In our increasingly high octane and money/market oriented world it is sometimes hard to really believe in old fashioned human values such as altruism. Christmas of course challenges that. There is such a gluttonous consume and spend fest, and such a lot of anxiety about getting enough, buying the right thing, and a lot of confusion between what we really want to do as opposed to what we feel we have to do, and motives can get horribly jumbled.

There were 2 articles in the BMJ this week about longevity and Olympic athletes. One of them  [1] found that those who won medals lived several years longer than those in the general population and longer than other athletes.  One assumption was that this is linked to fitness, but that is probably unlikely. Another study also published in the BMJ this very week found that high intensity exercise does not give a survival advantage [2]. I suspect that in fact the increased longevity comes from feeling better about themselves, which will do all kind of positive things for our immune system and overall health.

Psychoanalysis has been getting a bad press for quite a while now. It is not uncommon to read about it as something that went out with the dinosaurs, as having no evidence base and as long past its sell-by date [1]. Working at the Tavistock Clinic, which continues to practice and teach about psychoanalysis, as well as other modalities, can leave one feeling somewhat under siege. What is maybe overlooked is how much evidence has recently come forward which bears out many of the ideas of Freud and his successors.

A raft of studies are pointing to the worrying effects of poverty on worse physical and mental health. A new American study showed that being unemployed, even for a short period of time, increases the risk of heart attacks, and that having multiple job losses massively ups that risk. [1]. This was a big study, of over 13,000 Americans between 50 and 70 over nearly a decade. The risk of acute myocardial infarction after  job losses were very high, as great as seen in smoking, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

These processes seem to start very early. Rather frighteningly, a new study has even found that child poverty as well as stress as an adult, and living in poor neighbourhoods, can all have an effect on one’s gene expression, particularly in relation future immune responses. [2]. This study showed that people who had experienced childhood poverty had different gene methylation from those who hadn't, despite the fact everyone in the cohort had achieved the same socioeconomic status later in life. Early poverty left a detectable and lasting molecular mark on an individual's DNA.

A fascinating new study this week showed that people who have minds that wonder more, who cannot concentrate as much, also have shorter telomeres, a classic biomarker for ageing and cellular death. Telomeres protect the end of chromosomes and are a good predictor of immune functioning, early death and disease [1]. Participants were measured for aspects of psychological distress and well-being. The sample was highly educated and had a narrow range of both chronological age and psychological stress (most were low stress). Those with  a tendency to mind wander and concentrate less on tasks basically had shorter telomeres. Given that so much is suggesting that people’s attention spans are shortening, then this is a worrying finding.

This week saw the demise of one of the greatest figures ever in infancy research, and the person who really begun the process of linking developmental science and therapeutic practice. News of Daniel Stern’s death has shaken all who came into contact with him and who knew of his work. I am sure I am not the only person whose world was turned upside down when I first read what is still his best known work, The Interpersonal World of the Infant [1]. It is quite extraordinary how far the field has come since the publication of that seminal book. Looking back at that text, it was clearly a work of genius, so far ahead of its time, and in it Stern put into words so much that so many people had faintly intuited but could not make explicit. It was Stern who first taught us about affect attunement, a concept we take for granted now but which he had to persuade us of. He did this using research and videos about real babies, showing us how they were born primed to interact, to seek out faces and voices, born ready to be understood, feelingful beings who were also extremely intelligent. Stern’s baby was a real baby, alive, flesh and blood, and researchable, and those of us working therapeutically needed the evidence he brought to put alongside the theoretical psychoanalytic babies we had been taught about, by Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan and others. His was a mind which would not be confined and he embraced not only psychoanalysis and infancy research, but creative arts and especially music, to help make sense of processes of change and development.