Are you a good person?

Are you kind to fellow humans—and all creatures great and small?

Do you support worthy charities, help those in need, and do good work?

Or do you have a dark side? Is there part of you that wants to lie and cheat and manipulate situations to your advantage? Are you interested in enriching yourself—even if that comes at a cost to others?

The answer is: All of the above. In the fine words of that great philosopher Paul McCartney: There is good and bad in everyone. Humans are capable of astonishing acts of courage and bravery, but under certain circumstances we might be utterly spineless, cruel, greedy or depraved. To deny these things in you—what Jung called the shadow—is to project them unconsciously onto others.

“I’m a good person,” a client said. But all around her—her husband, her children, siblings, parents, neighbours, immigrants, foreigners—were bad. This construction of the world left her lonely and disengaged, holding on only to her sense of superiority. She came to therapy when it came crashing down.

“I’m the bad guy?” says Michael Douglas at the end of the movie Falling Down. Robert Duvall, the cop aiming his pistol at him on the Santa Monia Pier, nods. 
​
“How’d that happen?”

A few weeks ago my therapist sent me a link to an extraordinary song that explores these themes. Hi Ren went live on YouTube on December 15 last year. When I first saw it, it had surpassed 5 million views. Today it’s reached 8.2 million and it's rising super fast. Word of mouth: This is the song of our time; a human anthem.

It starts with Ren, wearing a hospital gown, being wheeled into a semi-derelict room by a man with a pig’s head and a bloodied butcher’s apron. Ren is obviously a patient. He too is perhaps feeling derelict and abandoned—and powerless too in the hands of those charged with his care.

He starts playing the guitar.

It’s beautiful. An acoustic guitar. A pleasing melody. The incongruity of the surroundings. But he’s tugging at the nylon strings a bit hard. A bit twangy. Aggressive considering the sweet Flamenco notes that fill the room.

Then Ren opens his mouth and the melody is joined by a wail of wild, high-pitched half notes. It is otherworldly. It is perhaps something like the human mating call before we learned to speak, or the dawn chorus in Hades. We are drawn to this—we willingly enter his beautiful madness.

And then the rapping starts.

In his famous Red Book, Carl Jung attempts to commune with his own soul.

“ ‘My soul, where are you? Do you hear me?' he starts. 'I speak, I call you – are you
there?’ ”

In this piece of work, Ren opens with a salutation from his shadow to his ego.

“Hi there, Ren,” he hisses. “It's been a little while, did you miss me?”

This is the opening salvo in a blistering verbal assault from Ren’s inner critical voice.

Replies Ren:
“I’ve been taking some time to be distant,” he explains.
“I've been taking some time to be still.
“I've been taking some time to be by myself since my therapist told me I'm ill.
“And I've been making some progress lately,
“And I've learnt some new coping skills”

The critical voice is extremely skeptical:
“Ren, you sound more insane than I do,” he says.

He mocks Ren for imagining that some standard course of treatment—take another pill, the sound of white noise, a 10-step program—will make any difference, and ridicules his musical ambitions.

The argument hots up until the critical voice thunders his authority. He is the snake in Eden. Lucifer. Antichrist. Mephistopheles. Satan.
“I am you, Ren, you are me.”

Who is Ren actually? Where did this guy come from, this Keats-with-guitar? You could be excused for imagining he just picked up a guitar one day in a psych ward and discovered his madness instinctively knew how to play and had something to say.

Ren Gill was actually a talented musician in his youth. He started out making beats in his bedroom at 13, then went on to Bath Spa University to study music performance. One day in 2009, busking in his hometown of Brighton, he was spotted by a talent scout and snapped up by Sony Records.

The childhood dream swiftly turned into a nightmare however. Ren woke one morning feeling utterly lethargic, drained, and aching all over. He started having panic attacks. He’d stay in bed. He said: “My life changed overnight, I woke up one morning feeling like I'd been spiked—my personality disappeared.”

He entered the mental health system. He was put on antidepressants. Antipsychotics. It's not hard to imagine the kinds of interpretations psychology offered up for his illness—he was probably told for example that he was depressed, suffering from low self-esteem, bipolar, afraid of success, delusional, paranoid, mad. In some cultures he would be considered possessed, in need of an exorcism.

​The truth, discovered many years later, was that he had a longstanding untreated case of Lyme disease, the complications of which still impact him today. Ren’s health problems were not manifestations of some inner psychic conflict. He was bitten by a tic.

He has struggled. But perhaps the struggle, the suffering, is integral to his genius.

In the final stanza, Ren refuses to back down, and stands to face his demon:
“I go by many names also,
“Some people know me as hope,
“Some people know me as the voice that you hear when you loosen the noose on the rope.”

I’ve watched Hi Ren countless times now, but this passage, this lone shriek in the cold, silent void of a long and desolate night, this absolute guttural refusal to quit, still reverberates. This is courage. And if you going to live, stand in the fire, sing at the top of your lungs! Ferocious, persistent, immortal! 

The Hollywood movies might leave it there. The good guy narrowly defeats the bad guy, the evil forces are vanquished, and the credit roll as a beautiful melody transports us back to our lives.
 
Critical self
I have worked with many clients whose lives are made wretched by an invisible sargeant major who subjects them to a permanent harangue of negativity. It can come as quite a shock to discover that some of the nicest people are often subject to a totalitarian inner form of government—a brutal, relentless inner monologue that is with them 24 hours a day.

Perhaps it is an internalised strict parent, sibling, school bully, racist, sexist, homophobe, ableist. The child who is abused by a parent may conclude that love and abuse are indivisible. Lorna Smith Benjamin describes masochism as a gift of love to the original abuser.

Perhaps you experienced a traumatic event or time in your life, one that was so terrible it couldn’t be processed so was instead dissociated, divided up into images, sensations, stray thoughts and emotions. You bury these fragments in a deep hole at the far of the garden, but to your great dismay they keep coming back. The past reverberates in the present. Time in itself does not necessarily heal.

I’ve also met people who might have had perfectly idyllic childhoods yet still berate themselves mercilessly for every bone-headed move, bad-hair day or dumb remark. Perhaps your critical voice starts out by alerting you to where you might have room for improvement, acting in your best interests, but over the years it can become domineering and disempowering. 

Incidentally, if “the voice” is more than a thought or a feeling but is experienced as an actual, heard voice, some people might conclude that you must be mad, possessed and probably dangerous. And while such voices may point to the consideration of psychosis, it does not prove it. Many people hear voices at times for a variety of reasons.
​
Therapy might enable a client to develop a greater awareness and understanding of their inner critic. We might imagine it is an actual person—what age, gender? Remind you of anyone you know? The client might have a conversation with their critical voice. It can be useful to think of humans as being made up of multiple “selves,” lots of disparate strands in the tapestry. They all inhabit our being in a loose confederacy. And the client might find some other sentiments in this “community of selves” that can challenge and counter the inner bully.

The shadow
Sometimes, however, therapy attempts to go to far in expunging any negativity or nastiness. Jung argued we not born pure, but whole. We cannot edit ourselves to be merely good. We can never be untethered from our shadow. In Memories, dreams, reflections, Jung called the shadow—“everything that the subject refusers to acknowledge” about themselves (1995: 418).

Pure goodness becomes insipid. Heaven, with no shade, is no place for humans—a place, as David Byrne sung, where “nothing ever happens.”

Anyone who denies their inner propensity for evil as well as good will find that it manifests itself in unanticipated ways.

To make light—to live—is to cast a shadow. This is a chiaroscuro world. 

Artists, poets, writers, musicians, comedians, people who bring light to the world, must also experience darkness. 

And the shadow, by the way, doesn’t always have to be something bad. You might disavow your own brilliance, or talent, or potential for success. The more a person identifies with and invests in one polarity, the greater the opposite polarity grows in the shadow. 

We don't like bad stuff. The child who has not yet learned to tolerate and accept anger will hand it off, screaming at the grown-up: “Why are so angry with me?"

Any emotions, beliefs or characteristics that don't fit with your carefully-crafted, social media-ready self-image are simply projected onto others. Your partner—that's the easiest place to start. Then there are family members—one sibling is often cast as "the bad one"—neighbours, that asshole at work, men, women, black people, white people, those people over there, others.

The targets for projection and scapegoating are plentiful. Twitter is a very shadowy place indeed.

Writes Robert A. Johnson in Owning your own shadow: “Probably the worst damage is done when parents lay their shadow on their children...If a parent lays his shadow on a young child, that spits the personality of the child and sets the ego-shadow warfare into motion."  (1991: 34).

So how do you find your shadow? Ask yourself: Who do you judge? Your enemies, the people you dislike the most, have much to teach you. For they are you.

Projecting your shadow isn't just bad for others. It's bad for your too. Continues Johnson: “To refuse the dark side in one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness; this is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness or unconsciously inspired accidents. We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshipped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us. We must be whole whether we like it or not” (1991: 26).

You want world peace? To start with, stop pointing accusatory fingers every which way, and instead take a look inside.

If we can own our shadow we can develop some conscious control over it, rather than have it unconsciously express itself in disastrous ways. And if we can accept that we are all flawed, vulnerable, insignificant, ignorant, that life is hard but also beautiful, that not one person on this planet knows how or why we are here, then we can perhaps be more empathic, more forgiving, kinder. We can greet each other. The words “human” and “humility” come from the same root, the Latin word “humus,” meaning earth or ground. We are not celestial beings. We return to the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

”No one can escape the dark side of life,” writes Johnson. ”The balance of dark and light is ultimately possible—and bearable” (1991: 15).

Let's dance 
At the end of Hi Ren, this remarkable young man puts the guitar down, looks right into the camera and delivers a powerful soliloquy.

“It wasn't David versus Goliath,” he says, “it was a pendulum eternally swaying from the dark to the light. And the more intensely that the light shone, the darker the shadow it cast.
​
“It was never really a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance, and like a dance, the more rigid I became, the harder it got. The more I cursed my clumsy footsteps, the more I struggled. And so I got older and I learned to relax, and I learned to soften, and that dance got easier. It is this eternal dance that separates human beings from angels, from demons, from gods. And I must not forget, we must not forget, that we are human beings.”

In 1949, in thick fog, Ben Hogan had a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus. On Tuesday morning last week, in broad daylight, Tiger Woods collided with himself.  

At the time of his crash, Hogan was 36, and a late starter in a career interrupted by World War Two. Despite or perhaps because of his horrific injuries, his best triumphs lay ahead: In 1953, on shattered legs, he played just 6 tournaments and won 5 of them including the Masters, the US Open and the British Open. 

We don’t know why Tiger Woods spun off the road—no other vehicles were involved. We do know he was late and tired, and driving on a notoriously dangerous stretch of road. We know he is 45, and was a very early starter in a career interrupted by wild women, sex addiction, scandal, divorce, drugs and severe physical damage brought on by too much wear and too much tear: He’s had 5 operations on his back and 5 on his knee, among many other medical decisions and revisions and incisions.

Ben Hogan had a car crash and then the man became a legend.  
Tiger Woods was a legend and then the man became a car crash. 
 
​Hallowed be thy name
Aside from golfing prowess, and a car crash, these two men have this thing in common; Both were shaped by the extremes of the father.

"The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents,” wrote Carl Jung. 

For Hogan this was literally true: He was 9 and in the house, possibly even in the room, when his father took his own life with a pistol. 

​Earl Woods meanwhile was a college baseball player who spent 20 years in the US Army—including tours of duty in Vietnam as a Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel—before finding his true calling: putting his son on the world stage. 

He put a golf club in his hand at the age of one, had him appear on TV—with Bob Hope—at two and turned him into a kind of child soldier of golf. 

As a newly-minted pro, at a dinner in his honour, the father said of the son: “He will bring to the world a humanitarianism which has never been known before…I acknowledge only a small part in that in that I know that I was personally selected by God himself to nurture this young man.”

Later, he said: “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.”

Sports Illustrated asked for clarification, suggesting he meant sports history. He surely wasn’t suggesting Tiger would be bigger than, say, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Buddha? Was he?

Yes, he was. He added that Tiger would accomplish miracles and was, in fact, the “Chosen One.”

Mental mastery
We are always hearing about athletes’ physical health in great detail. When the England football team captain David Beckham broke the tiny second metatarsal bone in his left foot in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup, it was practically a national emergency.

But very little is said about their mental health, which is odd when you consider how odd their lives are. Studies show that around 35 percent of elite professional athletes suffer from a mental health crisis, in all the usual time-honoured ways: addiction, drugs, stress, eating disorders, sleep disorders, burnout, depression, anxiety. 

These concerns are increasingly being taken seriously by sports’ governing bodies, with a blueprint provided by the International Olympic Committee’s 2018 Expert Consensus Statement on mental health in elite athletes.

But the athletes themselves rarely speak out about their troubles. One exception is Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, who suffered a Tigeresque career meltdown but lived to tell his story. Two years ago he tweeted: “I struggled with anxiety and depression and questioned whether or not I wanted to be alive anymore. It was when I hit this low that I decided to reach out and ask for the help of a licensed therapist. This decision ultimately helped save my life. You don’t have to wait for things.”

In pro sports, golf is perhaps uniquely challenging. Careers tend to be long, travel is brutal—Gary Player has spent years of his life in aeroplanes. You are on the pitch for hours, day after day, and your failures, injuries and other setbacks are many and often painfully public. It can be a solitary existence; research shows a higher risk of mental ill-health in individual sports than in team sports.

Then there is the culture of golf. You play the ball as it lies. You don’t complain. You accept the bad bounces. And above all, you must maintain the image of golf as good and wholesome, a cure for mental ill-health rather than a cause of it. While other top athletes spit and swear and occasionally break someone’s jaw, golf pros are expected to call penalties on themselves, shake hands with their opponents, donate their winnings to the nearest cancer hospital. It’s good for business.

Any famous golfer must surely struggle at times with their idealized public image as a dominant, fearless but ever-polite superhero, a role model, an exemplar of human potential, especially when beset by feelings of internal turmoil or doubt or murderous rage or the vast emptiness that fame and a life on the road can bestow. The more vaunted the image, the bigger the shadow.

When you consider what Tiger Woods has been through—his childhood, the highest of highs, the lowest of lows, the scandals, injuries, accidents, and not least, throughout it all, the endless death threats, trollings, put-downs and shamings from a largely white sport with a racist history—his comeback in 2018 and 2019 is astonishing.

But as he recovers from his horrific injuries—he surely will—perhaps what comes next is not another comeback to the Tiger of old, but a “go forward” to something new.

The real Tiger Woods is neither the world peace humanitarian he was once made out to be; nor is he a sex-addicted junkie. Like anyone, he’s just trying to play it down the middle.

Jung wrote a pretty good guidebook for this sort of thing, called “Modern Man in Search of a Soul.” He writes: “Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
​

As I set up my voice recorder on Donald Trump’s desk, my hand was shaking. “Sorry about my hand,” I told him. “I have Parkinson’s.”
“Oh that’s great,” said the future U.S. president. “That gets better as you get older, right? Some of my friends have it—they do great with it.”
Of all the many varied and sometimes baffling reactions from people to news of my neurological ill-health, Trump’s was the most remarkable. Parkinson’s is degenerative? Fake news.
It was July 2014 and I was in Trump’s gilded office, high above New York’s Fifth Avenue, to interview him for the American magazine Golf Digest. I spent 90 relentless minutes in Trump’s PR wind tunnel, blasted by bluster, amplification and foghorn declarations of greatness.
It starts with extreme, absurd flattery: He introduced me to some men in suits as “the finest journalist ever to come out of the U.K.” It swiftly moves on to Trump: “There is nobody more aesthetic than me”; “There’s nobody more environmental than me”; “I have the greatest brand in the world.”
These audacious, breathtaking assertions perhaps explain Trump’s success: “Trump” is a fantasy world where anything is possible, dreams do come true, you will be rich, end everyone loves you—apart from a few “losers and haters.” 
But it also perhaps contains the seeds of what will surely be Trump’s eventual downfall. Norman Vincent Peale was a friend of Trump’s parents, a pastor and the author of “The Power of Positive Thinking.” He had a huge influence on Trump from an early age.
Positivity is great—to a point. ​Over time, however, the positive thoughts can become tyrannical. They turn into exaggerations, spin, irrational optimism, delusions and lies. You start to believe in your own bullshit. You malign and punish anyone who disagrees with you—anyone who dares to say that the emperor has no clothes. You become divorced from reality (for catastrophic examples, see subprime mortgage crisis, Bernie Madoff, Brexit, much of U.S. foreign policy and Trump’s bizarre magical-thinking response to the coronavirus). Your lies drown you.

Who lies?
The truth about lying is that it is and always has been a quintessential element of being human. Kids learn to lie as soon as they learn to talk. As adults, research shows that we lie on average once or twice a day, and while most lies are modest edits to make life’s narrative flow a little better, we do occasionally tell some whoppers too, most commonly to the person that we're closest to. Eighty-five percent of job applicants lie on their resumé.
All governments  lie.
Lying is greatly reduced by guilt and the belief that honesty is a good thing, but lies can beget lies can beget bigger lies: With compulsive liars, the brain gets used to dishonesty. We expect people to be generally trustworthy and honest; we are therefore gullible. These realities are magnified enormously by social media (see The Great Hack for a chilling insight into how elections are manipulated). Beliefs in lies that accord with our worldview—including fantastical conspiracy thories—are retained even when  proven false; sometimes those beliefs even harden on being disproved.
In July, it was reported that Trump had told more than 20,000 lies since he took office, and has averaged 23.8 lies per day since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the U.S. He does not so much lie, perhaps, as regard the quaint notion of truth as an irrelevance.
But it isn’t.
It’s not true: Parkinson’s doesn’t get better as you get older. No, Mr. President, your inauguration crowd wasn’t bigger than Obama’s (and Obama by the way was born in the United States). No, you can’t buy Greenland, or get Mexico to pay for your wall, or ask Ukraine to help your election campaign. No, global warming is not a Chinese hoax, wind farms don’t cause cancer and no, you definitely can’t treat coronavirus with bleach.
I asked Trump about his controversial golf course in Aberdeen—“one of the greatest courses ever built in the world”—and his strong-arm tactics in buying the land and overturning environmental opposition.
Trump replied: “Yeah, look, what people don’t know is that a poll came out, which said I had a 93 percent approval rating in the area. There have been stories about how incredible this has been for Aberdeen. It’s been a huge, huge success for Aberdeen. Everyone’s doing well, because of my golf course. It’s so successful, and the people love me over there. Aberdeen is booming because of me. You can’t get a hotel room because of me. The course is full, by the way, it’s doing record business. I can’t get friends of mine on the course. Look, 93 percent of the people in Aberdeen love me.”
The 2010 BBC documentary All-American Billionaire shows several clips of Trump trumpeting this 93 percent approval rating in a series of interviews. Despite repeated requests, the program’s producers never could find the source of the figure; nor could a spokesman for the Trump organization; nor could I. 
And I called the course the next day, claiming to be a golfer from Edinburgh enquiring about booking a round on the course later in the year. “Come tomorrow if you want,” I was told. “Or come at the weekend. We’ve got plenty of times available.”
A favourite tactic of trumpology is to cite unnamed sources who affirm his brilliance. He referred to some “very important and very powerful political people” in Scotland who told him that Trump is the best thing to happen to Scotland in years.
At one point, growing weary of the unrelenting sales pitch, I decided to employ a bit of trumpery on Trump by citing unnamed sources who disagree with him. I told him that I had asked a few people in the golf industry what they thought the Trump brand stood for, and that one had said: “Ostentatious wealth coupled with poor taste.”
Well, he didn’t like that. The hot air turned cold. He demanded who had said such a thing. Trump said “if you put that in, it’s no longer a good story, it’s not even a fair story.” He added that the unnamed person was “gutless” for not going on the record. 

"You can do anything"
​Trump said he thought golf should be an elitist, aspirational pursuit, a reward for being rich, despite its origins in Scotland as a game of the people. He took a business call (“Absolutely…have them do something incredible there”). He repeatedly chided me for my earlier impertinence, which he described as “do-you-beat-your-wife” journalism. There was a brief visit from his eldest son and family, Don Jr., the one who likes conspiracy theories and killing rare animals.
Then it was time to go. We walked out to the reception area and posed for photos in front of a wall covered in framed magazine covers of Trump. Trump showed me the glossy 2014 Miss USA brochure—he bought the rights to it and Miss Universe in 2002—leafing through the pages, pointing out some contestants that caught his eye. 
In his book Think Big he writes: “The women I have dated over the years could have any man they want; they are the top models and most beautiful women in the world. I have been able to date (screw) them all because I have something that many men do not have. I don’t know what it is but women have always liked it.”
Trump then proceeded to rub the side of his head against the chest of one of his secretaries, half-closing his eyes and making cooing sounds as he did so.
Many women have come forward to accuse Trump of sexual assault; in the famous “locker room banter” tape, he brags about his misconduct.
“You can do anything,” he says.
​He can say anything too, whitewashing his at-times open racism with statements such as "no one has done more for black people than me."
Many have questioned Trump’s sanity.
More than 70,000 mental health professionals signed a petition declaring “Trump is mentally ill and must be removed from office.”
The main Trump diagnosis from afar has been narcissism or, specifically, Narcissistic Personality Disorder: “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”
Others have diagnosed Trump as a psychopath or having Antisocial Personality Disorder: “A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.” One Oxford professor used a psychometric scale to conclude that Trump is more of a psychopath than Hitler.
Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist and also Trump’s estranged niece, is scathing in her assessment of her uncle, who she called on to resign. In her book, Too Much and Never Enough, published last month, she writes about the “malignantly dysfunctional” Trump family, especially Donald’s parents who were by turn self-serving, absent or cruel.
Trump’s own self-diagnosis is that he is a “very stable genius.”
The best diagnosis, perhaps, is that he has a full-blown, chronic case of being Donald Trump.
Trump is a kind of parody of tycoonery, distillation of capitalism, an extrapolation of what you get when society genuflects at its altar; when the law of the jungle trumps human qualities like kindness, empathy, compassion, trust, integrity, vulnerability, fairness, sharing—and love.
In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, the ruthless pig Napoleon engineers a coup against his fellow revolutionary leader, Snowball. He invents the lie that Snowball—the hero of the Battle of the Cowshed—is in fact a traitor, and that he, Napoleon, is the real hero (Napoleon was nowhere to be seen during the battle). The propaganda, masterminded by the pig Squealer, is successful: Snowball is driven off the land by Napoleon’s dogs, and all the bleating sheep, now living in squalor, see Napoleon as their true leader. Orwell intended the book to be a warning: Beware the megalomaniac who lies, cheats and manipulates his way to the top, spreading fear and manipulation along the way, while lining his pockets, furthering his power, and in his wake leaving any concept of society in tatters, with the populace divided, bitter, afraid and impoverished.
Trump is not the first megalomaniac, narcissist or psychopath to occupy the White House. But he might perhaps be the first president to regard himself as bigger than the presidency.
If he loses this election—“you’re fired”—he will not go gently into a retirement of golf, opening libraries and doing good charitable works; perhaps an annual Christmas selfie with Melania offering goodwill to the world. There may be outrageous legal challenges, injunctions and counteractions. Increasingly paranoid, incoherent tweets. In the Hollywood version, Trump is led away in cuffs, unshaven, his once resplendent mane now a sudden shock of white.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Among the tens of millions of deaths resulting from the last great flu pandemic 100 years ago—the so-called Spanish flu—was Sophie Halberstadt, the fifth of Sigmund Freud’s six children. She died on January 25, 1920.

Freud wrote to his mother the next day, informing her of the terrible news, and adding: “I hope you will take it calmly; tragedy after all has to be accepted. But to mourn this splendid, vital girl who was so happy with her husband and children is of course permissible.”

The next day he wrote to his friend, Oskar Pfister, that “sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been snatched away by pneumonia, snatched away in the midst of a glowing health, from a full and active life as a competent mother and loving wife, all in four or five days, as though she had never existed...The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us. Tomorrow she is being cremated, our poor Sunday Child!”

There was no comfort in religion for Freud—famously atheistic, he regarded a belief in god as an infantile need for a father figure. Writing of Sophie’s passing to psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, Freud said: “as a confirmed unbeliever I have no one to accuse and realize that there is no place where I could lodge a complaint.”

Sophie left behind two sons. The younger one, Heinele, was just a baby at the time. He was, wrote Freud, “physically very fragile, truly a child of the war, but especially intelligent and endearing." When he too died, three years later, of tuberculosis, Freud was undone. Another three years on, Freud wrote to fellow analyst Ludwig Binswanger: “This child has taken the place of all of my other children and grandchildren for me, and since then, since Heinele's death, I no longer take care of my other grandchildren and no longer feel any enjoyment in life either."

To British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones he wrote: “Sophie was a dear daughter, to be sure, but not a child. It was ... when little Heinele died, that I became tired of life permanently. Quite remarkably, there is a correspondence between him and your little one. He too was of superior intelligence and unspeakable spiritual grace, and he spoke repeatedly about dying soon. How do these children know?"

Freud had written about grief before as a younger, less blemished man. His landmark paper comparing mourning and melancholia (1917) said the former was a healthy, temporary depression following a loss, a process that when completed successfully allows the bereaved person to live and love again. Melancholia by contrast, more self-defeating, enduring and with no apparent conscious cause, was more problematic. Freud memorably described it as “an open wound.”

But as the losses mount, they can accumulate and sometimes be felt more keenly over time, not less, and the distinction between mourning and melancholia can become blurred by all the tears and the fog of remembrance.

In another letter to Binswanger in 1929, Freud wrote: “Although you know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It's the only way of perpetuating that love which we don't want to relinquish.”

Freud suffered in his life. A perpetual cigar smoker, he had more than 30 surgeries on a mouth cancer that caused him excruciating pain. He and his youngest daughter, Anna—a famous psychologist in her own right—fled the Nazis n 1938 and moved to London. Freud died by doctor-assisted suicide the following year, three weeks after the start of the Second World War—a war that saw his four sisters murdered in the Holocaust.

The death of Sophie, however, and of little Heinele were defining moments in the landscape of his 83 years on earth.
​
Freud learned that we never really get over life’s biggest losses. What we can do is honour the dead by living—and living well.
 

Inauguration Day USA.
The time has come for the 45th president, Donald Trump, to take the oath of office. The property developer and reality TV host is one of the richest people in the world and, at 70, the oldest president to be elected.

​But what do we really know about the man beyond the biographical facts and his rather cartoonish public image?
Underneath all the bluster, self-promotion and insatiable hunger for power, wealth and women, is there a sensitive, damaged soul? A conscience? An inner life? Or just the sound of a chill wind whistling through empty, dark chambers of the Trump machine, bereft of emotion, spirit, light or love?
Who is Donald Trump?
What is his psychology?
 
Narcissistic personality
Three prominent American psychiatrists wrote to president Obama in late November stating that Trump suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder and was thus unfit for office.
“Professional standards do not permit us to venture a diagnosis for a public figure whom we have not evaluated personally,” stated the letter, which was made public. “Nevertheless, his widely reported symptoms of mental instability — including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality — lead us to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office.”

The diagnosis of NPD—also the conclusion of five therapists in a story in Vanity Fair—is summarised by the industry standard reference book, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), as: “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. Believe that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with other special or high-status people (or institutions)
4. Requires excessive admiration
5. Has a sense of entitlement
6. Is interpersonally exploitative
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.”
 
Worse than Hitler
Others have meanwhile diagnosed Trump as a psychopath. One Oxford professor used a psychometric scale to conclude that Trump is more of a psychopath than Hitler.
Psychopaths, which I have written about previously, are usually not chainsaw-wielding serial killers but are instead the kind of driven, high-functioning, succeed-at-any-cost characters who can be found in all walks of life. In his 1993 book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, Robert Hare estimated there were at least 2 million psychopaths in North America, and by that measure there are likely 400,000 in the UK.
Hare identified 20 characteristics of psychopaths that are used in his diagnostic test, the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), such as: Glibness/superficial charm; Grandiose sense of self-worth; Pathological lying; Cunning/manipulative; Lack of remorse or guilt; Shallow emotions; Callousness/lack of empathy; Failure to accept responsibility for own actions; Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom; Impulsivity; Early behaviour problems; Promiscuous sexual behaviour. (Take this quiz if you want to find out your level of psychopathy.)
Psychopathy isn’t a recognised disorder in the DSM—it only gets a brief mention in the description of Antisocial Personality Disorder.” ASP is defined as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others” and includes ego-centrism; self-esteem derived from personal gain, power, or pleasure; goal-setting based on personal gratification; lack of empathy, incapacty for intimacy; manipulativeness; deceit; callousness; hostility;  disinhibition. Criminal activity is also among its diagnostic indicators (eg. “Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors”).
 
I have met Trump on more than one occasion and in 2014 interviewed him for an hour and a half in his Fifth Avenue Trump Tower office for the American magazine Golf Digest (you can read it here). So as a qualified psychotherapist, what’s my professional opinion: NPD? Or ASP?
Neither.
Why?

Firstly, there’s the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule” which stipulates that its members should not make a diagnosis of someone who they have not examined face-to-face; nor should they publicly discuss the mental health of anyone without their consent.
The rule takes its name from the 1964 election, when Fact magazine reported psychiatrists’ opinions—not “facts”—about the mental health of the Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, describing him as “warped,” “narcissistic,” “impulsive,” a “paranoid schizophrenic,” with much condemnatory armchair speculation as to his psychobiography, motivation and overall mental health. Goldwater lost the presidency but won a lawsuit against Fact for libel.

Many practitioners have broken the Goldwater Rule—desperate times apparently call for desperate measures. And there is no explicit equivalent of the rule to be found among the ethical guidelines of British psychotherapy professional bodies like the UKCP and BACP. But mental health professionals’ urge to diagnose public figures from afar is to be resisted. Anyone is free to have an opinion about a public official and express it, within the bounds of libel law--calling someone for instance a lying, power and money-hungry sexist racist bigot. But using your professional position to label any human being—yes, Trump is human—with a specific clinical diagnosis without their input and consent is an an act of violence to that person and to the absolutely vital notion of confidentiality which underlies the profession.

For me, however, a bigger concern with branding Trump as an NPD or an ASP is with the validity of such diagnostic labels.
There is an obsession in western psychiatry with attempting to apply a medical model to mental health, as if all psychological distress can be divided up into a textbook of discrete, objectively-measurable, uniform conditions, as if terms like “depressed” or “schizophrenic” or “narcissist” were something more than broad adjectives that mask vast individual differences, experiences and meanings.
This return to a reductive conception of mental illness has been driven by political and economic forces. There is much commerce in pathologising aspects of the human experience that are deemed problematic, itemising them according to their supposedly reliable patterns of symptoms, ascribing biological causes to those symptoms, then prescribing drugs which promise to reduce or eradicate them.
The DSM is a kind of license to medicate. By 2005 for instance, facilitated by enormous amounts of sponsored “research” and marketing, one in 10 Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant. “Shyness” is now considered an unacceptable sickness. The diagnosis of “bipolar” has risen by 4,000 percent since the mid-1990s.
This is not to say that mental illness is a myth, a mere social construction, a form of political control, as the “antipsychiatrists” like Laing and Szasz claimed.
Nor is it to say that there is no place for medications and biological considerations of the psychological, or that the DSM has no value—it does provide a framework and a language; a shorthand that facilitates communication among colleagues, and clues about treatment direction.

But to pretend that there is such a uniform, distinct condition like NPD or ASP that descends on the unwitting, passive recipient as might measles or tuberculosis, is ridiculous. Our psychology affects how we live our lives, and how we live our lives affects our psychology, leading to an infinite branching of the tree of function and dysfunction. The complexity of humans and the diversity of their distresses defy neat pigeonholing.

So what can we say about Trump?
The most accurate “diagnosis” of the new president is that he has a very extreme case of being Donald Trump. Society has richly rewarded him for that. He represents a kind of extrapolation of the laws of the jungle, a quintessence of capitalism, where there is no place for doubt or indecision or self-reflection; no let up. Like a hungry shark, Trump is always swimming, alone, and everything else in the ocean is viewed solely in terms of opportunity and threat. In his get-rich, self-help, self-homage book Think Big, he writes: “The world is a vicious and brutal place. We think we’re civilised. In truth, it’s a cruel world and people are ruthless. They act nice to your face, but underneath they’re out to kill you.” 

A psychologist in the magazine The Atlantic last year concluded: “It is always Donald Trump playing Donald Trump, fighting to win, but never knowing why.”

New Yorker writer Mark Singer memorably described Trump’s life as “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”

In my interview with him, I concluded by asking Trump if there was ever a pause in the relentless self-promotion and salesmanship:
Q: Does it ever stop? Do you ever switch off?
A: Um, probably, but... not too often.
Trump looks puzzled, as if this notion had never occurred to him. He laughs.
Q: Yeah.
A: I don't know.
Q: What would happen if you did?
A: I don't know. It might be a disaster. I think it could be a disaster.

​Long considered a sexist dinosaur with a cocaine habit and some bizarre ideas—does anyone believe that little boys literally fear castration, want to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers?—Sigmund Freud is enjoying something of a renaissance.

As Oliver Burkeman recently outlined, the therapy Freud invented, psychoanalysis, is at last gaining some much-needed empirical support, while at the same time the default treatment on offer in the U.K., quick fix, symptom-focussed cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), is increasingly looking like some sort of snake oil.

CBT appeals to our common sense. But common sense isn't as common as we'd like to believe.

Freud’s revelation was that we are not necessarily always logical, rational beings making optimal choices as we navigate through life’s vagaries, that we are in fact to a large extent strangers to ourselves.

Therapy today
Freud’s influence was far-reaching and profound. But he was a flawed character. You get the feeling he started to believe in his own myth. Patients often had to fit into his theories rather than the other way round. Any dissent might be met by indignant harrumphing or an ended friendship. He was capable of exploiting his position as a white male authority figure for personal ends. His work was sometimes more to do with furthering the legend of Sigmund Freud than with healing.

Some of his ideas and speculative musings have great metaphorical and symbolic value, yet he invited ridicule by insisting on speaking in absolutes and the rigid certainties of hard science. He was somewhat obsessional, detached, and ironically perhaps not so much of a people person, once writing, “I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience, most of them are trash.” The best they could hope for was “common unhappiness.” In photographs, his facial expressions run the gamut from utter foreboding to grim disdain.

Freud claimed psychoanalysis worked. He would identify unconscious motivations and unhelpful patterns, explain them to the grateful patient and, thus fortified, the patient would make better choices going forward. Except that very often they didn’t.

Today’s therapists who work at any depth will, like Freud, want to uncover your blueprint, your patterns, your unconscious processes. They might explore your childhood, interpret significant memories, analyse your dreams, which for Freud were the “royal road” to the unconscious. But they know that, while self-knowledge is helpful, it only takes a client so far. Lasting change and healing comes from the heart as well as the head, through acceptance, support and love. Research shows it is the therapeutic relationship itself which heals.

Good therapists are not inflated with their own importance, nor blinded by their own certainties. They treat clients ethically, not just because there are codes of ethics to abide by, but because ethical therapy is inherently good therapy. Above all, they are fully engaged with the client, noticing what is happening between them, and always working in partnership with them, in their best interests, rather than lording over them as they lie on the couch, prostrate and exposed (whether as a client or a therapist, I prefer to sit chair to chair and eye to eye). A good therapist cares.

It’s not enough to know and be known. To thrive in this life it helps, too, to love and be loved.

​An important ending warrants cake. And at a meeting of therapists, what better than a cake bearing Sigmund Freud’s face?

How very Freudian. The father of psychoanalysis would likely regard biting into his face as a highly Oedipal act. He might note our obedience to the pleasure principle: we get cake, we eat too much, then the reality principle sets in—we feel gross and our super-ego makes us feel guilty. He would chuckle at our cake-related repetition compulsion. He'd probably say the whole thing was all about sex.

What actually did Freud have to say about cake? A quick online search of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud reveals a handful of mentions. A retelling of an interpretation of a cake-related dream. An analysis of an irritating, unfunny joke involving cake. A 1909 letter to Ferenczi offering “most cordial thanks for the very splendid holiday cake.”
​
And this little tale, courtesy of one of Freud’s closest chums, Dr. Hanns Sachs:
​“Our maid is particularly fond of a certain kind of cake. There is no possible doubt of this, as it is the only thing that she always makes well. One Sunday she brought in this particular cake, put it down on the sideboard, removed the plates and cutlery of the previous course and stacked them on the tray on which she had brought in the cake; she then put the cake back on the top of this pile instead of on the table, and disappeared with it into the kitchen. Our first idea was that she had noticed something that ought to be put right about the cake, but when she failed to appear again my wife rang and asked: ‘Betty, what has happened to the cake?’ ‘How do you mean?’ replied the maid, not understanding. We had first to point out to her that she had taken the cake away with her again. She had put it on the pile of dishes, carried it out and put it away ‘without noticing’.

“Next day, as we were about to eat what remained of this cake, my wife noticed that there was just as much as we had left the day before—in other words, that the maid had rejected her own share of her favourite dish. When asked why she had not eaten any of the cake she replied in some embarrassment that she had not wanted any.

“The infantile attitude is very clear on both occasions: first the childish insatiability which did not want to share the object of her wishes with anyone, followed by the equally childish defiant reaction: ‘If you grudge it me, keep it for yourselves; I don't want anything at all now’.”

Yesterday the newly-elected Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn unveiled his shadow cabinet. Part of the line up was a position new to British politics: shadow “Minister for Mental Health.” Liverpool Wavertree Labour MP Luciana Berger, 34, assumes the role. She was first elected to Parliament in 2010, served as shadow Minister for Energy and Climate Change, and then shadow Minister for Public Health, campaigning for the NHS.

Regardless of where you or I stand on the political spectrum, this seems like an eminently sensible idea. Partly thanks to the efforts of former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in the last government, mental health issues have become a major political talking point lately and featured prominently in the election campaigns this past spring. But actions speak louder than cheap political rhetoric: over the last Parliament, mental health service budgets, already on their knees, were slashed by more than 8 percent. Services are inadequate. Last year, 7,000 vulnerable people in the U.K. with mental health problems—a lot of them children—ended up being held in police cells, because there were no beds available.

Freedom of information requests by Berger earlier this year showed that NHS clinical commissioning groups on average spend just 10 percent of their budget on mental health, which accounts for almost a quarter of the NHS’ burden of disease.

One in four people in the U.K. experience mental ill-health every year, causing an annual loss of £26bn to the economy.

Berger said: “Mental health should be treated no differently to physical health. People with mental illness shouldn't have to expect different standards of care simply because of where they live.”

In a speech in Parliament in February, Corbyn said: “All of us can go through depression; all of us can go through those experiences. Every single one of us in this Chamber knows people who have gone through it, and has visited people who have been in institutions and have fully recovered and gone back to work and continued their normal life.”

On Sunday, his first morning as leader, Corbyn snubbed the BBC’s Andrew Marr show and instead visited his local NHS mental health trust, Camden & Islington.

The ghost in the machine
One priority for any politician who wants to improve mental health services in the U.K. should be to promote a much greater diversity of available treatments. The NHS is far too therapeutically monocultural, wedded to the symptom-treatment medical model of clinical psychology, one that attempts to apply simplified, uniform labels to the vast diversity and complexity of human psychological distress, and a one-size-fits-all miracle cure-all in the shape of short-term cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Psychotherapy and other more holistic and sophisticated approaches get squeezed out. Too often the notion of “stepped care” ends up being just one step—and not a very big one, either.

For more than two millennia, from the time of Socrates, psychology was essentially a philosophical endeavour. With the dawn of the Enlightenment, however, the Industrial Revolution, and a new age of reason which pledged its allegiance to rationality and logic, it abandoned its roots in favour of modernist ideas of “science.”

This shift was especially marked by the publication in 1913 of John B. Watson’s influential manifesto of radical behaviourism, which recognized “no dividing line between man and brute.” Watson was only concerned with the observable, measurable human responses to stimuli. What went on in between, in that messy “black box” of the human psyche, was of no concern. For the past century, this kind of “positivist” psychology that treats humans as machines has prevailed. It is still taught widely in universities. It directs much flawed, quantitative industry research that is influential yet of limited practical value to psychotherapists (the French existentialist Merleau-Ponty regarded the “science” of psychology as “always both naïve and at the same time dishonest”).

The new modernism is neuroscience. Brain scans are fascinating, but as explanations of minds, souls or consciousness, they are about as useful as a map of London is as an explanation of London. These neuroimages are but the flickering shadows on the walls of Plato’s Cave. They are fixated on the machine instead of the ghost in the machine.

At its best, psychotherapy dances with the ghost as well as the machine. It rejects attempts to delimit, confine or manualize the complicated business of being human and looks instead below the surface, considering historical causes of symptoms, unconscious and conscious motivations, intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts, and environmental constraints and challenges. It embraces uncertainty (Voltaire: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition. But certainty is absurd”).

In a postmodern world, there are no absolute, objective truths when it comes to human beings and their psyches. Subjectivity rules, and my truth, my reality, my experience of being anxious, depressed, bipolar, schizophrenic, suicidal, disabled and so on might be entirely different to yours.

One photograph. A little boy in a red T-shirt, blue shorts and tiny trainers. He is face down on a beach in Turkey. The toddler, just 3 years old, was Aylan Kurdi. He drowned alongside his brother and mother.

Aylan was just one story in the huge current refugee crisis—a mass exodus of 4 million Syrians attempting to flee war and the occupation of their homeland by Islamic fundamentalists. More than 2,600 have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean for the imagined sanctuary of Europe. In stark contrast to countries like Germany and Sweden, the response from the British government has been pitiful: only 216 Syrian refugees have thus far qualified for the official relocation program and Prime Minister David Cameron originally said the total would not rise above 1,000. “I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees,” he said, thereby blithely consigning thousands to staying home to face persecution, torture, imprisonment and death, or else risking escaping on leaky, overcrowded boats.

The number of forcibly displaced people around the world reached a staggering 59.5 million by the end of 2014, compared to 51.2 million a year earlier and 37.5 million a decade ago. The massive increase in people in search of refuge over past decades is no accident. It is the direct result of globalisation, a Third World crisis born to a significant degree of First World politics. As long as there are great disparities between economic, social and political conditions between countries in the world, migration in large numbers is inevitable.

The easiest way to justify such a profoundly unequal and unfair world order is to blame its victims, through a process of “othering” or what Edward Said calls “Orientalism.” Dominant powers establish “truth” about both themselves and those over whom they exert power. “We” are surely rational, developed, humane and good, while the “other”—foreigner, immigrant, refugee, asylum seeker, eastern European, Muslim, African, Asian, black, nonwhite—is portrayed as inherently barbaric, inferior, backward, aberrant, criminal, corrupt, violent, poor, lazy and dirty. The mobilization of such negative stereotypes by politicians and press in the U.K. has been going on for generations. Both of the two main political parties compete in a dismal race to the bottom for the perceived electoral asset of “toughness” toward outsiders, while sections of the British media, which have a long, horrible history of xenophobia, compete to see which can attract the greatest number of readers by publishing the most hostile, fearmongering stories. A columnist in The Sun recently called the refugees “cockroaches”; the Daily Mail wondered why the government could stop Hitler but not “a few thousand exhausted migrants.”

As Noam Chomsky writes: “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

And then, on Wednesday, a photograph appears, the corpse of a little boy, washed up on the shores of “Fortress Europe.” And through the democracy of social media, the public responds, magnificently, with great humanity, putting the politicians and tabloids to shame with campaigns (eg. #refugeeswelcome), fundraising and relief runs, petitions, marches, banners at football matches and all kinds of extraordinary, individual offers of help.

“I’ve worked for the UNHCR for more than seven years and, to be honest, this is the most generous response I’ve seen in terms of the way it has touched people and their willingness to offer help on a very personal level,” said Laura Padoan of the UN refugee agency.

Therapy—for better or for worse?
In psychological terms, the demonizing “othering” process is called projection. All the unpleasant parts of us are ascribed instead to the “other” such that we can preserve a self-image of purity. This happens individually, between us, and it happens collectively, between nations. What Jung called “the shadow” does not live in foreigners from Third World. It lives in all of us.

Psychotherapy, too, has a tendency to project, to “other,” to blame the victims. Social environment psychologists like Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney have pointed out that so much human psychological distress and suffering is born of dire circumstances, the result of a ravenous capitalism machine that mankind used to master but has now enslaved us.

Rather than looking for insight, the late British psychologist David Smail argued that therapists should look for “outsight”—an awareness of a person’s environment, of the oppressions of a deeply-unfair social order; an indefensible hierarchical power structure that keeps people down.

Not surprisingly, studies have shown considerably higher rates of psychological distress among refugees, including PTSD, depression and somatic complaints compared to the general population or other kinds of migrant. Let’s hope that the traumatized refugees who do manage to arrive at our green and pleasant land aren’t then exposed to the kind of counselling that invites them to consider their dysfunctional “negative automatic thoughts” or unhelpful “repeating patterns” of behaviour.

Writes Smail: “I can think of no mainstream approach to psychological therapy which doesn’t harbour at its core a humourless authoritarianism, a moralistic urge to control, that has the ultimate effect of causing infinitely more pain than it could ever conceivably hope to cure.”

The ways that counsellors and psychotherapists seek and work with both insight and “outsight,” the extent to which they “other” their clients, and the power dynamics in the consulting room determine whether they are part of the problem or part of the solution. Therapy, for better or for worse, operates at the intersection of the personal, the professional and the political,

Togethering
In his 1955 book The Sane Society, Erich Fromm concludes: “In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.” The future, he argued, will either see a grand, mutual destruction—or else a rediscovery of our shared humanity.

Sometimes we are woken up to that shared humanity. We meet someone who rocks us out of our complacency. Or something dreadful happens to us that makes us see things afresh. Or we see a devastating photograph that completely stops us in our tracks.

The image of Aylan’s lifeless little body cuts through all the stereotypes, the xenophobia, the UN reports, the statistics of war (the greater the number of people suffering, the greater the likelihood of a collapse of compassion). He could have been your child, or a friend’s child or any child. He could have been you.

We look at that photograph and we feel outraged. We are impelled to do something. We might not get it right. We might be clumsy and make mistakes. But we try to come out from behind our own borders and boundaries and barricades. We join forces, we connect, we act. We are One World. And so, instead of “othering,” we tiptoe towards some kind of “togethering.”

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