Freud
What do we mean when we say we are ‘giving up’?
Adam Phillips explores the various implications of the phrase, contrasting giving up smoking or alcohol with giving up hope – and being given up on
Have we all become more paranoid since the pandemic?
Covid-19 proved devastating to our self-confidence and faith in others, says Daniel Freeman, who describes the ‘corrosive’ effects of mistrust on individuals and society
Double trouble
Elsa, a concert pianist, is starting to panic. Her adoptive father is dying, and she keeps meeting her doppleganger, fuelling an obsession with her origins
The art of the monarchy
Michael Hall on how the Queen made her mark on the Royal Collection
The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal
There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…
Do Jews think differently?
Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with…
Jessie Greengrass’s Sight is unashamedly philosophical
The precarious stasis of late pregnancy offers the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s exceptional first novel a space — albeit an…
Mysticism and metamorphosis
‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…
Did Hans Asperger save children from the Nazis — or sell them out?
Simon Baron-Cohen wonders whether the humane Hans Asperger may finally have betrayed the vulnerable children in his care in Nazi-occupied Vienna
Good stories of bad Bloomsbury behaviour
Even the Group considered Bunny Garnett and Henrietta Bingham quite ‘wayward’. Their powerful charms appealed to both sexes, says Anne Chisholm — and they even managed a fling together
Iain Sinclair and me — Michael Moorcock meets his semi-mythical version
In the late 1980s Peter Ackroyd invited me to meet Iain Sinclair, whose first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I…
How consumer habits are subject to the law of unintended consequences
Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan)…
Brian Aldiss unpicks the Jocasta complex
What if the gods of Greek myth had parallels with Freud’s notion of the unconscious? This is just one idea…
Sabina Spielrein: from psychiatric patient to psychoanalyst
Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology…
The lesson of the young men fighting for Isis: evil is in all of us
I had an interesting discussion with my friend Aidan Hartley earlier this week about whether the young men fighting for…
Two narcissists trapped in one static caravan
I was two days alone in the caravan and no signal or reception of any sort. It was like a…
It's a stupid lie to say we're all bisexual
It’s a stupid lie to say that we’re all attracted to both men and women
Do women want what they say they want?
What do women want? You might have thought the Wife of Bath had got this one sorted, but Daniel Bergner…
Hysteria is a pile-up of unmotivated absurdities
Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by…
