Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it

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If you’re using the word more or less or improve or decline you’re already making a quantitative claim. If you do it without data, you’re talking through your hat. You’re just making stuff up. So the idea that we can do without data is just a recipe for your irrationality. I wonder aloud why he has never previously told the story of Eddie’s death. Given what I’ve been through, I’ve done OK. If you were to mark it in terms of difficulty, I’m about a five

Contrarian arguments can be fascinating. This author was briefly mentioned in the New York Times' 2010 year-end “10th Annual Year in Ideas”, which also linked to his article in Foreign Policy from a few months ago: Best. Decade. Ever.: The first 10 years of the 21st century were humanity’s finest — even for the world's bottom billion. On Getting Better by Adam Phillips is published by Picador Books and will be available for sale from the 4th of January, 2022) Like his earlier book Catalyst in this book also the language is simple & learnings are practical.. though this book could have been shorter as I found some points repetitive People continue to pursue various kinds of irrationality or superstition. But you may be right that people recoil against the idea of overanalysing in their lives or over-rationalising.I notice on Rosen’s desk an unframed photograph of a young man. Rosen swivels to look. “That’s him,” he says, “not all that long before he died.” There is a built-in disadvantage to humanism it doesn’t necessarily get the blood pumping as much as religious ecstasy or nationalist fervour or militaristic passion and dreams of glory.

I’ll give myself a mark, shall I?” he says. “Right, fair enough. No, I think this is quite a good thing to do actually. Like they did at the Beeb. Every now and then you have to do a little…” Of course, data can be misleading. They can be biased, and the attention to data has to be accompanied by a scrutiny of the validity of data, but it’s always better to look at the best data available and not to be driven by headlines and anecdotes. Not quite the crusade because I am distrustful of leading an argument by passion or by my moral fervour. But I decided partly at the urging of leaders and critics to not let the book be completely bloodless and to muster some moral and emotional energy for the values that I argue in the book namely humanism.Without at least a concept of cure, or conversations about cure, medicine wouldn’t make sense; likewise psychoanalysis, Freud would discover, only made sense with and without a concept of cure. And through psychoanalysis – always only a form of local knowledge – Freud would also discover, of course, the limits of the making of sense, and the competing claims about sense-making. It wasn’t long before psychoanalysts also had to imagine what psychoanalysis would be like without agreed aims, without an agreed concept of cure, of acceptable goals of change. As though psychoanalysis may have opened something up that couldn’t be foreclosed by compelling representations like concepts of cure.

One of the ways of describing how psychoanalysis revises (and reprises) the medical model of cure, I think – though Freud was not always either explicit about this or conscious of it – is to say that it re-presents the concept of cure as if it is, unavoidably, a question of morality, a moral issue; as though the so-called ‘good life’ of ancient and traditional philosophy has been somehow all too literally replaced, or displaced, by the criteria of health of modern medical science; the good person has been redescribed as the healthy person (without the question ‘What is health good for?’ being asked, health tending to be less controversial than goodness: health as the solvent, the redescription of morality). As though shared knowledge has replaced each individual, personal hope. As though to know what it would be to be cured would be to know more or less what a good life was, if only for oneself. As though, in a sense, medical science could cure us of the perplexities of morality (by telling us who we are, it tells us who we can be); what Foucault described in Madness and Civilization as ‘the doctor–patient couple in which all alienations are summarized, linked and loosened’. There are tradeoffs along the way, existential anguish seems to be on the rise, innovation is pushing us into an unknown stratosphere, but overall our lives are a picnic compared to a century or two ago. Getting Better is written in an unusual stream-of-consciousness style which can be a bit rambling and goes off on all sorts of tangents and parenthetical detours. Rosen reveals in the final chapter that this style in itself is part of his method for Getting Better. He also makes a very effective argument for the role of aid programs in supporting improved health and education, "The biggest success of development has not been making people richer but, rather, has been making the things that really matter – things like health and education – cheaper and more widely available." A stunning new memoir from national treasure Michael Rosen, exploring the role trauma - from chronic illness to the loss of a child - has played in his life, and how we can learn to live again in the aftermath of tragedy

"If you scoured the news for all of the greatest dangers in any given year in history it would sound rather dire."

Because I’m not him!” Rosen says. “So you try not to be burdened?” I ask. “Or not to be a burden?” “Both, actually,” he says. “I guess I have sad thoughts every day. But I try not to be overcome by them.” We will all go through hardships in our lives, whether it’s a job loss, money worries, a bereavement, a relationship ending, an illness etc. And this book instils such hope that I think it would do the world some good if everyone had a copy. Adler’s device can be seen now as an early example of a version of what came to be known as existentialist psychoanalysis; or psychoanalysis without the unconscious. The patient – like everyone else, according to Sartre – is the sum of their choices. And essentially what they are suffering from is their fear of freedom, their refusal of their actually existing choices. They are not, they suppose, the authors of their own lives – their symptoms are; they have delegated their agency to something they call the unconscious, when once they might have delegated it to the gods, or God, or to the powers that be. But Adler’s practice, in the context of the early, more experimental days of psychoanalysis, is instructive: it suggests that the patient knows what it would be to be cured – has their own idea about cure – and can imagine the consequences of their cure (the more contemporary, more nuanced family-therapy version of Adler’s question is ‘How would your life be different if you were cured?’).

In spite of his adamant refusal to be caught up with any sort of therapeutic evangelism,’ comments Khan, ‘there is a definite, and progressive, theory of cure in the writings of Freud.’ ‘Progressive’ here depends on what counts as progress. We should remember, that is to say, at the outset, Freud’s disparaging remarks – disparaging about both his most inspired follower, and about the wish to cure – in his infamous obituary for Sándor Ferenczi, his colleague and collaborator, in 1933. ‘After this summit of achievement,’ he wrote, ‘it came about that our friend drifted away from us … the need to cure and to help became paramount to him.’ As though the wish to cure and help someone was itself a betrayal, a misunderstanding of psychoanalysis. This we might take as an emblem of Freud’s ambivalence about the concept of cure in relation to psychoanalysis. If you want to stay in the psychoanalytic fold, the wish to cure and help must not become paramount. This rather starkly dissociates psychoanalysis from medicine, and indeed, from the so-called helping professions.The subtitle of the book is 'life lessons on going under, getting over it and getting through it', which reminds me of the refrain in We're going on a Bear Hunt. 'Can't go around it Can't go over it Can't go under it We have to go through it.'