It is easy to get sucked into treatment plans and strategies, to be seduced by some new model promising a cure in only a few sessions. But life just isn’t like that

Female patients use their bodies as a canvas on which to express their distress

“Your patient finds being cared for unbearable,” he says.

Who have you been pretending to be for all these years? For older patients, it's all about finding out

My patient had been silent for about ten minutes—that's when I began to worry

A lot of therapy involves accepting what we are actually like instead of punishing ourselves for not being how we’ve been taught we ought to be

Brexiteers need Remainers, Capitalism needed Communism—and vice versa

A psychoanalyst once summed up glibly the two approaches: Freudian—your mum was mean to you. Kleinian—you think your mum was mean to you

It was my own urge to sexualise all my relationships that made me so defensive about my feelings for my analyst

There are challenges to long-distance therapy. But it also allows sessions to take place from anywhere