Interview with Sue Einhorn
7 May 2019
What is your personal background and how did you become involved in psychotherapy?
After university I worked as a literary agent, but I lacked confidence in that business. There was an advert in the paper – this was 1969 I think – looking for trouble-shooters, untrained trouble-shooters. The idea was that young people weren’t all trouble-makers, some had good hearts, and you didn’t need to have a training to do youth work and similar things. So I was recruited and I went to Wales to work with “unattached youth”. It was one of two or three such projects in different parts of the country. “Unattached” here was an American term. What it really meant was gangs of kids – young people who were in those days called delinquents, like the motorbike gangs under the arches in Brighton. Where I was in Wales there were lots of bikers, but there were other children who were just hanging around the town centre. It was a new town, Cwmbran, and the project involved both community development and youth work. I did the youth-work part, which was to open up a coffee bar where these young people could come, and I got involved with the local gangs along the valleys. We were given training in T-groups. People from the organisation in Wales and elsewhere would come together for T-groups run by people like Josephine Klein from Goldsmiths. I got very interested in the psychology of young people. There was a lot of sexual abuse there. But I also got interested in community organising and when I returned to London after about two and a half years I went to the LSE to study social work while working in a residential project.
In my next job I worked at another residential project in Primrose Hill, looking after kids in the care of Camden Council. I reconnected with a lot of political thoughts and ideas at that time. Before I left Wales I had applied to the Guild of Psychotherapists and was accepted, but I was very puzzled about where you went from there. This was 1971–2; the Guild had only just been founded, and in the end I didn’t take it further. So I didn’t get involved psychoanalytically really for some time, though before I left for Wales I had actually begun in therapy at the Marlborough Day Centre with Bob Hinshelwood, who had only just started out too. But I left and I didn’t return to the therapy world until the 1980s. After the LSE I committed myself to community work. I was employed for two or three years by Islington Council, organising tenants, setting up youth clubs all around Highbury, tenants’ associations and a community nursery, all sorts of things – many of which still exist.
Then while I was pregnant with my first child I changed jobs and went to work at the North London Polytechnic, teaching group work and community work to social workers. I did that for about nineteen years, doing more and more group work. My main political involvement was with women’s groups. It was in 1980–1 that I returned to therapy, for personal reasons. Various other colleagues at the poly also went into therapy and there was a lot of feeling around about wanting to train as a therapist. Eventually I got involved in the Women’s Therapy Centre, which was also starting up at this time. I was involved with running child sexual abuse groups – Incest Survivors’ Groups, we called them – and started thinking about training. My analyst at the time was really angry because I decided that, politically, group therapy would be better for me. Overall, the trajectory from feminism into the therapy world was the same for me as for lots of women and community activists of my age. It was a very common way of moving at that time because the personal is political. What was clear was that whatever people were like in their external lives, it wasn’t like that privately. We recognised that people’s personal lives didn’t really meld with their emotional and psychological lives.
There were two main strands to it for me. One was the transmission of trauma, to do with my Jewish background and other things, and the other was political. I really believed that people could help each other and that analysts couldn’t be as helpful to me as a group of people could be. My analyst probably was helpful but I don’t think I was receptive. Also I was good friends at that time with Sheila Ernst; she and I were very close. Sheila had already started training at the IGA. I decided that I would prefer to train as a group therapist than an individual therapist, but I wasn’t sure if I could hold down a full-time job and train as a therapist as well, so I went to the WPF for a year to do their group course, where I met Tom Hamrogue, Eva Gottisman and Norman Vella. Both Tom and Norman are dead now. Ironically Norman had been a student of mine at the poly when he was a social-work student and we then reversed roles. They, and Norman in particular, encouraged me to apply to the IGA, which I did in 1989. I was already in a twice-weekly group with Malcolm Pines and I had done the IGA Introductory Course in 1982. I qualified in 1991.
I did it really because, as I often say, you can’t get rid of jealousy through politics. The whole idea of the women’s movement and progressive left-wing thought in the late 1960s was that there should be no such thing as jealousy. There were all sorts of ordinary human feelings that people disapproved of, and many of us came to feel that you can’t really change society by simply reorganising – you have to understand the emotional inner world of people as well.
That period in time also encompasses great political change, from the late 1960s to the end of Margaret Thatcher. There’s such a gulf between the image of motorbike gangs in Wales and under the arches, and a certain somewhat patrician philosophy of helping “delinquents”, to the end of the period when state provision was being destroyed. How much of your journey was to do with a reduction of the space in which you could do any of this kind of work? Were your opportunities to be political – to organise at the level of social work, for example – vanishing? This was also the time when social work was changing, becoming more bureaucratic.
Yes indeed it was, which is why I left. Social work became “competency-based” whereas when I started it was very open to psychoanalytic ideas.
Perhaps I should explain that I was brought up by communists. I was what was called a “red diaper” baby. When I went to university, which was in Exeter, it was a complete shock. It was a very landed-gentry, upper-middle-class environment, and I was very out of my depth. So I got involved in the art school and various other things like that. But politics was the way I was brought up. I’m an incredibly conventional person. It never occurred to me that there are other ways until I went to Exeter, and I came back to London specifically for the Dialectics of Liberation conference, which was in 1967, and the whole R. D. Laing thing. It’s complicated to recall because I was involved in lots of different trajectories of ideas and thoughts and thinking. Free schools, women’s groups, all sorts of things, so it’s very difficult to make a linear trace. I was the first generation to go to the red-brick universities. They were just opening, Exeter was only just being built. The country was hungry for graduates and so you could choose any job you wanted. Nobody asked you for qualifications or anything like that. You could experiment a lot. So for me to become a literary agent for a couple of years was incredibly easy. One or two people thought it would suit me, and that was that. But politics was always in my blood. I was always active politically in one way or another, and because of the whole Jewish trauma business, I was also always involved in psychological thinking. How to bring those together, and work with them, was always the dilemma for me.
The premise of Dialectics of Liberation was that psychological thinkers could lead the way. Did that make sense to you?
Absolutely. I’m talking now of me in my twenties. I was very young. Contradictory ideas to me weren’t contradictory at all, they were dialectical. So you could both believe that psychology could lead the world and you could believe revolutionary reorganisation could lead the world. It was the kind of Fanshen moment if you like. The idea was that reorganising and restructuring were crucial, but not unless people could change their emotional relationship to each other. Since people’s emotional relationships were incredibly complex and difficult you couldn’t really change them unless you did something radical – particularly if you were a woman because the women were relegated to very stereotyped roles really within the revolution, and within the Dialectics of Liberation conference.
I’m interested in exploring the politics of group analysis. There’s a lot of talk in group analysis about its radicalism, especially as against psychoanalysis, but there’s also a lot of evidence I’ve seen of an extremely bourgeois (for want of a better word) approach in the organisation of group analysis. What happened to that radicalism of the late 1960s and 70s? Was it a generation which actually drifted with the winds or did these radical ideas became outdated? Or was it that the space in which it was possible to do anything become narrower and narrower as the years went by and then Thatcher took power?
There’s a big answer and that is neoliberalism. The whole trajectory meant that the world in that sense was shrinking. There’s another level of answer, which I began before, which was family investment in my generation. We were the purpose, and certainly for a Jewish family we were very much the purpose, and so we were embedded with a lot of hope for the future. So when I went to Wales, it was my opportunity to have an adolescence. I did it to escape London. I did it because in a much more personal sense I had very little confidence. I was working in the literary-agent business and they wanted to promote me to television. I was so scared I left. (Again television was very new in literary worlds in that way.) So in a personal way, for me running the coffee bar and being involved in all sorts of things there, including an understanding about incest, was a very personal journey.
One of the things about the women’s movement was that it was a collection of a wide variety of different political perspectives. I was mainly involved in women’s aid and consciousness-raising, that sort of thing. A lot of us were there because we lacked confidence. We weren’t militantly secure about what we wanted. We were actually quite frightened. For some people it was a very militant movement, to sort of hate men or whatever, but for most of us it wasn’t about men. In fact my partner then (now husband) was involved in a men’s group. There were men’s groups around at the same time. There was a questioning of relationships, and there was a questioning of what confidence is. So there’s my personal story but there’s also a much broader sense that a lot of women who got involved in the women’s movement, particularly consciousness-raising, were in it because we lacked confidence and were looking for something. And of course most women weren’t in the women’s movement, most women rather despised it. I didn’t come across other feminists in Cwmbran, neither did I when I was in Exeter at university apart from an American couple doing a year abroad.
So it’s a complicated answer because there was a real desire to change the world and to change relationships, but what many of us learnt in our consciousness-raising groups was that however much we might have wanted a different relationships with our partners, we also carried our family history into the relationship. That was the reason for the move into therapy.
You mentioned jealousy. Was this jealousy between the sexes or among the women?
Jealousy is just a good example. You can’t instruct people not to be jealous, however politically desirable that might be. Envy and jealousy are very complicated. We know that there are huge amounts of envy and jealousy between sisters, and between men. Between men and women, between women and women. I don’t know about jealousy between men. There’s a lot of envy and competition among men but the jealousy between women is so closely linked to love that it’s a very complicated issue. I’m also wondering whether to make this the focus of my Foulkes Lecture.
One thing that struck me in the large group after your Sheila Ernst Lecture was a sense in the group that feminism might actually get in the way of discussing intergenerational unfairness or abandonment. Perhaps to dwell on the discourse of feminism now is to dwell on what have become “high-class problems”. Is feminism still defining of your work as a group analyst and as a politically aware person?
But how can you extract feminism from who I am? I am a feminist, it’s part and parcel of the way I am and the way I work. If you pick up a sense in groups I conduct that there is some sort of dialogue about male and female going on, it is because there is a difference. Having said that, the Sheila Ernst group was quite a surprise to me. It came about because of the older women’s therapists’ group that I’ve been involved in for all these years and suddenly there were all these women who wanted to be part of the group as well! And of course they could be, but it would be bizarre if they became part of that specific group. I mean I could help people set up groups if they wanted that but this was a particular group started at a particular point in time.
It wasn’t just that. There was also discussion of women’s feelings about having children, and a sense that the younger generation’s instinct to be mothers had perhaps been delegitimised by the political sensibilities of their own mothers.
Absolutely. I mean it was really different for the younger women being brought up in the 1970s communes. I mean this is what I’m talking about. You cannot eradicate jealousy just by having a commune. You can’t really share children in the sense that everybody can be the parent, and there were a lot of huge disturbances which were linked to that. And some of the children brought up in communes were there in that large group. I think it was part of the chaos of trying to live an unconventional lifestyle, and a political lifestyle, that people who were living it didn’t really understand all the ramifications. We didn’t know what we were doing, though I should explain that I didn’t live in a commune myself.
I’m still worrying whether, if the political agenda of the 1970s carries over too long, there’s a risk that it tunes out more important issues.
Did you ever read a book called Beyond the Fragments? That book basically talked about the betrayal of issue-based politics, and your question is an incredibly valid one because when you focus on one thing, which people do at the moment in terms of saving the earth, rather than seek a total political context, actually it can be a problem. But on the other hand one’s mind and one’s activism can’t encompass everything. This is one of the big rows I think that Dick Blackwell is always having with people on the Forum. He wants everyone to know everything. But you’re absolutely right that too much of a focus in one way is a hindrance. It’s better if it’s like a kaleidoscope, you see things one way and then you shake it again and see it differently.
Talking about politics and group analysis is actually rather painful for me because I think that group analysis has never really grasped its political focus in any way whatsoever and has increasingly betrayed it, and has done through ideas like the social unconscious. I will take a lot of flak for saying that, but I wish to clarify that what may be more interesting to understand than an apparently oppositional position on my part is why I have been so reticent about my feminism.
You said in the Sheila Ernst Memorial Lecture that what was called “the personal is political” is now called the social unconscious. But I would have thought that they’re not really the same thing at all in terms of metapsychology: one is unconscious and the other is conscious. So it seems to me that it’s not really about what the social unconscious may or may not be as an idea—
Well the unconscious can’t be defined as social and nonsocial, can it? You can’t say I’ve got a social and a nonsocial unconscious. We have an unconscious, full stop.
What I think I mean is that perhaps this isn’t really a conceptual argument; it’s a political not a “scientific” argument.
I suppose what I think is that saying “the personal is political” is saying why politically interested or motivated people and feminists go into therapy. Or why we might become group analysts, train as therapists, and that there’s a very deep understanding that there’s no such thing as an individual. We’re all part of the social in which we live. So I suppose to then start discovering something called the social unconscious is a bit of the way in which some of the more feminist ideas get taken up and then become what you might call scientific or acceptable because of an authority that’s imposed along the lines of “look we have something called the social unconscious that hasn’t been thought about or analysed before”. I don’t know what somebody like Foulkes would say. His interest in Elias as well as Freud meant that he had this conjunction right from the very beginning, it was a kind of very strongly felt mixture of the two: you couldn’t separate things out. But the following development of group analysis concentrated much more on the psychoanalytic than the social. In my opinion it was Farhad Dalal’s book Taking the Group Seriously that actually found Elias again and brought him back into the framework, which then enabled people to do things like “discover” the social unconscious. But the competition between the men in group analysis meant that for a long time it wasn’t a dialogue about developing Foulkes’s ideas, it was about who owned the social unconscious.
I want to distinguish between the value of theorising and the power position of claiming to be an authority in a particular area. I have often been cowardly in not claiming enough authority about being a feminist so I understand the hazard of being identified in a particular way, but to think about the social unconscious is more complex. At each international symposium, participants have thronged to Haim Weinberg and Earl Hopper’s workshops on the social unconscious because we are hungry to understand how to integrate being penetrated to the core by the social. I want to stress that I think they are doing crucial work through the New International Library of Group Analysis and these workshops. My concern is that what is transferred to them is an authority on the social unconscious which gives the topic a scientific aura but limits the dialogue. This is not personal to them but part of a social context always seeking safety in believing that someone really knows what is going on. If only!
What about competition among women in group analysis?
While the men compete with some degree of hostility towards each other, it is less clear to me how women express their competitiveness. But of course competition is there. Our training as group analysts entails a wish to be open, confident enough to express one’s thoughts and ideas but not to be the one who knows absolutely. This certainly fits a more female approach. It is too complicated to say more just now, but perhaps we take out on colleagues the feelings we cannot express as conductors?
What does this all mean in terms of technique? I’m thinking, with regard to the idea of openness, about the withholding of the personality of the analyst, for example.
One of the things Foulkes says is that when you’re a trainee your group is likely to have the characteristics of you as a trainee, and I think he’s right but I also think it’s true of all groups because conductors are group members even if we are “special group members” (as he puts it). Therefore the groups I conduct are bound to be influenced by who I am and what I am, so at one level it’s a group-analytic answer, that each member influences the group and therefore the conductor also will. At another level I think I’d take a much more relational stance. I try very hard not to set myself up as carrying the answers. So I’m very quick to agree that I might be wrong or I’ve got it wrong. I have a lot of respect for the idea that people really do know themselves better, and I feel it’s very important to be inclusive of difference. I think group analysis has lost its way in terms of being inclusive of difference. When I first trained I did a lot of work to try and do something about that, and others have also done so since then, but as far as I’m concerned the last ten or fifteen or even twenty years it has mostly been a lost cause.
I think there’s a problem, which is that it’s quite hard not to know the kind of political preferences of your group conductor, and so you may or may not feel inhibited by that. People make all sorts of assumptions about what you’re like, so in that sense I try to keep my politics out of it, and I do keep my private life out of any clinical work. But I also believe that people get to know their therapists and their group conductors extremely well, even if they don’t know details of their lives. So in some ways I’m quite open with people.
What you’re describing is very different from what I understand to have been the philosophy of the consciousness-raising group, which was all about mutual disclosure: without talking about your own experiences it wasn’t possible to communicate and reinforce the consciousness-raising. So what changes with the psychodynamic alternative – withholding not disclosing? Was that different attitude something you learnt to believe in or is it a problem to relinquish participation or transparency?
I think therapy is different from consciousness-raising. In the consciousness-raising groups I was in, there was always a level at which people just did not go. There was a real feeling of anxiety about wounding each other. There were jealousies and envies, and working out what was safe was an underlying theme. (I always had a fantasy that the Americans did it better, but I don’t know whether that’s right.) I think the purpose of therapy is slightly different. I think in therapy groups you try as the conductor to make it as safe a place as possible, which means it’s not real. Therapy groups are not real in the sense that people don’t socialise outside; they’re a kind of bubble. And in that bubble there are certain rules about integrity, honesty and an understanding that people are in the group because they want something for themselves which we call therapy – some sort of way of dealing with pain, with hurt, with humiliation, with shame (and shame is a huge issue). And so a therapy group needs a conductor, a psychological holder, to hold the safety of the group so that in this unreal safe space you can do some very painful, difficult work that couldn’t be done unless the group was safe enough. You make it safe enough to do unsafe work, and that to me is the essence of the therapy.
So when you talk about your opposition to a concept like the social unconscious—
I’m not opposed to it. I just think it’s not a unique discovery.
But there’s something you’re challenging in group analysis. Is this something that has therapeutic consequences or are we talking about the realm of professional discourse – the world of the scientific committee rather than the world of the consulting room? I’m not trying to encourage you to criticise your colleagues but to raise the question of what is the social purpose or the good of group-analytic therapy as opposed to any other kind of therapy, and does this depend on these different schools of thought?
I mean analytic therapy of all sorts is a mystery because you never know what goes on in other people’s consulting rooms and so I wouldn’t be in a position to say that somebody was a better or worse group analyst than myself. I really don’t know – I know how I work.
Perhaps we can go back to the Dialectics of Liberation. There’s a complete denunciation of psychoanalysis as a perpetuation of family models and so forth as opposed to a liberating practice. Someone like David Cooper was so extreme in the 1970s in this regard; he even advocated therapeutic sex with a client. Actually I think those books of his are amazingly interesting but they’re unthinkable today. The point is that there was a belief at that time that psychotherapy could liberate people from their family, from their society. How anybody theorises psychotherapy isn’t just a scientific problem, it’s also a question of what a therapist can hope for on behalf of the people who go through psychotherapy. Is it something small like the gradual building of self-awareness, or is it something large to do with changing a whole relationship to society and indeed changing society itself?
I don’t know what I hope for. I think an understanding about how to relate and how to find relationships that are of value, where you feel known and you can feel support or you can feel loved. Accepted rather than loved, I would say, and seen. Those are important things. To feel that you’re seen. I think that in all therapies – individual, couple, group – whatever I’ve done and been involved with, some people are able to use it to get better and other people can’t. If you’re asking me a political question, I think that if you break the bounds of convention you are then open to quite severe social punishment until the world changes, and I think there was almost a delight in masochism in the Laing–Cooper years. The more opprobrium and attack that came their way, the better and more special they felt. At the same I time think that they opened the doors to some really good questions and were really important, but the way in which people were used, including themselves really, was very damaging. So I think we can learn a lot from the experiments but I think protecting people should be part of any kind of unsafe exploration of the self. I very much want people to feel safe. But I’m also not sure how much any therapy works. I go up and down about the extent to which I think it’s helpful or not.
We’re talking about small groups here, but what about your work in large groups. When you talk about safety in therapy, it doesn’t seem so important in terms of large groups, especially large groups of professionals.
No, I think the opposite there. I think it’s better when things are a little bit unsafe. It’s like the grit that forms the pearl. But I don’t like the large groups of five or six hundred because I feel there’s too much of wiping out of people, not seeing, and you’re just inviting lots of subgroups to get together. Groups of about sixty to a hundred can, I think, be extremely interesting, and although you still get subgroups you get enough interaction and connection between people to do some quite interesting things. But I don’t think safety is the primary feature there. How you develop dialogue, how you manage to stop a subgroup controlling everybody else’s way of thinking, those are the more difficult things. In conducting large groups, I try to find ways of getting people who aren’t talking at all to talk so I might be much more directive than I would be in a small group. I’m also much more playful in large groups, much more likely to challenge through some sort of playfulness. I try and ease the tension a little so that people feel a bit more able to say things rather than to sit on their hands and wonder if it’s the right time.
For myself, I genuinely believe in the value and potential of larger groups. The group that I’m closely part of is the GASi Quarterly Members Group, which is a median group, and I really enjoy the GASi large groups because there seems to be a genuine possibility of thinking freely and radically (which is resisted as well of course). I was incredibly struck at the last winter workshop when it moved from a large group into papers and presentation. It felt to me like the police had turned up, and suddenly the workshop had become institutionalised and everybody was incredibly conscious of their status in the hierarchy. I found it difficult and unpleasant. When I’m in larger groups, I’m always as I see it fighting against that institutional regime or groupthink or various kinds of professional power play. It’s of course very unusual to find a place where you can actually speak in a determined way like that without there being significant adverse consequences. Perhaps it’s easier for me to take an oppositional stance because I’m an outsider, I’m not a professional. In GASi that doesn’t matter as much.
What I perceive outside the larger groups is for me a real problem in the psychotherapy world as a whole, but in group analysis all the more so because of its claims for itself sometimes as being radical and socially engaged. The extent to which the group-analytic world is a guild world, with perhaps significant financial rewards eventually, and great financial investment required to train, which puts it beyond the reach of ordinary people, and which seems to have a stifling effect on trainees. For me it’s a strange paradox that one of the centres of group analysis is the potentially very radical larger group and yet it’s surrounded by this middle-class, professional apparatus, for example at the IGA. Maybe you need that apparatus for containment.
I think the QMG, which I’ve never been to for a variety of reasons, is much more in the spirit of what Pat de Maré wanted. The idea that you’re all there and that people should feel free to speak and that in itself is therapeutic. I think he’s somebody you’d really have liked. He was certainly a radical. I suppose I feel a bit irritated by your attack on the training and the profession because it’s getting boring. We’re all a minority, we’re all tiny. There are so few group people. We’re just a little speck on the dot of psychoanalytic psychotherapy world and it reminds me of street gangs fighting for the street because they can’t get a proper house and can’t get to university – you know, all the things they’re entitled to. When I was working as a youth worker you had all these gangs demanding their territory because actually they had nothing but the street they lived in to have any power over. They didn’t have any power beyond the street. I think we’re all gangs: the IGA, the QMG. (As far as I can see GASi and the QMG often have a go at the IGA.) I have a deep wish, always have done, to open it out from the bourgeois world that I’m part of. I’ve always wanted that. As I said, when I first trained and became active I tried hard to do something about it. But things have become more and more reactionary, and now that there’s a more managerial approach at the IGA there’s also a slight populist movement trying to fight against it. So we have our own struggles going on. There’s a group of people in the group-analytic world saying that training itself reproduces the problem, but I think that if you don’t train therapists they’re not accountable, and we should certainly be accountable to people.
On the one hand there’s the issue of the street gangs and on the other there’s the issue of the people who help and are helped through therapy. Maybe there’s some kind of split here. At the Berlin symposium there was a response to Farhad Dalal’s address by a rather impressive German psychoanalyst or psychiatrist. He made a defence of pure clinical work with all its boundaries and bureaucracy, quite separate from politics, and in a sense you’re doing the same thing here but it’s as if you’re wanting to have your cake and eat it too because you’re laying claim to political consciousness while stressing the safe and containing work of caring for people in small groups.
Why are they contradictory?
Because what I’m observing is something almost repressive in the political culture of group analysis, which surrounds and can penetrate large groups. At the Brexit Large Group a couple of years ago, for example, which you conducted, the lack of any connection in that room apart from one or two people with the Brexit position, with the fury and the despair and the hate that’s all bound up in the Brexit position, was quite shocking. The group was a lesson in the contemporary ghettoisation of politics, and of life, into factions which can’t communicate with each other. I take your point about the need for training, which is a discipline which allows people to be responsible, and it’s a bit of a cheap shot on my part to mention fees and so forth. I also completely take your point about Laing and Cooper’s masochism. I accept all of this but nevertheless I come back to the gulf between the political ambition, the desire for something revolutionary and liberating as opposed to this very small-scale task of helping a few, those who can be helped. Somewhere in my question is a longing, perhaps too late, for a grander oppositional scheme to be part of psychotherapy again.
Well I share it with you. That’s why I work at Beobab, run by Sheila Melzak and Dick Blackwell. They work with victims of torture, stolen as boy soldiers who themselves have done terrible things, have had terrible things done to them. Beobab has a therapeutic-community approach to working with those young people and I do volunteer work there.
I come back once more to the spirit of the Dialectics of Liberation. It wasn’t just about caregiving or reaching out to the dispossessed. I’m not in the least bit trivialising those things. My own politics aren’t the politics of the Dialectics of Liberation at all, but the spirit there was one of a defiance which I find admirable, of saying no to the wider society and thus risking the social punishment which you talked about. But perhaps there comes a point when it is necessary to relinquish that attack on orthodoxy in order to be able at least to have the room to do the things which are protective instead. Do you see what I mean?
I completely do. The question that you’re posing for somebody like me links me to a level of despair and distress that I can’t really afford to get into that much. It’s linked to ageing but it’s certainly linked to a very strong sense of despair at the power of what I would call the neoliberal project that’s taken over. I began telling you that I was born into a family where I was the purpose and therefore for me there’s always got to be a sense of purpose attached to what I do, and that purpose has changed into the one you’ve described, which is that if I can be of use to one or two people, that goes somewhere because the wider project of changing the world if you like, or fighting the things in the way I deeply believe in, I don’t have any hope of that. I think we’re living in a time that has got to be endured and eventually there’ll be a turnaround and I hope I’m alive for it. I don’t think the project was betrayed by the fragments, by the attention to feminism or to ecology or to unions, I think it was betrayed by the success of the neoliberal project where people who have real power to distribute real money, or to take real money themselves, they’ve won for the moment but hopefully not forever. So of course I understand what you’re saying but I find it deeply upsetting and it’s the source of despair to me. And I don’t know whether within that context we can deeply help people in groups either. That’s why I’m very minimal about it. It’s also in some ways I suppose why I’ve been attracted to trauma because, quite apart from anything that’s within my own life, usually there is a possibility of reaching something that’s a bit more healing with people who want to deal with certain levels of trauma. And that reconnects me with a faith in what I do.
Rob White
rob.white.email@gmail.com