Publications and research interests

Portraits of the Insane. Théodore Géricault and the Subject of Psychotherapy, Karnac, 2016

Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts. Romanticism and the Analytic Attitude, Routledge, 2012

with Del Loewenthal, Post-Modernism for Psychotherapists. A Critical Reader, Routledge, 2003

Théophile Gautier: A Romantic Critic of the Visual Arts, Oxford University Press, 1982

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’ 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.

My last book centres on five portraits from the early 1820s by the French painter Théodore Géricault, of people diagnosed as insane. It aims to raise questions about the nature of diagnosis, and how we ‘represent’ each other.

I am also considering a biographical study of W. R. Bion.

Portraits of the Insane.Théodore Géricault and the Subject of Psychotherapy, Karnac, 2016
Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts. Romanticism and the Analytic Attitude. Routledge2003, with Del Loewenthal
Post-Modernism for Psychotherapists. A Critical Reader. Routledge1982
Théophile Gautier: A Romantic Critic of the Visual Arts. Oxford University Press