It is now proper autumn.

Here is a tree outside my house a few weeks back, now it’s already lost its leaves! They will come back, not everything does

A timely quote:
‘If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.’
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The excruciating state of the world. will we ever see the below?

I could not quite face doing a blog this month as like so many I am preoccupied with the Middle East but saturated with views, images, and scary amounts of hatred on both sides and too little compassion

At the end of the newsletter (after the joke!) are a few blogs or podcasts that i have found helpful and here I have pasted with permission is a beautiful piece by the inimitable Bayo Akomolafe.

When the World becomes Solid
(To be correct is to lose the plot) by Bayo Akomolafe
You see, when the world becomes too solid for nuance, when it hardens up and crystallizes into a binary that forces you to pick a side, compelling you to become intelligible to the hardness that creeps on its once loamy surfaces, cracks become the first responders.

We need a politics of tenderness now more than ever. Not tenderness as capitulation to particular conclusions that have already been made. Not tenderness as “if you don’t see the world as I do, there’s something wrong with you.” But tenderness as a nurturing of grace that allows something different, something even beautiful, to be born in the midst of the fires.

I am however afraid that this hardness will spread like a pestilence, and that the softness of our flesh would be quickly eaten up by scaled skin and stiff exteriors fashioned in the moral likeness of our pain. I am afraid that we would become impervious and inflexible in the correctness of our views, incarcerated within our screams, and unable to be open to the incalculability of being an other. I fear that we are already scaffolding mushroom clouds, monumentalizing the explosion, calcifying it, and fashioning swords from the feathers of the blast. Maybe the days are quickly upon us when a third way, an impossible path, would be so threatening to the hardness of our times, so fugitive, that it would warrant imprisonment. And more wars.

Yes, I am afraid we might become victorious. I despair that we might win. If we do win, if we purchase victory with the blood of the damned other, I hope we might eventually find that to be correct is the biological equivalent of a chick remaining in its eggshell long after being expelled from its mother. Just to be safe. That life is allergic to correctness. And that the algorithms of peace have never been calculated by or premised on who has the right answer.

Not everyone wants to be inundated with writing about this issue so at the bottom of the newsletter I have pasted in some other blogs and videos/podcasts , including Slavoj Žižek, Gabor Mate and others, after the joke, for those who have the stomach . there is also a beautiful video of Israelis and Palestinians singing for peace in 2018 that brought me to tears

The moving statue of first world war poet Wilfred Owen who died aged 25 towards the end of that ‘war to end all wars’.

Free download for subscribers. If you are not subscribed, click below

The search for identity: working therapeutically with adolescents in crisis, by Rachel Acheson and Maria Papadima

This has been a really popular paper in the journal of Child psychotherapy. In the news, there is frequent mention of adolescents’ mental health nowadays being ‘in crisis’. This paper offers the perspective of two psychotherapists working in a crisis service, trying to engage adolescents and their families in therapeutic work. They argue for a combined developmental, psychoanalytic and systemic approach to understand and work with the perceived mental health crisis in adolescence.

This paper explores the desire of some adolescents today to have a mental health diagnosis and use specific, psychiatric-oriented language to frame and understand their distress. A cultural and theoretical exploration of this phenomenon is offered, viewing it as an expression of adolescents’ need for establishing their identity within peer groups, online and offline. The paper underlines the necessity for an approach where the whole network around the adolescent – the school, the parents, the therapist – work together to address the occurring crisis. The crisis this paper refers to is conceptualised as one involving developmental adolescent turmoil, expressed through mental health language.

Upcoming talks or events

I am doing less events but a few to keep an eye out .. coming up there are the below (and do though send in information about other events as I am less in the loop at the moment but like to advertise other organisation’s events)
November 24, 2023

Respark, neglect and dissociation after trauma

Event Link
Talk on desparking after trauma and neglect
Organiser: Adoption Plus. Location: online
February 10, 2024

Courage in trauma Work

Event Link
When to Be Brave & When to Stay Safe – Working with Child Trauma
Organiser: Adoption Plus Location: online
April 19, 2024

Resparking: Understanding and working with shut-down states

Online Training Day: Respark
Organiser: Brighton Therapy partnership Location: online
My other future events can be found here

A few others of interest:

Susie Orbach, A Woman’s body: site of assault, site of trauma, site of resistance: Tavistock External trauma lectures see here

MINDinMIND: Eating Disorders Symposium see here

TR Together: Stephen Seligman, working with Neurodiverse clients details here

ICAPP (Institute of Child Adolescent and Psychoanalytic Therapy: CPD by this interesting Australian outfit that i did a series for last year. this year they have see here

An autumnal men’s pond on London’s Hampstead Heath (and a few brave souls spotted in the water)

A few blogs to enjoy

Jean Twenge: An important researcher, good on details and the big picture arguing that yes its phones and social media that is contributing to worsening adolescent mental health read here.

Louis Weinstock: Short but important, how to stop hatred read here.

Aaron Balick: On weaponised reactivity generated by social media read here.

Formats and Bookfunnel

Thanks for those who helped testing the audio version via BookFunnel which seems to work well. It is still available here and using this code U2GU3NF at checkout gets it for 25% off, ie £4.50.

I am aiming to shortly release a cheaper version of the ebook formats on bookfunnel too, for Respark and also Affect and Emotion.

I am wondering whether to offer signed copies of any of the books and send them out from my home.

Would people be interested??????

‘RESPARK’ is also available in all the formats below.

The other audible formats here and on Spotify and other platforms

The physical book and ebook is available from amazon or better, independent bookshops eg psychological therapy books and the reincarnated Karnac books here, yay!

Please do leave a review anywhere you buy it, it really helps a lot.
Affect and Emotion (the new edition) is available here on amazon … or psychological therapy books …. only about 6 quid too!

Click on links below to view or buy these:
Nurturing Natures,
Affect and Emotion
Nurturing Children,
The Good Life,
From Trauma to Harming others

For other journal papers and chapters papers and chapters see here

A few recently read non-therapy books

Just Beyond Yourself by David Whyte

Just beyond
yourself.
It’s where
you need
to be.
Half a step
into
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you’ll meet.
There is a road
always beckoning.
When you see
the two sides
of it
closing together
at that far horizon
and deep in
the foundations
of your own
heart
at exactly
the same
time,
that’s how
you know
it’s the road
you
have
to follow.
That’s how
you know
it’s where
you
have
to go.
That’s how
you know
you have
to go.
That’s
how you know.
Just beyond
yourself,
it’s
where you
need to be.

A few interesting podcasts

Lisa Feldman Barrett, her ideas about the brain have pushed the field foreard, here interviewed by Andrew Huberman listen here

Robert Sapolsky and Free Will: The great psychology and primate scientist Sapolsky challenges us with his views on free will, he has a new book about it, and you can catch him here and in other spaces, always fascinating to listen to listen here

Poet Andrea Gibson on Sounds True: Facing mortality and being adored and cherished by the universe (who doesn’t want that?) listen here

Brian Cox On doubt, the Universe and the Future of humanity. . Ambitious subjects (!) but he’s generally interesting I think listen here

Naomi Klein, Conspiracy Theories, on the Blind Boy Podcast: This was fascinating, Naomi Klein too often confused with Naomi Wolff who IS a conspiracy theorist. This is very thoughtful and opens up thinking about the weird space in which far right thinking morphs into left sounding ideas. I like his podcasts, he has been getting some interesting guests listen here

A few research bites etc posted on X (twitter)

And finally … terrible joke time.

What do Jedi trees say to each other in the autumn? May the forest be with you.

Apparently the International Psychoanalytic Association last year had a winter trip in the Alps where many people were hurt in a pre-conference ski accident. One ambulance worker was heard to say ‘I have never seen so many Freudians slip!’

That’s it! Thanks for reading everyone

Here is information about a joint Israel—Palestinian peace initiative which to me seems important Standing Together.

A Guardian article about peace and defences against it due to unprocessed grief.

There is also a group called Humanity not Hatred that is trying to glavanise more joined up thinking.