Interview with Juan Tubert-Oklander

17 May 2019

The interview took place in the garden of Juan Tubert-Oklander’s London hotel the afternoon before his Foulkes Lecture. Towards the end of the interview, Regine Scholz, who was also staying there, joined the conversation.

You speak in your Foulkes Lecture about group analysts paying “lip service” to fundamental concepts and you call for a new paradigm. Elsewhere you’ve spoken about “transcendental change for humankind”, so it’s a large project you’re contemplating here. Do you think group analysis can change the world?

That’s a very big question! I do not think group analysis or psychoanalysis can change the world by themselves. I think there’s a need for a deep change in our way of thinking about ourselves, humankind, society, the world. I think we have something to add as analysts. It may not be all that much but it’s our bit. I believe that when Freud created psychoanalysis he opened a whole new path for the human mind, a new way of thinking, but he wasn’t quite aware of that. At least he wasn’t all that aware of the momentous change he had initiated, and I believe that group analysis has come to correct some of the original deficiencies of psychoanalysis.

So what can we do? We can invite people to think in other ways. There are quite a lot of people from many sides and disciplines trying to do that, but we have a bit of knowledge and experience that other people do not have. We have something to add – let’s say a bit of salt and pepper – to the dish, and that’s the recognition of the unconscious dimension of human experience. I very specifically put it that way. I do not think there’s anything such as the unconscious. When you say that you suggest that the unconscious is a thing or an object – something like an inner mental organ, Freud’s “mental apparatus”. I do not think about it that way. What I believe is that Freud discovered a whole new dimension of human experience: the unknown in our experience of ourselves and others and the world. That new dimension is not necessarily linked to individual human beings. There’s an unconscious dimension to solitary meditation, to a dialogue like the present one between you and me, to a group discussion, to an inter-group relation, to institutions, to communities, to nations and to international relations. There’s always an unconscious dimension to every human event and I think that’s something new. Freud started it, we group analysts amplified it to cover a much wider field, and it’s something that has to be taken into account. Politicians, philosophers, sociologists usually do not take it into account. That’s the bit we can add. There is a need for a wholesale reflection on human affairs; they aren’t being conducted in a very sensible way nowadays. I think that most of the affairs of the world are in a dark condition presently.

What was in the back of my mind when I asked you my first question was the difference between the large group and the small group. But perhaps before we can get to that difference, I have to ask what the difference is between paradigm and technique in therapy. It’s one thing to formulate ideas about the unconscious, it’s another thing to engage in a practice where people achieve a new level of awareness or understanding – are perhaps even motivated to break with their surroundings or beliefs. Can you comment on this difference?

I do not believe in technique. I have to qualify that remark. Of course there are techniques to do specific things. There’s a way to build a table like this one here. There are several ways and some are better, some are not so good, some are poor and some are outright bad. But I don’t believe there is something like the psychoanalytic or group-analytic technique. This is not a new idea. In psychoanalysis, Michael Balint wrote about it in the 1960s. He challenged the idea of a standard psychoanalytic technique which all of us should apply. It’s like the way medicine is taught and practiced nowadays, with protocols. A protocol is a recipe in which you follow a certain sequence of actions and that sequence guarantees the result. That’s the way medicine is taught now and I believe it’s nonsense. The way medicine is taught and practiced seems to aim at avoiding the need for doctors to have to think. They just apply procedures. In psychoanalysis and group analysis there are ways of doing things, some better than others, such as establishing a contract or carrying out a session, but they do not guarantee anything. They are just our metier. The real stuff is a certain attitude, a certain way of thinking of being, of relating, and that has to do not with an analyst does but with what he or she is. This is not a very popular idea, at least not in psychoanalysis, where there’s a great emphasis on technique.

So what is it that I call a paradigm? A paradigm is a way of thinking, of generating thought. It’s a vantage point. It’s a perspective and a style. It includes a series of assumptions about reality, about what is and what is not, about what knowledge is and how we can ever know anything, how we can identify reliable knowledge and discard unreliable knowledge, how we can communicate such things, what are the values that underlie anything we do. So all of these are philosophical questions but as I say in my lecture there’s no such thing as mere philosophy. Philosophy is the very stuff of existence: the need to understand something about our being and where we are, where we’re going and what we’re doing, and I believe that every human being has that need, whether conscious or unconscious, acknowledged or unacknowledged. So when I talk about a new paradigm, it’s an attempt to find a new way of thinking ourselves, others, relations and existence.

Well this is easier said than done, of course! But quite a lot of people from all places are suggesting it. For example there’s a Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire, who wrote quite a lot about education. He was interested in teaching reading and writing to people who didn’t have that ability – poor people, native people – and what he said is that it’s not a matter of technique, it’s a matter of reflection. They have to find in themselves a new belief that they can learn because they have been oppressed, exploited and indoctrinated to believe that they cannot. So his work to teach reading and writing was aimed at developing a new social and political consciousness. Of course he was considered a danger to society. Nowadays the president of Brazil, Bolsonaro, has forbidden the use of Freire’s ideas because that way of teaching makes people change and turns them into less manipulated people. There’s another Brazilian called Leonardo Boff. He was a Catholic priest, a theologian and author. He was a member of the Liberation Theology movement, and he was persecuted by the church during John Paul II’s very long period as pope. The person who was in charge of persecuting him was Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict. Boff was forbidden to teach theology, to publish, to write, and so he left the Catholic church. He married a former nun, and he is still working in what they call Christian communities. In the last couple of decades he has been writing about religion from an ecological point of view. He says that spirituality requires a respect for nature and Mother Earth. In the realm of politics, there’s the present President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, who’s been restoring the ancient beliefs of the Incas of the Pachamama, which is Mother Earth. He has included that in the Bolivian constitution, that Mother Earth must be protected. Other people who have been working like this are philosophers, for example hermeneuticists like Paul Ricoeur.

Would you say that you are a traditionalist and a socialist?

Yes.

I understand your point about technique but I’m wondering about the person sitting listening to your lecture this evening who asks, “What does this mean for my practice?” So now I want to ask about the distinction between the small and large group. You have referred to de Mare’s idea of koinonia, for example. To what extent does the small group inevitably tend to reproduce what one might call the bourgeois family whereas larger groups can offer something less restrictive? You have been talking about thinkers and politicians who are outside the analytic field, but it is interesting to think about an analytic practice which goes against the ideologies and the norms of the world we live in for the sake of some other kind of community or solidarity.

When you work in small groups you tend to focus on personal issues. People are worried about their lives, their intimate relations, their history, their future, and that is not the theme of large groups. You talk about different things. I believe that if people are to understand themselves and their position in life, in the world, they have to also be able to think about the wider dimension. But that doesn’t emerge spontaneously in small groups, not so much at least as it does in large groups. So it is the conductor’s business to introduce that dimension. For example an interpretation could be, “you are relating to me and to other male members of the group in a stereotyped way that is a part of our cultural heritage.” That sort of interpretation isn’t a part of traditional psychoanalysis but it’s something that has to be taken into account even in bi-personal analysis. A male patient and a female analyst are both determined by the cultural stereotypes of what a man is, and what a woman is, and what the proper ways for the one to behave to the other are. For example a man could feel humiliated that he is in need of help because men shouldn’t need help, even less from a woman, and a woman may feel that she should not be disrespectful to this man because that’s what she was taught by her father. And all that’s unconscious for both them, what we call in psychoanalysis transference and counter-transference. I think such issues should be worked through and interpreted in the analytic relation but of course if the woman analyst has never had such issues addressed in her own analysis, most probably she won’t think about that. In bi-personal analysis and small groups, quite often it is the therapist’s job to introduce such things if the therapist is aware of them, and if he considers that they are a part of the business of analysis.

In large groups, such things tend to emerge spontaneously, but of course much depends on whether the conductor or conducting team in the large group – nowadays called the conveners – feel that they should intervene to point out such things or invite the group to reflect about them. For example, when Reyna my wife and I went to the European symposium in Dublin in 2008 we participated in the large group and we felt that the conducting team were too passive for our taste. They did not introduce themselves when they started and they were seated in different places. There were five hundred participants and really the themes that emerged during those four days were related to a series of facts. It was the first time a European symposium was being organised in Ireland, which has a very long history of colonial subjection to Britain. (The Group Analytic Society is of course pretty much a British affair.) Besides, almost all the organising committee members were women, and that was new. There were also other conflicts going on. One or two months earlier, Ireland had voted down the Maastricht Treaty – in that very room – and I remember the first day someone talked about a very heavy emotional climate and the difficulty of speaking. Everybody was worried that there were no microphones, that we couldn’t hear each other. Of course the first day in a large group usually brings out this kind of concern, but someone said, “can it have something to do with the fact that the new Treaty has been voted down?” No one took that up, and the conveners did not mention things like that. Further conflicts emerged on the second and third day between men and women, and between Europeans and non-Europeans, and on the fourth day a Japanese colleague, a woman, stood up, and said, “I wonder, if it is true that there are people from thirty-three nations and the five continents here, why this is called the European symposium?” It was a good question. All this was happening at that meeting and there was no attempt by the conducting team to interpret it. Of course I know that their tradition was that the group itself must come to conclusions, that it is not the business of the conveners to spell out what is being expressed without being said – to do that would be to use an approach much like Bion’s, when he started to reflect aloud about what he thought was happening in the group.

Reyna and I come from Latin America. I come from Argentina, she comes from Mexico. We’ve been working together in Mexico for a quarter of a century and we tend to be more active as group conductors, and to suggest a way of thinking about things. I know that the theory is that the group should develop its own thought without being manipulated by the conductor but everything depends on how one interprets. If one believes interpretation is some sort of discovery or uncovering of hidden things then there is always a danger of indoctrination. But we believe that analysis is dialogue, and when we say what we think we expect people to disagree and to say their bit! And of course we know that the conductor has a certain investment but we have to work that through so that the members of the group, be it small or large, dare to enter into a real dialogue between themselves and the conductor or conductors. Large groups are pretty difficult because they usually meet for a very short period. I think median groups are perhaps the best way. Marina Mojović has been working in Belgrade with her citizens’ groups, which meet regularly for a couple of days and are open to anyone who wants to go. We have been there once and it seems an interesting way of working.

In Argentina there was a pioneer of psychoanalysis and group analysis called Enrique Pichon-Rivière. He developed an approach simultaneously and independently from Foulkes, with other concepts but it was pretty much compatible with Foulkes’ approach. He and his coworkers and his students created a collective experience in the city of Rosario, one of the three largest cities in Argentina. They went there from Buenos Aires to run a giant workshop in the university, open to anyone. It all took about three days. To begin Pichon-Rivière gave, not precisely a lecture, but some sort of pep talk. He introduced the problematics they were thinking about, and then the audience was divided into small and heterogeneous groups to discuss what had been put forward in his opening talk. Then the conductors of the groups met for a staff meeting with Pichon-Rivière. Afterwards he once again spoke with the whole audience and then there were homogeneous groups – groups of sportsmen (there was group of boxers), groups of accountants, groups of architects, groups of artists. Then they went back to a plenary meeting. On the second day the number of people who participated was much larger than the first day. His idea was for this sort of work to be equivalent to analysing a city. So there are different ways in which you can set up a group-analytic activity to make it work in a community.

Let me push again on this question of a radical practice. There are various models of such a practice. I’m told by German group analysts that in communist Eastern Europe, the goal of group psychotherapy was to learn to overthrow the group leader, who was like the Tsar or the monarch. And then there have been more informal models such as consciousness-raising groups and community groups of other kinds where the idea was to educate about people’s rights. These models are very different from the classical psychodynamic practice of just reflecting or framing personal issues. You’ve already spoken about this in terms of identifying gender stereotypes explicitly. How far would you go in raising issues in a group or even encouraging some sort of radicalisation?

I’ll go back to Pichon-Rivière and my own tradition. He said that in the evolution of a group, or of bi-personal therapy, there’s first what he calls a pre-task period. A pre-task period is a period in which the members of the group do not tackle what they are there to do, but they complain and criticise. Then comes what he called the dilemma. The dilemma is the either/or. The group is split into two fractions. Then comes, if there’s some work on that, the problem stage. There’s a definition of a common problem for all the members, and they are able to think and discuss that and try to see how it can be tackled. He believed that in the final stage there should be a project; the group develops a project, a project for action which is the group’s project not the conductor’s. He believed that healing always needs action, although that went against the psychoanalytic tradition of reflection without action.

I believe that the blank screen is a delusion. It’s impossible, it just cannot happen. What happens in psychoanalysis is that patients are taught that they should not talk about some things, that they should not talk about what they perceive or even about what they know about the analyst (because there’s gossip of course). I remember a book by Margaret Little in which she talked about her analysis with Winnicott [Psychotic Anxieties and Containment: A Personal Record of an Analysis with Winnicott]. Margaret was a very good physician and when she initially went to analysis with Ella Freeman Sharpe she immediately noticed that her analyst had a heart condition. Sharpe had breathing difficulties, her fingers were rather blue and deformed. Little talked about that because she had been told she should talk about everything. There was utter silence. Little thought she was being rude. She also recalled that it was a very small office and in order to open the door the couch had to be moved move. Sharpe never let her help even thought she was a young woman and Sharpe was an old woman. That was never talked about either. Sharpe died during a vacation and Little still needed analysis. She went to the director of the Institute, Sylvia Payne, jumped on the couch and cried for the whole session. Sylvia Payne said, “but you’re very sick!” Little replied, “that is what I’ve been trying to tell Ella Freeman Sharpe for years, but she wouldn’t listen!” She went to Marion Milner until Winnicott had an hour for her. When she was seeing Winnicott, one day he came in and he wasn’t well. She said to him, “are you sick, Dr. Winnicott?” He said, “well, I have laryngitis.” She said, “Don’t tell me that. You are having a heart attack, go and see a doctor.” He accepted her suggestion and next day he called her. “You were right I was having a heart attack and I won’t be working for some time.” And she felt this was a healing experience for her because when she was a girl her mother always told her she was completely useless, and she had felt completely useless with Sharpe, but Winnicott acknowledged that she was an adult and a physician who could diagnose him. That’s a dramatic example, but patients always interpret their analysts, whether they say it or not.

A little over a year ago my daughter died. She was forty-two years old. My patients knew about it and they asked me how I felt. We discussed it – that’s the way I work. I would not restrict any theme that emerges and of course it’s not easy for an analyst. If an analyst is going through a bad period with a bereavement or a divorce or sickness, those are subjects that I have always felt should not be avoided. I remember I had a case I published, a vignette. A patient of mine, a younger woman, was sitting for her session and I was having a very bad day. I was very sad. I was coming from my own personal session of analysis. In Mexico, going from one place or another takes forty-five minutes or an hour and so usually by the time I came and saw my patient I was OK, but that day I wasn’t. She came and went to the couch and had an hour of very light and funny talk. I didn’t say much, then the session was over and I felt it went fine. The next day she came and told me, “I’m crazy.” “Why?” “Yesterday when I came out I sat in my car and moved the rear-view mirror to check my mascara and I saw in the mirror an old lady! I had a hallucination.” I asked her what she thought about that and all her ideas were something like a very severe state of depression. I said, “I wonder whether this has anything to do with the fact that yesterday’s session was different.” “Why? What do you mean?” “Well I was very sad yesterday.” “What happened?” “It’s not anything severe, it’s just I was sad.” And we started to work on that and I suddenly said, “I think you have introjected my own sadness.” She said, “but I didn’t know anything about that at the time.” “Well perhaps you noticed it.” Then she remembered that when she came into the office she thought she saw my eyes were red as if I’d cried. I had not cried but I was sad. And then we carried on. I asked what she thought had happened to me and she answered that her first fantasy was that my mother had died. It was not the case but at my own psychoanalytic session I had been belatedly working through the death of my mother. I did not tell her that at that moment, but we started to work on what she had done the previous session, which was to pep me up with light and funny conversation. That was what she had always done with her father. Her father was a very strong and imposing man but he was quite fragile and he always had to somehow maintain the illusion of his strength. So we could work that through and at the end when she left she said, “I hope that you get over your sadness soon.” That’s perhaps an example of why I say that I don’t believe in neutrality and anonymity.

In a group, let’s say there’s a national election going on. That has to be talked about. Of course the members of the group are probably divided in their positions and they are interested in knowing my own position. I first try to find out their positions but eventually I tell them what my position is, and we have to discuss how we can relate and work together in spite of our differences. To me analysis means exploring similarities and differences.

The theme of a feeling for the underdog and the excluded person comes through to me in your writing, for example in the way you emphasise controversial figures in the history of analytic thought. Of course you are from Latin America, coming in a way as an outsider to deliver this Foulkes Lecture in the British centre of group analysis. Can you say something about this outsider theme and what connection it may have to your own life?

You have it right about the feeling for the underdog. For some time, quite a few years now, Reyna and I have been defending a position that group analysis was born in two places at the same time, in Argentina and in Britain. Of course the name “group analysis” was introduced by Foulkes but what Pichon-Rivière was doing at the same time in Buenos Aires was pretty much the same, really compatible. Even Foulkes acknowledged that years later, in a letter he wrote to Juan Campos Aguilar in Spain, when Campos was about to publish the translation of Foulkes’ 1975 book, Theory of Group Analysis. I know that this idea, which we wrote in a book we published in 2003 for Jessica Kingsley [Operative Groups: The Latin-American Approach to Group Analysis], in Malcolm Pines’ series, is not shared by many people in the Group Analytic Society. I think that for some of them I am not a group analyst because I have not been trained in the Foulkesian tradition, even though of course I have studied Foulkes extensively. But I believe that group analysis is a generic name, as is psychoanalysis; it does not have a copyright. For many years the International Psychoanalytic Association behaved as if psychoanalysis was a copyrighted term which should only be applied to the members of that association.

There was a Mexican group analyst called Santiago Ramírez – he died many years ago – and he used to quote Emiliano Zapata’s expression that the land should be for those who work it. He said in these things we have to be Zapatistas – ideas are for those who work them not only for those in authority. I am telling you that because I come from Latin America. Latin America is a continent that was colonised for many, many years, and brutally colonised, and of course there’s a feeling about that. A few years ago Reyna and I went to a meeting in Mexico with some representatives of the government of Spain. It was a public meeting and there was a reception. We were drinking wine and there was a woman who was a member of the then-socialist government of Spain, and she said, “What is the matter with you Mexicans? Why do you still keep worrying about the conquest? It was five centuries ago. We have had wars with the Netherlands, very bloody wars, and we don’t hate them.” I said: “The problem is that you only killed each other. Here the conquest was the destruction of a flourishing culture. It was a cultural genocide and that does not go away. It is still there.” And it is still there, not only in the relationship with the Spanish conquerors but with the ruling class in Mexico. So, yes, politically and emotionally, I always tend to side with the underdog.

In terms of my own construction as a human being, I am Argentinian but my grandparents were Russian Jews who emigrated. My parents were born in Argentina. When I was born my parents were both young students. They had not graduated from the university yet. They were members of the Communist Party and they were quite dogmatic about it. I was reared in the religion of atheism but later I was cured of that! Although I do not care much about religious organisations, I would say that the sort of ideology I am referring to as a new paradigm is not all that new. The kind of social change you were asking me about was what Jesus of Nazareth was trying to teach people, and they killed him for that. I came to psychoanalysis because my first analytic treatment was when I was ten years old. I went to that treatment because I needed it. My parents sent me because I had quite a lot of symptoms, physical and mental symptoms, and it saved my life. So I remember when I was a child that I thought I would like to perhaps be an analyst. There was something else: my mother was a very sick person and I lost contact with her when I was about eleven or twelve years old, and I think when I was a child I thought I would like to be an analyst so that other children would not have to undergo the kind of suffering I was going through.

In the following years I forgot about it, I went through other vocations. I wanted to be a stage magician first, then I wanted to be a movie director, but by the time I finished high school I came back to the idea that I would like to be a psychoanalyst. I didn’t like medicine – I was very much of a hypochondriac at the time! – but I went to the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, asked them how can one become an analyst and was told you have to be a physician first. So I went to medical school and I liked it. In the end I liked it, but when I finished my medical studies I went back to the question of psychoanalysis. At the time it was not possible for me to enter training so I studied as a group therapist first. I am saying “training” because we are talking in English but I do not like the word. I say that training is for sportsmen, for marines and for trained seals. I prefer the term we use in Spanish and French, formation. I think that the idea of training is pretty much an Anglo-Saxon approach. I first trained in group therapy then I went to Mexico and in Mexico I studied psychoanalysis, became a psychoanalyst and was a member of the psychoanalytic association for some thirty years. Both my wife and I resigned from that association a little bit more than a year ago because we did not like the way things were carried out there. It was not just dogmatic but corrupt. We are still members of the International Psychoanalytic Association through the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. I don’t know if that’s worth much but we are still members, although as I told you in an email I consider myself a maverick!

[Regine Scholz:] why did you move from Argentina to Mexico?

I had been accepted to train in the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association but things were pretty bad in Argentina. There had been in 1976 a military coup d’état. Every day someone was murdered in Buenos Aires, either a member of the opposition or a member of the armed forces or a judge or a politician. Once – I was married to my first wife at the time, not long before we came to Mexico – a man was shot just in front of my house because across the street there lived a former vice-president of Argentina, Admiral Rojas, who was one of the most hated people in Argentina. There were armed bodyguards in the door of his apartment building and someone came running and they shot him. I went to Mexico to a congress. It wasn’t a psychoanalytic congress, it was called the Congress of Human Sciences in Asia and Northern Africa (it was formerly called the Congress of Orientalists). I had friends who had moved to Mexico and I saw that there were opportunities. I was walking through the city and I heard the sound of a police car and suddenly I noticed I was not tense. I said: “How many things have we grown accustomed to in our country? One cannot live like that.” And so I came to Mexico with my first wife and three children. The fourth was born a few days after we arrived. I’ve never regretted it. I’ve been living in Mexico for forty-two years now. I’ve divorced and married again to a Mexican colleague.

You’ve talked about what sounds like a very painful experience of losing contact with your mother but then you also speak very touchingly about your wife, and I wonder whether you have something to say about love, the loss and finding of love?

I have. In my own conception of life, love is the most important thing. That’s why I have sympathy for Jesus of Nazareth. When I speak about Jesus of Nazareth I speak of the historical Jesus, not the Christ of faith. The Christ of faith is a symbol that has been constructed in order to represent a certain view of life. If there’s some sort of indoctrination that I share or drop upon my patients, it’s this belief in love. I believe that love is more powerful than hate, always. That’s why I cannot accept Freud’s idea of the death instinct. Of course there’s hate, there’s envy, there’s conflict, there’s greed, all of that exists but I can’t accept that to be the essence of human nature. That’s my own ideology.

Is this love connected to adversity, to suffering or perhaps marginalisation? As opposed to say the love that goes from one stable family to another? Are there different kinds of love?

I don’t think we all have the same experience of love. I think that hate is needed to face the world but it’s needed because of circumstance. I mean sometimes you have to fight a war, sometimes you have to break apart relations. But I do not believe hate to be some sort of a drive, an instinctual drive. It’s one of our resources in order to face what we cannot or should not accept. I believe that if there is a drive in us, it’s a drive for relationship, harmony and neutrality. Of course that was not Freud’s philosophy at all and I think that one of the most important things a child has to learn, if he’s lucky enough to have a good family and a good upbringing, is that love is not a thing. It is not a cake which if you give someone more there’s less for the other. It is a living function which the more you give the more you have to give; it’s a function of the heart, I would say, and in that I am very much a Christian.

It is interesting to hear about this spiritual dimension of your thinking. It doesn’t necessarily come through to me in your papers. I even thought when I was reading them that a religious point of reference was missing. So I am very pleased that it has emerged. I didn’t think I could really ask you about what seemed to me to be missing.

Well it’s usually considered to be rude to ask people about their religious feelings! But, as I told you, I would answer that question if a patient asked it. Now one thing about religion: I come from a Jewish family but my parents were revolutionaries and they did not provide me with a Jewish education and upbringing, so I did not have the Jewish tradition and festivities. I was reared in a Catholic country and I felt very sad when Christmas came and we did not celebrate Christmas when my other friends in the building were celebrating it in their home. So I decided that next year we should celebrate Christmas. I don’t know what I did but I convinced my parents to do that and we had a family reunion. They weren’t very consistent because they were practicing atheists and they did not provide me with any consciousness of being a Jew but then they sent me to a Jewish summer camp. It was a summer camp of left-wing Jews and I remember there was a girl there who said something about us Jews and I said “I’m not a Jew,” because to me being a Jew meant having a religion. She said, “Yes you are a Jew.” I said, “No I’m not, let’s go to a leader and ask her.” And she said, “No no, you’re a Jew if you’re here.” Well that was very strange to me. It was if someone had told me I was from Australia! I had never had a relationship with the Jewish religion even though I respect it. To me religion was Christianity because that’s what was there to be seen and what I knew about, and many years later when I was forty-something I decided to be baptised by a friend and colleague who was an Anglican priest. I loved his sermons – he was from Uruguay and a very interesting mixture of scripture, heterodox theology, partly from several branches of Christianity, social criticism and psychoanalysis! Those were his sermons. So formally I’m an Anglican but I’m not a practicing believer. I go to church, to whatever church there is, if there’s some reason for that. If someone marries or someone dies, I have no problem going. I have religious feelings and thoughts, although I do not like organised religion.

Rob White
rob.white.email@gmail.com