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The number of people seeking help for gender-related issues has risen significantly in recent years. Gender variance is not uncommon — it’s estimated that 1% of the population is gender variant to some degree. Yet not all therapists feel confident working with gender and gender identity…
With text messages, online networking and email so easy, talking to another person may seem old-fashioned. These days, communication is abbreviated and electronic. A quick text message or a short email is usually enough to get our message across. But humans have been talking to each…
First identified in 1982 by social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling, the broken windows theory suggests that broken windows that are not quickly repaired will encourage people to break more windows in the same neighbourhood. According to this theory, broken windows not only…
The French novelist Marcel Proust said, ‘It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.’ Proust was making the point that only in illness do we become aware of our bodies. Through pain,…
Born on New Year’s Day, 1879, in a village a few miles from Swansea, Alfred Ernest Jones first encountered the work of Freud in 1905. He became intrigued by ‘a man in Vienna who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him.’ This approach was new to Jones, …
The first world war soldier’s pocket book contained, among other things, an informal will. These books were carried by all servicemen throughout the war. For many years, the last wills and testaments of nearly 300,000 soldiers who died in battle were left decaying and unpreserved in…
There are countless depictions of psychotherapy in film but Judd Hirsch’s portrayal of a psychotherapist in Ordinary People is widely regarded as one of the passable few. In a session with the teenage protagonist, he muses: “Hm, now we’re back to the rotten kid routine. She (your…
In his behavioural study written while at Harvard University, Karthik Narayanaswami explains how various forms of cognitive bias were used throughout the Nazi propaganda poster campaign to help perpetuate racism and hatred across Germany. It was only through this manipulation of the…
Born an only child in Glasgow in 1927, Ronald David Laing often claimed that his parents were psychologically ‘peculiar’. His father had a breakdown when Laing was in his teens. Laing studied medicine at the University of Glasgow but failed his exams in 1951 and had to re-sit these…
The Institute of Psychoanalysis has commissioned a short animated film that sets out to demonstrate the function and process of psychoanalysis. The patient, dressed in worried black, attempts to resolve a perceived issue with his boss. Using free association and dreams, the…
