Publications and research interests
Cézanne and the post-Bionian Field. An Exploration and a Meditation, Routledge, 2021
Portraits of the Insane. Théodore Géricault and the Subject of Psychotherapy, Karnac, 2016
Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts. Romanticism and the Analytic Attitude, Routledge, 2012
Théophile Gautier: A Romantic Critic of the Visual Arts, Oxford University Press, 1982
with Del Loewenthal, Post-Modernism for Psychotherapists. A Critical Reader, Routledge, 2003
I am interested, as anyone practising analytic therapy needs to be, in what Freud called ‘free-floating attention’, our capacity for open-mindedness and reverie. Neuroscientists might view this as part of ‘right hemisphere’ activity, without which our reasoning and cognition, necessary and important as they are, risk leading us astray.
My first career was as an art historian - I have a doctorate from the Courtauld Institute and I taught and examined widely in art schools – and I am interested in how poetry and art can help us in all kinds of ways, not least in maintaining an open, ‘analytic’ and ‘field’ attitude.
The therapeutic setting is a privileged space for developing our availability for
the unknown and unprecedented, and I see psychotherapy as a ‘science of the human’, which can help us question and challenge orthodoxies, and re-connect us to sociality.
