week iron etc course is over next week – I have no idea what makes a difference for better or worse, rest food, exercise – just don’t know.
Also can you remind me of that breathing exercise you showed me
thanks a lot
hope you’re ok
Paul x

He could not imagine living a less than full life. Typical Paul. he was already feeling ill, I had sent him some HRV techniques, but he focused on me and was generous about a radio 4 program I had recently done on ACEs in 2016, Unhappy Child, Unhealthy Adult

From: Paul Gordon
Sent: ‎16/‎02/‎2016 21:12
To: graham music
Subject: Re: Re:

really excellent programme and you were great – nice radio voice and so articulate. well done!

x

We didnt see the writing on the wall, but he continued to live his life fully. he took up riding a motorbike and learnt to play the guitar, pretty well I gather even though he was very private about it.

Paul with his bike ..

As Paul retreated in his neurodegnerative illness I already missed him, the loss was long and gradual. I comforted myself by having his books near me, and the books of his friends and colleagues and those he admired next to some of his books, such as:

David Smail, who I sat next to at his wedding, who in his writings such as The Origins of Human Unhappiness argued so strongly that self blame can be often substituted for anger at life events:

Peter Lomas, who wrote so much and so deeply about what is wrong with psychotherapy, and made such a strong case for being human and humane and for The Limits of Interpretation.

Robert Hobson, in fact father of Peter, whose open-hearted thinking especially in the latter half of Forms of Feelings influenced us both so much. I still think it should be compulsory reading for trainee therapists.

Of course the great John Berger, especially his still astonishing Ways of Seeing, with whom he collaborated. Berger in fact sent Paul a picture of a motorbike, from one motorcyclist to another, all this described in a lovely book in which again Paul’s dear friend Gareth Evans was involved, Seeing Through Drawing, which also included Anne Michaels.

I have Pauls friends and inspirations on the shelf next to this desk as I type. see below, as if we were at an imaginary party together. I still want to imagine that. Those thinkers are all gone now but it is amazing how people can stay alive inside us and come back to visit us. Click to read a few words here that Paul wrote in the Guardian after Berger’s death.

Below a hint of that party … I hope you have your own, and Paul would want you to choose your very own guests!!

Another poet he loved, I think because of his earthiness and deep feeling, was the Welshman R.S Thomas. Here is one called Good

The old man comes out on the hill
and looks down to recall earlier days
in the valley. He sees the stream shine,
the church stand, hears the litter of
children’s voices. A chill in the flesh
tells him that death is not far off
now: it is the shadow under the great boughs
of life. His garden has herbs growing.
The kestrel goes by with fresh prey
in its claws. The wind scatters the scent
of wild beans. The tractor operates
on the earth’s body. His grandson is there
ploughing; his young wife fetches him
cakes and tea and a dark smile. It is well.

Paul’s last book was about the great revolutionary writer Viktor Serge , Vagabond Witness and The Politics of Hope which was a beautiful rendering of a life, and said so much about Paul’s feelings for poetry, for hope, for politics, for leading a full life .

I found an email when I commented on his draft , much of what I wrote was nit-picky grammatical stuff, I loved the book and more, I loved the fact that Paul decided to write it. Perhaps what I yearned for in fact was less quotes and more of Paul’s own words and feelings. I suggested more ‘about you and why you think he is important, the traditions of political writings and what they have inspired in you and others as revolutionary writers who were able to be truthful and why it might still be important today etc’.

At the end of the book he quoted a poem Serge wrote for his comrade who died, and I cried as I thought of not seeing my friend Paul again, and my goodness ‘Finished’ is hard to get ones head around

A few lines:

‘Finished: the romances, dark lips and golden eyes…

Finished: the paprika dishes and the slightly rough red wine shared with beggars while swapping tall tales…

Finished: the books written…

Finished: the insults. They did not stint there.

(The poem ends:)

I am listening in your stead, what radiant silence falls on the clamor.

Gordon, Paul. Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope (p. 62).

He was frailer by the end and so lovingly and beautifully looked after by his wife, the writer Melissa Benn and their 2 children, Hannah and Sarah, who he loved and adored and was so proud of. Below they are happy all together on their wedding day.

I end with a few words from the last note I sent to him:

‘You have been a light in my life, you will be till it’s my turn to take my last breath, and I’ll try to pass some of that on. Thank you dear friend for being so very you’

Thank you readers for sharing my thoughts and feelings about love and friendship and Paul. I hope we can all go into the holiday period with some hope of love and friendship and gratitude and inspiration.

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A Time to Talk

Robert Frost

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

Consulting Rooms in The Huddle Practice: Space available (Londoners).

This is probably best for adult, adolescent or couple work.

4 of us currently work there, looking for anyone (nice!) wanting from half days to whole weeks (pictures above and below)