The psychiatrist diagnosed “delusional parasitosis”, the false belief that parasites have infested the body. The roughly 1-in-100,000 people who suffer from this condition imagine that ants, worms, ticks, mites or other bugs are moving around under their skin. It is, as the label suggests, a delusion, often brought on by schizophrenia or dementia. When the insects strike, nothing can persuade patients that the critters aren’t real.

Delusional parasitosis is a relatively rare condition, but it is indicative of a phenomenon that is surprisingly widespread: the presence of animals in psychological disorders. The medical literature contains tens of thousands of cases in which animals or thoughts of animals played a significant role in the expression of mental distress.

For the examples above, we could substitute the childhood victim of sexual assault who grew up obsessed with rats; the pet-loving psychotic whose facial tics made him look like a snarling dog; the mother in West Africa who woke from a dream convinced she had been impregnated by a baboon; the young woman who believed she was being controlled by her cat; or, closer to home, the child of a friend who took to howling like a wolf during the Covid lockdown.

Or we could consider the long history of sociogenic illness or “conversion disorder”, in which seemingly benign behaviors, often in imitation of animals, spread rapidly and without apparent cause within schools, religious orders and other close-knit institutions. Medieval records from France and Spain describe groups of nuns barking like dogs while running through the fields, or mewing like cats for hours each day, or bleating like sheep, tearing off their veils and convulsing in church.

Suggested reading

Can boars make Britain great again?

By Greg Noone

Of course, wild animals have been almost completely absent from most people’s lives for centuries. We have long considered them inferior: less conscious, less intelligent, less self-aware, less rational. An animal is everything humans are not, the quintessential “other”. Yet they feature in our psycho-pathologies, hallucinations and dreams, in art and story-telling, and in the mental lives of children. They creep into our psyche in spectacular and sometimes alarming ways. 

That’s especially true of people who suffer from medical disorders: whether blindness, or dementia, or schizophrenia. Their visions can be exceptionally strange. In 2019, a group of psychosis patients taking part in a medical study reported seeing snakes crawling out of their arms, a rhino crossing the street, a cow in the corridor of a school.

Fantastical creatures of this ilk can just as easily be summoned by swallowing psychedelic drugs like LSD or psilocybin — the chemical that gives certain mushrooms their magic. On trips of this kind, animals are almost always part of the landscape. During my first and probably last experience with psilocybin, I found myself in a world of reptilian and parasitic freakery, in which snakes, lizards, worms and other legless lifeforms crawled and slithered about a garden trellis, taunting me with grotesque faces that resembled the carved gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals. It sounds terrifying, though my feeling was more of benign interest. 

Nor am I alone: the psychologist Benny Shanon, who drank ayahuasca several hundred times while researching a book about its effects, encountered animals in his visions more frequently than anything else, mingling with lizards and crocodiles, fish and bees, butterflies and jaguars. All the while, many of us cross paths with animals, both magical and mundane, in our sleep. And if it’s tempting to seek meaning in such visions, they may tell us more about the animals than about ourselves. 

Alison Hawthorne Deming, a poet frequently visited by dream animals, describes them as barging into her brain, self-willed and unconstrained. After dreaming of a horse that had turned up for treatment at Sigmund Freud’s consulting rooms, she concluded that it was “a messenger from the animals’ homeland telling me that we’re driving them crazy and they have no science with which to treat themselves”.

The truth is that what causes highly realistic animistic images to surface in the non-conscious mind remains a mystery. Yet one compelling possibility is that the brain, when deprived of its usual stimuli, tries to make sense of the information it receives by providing a hypothesis or story of its own, or by over-activating the default mode network, a set of brain regions that supports daydreaming and introspection. Its tendency to conjure up an abundance of animals, rather than, say, inanimate objects, may relate to the fact that the human visual system evolved to be acutely sensitive to living things.

Over the hundreds of thousands of years that Homo sapiens and our antecedents lived as hunter-gatherers, individuals with the ability to detect animals quickly in the landscape were more likely to survive and reproduce, and this trait was gradually selected for until it became a universal inherited characteristic of the human brain. To coin a phrase, we became “animal-minded”, preoccupied with the circumstances of our fellow creatures and highly attuned to their anatomical forms and ways of moving.

Derek Hodgson, an archaeologist whose expertise also includes neuroscience and psychology, suggests this mechanism likely evolved in our ancestors over successive generations in response to both the persistent threat they faced from carnivores and the intense competition for food. An intuitive emotional reaction to the slightest possibility of an animal would have considerably increased their chances of survival. “They were competing with predators who were predating both on them and on the animals they were hunting for food,” Hodgson explains. “If they made a mistake and they didn’t react, they were in trouble. They had to be keenly aware of animals that used camouflage to remain concealed, otherwise they would have lost out in the long game of hide and seek.”

Modern brains still possess this attribute. Neuroscientists have discovered a dedicated neural pathway linking the visual part of the brain (the visual cortex) to the emotion-processing part (the amygdala). Known as the ventral stream, this pathway generates a fast visceral response at the sight of an animal, alerting us to its possible presence before we are consciously aware of it. We remain hypersensitive to living things, just like our Ice Age ancestors.

More from this author

Does a near-death experience change you?

By Michael Bond

While we rarely get a chance to test our animal-mindedness in everyday life, it becomes fully activated when our psyche is disrupted: in conditions of psychosis, neurosis, delusional thinking, phobia and obsession, or when we’re dreaming or hallucinating. The creatures that visit us during such times are, perhaps, indicative of the conflicted ways we think about animals, and our fraught deliberations over whether we are, in fact, one of them.

The mid-20th century American anthropologist Ernest Becker believed that our attitudes towards animals — indeed much of our behavior and thinking — are driven by the realization that we will one day die. The terror of ending up as compost drives us to raise families, cultivate values, subscribe to religions, and generally build things that will outlast us. Animals, which we are used to seeing as roadkill or meat on a plate, remind us of our own flesh-and-blood reality. Distinguishing ourselves from them is a step towards the symbolic immortality we crave.

Becker’s ideas help explain why we so resolutely cling to the notion of humans as a species apart, despite growing evidence that we have seriously underestimated the worlds and abilities of our fellow creatures. Most biologists now agree that all vertebrates and many non-vertebrates have some form of consciousness, and that animal emotions can be as complex as human ones. Our deliberate separation — the belief, which dates back to ancient Greece, that we are a superior species — has been a disaster for animals themselves. It has allowed us to kill them with impunity, and to keep their suffering at arm’s length. And it has enabled us to avoid the cognitive dissonance of having to face up to the truth that we are what we eat: meat on the bone.

The conceit that humans are exceptional is easy enough to maintain with full awareness. But when we are asleep, cognitively compromised, high on stimulants or otherwise distracted, our fellow other animals become our equals. What are they doing there? It is hard to know for sure. At the very least, they should remind us that our relationship has been longer, and more intimate, than most of us are prepared to acknowledge.

***

Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind is published by Picador on 19 March.

Just as unrealistic were Samuel Johnson’s 1769 hopes of rising by eight in the morning, a self-command plaintively repeated many times over 50  years of diary entries, without much success. Woody Guthrie’s  “New Year’s Rulins”, written down in 1943, were a mixed bag: “change bed clothes often” and “listen to radio a lot” sound eminently SMART, but “help win war — beat fascism” less so. Meghan Markle’s resolution a decade ago to “let the magic know that there is an open door policy with me in 2016 and that it is always welcome to join the party”: time-bound, certainly, but neither specific nor measurable. But then again, she did land a prince that year, so what do the psychologists know?

What the SMARTies miss is that turning an essentially optimistic ritual into a piece of efficient project management is a depressingly cowed way to kick off the year. If we are forced to view them in psychological terms, New Years’ resolutions are better framed as a socially sanctioned form of Borderline Personality Disorder. For a few weeks in the depths of winter, there is collective permission to dream of personal reinvention in the most exuberant and improbable of ways. Or as G.K. Chesterton observed, equally unheeding of the SMART imperative: “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.”

Never mind your unspoken conviction that you are bound to fail in your self-improvements sooner or later. Right now, you are in a generous imaginative realm where anything is possible. You are listening for bells, and letting the old year out through the back door. You are first-footing the homes of your friends while carrying propitious gifts. During this mysterious interlude, full of icy dark and ghosts, why not dare to dream of miraculous transformations too?

All this technocratic talk about New Year’s resolutions misses the point because it doesn’t fully grasp what they are. In making one, you are not offering a sober prediction about the conduct of your future self, based on available evidence. If questioned, many fervent annual resolvers would predict that they are bound to default eventually, but still place stern notes to selves on the fridge in the meantime.

Unlike with prediction, your will is involved. You are forming an intention, and it can only come from you. For this same reason, Zoe Williams’s half-serious suggestion in The Guardian last year, that we start choosing resolutions for our friends instead of ourselves, is a non-starter. An intention has to relate to your own perceptions of what is valuable in life, not theirs.

Intentions are weird mental entities, and philosophers struggle to pin them down. They are different from mere beliefs, because of that presence of the will. But they also seem different from desires, because you can long for something you have no intention of trying to get. In order to properly count as having an intention, some philosophers think you must display commitment, having already started to make preliminary steps towards your goal. Others disagree: it can be the kind of “pure” mental state you can have while sitting around doing nothing whatsoever. New Year’s resolutions look like they fit the latter model better than the former, and not just because of all that turkey. Had you embarked upon realizing your goals already, they wouldn’t have the requisite dramatic promise of a fresh start.

Suggested reading

On Bonnie Blue and Roger Scruton

By Kathleen Stock

Accordingly, you should ignore any so-called experts ludicrously exhorting you to “soft launch” New Year’s resolutions in September, on the grounds that this will be more effective. Such pedestrian minds are apparently blind to the awe-filled sensation of standing between two huge temporal edifices in the dark. You are shedding the old self with the old year, and plunging headlong into the new on both counts. In September, telling yourself you are going to start running five miles every day is mundane. On 1 January, it becomes a magical incantation.

So: thanks to its symbolic context, a New Year’s resolution isn’t just any old intention. This context also explains why it has a kind of solemn import that the everyday version lacks. The felt gravity is hard to explain otherwise. You might say that it is because you have made a promise to yourself, but self-promises are the easiest kind to break. You might say it is because you have told others about your resolutions, in order to “hold yourself accountable”. But even if you have, it is unclear why others should care either way. Your projects are not theirs, and vice versa.

Perhaps to overcome this difficulty, an article in this week’s Atlantic suggested that New Year’s resolutions be agreed collectively with family or friend groups, the better to avoid future backsliding. Once again, possibilities of thrilling self-transformation are made to sound more like completing a group presentation at work. A better story is surely more Nietzschean. It is a crucial part of the January fantasy that your body and soul will be forged into some new and miraculous shape, simply by the force of your own will.

For delicate souls, this might sound disturbingly oppressive. Indeed, to explain the difference between an everyday intention and a resolution, some philosophers picture the latter as a piece of self-imposed legislation. Alain de Botton has said that “we need resolutions for the same reason as we need laws, to keep ourselves in check”. Meanwhile, Richard Holton pictures resolutions as involving intimidating meta-intentions. When you make a resolution, behind your ordinary pusillanimous intention to do such-and-such in future stands another intention, armed with a metaphorical cattle prod, there to stop you giving into temptation to break the first.

Since some people don’t like being told what to do, even by themselves, it is presumably these kinds of legalistic or military conceptions that give rise to endless variants of the “Why my resolution is to give up on New Year’s resolutions” article from Guardian authors. Others worry that resolutions are bad for mental health, apparently defining “feeling disappointed in yourself” as a form of mental illness. The good news is that you are likely to get over this sort of illness very quickly — and that as long as you are alive, there will be further New Years to try again.

Suggested reading

Does Nick Fuentes have daddy issues?

By Kathleen Stock

For this is surely the best side of the annual ritual of resolutions, properly understood. They are not just an expression of what you want to do, but of who you want to be. They are an intrepid acknowledgment that you are capable of being a better person, couched not in the bitter language of self-recrimination but of hope. Whether they actually lead to a slimmer waistline or more efficient working habits is neither here nor there. The point is that, right now, you can almost believe they will.

And the new year serves a further function: of allowing you to leave certain things behind. As with rituals of confession and forgiveness, you now have a formalized opportunity to mentally cast off the past and start again. Without religion we have precious few occasions dedicated to symbolic renewal, and certainly no collective ones. Our vernacular may be full of punishing talk about public “accountability”, but says little that is useful about meaningful repentance. This means it can be very unclear when repentance may legitimately end, and how exactly one is supposed to move on. Here, perhaps, we really do need something time-bound. In lieu of a priest, a calendar can help.

None of this immense value can be described in the language of “measurable” or “achievable” outcomes. Indeed, it can barely be described in words at all, without flat-footed literalism stamping the life out of it. Those who are keen to dismantle the institution of New Year’s resolutions are taking away more than a bit of February self-recrimination. Who wants time, boringly viewed as an undifferentiated plane? Who wants human life seen as a monotonous toil, with no small deaths along the way nor invigorating rebirths?

As for me: in 2026, I resolve to be more loving to my family, more attentive in my friendships, more fastidious in my habits. My January will be the driest on record. My language and my kitchen will both be impeccably clean. I will go walking in nature every day, laugh in the face of thunderstorms, and leap hills effortlessly. My columns will soar like an eagle, float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee. I will finally finish reading The Brothers Karamazov. In Russian. And if I can help it, I will mostly be staying away from the psychological professions. Their disenchantment can be horribly catching.

As a psychologist you hear many stories like this. But you don’t need to be a professional to know that hardship during childhood can shape us for life. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as family breakdown, violence or neglect, are now hard-wired into our understanding of developmental psychology.

We are rightly aware of the damage that adversity can cause, but we are far less attuned to the risks posed by the opposite: the absence of challenge. The childhood and adolescent distress that we currently frame as a mental health crisis can be understood as much through the lens of ACEs as its corollary: what I propose we call Overprotective Childhood Experiences (OCEs).

OCEs are ACEs’ caring cousins. They are what happens when parents remove the tricky bits that help us learn and grow. Instead of fighting over toys during playgroups, children can be assigned them on a parent-led rota basis. Similarly, there’s no need for solitary imaginative play that arises out of momentary boredom when you have the frictionless fun of an iPad for now or AI-powered virtual reality in the future. If ACEs create hardship in the home, OCEs form a parent-imposed “easy mode” that makes the world beyond the home seem harder than it is.

While psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt have popularized the phenomenon of overparenting and warned about the risks, these concerns remain a somewhat heterodox position. Haidt’s insights are evidenced, well argued and common sense to anyone who works with kids; the mystery is why so many families still act against his wisdom. I believe that part of this is because we’re better at recognizing acute risks over slower, chronic ones. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s best-selling book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, might be theoretically dubious, but it feels intuitive to people and so it’s become part of pop-psychological lore. Trauma and ACEs capture our immediate fears, but we don’t have a concept or word for other types of risks.

Suggested reading

What’s the point of the University?

By Wessie du Toit

As a result, mainstream parenting culture (which is what I encounter in my therapy practice) remains fixated on the risks of adversity. Most parents are unaware of the severe risks posed by OCEs, even though I see mainly OCE-shaped problems in my practice: checked-out, pallid, withdrawn kids who are overwhelmed by school, by groups of other children, and by the challenge of the world beyond their screens. Unlike a lot of ACEs, which are often events outside our control, OCEs are fully avoidable and fixable through basic parenting decisions. To return to Theo’s struggles from the beginning of this piece, we need to be able to discuss both the ACEs (fraught separation, death of a relative) as well as OCEs (removal from school, decreased challenge through digital instead of real relating, questionable neurodevelopmental diagnoses) that shape his world.

The advent of technology, most recently AI, has supercharged the problem of OCEs. Faced with the decision between the friction of interpersonal play or the ease of Roblox, an iPad-reared child will opt for the latter. An AI-reared child has no need to expend creative effort into actually drawing a dragon when they can get one made in moments. And character.ai is there to meet any of your friendship needs with relentless positivity and fun. These OCEs do not just impact emotional resilience. They hit at the very core of our being and cognition, eroding our capacity to persist with the effortful thinking and interpersonal processing that characterize growing up and becoming a fully functioning individual.

When Meta’s chatbots were found to be behaving flirtatiously with children, the response was understandably one of outrage. But alongside fears of AI’s sexualization of children, there is another danger: AI’s ability to simulate frictionless relationships. The chatbots were in fact designed to hack the human need for attachment. They offer all the warmth and validation we get from the best relationships without any conflict; the thrill of an adolescent crush without the uncertainty or rejection. Tech gives you what you want, not what you need.

Suggested reading

What I've learnt about motherhood

By Kathleen Stock

Parents are increasingly unable to bear to see their children’s minor upsets too. They protect their children from challenge and social friction, assisted in their endeavors by technology that makes their children’s lives smooth and easy. The loneliness and dysfunction that ensues from these OCEs is often subsequently interpreted as a mental health issue within the child, rather than an effect of problematic parenting and culture.

If tech’s solution for tech-enabled loneliness is AI chatbots, we can’t blame the turn to easy mode entirely on Mark Zuckerberg. Therapy hacked the human desire for conflict-free relationships long before the rise of those chatbots. The original pitch of therapy was to “do the work”: to transcend personal or outside-world difficulties through the challenging space of the therapeutic relationship, in which the therapist encourages the client to critically question their choices and motivations. Gradually, however, many therapeutic spaces have become safe spaces where all stories are heard and valued equally, without challenge. This is partly an artifact of therapy’s financial model. For the most part, people feel more satisfied when listened to than given a hard time. But it’s also an inevitable result of therapy culture’s hyperfocus on trauma and ACEs: you don’t want to retraumatize your client by querying their lived experience.

With that in mind, do you think it’s bad that chatbots just reflect your words mindlessly back at you, alongside generic encouragement? That’s exactly what a lot of person-centered counseling does too. This has happened at the cost of personal growth: the therapist now, just like many of today’s parents, tries to create a space without adversity for the client, affirming and validating the client’s version of events.

That affirming tendency was partly responsible for the rise of the “affirmative care” that we saw first in gender dysphoria and now in neurodivergence. To query or challenge a client’s account of their difficulties if they consider them to be around gender or neurodiversity, no matter how biased or improbable their accounts may be, has been labeled abusive and has even been prohibited under some psychotherapeutic bodies.

Therapy culture laid the ground for the chatbot shift to affirmation and flattery. When GPT-4 started telling us how brilliant we were for asking banal questions about train timetables, we should have been more worried. And now technology’s ability to smooth human experience is making inroads into the therapeutic space, where a growing percentage of AI use is now as a quasi-therapeutic companion. If your AI chatbot is too firm or too chatty in its therapeutic role, just tweak your prompt to adjust its settings — validate me more, help me stay with my emotions — and it will be just right for where you are right now in your life.

But friction-free therapy is only half the problem. AI also creates OCEs by undermining children’s ability to understand and consolidate knowledge. A 14-year-old girl told me about a peer at school who struggled academically — until she discovered she could have ChatGPT open at all times. When asked about how she’d cope in her GCSEs next year, she shrugged and said she’d probably slide her phone into her calculator case. She wasn’t bothered about passing anyway — if answers are handed to you as soon as the question crosses your mind, where is the value of memorizing facts?

Gen Alpha are right to see the internet as a vast resource for knowledge. It seems inevitable that we are moving into an era of extended cognition — the philosophical theory that the mind extends beyond the human brain in a network of information, whether social or technological. But our capacity to navigate that informational field — to know what it is that we’re looking for, and why we’re looking for it, and which bits of information are useful, and which are not — depends on our ability to reason based on information in our actual brains. Anyone can Google the First World War and get a good summary, or get Claude to adumbrate the Russian Revolution, but in order to truly understand the links between Germany’s faltering war effort and their audacious intervention to send Lenin to Russia to stoke the revolution, we need to have internalized a coherent picture of the world.

“Facts are not opposed to understanding; they enable understanding,” wrote the educationalist Daisy Christodoulou in Seven Myths about Education. Without chunks of general knowledge committed to our own long-term memory, we don’t have enough of a mental map to make good judgments, or even to make sense of new bits of information about the world.

So, as well as being emotionally harmful, the OCE-rich environment rots our cognitive abilities. It saps us of the knowledge we need to autonomously operate our AI assistants and our ability to tolerate the low-level frustration of memorizing boring bits of information that will allow us to know how to think. The problem of “frustration intolerance”, identified by the psychologist Albert Ellis, cuts across all our cognition. Without the ability to tolerate minor discomfort, we cannot progress in an imperfect world.

The urge for easy mode is understandable. Humans evolved in a high-risk environment full of potential ACEs that we rarely encounter anymore in the West; being hungry and hunted on the savannah is closer to a war zone than our safe, suburban lives. Grabbing opportunities to rest would have been crucial to our survival. But we now live in an environment where rest and assistance are far too available. Just like we can tear our muscles if we work them too hard, they also break down if we don’t exercise them at all. Humans do best in an optimal zone of stress — the sweet spot where we’re challenged enough to grow but not so overwhelmed that we break down.

Evolution has supplied us with impulses to push, improve and excel as well as impulses to hide and relax. They are two opposing but complementary forces in our lives, and their balance adjusts in different situations. Pushing entails discomfort, and we naturally wish to remove such discomfort. We don’t yet know the full consequences of such removal in the early developmental window, but we are perhaps starting to see signs of it in Gen Z’s troubled relationship both with working life — with their tendencies to “quiet quit” or check out altogether — and less satisfying, less frequent formation of human relationships.

It may seem counterintuitive in an age where we talk a lot more about trauma than checking out, but OCEs carry as serious a risk as ACEs when you take them too far. The risks of ACEs might be more obvious, but the risks of checking out, of withdrawing ourselves and our children from challenges, are just as real. We’re starting to see how they play out in our children’s well-being and our shared morale. We should worry about where they lead us.

* Names and minor details have been altered to preserve confidentiality

It’s not just Gino. Her co-author Dan Ariely, who is even more famous, was also accused of making up data, including in one of the same papers. The study found that people were less likely to lie about their car mileage on insurance forms if they signed an honesty pledge at the top, rather than the bottom, of the form. Although Ariely denies fabricating it himself, the mileage data on that study had been very obviously made up with a random number generator.

There is something deeply splendid, as the data sleuths who uncovered the problems noted, about all this: “We were, like, Holy shit, there are two different people independently faking data on the same paper. And it’s a paper about dishonesty.”

If we can’t trust the scientists, then who can we trust? How about reality TV? The Traitors is back again this week, and what’s fascinating about the show is that you get to see something very rare: people lying, in high-stakes situations, where you know that they’re lying. It is, I would argue, an excellent research opportunity.

More from this author

Climate science is making you miserable

By Tom Chivers

The hugely successful game show is essentially a parlor-game murder mystery: there are 25 or so people in a Scottish castle. A subset of the 25, perhaps three, are designated “traitors”; the rest are the “faithful”. The traitors must remain undetected, while, every so often, “murdering” — i.e. evicting — one of the faithful. The faithful, meanwhile, must winkle out the traitors; in daily roundtable meetings, they vote on who they think the liars are, and the person with the most votes is also evicted, whether faithful or traitor. At the end, if only faithfuls remain, they share a pot of up to £120,000; but if there are any traitors left, they take it all. Still with me?

It is compelling viewing. We, the audience, know who the traitors are, so we get to see the faithful flailing around, making weird leaps of logic and spreading unfounded suspicion around like a virus. But more interesting is how we get to see the traitors themselves — if they’re good — wearing their two faces: playing the faithful off against each other, being subtle little Machiavels, twisting words and pulling strings. Telling, basically, bare-faced lies. Honestly, sometimes it’s hard to watch.

It’s dishonesty on open display, which is surprisingly rare and surprisingly uncomfortable. It’s shocking. All the more so when you see how the excellent liars build the trust of the faithful. Perhaps our fascination with the program is because we spend so much of our lives trying to work out whether someone is being straight with us, whether we can trust that salesman or that builder or that would-be lover; it is refreshing to see someone unambiguously lying. And it gives us a chance to learn about how dishonesty manifests.

This isn’t something we can really do under research conditions — partly because it’s so difficult to get ground truth. Here’s what I mean by that. If you’re researching, say, the efficacy of a cancer screening test, you run your test on a bunch of people who either have cancer or don’t, and you see whether the test correctly identifies them. But you can only do that because you know, separately from what the test says, who really has cancer and who doesn’t. That’s ground truth. Without that, your ability to assess the accuracy of your test is severely limited.

For example, in the US, law enforcement agencies still regularly use polygraph tests – “lie detectors”, in popular parlance. The FBI and CIA use them to screen employees; local and federal police use them to interrogate suspects, although the evidence is rarely admissible in court. But there’s a problem, which is that we don’t know if they work.

Suggested reading

The rise of the trauma star

By Lily Isaacs

The idea is that they measure stress: heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, and “galvanic skin response” (that is, how well your skin conducts electricity, which is a proxy for how much you’re sweating). And, in theory, someone who’s lying is going to be more stressed than someone who is telling the truth.

There are all sorts of problems with this idea, of course, not least the fact that being interrogated by the police is probably pretty stressful, whether or not you’re lying. But one really crucial one is that we don’t really know whether lying is more stressful, because most of the time, we don’t really know who’s lying, and when we do know, the lies aren’t very stressful ones.

Real-world research into polygraph testing relies on confessions as ground truth. That is, when a suspect fails the polygraph test, they are confronted with the results. If they then confess to the crime, the polygraph is considered to have been vindicated. But there’s a problem: the polygraph’s results are used to pressure the suspect into confessing. So if they pass the test, they won’t be asked to confess; and if they fail the test, they might get pressured into confessing even if innocent. The method is “virtually guarantee[d]” to find that polygraphs work, even if they don’t, a 2008 paper said, because the test result and its verification are not independent. It’s as though the accuracy of breast cancer screening was verified by whether it convinced the patient that she had cancer, rather than whether she actually did.

The other way of assessing polygraphs is in the lab. You might get half your subjects to commit a fake crime — stealing money from a closed room, for instance. Then you polygraph the participants, and say that if they can convince the test that they’re innocent (whether they are or not), they will win some money, say £50; the idea is to create genuine motivation to beat the test. You have your ground truth then; you know who’s lying, because you told them to lie. But now it’s only £50. It’s not going to change anyone’s life. The stakes are low, so the stress is low.

So we have two opposite problems, a kind of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle of lying. Either you can have a realistic, high-stress situation but no ground truth, or you can have ground truth but no real stress.

I’ve used polygraphs as the example here, but the same problems apply to all research into how we lie. Do people behave differently when they are lying? There are lots of claims about eye contact, about voice pitch and tension, about language choice — do liars use hedging language like “to be honest” or “as far as I can remember” more?

There’s an entire field of research into “micro-expressions”, fleeting facial movements we apparently make when we’re concealing an emotion. (There’s another problem, which is that like a lot of the research in this field, when it’s not fraud, it’s mainly garbage. The guy behind the “micro-expressions” idea claimed to have discovered people he called “wizards” who could tell liars just by looking at them, but it was basically rubbish.)

This matters. People’s dishonesty has huge consequences! How many people have, for instance, trusted a builder to renovate their house and then learned that they’re a cowboy? How many people are taken in by Ponzi schemes or crypto scams? More obviously the entire legal system turns on whether or not people are telling the truth. Some more reliable way of knowing whether someone believes what they say might, for instance, be very relevant in the notoriously he-said-she-said world of sexual assault cases. Politics… well. There’s a reason why there’s a book about politics called Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me?

But again, this is hard to research, because when we do that research, either we don’t know whether people are lying, or we do know they’re lying, but only about some inconsequential thing in the lab which probably isn’t that stressful to lie about. I imagine lying in court, or lying in the dispatch box, is extremely stressful.

What researchers need is some sort of situation where people are known to be lying, on camera, for high stakes: perhaps for tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. Obviously enough, that’s where The Traitors comes in.

Imagine if the contestants were hooked up to a polygraph and asked to beat it, in the knowledge that their results would be shared with the group. You couldn’t ask for a more direct, real-world test. It would be a small sample size, sure, but you could do several tests throughout the series and over several different series. And at least it would be valid. Better a small, but good, test than a huge one that’s entirely uninformative. You could do all sorts of other tests: linguistic and facial analysis, thermal imaging to detect changes in blood flow, eye-tracking to see where people look when they lie.

Of course, the whole idea only works when the stakes are genuinely high. And that’s why it won’t work at all for the current series — a celebrity series where they’re all playing for charity money and public goodwill, which I’m worried might render the whole thing a bit silly. Does Stephen Fry or Paloma Faith really care enough about the outcome to publicly stab somebody in the back? They’d only be hamming it up in any case. Will the other contestants care enough about the backstabbing for it to really hurt, anyway? Probably not. The whole point is that it needs to be nobodies for whom the money really matters, and so they are willing to debase themselves to win it.

Learning about dishonesty — actually learning about it, properly, not doing the fake crap research that is most of what is out there — could have profound impacts. Obviously not all of them would be good; imagine what governments and corporations would do with a ministry of truth. But it’s a huge part of human life, and we don’t really understand it. So, dishonesty researchers: when you’ve finished faking the data for your current studies, please do go and ask the BBC if you can do some proper research.

Now, decades later, the case has gone viral again. A Netflix show based on the murders, Monsters, became the most watched show on the platform, and the Menendez brothers’ Wikipedia page became the most viewed entry on the website. More than 400,000 people have signed a petition calling for the brothers to be freed, arguing their claims of sexual abuse were not taken seriously. Their demands have been echoed by several high-profile figures, including Kim Kardashian, and the former District Attorney of Los Angeles County, George Gasc​​ón. Last month, the brothers made their first appearance in court for a hearing that could finally see them freed. The judge has scheduled a second hearing for 30 January.

What makes the widespread support for Lyle and Erik so unsettling is that the brothers are not victims. They’re manipulative predators. And the reason they’re being regarded as victims is that culture and technology have enabled the spread of emotionally-transmitted diseases that debilitate thought. Put simply, stupidity has gone viral.

The facts of the case are well-established: Erik confessed to his therapist, Dr Jerome Oziel, that he and Lyle had killed their father, José, because he was domineering, and their mother, Kitty, because she was hopelessly depressed. Neither brother mentioned sexual abuse to Oziel. Nor did they mention it to their first lawyer, Robert Shapiro.

The brothers’ abuse claims only emerged after they met Erik’s second lawyer, Leslie Abramson, the following year. She started building a self-defence case, arguing the brothers had acted after confronting their parents about the sexual abuse, when their father threatened them. This was a tough strategy in part because there was no good evidence that the brothers had been in imminent danger requiring self-defence — in fact, the murder was clearly premeditated, with the brothers forging the paperwork to purchase two shotguns before the shootings. Nor was there any good evidence they’d been sexually abused.

By contrast, there was ample evidence of the brothers’ greed. A year before the murders, they were caught committing a string of burglaries in their Calabasas neighbourhood, stealing around $100,000 worth of goods. After the killings, they went on an extravagant spending spree, buying Rolexes, Porsches, and even a buffalo wings restaurant.

In order to counter this image of cruelty and greed, the brothers’ lawyers had to get creative. They tried to portray the brothers as sweet and naïve kids, dressing them in boyish jumpers. Lansing kept referring to them in court as “the children”, and Abramson would often maternally place her arm round Erik, and pick lint off his sweater. Her behaviour was so conspicuous the judge reprimanded her for it.

The lawyers also drew on a wealth of abuse-related pseudoscience. They received diagnostic advice from Paul Mones, a lawyer with no clinical training. Eight of the things the brothers claimed their father had done to them, such as poking them with pencils during rape, are mentioned in case studies in Mones’s book, When a Child Kills. Two witnesses said that the brothers had studied Mones’s book in jail.

Ultimately, the jury was unable to reach a verdict, so a second trial was held. Since the lawyers had failed to show during the first trial that Lyle and Erik’s supposed sexual abuse gave them a valid self-defence argument, testimony regarding the abuse allegations was not permitted in the second trial. Under these conditions, the second jury reached a unanimous decision that Lyle and Erik were guilty of murder, and the brothers were jailed for life with no possibility of parole. In other words, justice was served. The brothers had planned their parents’ murder, killed them while they were watching TV, and then celebrated by lavishly spending their money.

And yet, hundreds of thousands of people are now treating the Menendez brothers as victims. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In 2015, the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer convinced vast numbers of people that the rapist and murderer Steven Avery was an innocent victim of corrupt police. A petition to release him was signed by more than half-a-million people despite the significant evidence against him.

Why are people so easily convinced that cold-blooded killers are victims? It can’t simply be blamed on stupidity — after all, many gullible campaigns have in the past been led by respected intellectuals. In 1977, the novelist Norman Mailer was struck by the writing ability of the convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott, and, convinced he was reformed, called for his release. His wish was granted, and Abbott used his newfound freedom to stab a waiter dead.

A few years later, the Nobel Prize-winning novelists Günter Grass and Elfriede Jelinek, touched by the writings of rapist and murderer Jack Unterweger, petitioned for his release. Once out of prison, he celebrated by raping and murdering nine more women. The delusions of these authors, as well as those of the viewers of Making A Murderer, were born not from stupidity, but from empathy — or the tendency to try to feel what others feel.

The Menendez brothers, who had both written works of fiction, were masters of evoking both empathy and sympathy. Erik was an aspiring actor and Lyle admitted to his biographer Norma Novelli that he practiced crying convincingly. In the first trial, the brothers made heavy use of their acting and storytelling abilities, relating vivid tales of abuse while weeping with cinematic gravitas.

Curiously, during the first trial, the brothers’ claims proved more persuasive to women than men. Erik’s trial resulted in a hung jury, with all six of the male jurors pressing for a murder conviction, and all six female jurors pressing for a lesser conviction because they believed the brothers’ claims of abuse. Today, too, women seem to disproportionally trust the brothers’ story; most of the names on the petition to free the brothers are female.

One reason for this gender disparity may be that women, like great novelists, tend to be more empathic than the average man. A substantial number of studies have found that in mock sexual abuse trials, female jurors tend to be significantly more empathetic toward the alleged victims, lending greater weight to their expressed emotions and personal testimony when deciding on the verdict. Another study found that in a Menendez-style mock court trial in which the defendant was charged with killing their allegedly abusive father, female jurors were more likely to believe the defendants’ claims of abuse and consider them innocent of murder.

The same crocodile tears that won over female jurors in Erik’s first trial have now gone viral on social media, convincing many more of the Menendez brothers’ innocence. Since 2020, footage of the brothers’ courtroom acting has been frequently sliced into snippets, set to heartfelt music, and posted on TikTok. And yet social media alone is not to blame: the world is not just technologically different from the era when Lyle and Erik were convicted, it’s also culturally different. And culture has been pivotal in spreading falsehoods about the Menendez case.

To understand how culture has changed, we need to look again at the empathy gender gap. This difference doesn’t just affect the verdicts of juries. It likely also impacts the entire field of psychology, which in the 20th century was dominated by men, but in the 21st has increasingly become dominated by women. Between 2011 and 2021, the share of registered female psychologists in the US increased from 61% to 69%, and in the UK, women now make up more than three-quarters of all registered psychologists. This has correlated with a change in the way psychology is conducted, from the old masculine approach of objectifying humans as specimens to be studied with cold and often cruel detachment, to a more feminine, empathic approach that centres the feelings and lived experience of those under examination, even if this conflicts with objective reality.

More from this author

The scourge of Neotoddler protestors

By Gurwinder Bhogal

This matters because the social sciences shape mainstream culture, defining which human behaviours are normal and healthy, and which are aberrations to be cured. In a patriarchal, Islamist country like Iran, for instance, female immodesty is often considered a mental illness, and a mental health clinic will soon open to “treat” women who refuse to wear a hijab. Meanwhile, the West’s matriarchal field of psychology has normalised empathy, defining a lack of it as a problem to be fixed. This helps to explain why the last two decades have seen a surge in the use of the word “empathy” in published books.

One consequence of Western society’s idolisation of empathy is that certain myths have been allowed to flourish because they’re empathogenic: they foster empathy. The most important of these myths is “blank-slatism”, which sees people as “blank slates” who have little to no inherent nature, and are shaped largely by culture. In this view, people only become criminals due to negative experiences such as abuse or poverty, so a core part of any criminal case becomes identifying the trauma that produced the criminal. This is a seductive view for social scientists because it means anyone can be “fixed” through exposure to the right environment. It also encourages empathy because it’s easier and more rational to empathise with others if we’re all fundamentally the same person, differentiated only by experience.

The problem is, we’re not all the same. Blank-slatism has been resoundingly disproven by decades of twin studies. It can also be disproven by common sense. If people become criminals only because of experiences like abuse or poverty, then everyone who was poor or abused would become a criminal, yet the overwhelming majority don’t — and many who are neither poor nor abused do. In fact, the majority of crime is committed by a small minority of repeat offenders, suggesting personality plays a key role.

Since we all have distinct personalities, our minds are more alien to each other than we might assume. This makes empathy an inaccurate way to understand or predict the behaviour of others. A recent study found that, while women do tend to be more empathetic than men, they’re no better at inferring other people’s mental states. And while empathy is useful for some things, such as forming personal connections with others, it is a social guide, not a moral or judicial one. Nowadays, though, people are being encouraged to use empathy as a moral guide, which is dangerously delusional.

A chief reason empathy misleads us is that we never empathise with people, only with the people we think they are. Sometimes we fallaciously use ourselves as the model for others, presuming our own feelings and motivations are theirs. More dangerously still, we begin to idealise them, clouding our better judgement.

When we start identifying too strongly with another person, we will often go to great lengths to defend our idealised image of them. For instance, Lyle and Erik’s supporters sometimes argue that the brothers’ lavish spending spree with their murdered parents’ money was further evidence they were traumatised, because it showed they were trying to cope through “retail therapy”. As if the natural response to a lifetime of sexual abuse is to purchase a buffalo wings restaurant.

Suggested reading

Why women love Ryan Murphy's Monsters

By Sarah Ditum

Ultimately, empathy is a form of imagination. Cooper Koch, who plays Erik Menendez in Monsters, became convinced the brothers were telling the truth, and even visited them in prison. And yet although it was Koch’s job to put himself in Erik’s shoes, he never actually empathised with Erik; only with the idealised version of Erik he’d decided to portray.

Despite deluding so many people, empathy rarely gets any pushback in the West today. This is because there’s an assumption that empathy is key to compassion, and opposing compassion is a good way to be ostracised from polite society. However, not only is empathy not required to be compassionate, but it can also be an obstacle to it. In his 2016 book, Against Empathy, the psychologist Paul Bloom compares empathy to a spotlight: we only shine it on a few people at a time, and whenever we do, we lose sight of, and concern for, everyone else.

But empathy doesn’t just reduce our concern for others, it can also make us spiteful toward them if we feel they pose a threat to the object of our empathy. In one study, participants were told of a contest between two students for a small cash prize. Those who empathised strongly with the poorer contestant acted cruelly towards her rival — even though her rival was not responsible for her financial distress. Empathy-driven spite can also frequently be seen in the real world, such as in the recent case of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, whose murder was widely celebrated on social media due to his company’s history of denying health insurance claims. In such cases those who empathise with one side’s pain often wish to inflict even greater pain on the other. One might even say empathy is a major cause of sadism in the world.

It should come as no surprise, then, that many mock trial studies that find female jurors are more empathetic toward the alleged abuse victim also find they’re more punitive toward the alleged abuser, demanding significantly harsher sentences. We see this same empathic spite in the online Menendez discourse, most notably in the fact that many people who believe Lyle and Erik are victims also claim they were right to murder their parents. Some TikTok clips even celebrate the shooting. Predictably, TikTok is now also filled with clips attacking Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor in the first trial. One clip, which so far has more than 120,000 likes, shows photographs of Bozanich as a young woman and then as an older one, and states: “This is how you age when you’re a cunt.”

Not only does empathy make people spiteful, it also makes them unjust. In one study, participants watched an interview with a fictitious, terminally-ill girl called Sheri, and were then asked whether they would move her up the waiting list to receive end-of-life care — even though this would disadvantage other terminally-ill kids who needed the help more. Of those who were told to decide objectively, one-third opted to move Sheri up the list; of those who’d been asked explicitly to empathise with her, three-quarters did. Crucially, the participants admitted their decision to favour Sheri was unfair. Their empathy overruled their principles.

This has also been apparent in the Menendez case. Not only did some of Lyle’s friends, including his ex-girlfriend Traci Baker, agree to lie for him in court, but, recently, web users are now knowingly lying on their behalf. A Wikipedia editor called “Limitlessyou” started adding false and misleading claims on the “Lyle and Erik Menendez” page to portray the brothers as victims. One claim was that Erik’s prosecutor, Lester Kuriyama, theorised that Erik’s alleged homosexuality suggested José’s alleged molestation was consensual. The LA Times article that Limitlessyou cited for this claim included no such quote, because the quote was a fabrication; in reality, Kuriyama had theorised that Erik’s supposed homosexuality may have been the real cause of friction between Erik and José. Limitlessyou’s dishonest edit seems to have been intended to portray Kuriyama as a horrid person.

The ease with which people who empathise with Lyle and Erik can be inspired to lie for them is important because it casts doubt on two pieces of evidence recently submitted to exonerate the brothers. The first of these is a recently “discovered” letter, supposedly written by Erik to his cousin Andy Cano a year before the murders, in which Erik alludes to being sexually abused. The second is a sworn affidavit by Roy Rossello — a former member of Menudo, a boy band once managed by José Menendez — in which Rossello alleges he was raped by Jose. This evidence has not yet been authenticated, and yet it was cited by the former District Attorney for Los Angeles County, George Gascón, to support his push for a resentencing hearing to free the brothers.

As a former prosecutor, Gascón should be more discerning of a criminal case than the average TikToker or Hollywood celebrity, and yet he appears to be no less gullible. His political history suggests he’s embraced the same idealistic blank-slatism that characterises our age of empathy: criminals are not born but made, therefore criminals are victims and require understanding, not condemnation. He has spent his career trying to soften California’s approach to crime, introducing policies based on a fictional model of humanity. In 2011, he replaced Kamala Harris as district attorney of San Francisco, a position he held until 2019. During his two terms, San Francisco prosecutors filed criminal charges in less than half of cases presented by city police, and violent crime, which had been decreasing, increased by 15% while property crimes like vehicle break-ins increased by almost 50%.

In the wake of the 2020 George Floyd race riots, having pledged to tackle “systemic racism”, Gascón then became district attorney of America’s most populous county, Los Angeles. His approach to crime in LA was even laxer than in San Francisco, and within three years of his arrival, shoplifting had increased by a staggering 133%. He soon faced a public backlash, including from his own prosecutors, and last month was finally voted out of office. Ironically, the push to unseat him was led by victims of crime, who’d been left in the dark when Gascón chose to shine his empathy spotlight on criminals. It goes to show that when idealistic empathy becomes legislation, the world becomes more dangerous.

Despite Gascón being evicted from office, the Menendez brothers could still be freed, due to a habeas corpus petition they filed last year, which is backed by huge public pressure. For those of us who value objectivity, the best we can do is to learn, and share, the lesson of the Menendez fiasco: that empathy doesn’t work as a moral or judicial guide. Far from making us kinder people, empathy makes us gullible, biased, dishonest, cruel, and unjust. If we wish to know who’s right and wrong, guilty and innocent, we should spend less time trying to inhabit other people’s heads, and make more use of our own.

The daft incongruity of this answer works — at least for me — because the one thing everybody knows about Freud is how seriously he took sex. According to the canonical interpretation, lascivious urges and impulses buried deep in the unconscious are responsible for large chunks of our behaviour, and indirectly for much of the content of culture generally. If you’ve ever bitten your fingernails at a moment of tension, felt strangely aroused looking at a skyscraper, or wanted to kill your father over a competitive round of minigolf, Freud has an explanation for you. It may not be empirically falsifiable, but you can’t fault it for local colour.

Freud’s foundational insight, that human minds have unconscious aspects, has since proved invaluable — not least as a corrective to Enlightenment fantasies of perfectly rational interactions between participants, each transparently aware of his own beliefs and motivations. When it comes to the self and its patterns of decision-making — perhaps a bit like the government of the United States at the moment — we don’t always know who or what is in charge. Though the real-life Jung took this point and ran with it in his own work, he eventually fell out with Freud, judging the latter’s obsession with sex too dogmatic and itself in need of psychoanalysis. In the memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he recalled: “There was no mistaking the fact that Freud was emotionally involved in his sexual theory to an extraordinary degree. When he spoke of it, his tone became urgent, almost anxious, and all signs of his normally critical and sceptical manner vanished.”

But the recent republication of one of Freud’s most famous works seems to have put the monomania of its author in some doubt. As reported in The Observer last week, in a commentary upon a new edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, analyst and neuropsychiatrist Professor Mark Solms argues that Freud was using the term “sexual” throughout his oeuvre in a way that differed from ordinary usage. Instead, his intended object was “any activity that was pleasure-seeking in its own right — anything that one does for the purposes of pleasure alone, as opposed to practical purposes”. It seems clear that this might well include activities only tangentially connected to the nether regions, if at all: enjoyably attending to music, food, art or sport, for instance. Indeed, Freud apparently described a child kicking a football or swinging on a swing as “sexual’ in this vastly extended sense. And far from being the sort of cultural radical beloved of the avant-garde, Solms underlines that Freud was “a rather conservative gentleman and shared none of their revolutionary social inclinations”.

If this textual interpretation is right, then it too is funny: for it appears bathetically to undercut a century’s worth of edgy academic posturing about the supposed centrality of polymorphous perversity to the human condition. Perhaps poor Bertha Mason, stuck in Rochester’s attic, isn’t Jane Eyre’s sexual alter ego after all. Perhaps Hamlet’s interest in his mother is perfectly healthy. Perhaps Rosebud really is just the name for a sledge.

But there is a serious side to this too. One unfortunate aspect of modern (mis)readings of Freud is the way they have set up shop for the hideous idea of “childhood sexuality”, implicitly justifying perfect relaxation at the sight of young girls twerking in crop tops to Meghan Thee Stallion or cavorting with drag queens at Olympic opening ceremonies. If a reconsideration of what Freud actually meant prompted a reset, it would certainly be welcome.

On the face of it, Solm’s thesis seems to resemble one put forward by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, commenting in an illuminating book about Freud on his notion of an “erotogenic zone”. In early infancy — as all through life — we seek pleasure as a calming release from tension, pain, and agitation. The baby sucks at the breast or bottle and experiences gratification. Later, it is moved to find substitute objects that simulate or expand upon the original pleasure, investing them with motivational affect instead. As Lear puts Freud’s point: “In infancy we suck at breasts and plastic nipples, then we suck thumbs and blankets, then we suck on ice cream and candies and other delicious foods, then we kiss, and later we again get to suck on breasts and genitals.”

But clearly, this is not to say that children have anything like the sexual desires of adults: they haven’t the concepts, emotional capacities or physical apparatus, for a start. It is only to make the benign point that such feelings are at the very beginning of a developmental continuum which will, if all goes well, result in mature adult erotic experiences much later on. Just as we wouldn’t say a baby making protolinguistic burbling sounds had the capacity to write sonnets, nor is it appropriate to think of children as “sexual” simply because, like the young of many other species, they too seek out basic forms of pleasure to soothe themselves.

One unfortunate aspect of modern (mis)readings of Freud is the way they have set up shop for the hideous idea of “childhood sexuality”

Equally, Freud may have referred to “masturbation” as the “primal addiction”, but a child’s unfocused and exploratory touching is significantly different from what a grown adult knowingly does when clicking on PornHub. And when he talks about Oedipal feelings in infants — whether or not this is a plausible hypothesis, which it probably isn’t — he surely means extremely primitive affects, not yet brought into the realm of language, rather than fully-fledged emotions structured with subjects and objects. Many of us can look back at our former young selves and remember vague stirrings and nascent crushes; but as Freud also points out, memory is frequently unreliable about the meaning of things at the time.

Despite the obviousness of such points on reflection, they seem lost on those hundreds of academics now hellbent on “queering” childhood, complaining about the supposedly egregious social construction of early youth as a non-sexual “innocent” time as if this was the latest civil rights frontier. As one recently published, fairly representative article puts it — in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law no less —  “the taboo surrounding child sexuality and gender variance can make childhood especially traumatic for queer children whose desires and expression are forcibly suppressed”. In other words, kids are presented as suffering horribly for having to bottle up their sexual urges. This metaphor barely works for adults and is completely inappropriate for children. Like settlers moving further West during the gold rush, researchers desperate to uncover a new and profitable victim class are imposing adult frameworks upon younger groups, and reaping the professional spoils of grants and research outputs accordingly.

More from this author

Mama Swifties need to grow up

By Kathleen Stock

One serious issue here — albeit one that dare not speak its name in academia, for fear of looking embarrassingly déclassé — is that this framing of children as mini-sexual beings works rather conveniently for those adults with illicit designs upon them. But another less dramatic but still reasonable worry is that the constant cultural focus upon youthful “sexuality” may well be changing later adult trajectories. For, as is also highlighted by Lear in his book and by Freud before him, unlike with the sexual behaviours of other species, human sexuality is highly plastic.

Freud observed that what he called “the sexual aim” in humans — roughly, what we want to do — can come apart from “the sexual object” — who or what we want to do it with, or to — partly due to the influence of personal imagination, and partly due to developmental circumstances. In some cases, the aim can get stuck on fetish objects: practically no object, inanimate or animate, seems to be ruled out in advance. And a developing sexuality is also culturally permeable, as the fact of changing erotic proclivities over different historical periods attests. (If you care to be up to the minute, the latest trends apparently include orgasm hypnosis, Japanese rope bondage, and “dipping”. Do keep up.)

Uniquely among animals, humans have the ability to reflect on their own behaviours generally and third-personally, but then to incorporate findings into first-personal narratives about the self: who I am, exactly, and what my life therefore means. It is plausible, then, that the Freudians’ dragging of human sexuality from its formerly tenebrous gloom into a technicolour, over-theorised daylight has significantly changed the significance of sex for post-pubescent brains along the way, giving it disproportionate discursive importance for the ego, at the expense of making it something the id feels like it might be fun to try.

When we look at the falling rates of sexual experimentation in adolescence, coupled with the large numbers of people apparently making some particular sexuality or gender presentation part of their “identity”, the connection looks more than suggestive. Perhaps if we stopped thinking of sex as the root of all interesting human behaviour, we eventually might start having more of it. In the meantime though, we should at least take a different psychological tip from Freud, and avoid using children as the canvas for the projection of contemporary adult dramas.

Now, suddenly, after Pearl Harbour, he was in Washington, writing memos and proposals for the conduct of the Allies. He was being marked out by the most senior generals as one of the most capable men in the American army. His ascent was incredible. In 1936 he was a Lieutenant Colonel, having been a Major since 1924. Six years later, in 1942, he became Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in North Africa. Two years after that, he became a five-star general. And after the war, of course, he became the President. So much for Eisenhower’s retirement.

This story ought to make us pause. Because the self-help industry around life-changes generally divides into two poles. On the one hand, there’s the easy optimism of American-style self-help and its relentless belief that anything is possible — change yourself, whenever, however. On the other, there are the gloomy determinists, who glower that we shouldn’t sell false hope to easy targets. A few weeks ago, Janan Ganesh gave voice to the latter view, attacking self-optimism as a false dream that major life decisions can be corrected. Instead, Ganesh says, the truth is more like an Ian McEwan novel: make a bad marriage or pick the wrong career, and you are unlikely to recover. “Life is path-dependent: each mistake narrows the next round of choices. A big one, or just an early one, can foreclose all hope of the life you wanted.” But this is far too binary. What Eisenhower’s story shows is that the truth is often messier and more complicated than anything you can fit into a pithy line. This is not a subject about which we can make happy generalisations, as I show in my new book Second Act.

Look around and you will see late bloomers everywhere in modern culture. David Nicholls, promoting his new novel, recently told The Times that his favourite writer is Penelope Fitzgerald, who published her first literary novel aged 62. The book that many consider to be her masterpiece, The Blue Flower, was published when she was 80. The American footballer Jalyx Hunt recently described himself as a late bloomer when talking about his acquisition by the Philadelphia Eagles after a steady rise through the ranks. Jerry Seinfeld is making his directorial debut aged 70. At this year’s Brit awards the singer Raye became the surprise star, a late-blooming sensation. And whatever you think of Joe Biden’s age, he is a symbol of a workforce that is more and more active as it gets older. Nearly one in five Americans over the age of 65 are in work — nearly double what it was 35 years ago.

This list is not supposed to make you feel like anything is possible. The self-helpists are too credulous. What these later achievements prove instead is that you do not simply wake up one day and discover that you are Toni Morrison. Late blooming is a long, hard slog. But it’s also true that we simply don’t know how many people could change things for themselves — given the opportunity, put in the right circumstances. Instead of polarising between self-help platitudes and cynical epigrams, we need a new mindset about talent, potential, and flourishing in the second half of our lives. And the pervasive spirit of this mindset must be the word “perhaps”. There is no law of late blooming. I am not presenting the biographical examples as incontrovertible, pure, or morally exceptional. What I can argue is that in all fields — including mathematics, where late blooming seems unfeasible — we underrate the potential of hidden talent. And the success stories are remarkably contingent on the chaos of the life lived. Past is prologue, not prediction.

As John Stuart Mill said, the main lesson of history is “the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences”. And it wasn’t only Eisenhower who began his second act in the midst of war. Looking at a sample of men born during the Great Depression who served throughout the Second World War and the Korean War, the sociologist Glen Elder found that men from disadvantaged backgrounds became more socially competent and had improved psychological health after military service. They also improved their occupation outcomes as a result of skills gained in the army. As well as going to college on the G.I. Bill, many army veterans completed high school and undertook craft or vocational training. The army was a bridge from one sort of life to another, often coming at a time when their prospects seemed settled. They went from being school leavers with poor prospects to veterans with the chance of a decent life. It had seemed too late to change, but it wasn’t.

For men already established in jobs and families, the military was more likely to be disruptive. But for those who were on the route to a disappointing life, military service improved their trajectory. There were many negative impacts of army service: mobilised men were more likely to divorce, particularly those who saw battle action and were in their 30s when the war started. But this goes to show the same thing — changing your life path is possible, whatever your age or current experiences. The more you change your circumstances, the more you can change yourself. In the United States, delinquent men who were given overseas service, for example, were much more likely to use training opportunities provided by the 1944 G.I. Bill. As one pair of sociologists said: “Overseas duty, which embodies radical change, provides a unique stepping stone to eventual turn-around among those stigmatized with a criminal conviction.” It changed the way people thought of them and changed the way they thought about themselves.

For a lot of people, mid-life is the time when a second act becomes possible or desirable. We find ourselves lost on the path in the middle of a dark wood, as Dante said, or in Robert Frost’s terms, life itself becomes too much like a pathless wood. In these circumstances, anyone would like to get away from earth awhile. The theory of the “happiness curve” will tell you this period of dissatisfaction is normal, biological, nothing to do with your life or your work or your lost dreams, just mere hormones. Apes have the same dips. Don’t try to get away, this theory says. Stick it out. The feeling will pass.

But not only is the data around that claim looking less and less certain, with new studies finding that the happiness curve might not exist at all, it also places everyone too neatly onto an average line. You are the person you are; you are not a statistical event. This is where self-help can be helpful. Aspiration and ambition are how we change the world. Focusing on the outlier success stories isn’t a way of selling a hollow dream to unsuspecting dupes. It’s part of a culture of aspiration of which we have become sceptical through overexposure. But while the transformation we’re too often promised is rare, change is very possible — as long as we get past culture war divides and be open to the immense range of ways an individual life can flourish.

But self-help lets us down when it comes to how we make a change in our lives. There are no simple solutions to help you leapfrog yourself into a new life. Instead, we can take some advice from a great late bloomer, Audrey Sutherland.

Suggested reading

The enlightened case for being selfish

By Michael Cuenco

Sutherland was a Hawaiian kayaker. She started exploring Hawaiian coastlines in her forties, and purchased an inflatable kayak, which was mocked by more experienced (and male) explorers. But she persisted and became competent and well-regarded. Then, when Sutherland turned 60, she looked herself in the mirror and said: “Getting older, aren’t you lady? Better do the physical things now. You can work at a desk later.” She quit her job and went on her first solo exploration in Artic waters.

This was a remarkable change. Capsizing meant risk of death. Camping involved bear encounters, alone in the woods. The coastline was ragged from logging. Cabins often required repair before she could sleep in them. But for the next 20 years, into her eighties, she undertook solo kayak explorations of the Alaskan and British Columbian coast.

Sutherland used to give talks at kayaking associations. At the end, she would tell the audience to close their eyes and think about the one big thing they wanted to do with their lives if they were given $5 million dollars tomorrow. Now, she would say, open your eyes and ask yourself: “What’s stopping me?”

Suggested reading

E.P. Thompson, Marxist rebel

By Samuel Rubenstein

At one event, a man stood up and told her exactly what was stopping him. A job. A mortgage. Children. Elderly parents. A wife to support. This hardly elicited much sympathy from Sutherland, who had been a single, working, mother to four children, living on a moderate income. She replied: “Then you need to ask yourself: What part of my goal can I achieve now? What can I do now to achieve my goal later?”

That was how she did it. One step at a time. Read maps. Acquire cheap gear. Practice capsizing. Do preparatory treks in local terrain. Anything that gets you closer.

The stockbroker Chris Gardner said the same thing. He had gone from being a young black man with no degree, no connections, and no qualifications — with no access, that is, to the white, patrician finance world of the Eighties — to running his own firm. He was homeless for a short period and only got his break aged 27. For anyone who wants to be a late bloomer, he offered this most important piece of advice: “While you’re brushing your teeth, ask yourself: If tomorrow morning you could be doing anything in the world, what would it be? Second, what did you do today to make that tomorrow possible?”

But then Freud, by his own admission, was much less interested in healing the sick than in pioneering the “science” he called psychoanalysis. So he would have been dismayed to learn that, by the turn of the millennium, most psychiatrists would view his theories in roughly the same way chemists viewed alchemy: as a faintly embarrassing remnant of their field’s unscientific prehistory. “Freud’s ideas”, declared a major history of psychiatry in 1998, “are vanishing like the last snows of winter”. Ironically, Freud’s single surviving legacy in Western medicine looked set to be the use of talk therapies largely cleansed of psychoanalytic content.

This was a brutal demotion in status for a man whose impact was compared, in his lifetime, to that of Darwin. And even if that comparison was Freud’s own, it says a great deal that he wasn’t laughed out of Vienna for making it. Just as Darwin had uncovered the evolution of species by studying the flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands, Freud believed he had uncovered the evolution of the mind by studying the unhappy patients on his couch. Many eminent contemporaries took him at his own estimation: Einstein wrote him fan mail, and Bertrand Russell campaigned for him to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And Freud’s ideas came to hold such sway that through the Seventies the DSM-II, the American “bible” of psychiatric diagnosis, comprised a medley of psychoanalytic terms like “hysterical neurosis” and “schitzoid personality”.

Within a generation, university students were becoming more likely to encounter Freud’s ideas on a course in literary theory than one in psychology or psychiatry. One reason was the new discovery of primary sources which, in the Eighties and Nineties, turned assassinating Freud’s character into something of a public bloodsport among intellectuals. The wise and humble doctor eulogised by Auden now stood accused (irrefutably) of clinical ineptitude and scientific recklessness verging on fraud, (plausibly) of conducting an affair with his wife’s sister, and (absurdly) of attempted murder and child abuse.

Suggested reading

Why CBT won't set you free

By Nina Lyon

But far more damaging for Freud’s ideas was the rise, in the latter half of the 20th century, of an alternative view of mental illness based on three things: genes, brains and drugs. The decoding of the complete human genome promised to unveil the origins of psychological suffering in our parents’ DNA rather than in their care-giving styles. New brain imaging technology would enable us to observe psychiatric disorders in the contours of grey matter rather than rooting around for them in the murk of the unconscious. And new medications to treat mania, psychosis and depression were already replacing the hours of aimless chat prescribed by psychoanalysis. Freud began to look more like the founder of a religion than a scientist, and his followers like disciples zealously but fruitlessly interpreting his sacred texts. “Biomedical” psychiatry had seemingly triumphed; the real scientists would take over from here.

So it may come as a surprise that, decades after the study of the neuroses was replaced by that of the neurotransmitters, a prominent clinical psychologist has published a new book that includes a game attempt to make a scientific case for Freud. In Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Making of the Modern Mind, Frank Tallis dares to take a harder line than most other Freudian holdouts. When their discipline came under siege from biomedical psychiatry, most psychoanalysts — turtlenecked figures who could quote Proust and Lacan but had never seen the inside of a lab — retreated to Hampstead, pulled up the drawbridge and turned inward. Adam Phillips, perhaps the most famous of them, now argued that Freud’s ideas cannot be false but, like poetry, only “more or less interesting, more or less inspiring”. Sounding like High Church mystics in the age of modern science, the psychoanalysts in effect helped downgrade their own field from a mighty branch of medicine to a (more inspiring, interesting — and expensive) rival to astrology.

By eschewing such relativism, Tallis may be out of step with contemporary psychiatry — contrast his subtitle with that of the 2006 work Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind — but unlike Phillips et al., he at least takes Freud seriously on his own terms. After all, Freud fulminated against those like Jung who doubted the literal truth of ideas like penis envy and the oral and anal stages of sexual development. “We don’t reject Copernicus, Kepler or Galileo because they produced horoscopes,” Tallis points out. This is true, but some might object that there is rather more evidence that the earth travels around the sun than there is for the idea that the central trauma of a little boy’s life is his terror of being castrated by his father as punishment for wanting to sleep with his mother.

More from this author

WG Sebald's cure for trauma

By Matt Rowland Hill

Boldly (or, perhaps, rashly) Tallis attempts a review of the science. Freud’s ideas, he assures us, have had unspecified “seismic after-effects” in the field of biology. There have been conferences of something called the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society (among whose attendees, we are gravely informed, was Oliver Sacks). In support of Freud’s claim that dreams represent symbolic wish fulfilment, Tallis quotes a neuroscientist who writes that “‘wishing’ might be subserved by the mesocortical-mesolimbic dopamine circuitry of the brain”. There is certainly a pungent, science-y whiff to all this. But readers will decide for themselves whether it adds up to what Tallis calls “Freud’s scientific rehabilitation”.

But perhaps instead a case can be made for the enduring relevance to psychiatry of Freud’s worldview without resorting to scientific credulity or postmodern mystification. Indeed, millions of readers are already familiar with it by way of bestselling books based on a growing body of research on the effects of trauma. When Bessel van der Kolk argues that the human body “keeps the score” of the mind’s suffering, or that “traumatised people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on”, he can sound uncannily like Freud (whose work he liberally quotes). Likewise the Canadian physician and intellectual Gabor Mate when he writes that our early experiences can leave us trapped in a “physio-emotional time warp”. Van der Kolk and Mate place strong emphasis on “attachment theory”, first developed by the psychoanalyst John Bowlby, which explores how the effects of our early entanglements reverberate through our lives.

What’s more, the claim that Freud’s notions are unsupported by science no longer cuts as deep as it once did — because, as it turns out, so are some of the fundamental assumptions of the “biomedical” psychiatry that supposedly usurped them. The decoding of the human genome, completed in 2003, did not show that mental illness is predestined but, rather, that hereditary vulnerability interacts with our environment in enormously complex ways. Optimism around psychopharmacology has waned, as new psychiatric drugs have failed to appear and doubts about the efficacy and safety of the old ones has grown. And hopes brain imaging would transform psychiatry have petered out, as new technologies like fMRI have so far shown no utility in the diagnosis or treatment of mental illness. In 2022, a new history of psychiatry gloomily concluded that “biology is a bet whose payoff has been far more limited than its architects promised”.

None of this means that the Gothic edifice of Freud’s theories, with its vaults and gargoyles, is about to be rebuilt. But a sober assessment of what modern psychiatry can and cannot tell us suggests that, in broad outline if not in many of its details, his approach continues to hold much value. Our past loves and terrors can haunt us in the present. We are often opaque to ourselves, riven by conflicts we only half understand, our passions barely kept in check by external constraints. If we can be helped to overcome the thousand ways we protect ourselves from self-knowledge, we may see that our distress is not some random affliction but a meaningful response to the conditions of our development. Our suffering has a story, and it makes sense.

Freud once likened the way we repress unwanted thoughts to the ejection of a disruptive audience member from an academic lecture so that the event can continue smoothly. Now 30 years after Freud himself was manhandled from the podium of psychiatry and shut out of the lecture hall, the authorities who replaced him are faltering — and he can still be heard, banging on the door outside. Even if, as Auden wrote, “often he was wrong and, at times, absurd”, his voice cannot altogether be silenced. Perhaps the most canny assessment of him came from his wronged patient Horace Frink, who when Freud was dying was asked if he had any words for his former idol. “Tell him he was a great man,” said Frink, “even if he did invent psychoanalysis”.

Amid all the apocalyptic prophesying that has defined the dawn of 2024, this is the refreshing contention of Maggie Jackson’s call for us to embrace the unknown. Rather than focus on “aleatory uncertainty”, with its emphasis on how random the universe can be, Jackson’s Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure is more concerned with “epistemic uncertainty”, where the starting point of our pursuit of knowledge is the not knowing. The problem, she notes, is that this powerful drive makes us more keen to have any answer than to have the right answer.

Not only that: we like our experts to deliver the right answer quickly and with reassuring fluency, so we can relax and let them get on with life-saving surgery or cracking enemy codes, or whatever. And yet, we don’t like them to be so intuitive that they mess up when something surprising happens. When, say, the economy unexpectedly tanks or the shuttle blows up, we want to know why they didn’t consider other possibilities. And so Jackson says we need our experts to have both elements: the fluency that comes from training, practice and experience, as well as the alertness to the unexpected and a constant ability to switch from automaticity to “a readiness to work with the unknown”.

How might this be achieved? One answer is provided by psychologists and brain scientists who have spent years studying teams in high-pressure situations, from climbing Everest to reaching a jury decision in a rape trial. They have reached useful conclusions about using uncertainty to reach better decisions, instead of fleeing the discomfort of doubt. “Groups that cultivate judicious conflict, dissent, and mutual criticism tend to be high-performing,” says Jackson.

Suggested reading

Our Godless era is dead

By Paul Kingsnorth

Elsewhere, psychologists such as Celeste Kidd have highlighted how childhood experiences influence a person’s willingness to embrace uncertainty. Revisiting the Marshmallow Test that explores a child’s ability to defer gratification (leave the first marshmallow uneaten, and get two marshmallows later), Kidd concluded that “for a child accustomed to stolen possessions and broken promises, the only guaranteed treats are the ones you already have swallowed”. Her work, and that of others, showed that children who grow up in chaotic and unpredictable environments learn to take nothing for granted, and pick up quickly on changes and threats. Their quickness to change focus, and slowness to trust, is normally seen as a weakness, but it can be an advantage in precarious situations. Uncertainty, after all, usually breeds scepticism.

Yet this doesn’t mean that those with more contented childhoods necessarily feel more secure or see the future as predictable. The realities of life will often put paid to that. This coming year, for instance, will no doubt be defined by war, economic tribulation and political upheaval — with each outburst will come a reminder of the very real uncertainties of human nature. In almost every country, there is also a disquieting sense that nobody competent or trustworthy has the situation under control. There is no Nasa CapCom to take charge of a crisis or steer the spacecraft safely home.

Worse still, we lack not only a trustworthy skipper with a competent crew, but a chart and compass by which they might steer. Visions of the future have always been contested, but today even that contestation seems chaotic and unpredictable. Emotive causes that draw heavily on the justifications of identity groups attract fervent support, while old centres of authority founder in doubt about what values, causes or boundaries they ought to advance, or even defend. As Yeats wrote more than a century ago: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

This is the more difficult aspect of uncertainty that now burdens us. In a time of polarisation, of dismissing not just the opinions but the humanity of those with whom we disagree, can uncertainty open up some common ground? Here, Jackson defends tolerance, and free speech, especially for opposing opinions. “Tolerance is the chance to create with another an evolving understanding,” she says. “It is a mutual promise to keep learning.” And, crucially, this includes acknowledging the rights of other humans to hold opinions and adhere to values that one finds odious. Otherwise, like upholding freedom of speech only for speech that we find acceptable, it becomes meaningless. The problem arises when tolerance becomes relativism, when we embrace uncertainty so completely that no values or principles are worth defending. How, for instance, can we argue that the Taliban are wrong to exclude girls from school if we lack principles upon which to build the case that girls have an equal right to education?

Suggested reading

33 concepts to survive the year

By Gurwinder Bhogal

This lack of certainty about society’s underlying values imbues all levels of social life with a sense of precarity. Of course, those foundational values have changed through history, sometimes convulsively. The idea of universal equality among human beings would, for instance, have been nonsensical to most of our ancestors. Economies heavily reliant on chattel slavery collided violently with the enlightenment values expressed in the French revolution’s motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Public argument about society’s deepest values was essential to changing them practically as well as theoretically.

This, as we enter a new year, is the deeper question that underlies our troubled relationship with uncertainty: about what should we be certain, and how can we justify that certainty to ourselves as well as others? After all, without tolerance, we cannot test ideas against each other, or retain the basic sense that a person’s humanity is valuable, however strongly we reject their ideas. But without commitment to core values — such as a universal human claim to humanity — we have no defence against the worst ideas except to say that we don’t like how they make us feel.

Can we ever be sure that our ideas are the best ideas? Not completely. We can test them against the best opposing arguments, but at some point there is a leap of faith involved in putting them into action. But some ideas are better than others, and worth fighting for. Of that we should be certain.

It is fashionable to blame parents for being “too anxious” which has created a generation of kids too fragile for public life. But these anxieties haven’t come from nowhere. This is how we were told we were supposed to be. For decades, so-called “experts” peddled pseudoscientific theories and magic bullets in the form of parental behaviour management to cure all manner of social ills. The good parent was beatified as one who is aware of every risk and acts accordingly. And woe betide the “lazy” parent who does not. In doing so, they pointed the finger squarely at parents for nearly everything that goes wrong.

Since at least the Seventies, this is how generations have learned to think about problems, both personal and social: “What did the parents do?” At the inaugural conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) held last month, even critics of our over-fragile culture could not resist delineating all the ways parenthood has contributed to our censorious and illiberal culture. Phoning in from New York, Jonathan Haidt criticised the rise of the “phone-based childhood” and alluded to its roots in the Nineties when “free play” dwindled and paranoid parents started to think “everyone’s a child molester or rapist”. He was echoing his and Greg Lukianoff’s Coddling of the American Mind, published in 2018, in which they warn about the rise of “helicopter parents”.

Speaking like bewildered farmers whose chickens have come home to roost, they find it difficult to imagine that their own profession, psychology, might have something to do with our age of fragility. Over the years, a voluminous academic literature has mined the minutiae of childhood experience to find the sources of personal and social problems in everything from how parents feed their children (bottle or breast, spoon or “baby-led weaning”) to how many words they say before an ever-lowering crucial age.

In countless self-help books and on endless daytime talk show segments, they educated people in their emotional vulnerability and invited them to scan their childhoods for the sources of their troubles. A litany of minor behaviours became linked to metaphors of toxicity and a swathe of wicked personal and public problems. These experts preached a gospel of emotional vulnerability and now appear shocked that people believed them.

Suggested reading

The student mental-health crisis is a myth

By Ashley Frawley

Consider the widespread policy application of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences). Drawn from a questionnaire devised in 1998, it tallies up adverse experiences in childhood to produce a score said to be predictive of future life outcomes. Under the veil of scientific calculation, it pinpoints the cause of so many issues that had proven resistant to change. And instead of dealing with the tough business of things such as poverty and poor housing, it implied that governments could simply intervene to change the way parents behave. Even Haidt and Lukianoff draw on ACEs in their manifesto for a more robust public life, concluding:

“… there are two very different ways to damage [children’s] development. One is to neglect and underprotect them, exposing them early to severe and chronic adversity… The other is to overmonitor and overprotect them, denying them the thousands of small challenges, risks, and adversities that they need to face on their own in order to become strong and resilient adults.”

So whether you over-protect them or under-protect them, the problem is you. Moreover, besides being criticised for, among other things, downplaying the role of poverty and conflating severe experiences such as childhood sex abuse and not feeling anyone thought you were “special”, it was precisely devices such as the ACE questionnaire that led to the overuse of concepts such as “trauma”. Sure, you might have never lived in a war zone, but add up your bad experiences in childhood and you too can have a coveted claim to emotional damage.

This is a tough narrative to shake. From the speeches of politicians underscoring the importance of the “first three years” to popular books such as Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family, there is one point of agreement across the spectrum: Larkin was right. This is the ethos of parental determinism: the notion that what parents do is a key cause determining our personal and societal fate.

Not only does it fail to capture the complexity of the problems that face us, it also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, reducing the control people feel they hold over their lives. This is by design. The rise of parenting expertise happened in concert with the overall proliferation of other forms of pseudo-expertise, a large part of which involved the denigration of the ordinary, uninitiated individual’s ability to adequately manage his affairs. It is an expertise that arose hand in hand with a generalised pessimism about the ability of human beings to manage their fate.

Already by the middle of the 19th century, the enormous optimism about man’s ability to control the course of history that had characterised the “age of Enlightenment” had begun to wane. Optimistic figures of the Enlightenment such as Godwin and Condorcet had pointed to societal impediments to the “future progress of mankind”, and looked forward to the day when, once rooted out, problems would be a distant memory. Yet as many social problems appeared stubbornly resistant to change, a certainty grew that the answers lay not in the external world but in the internal world of the human subject. Society wasn’t the problem. The problem was you and me.

Suggested reading

Comrade Starmer has never had class

By Ashley Frawley

As Christopher Lasch observed, by the 20th century, social reformers increasingly came to see the family as an obstacle to the social changes they desired. If behaviours and beliefs were now an impediment to progress, it was logical to look to their source — the family and the leading role that parents played therein. Accordingly, once-banal aspects of everyday life came to be referred to as an “art”, communicating a “conception of marriage and the family that derived not so much from aesthetics as from science and technology… When marriage experts said that marriage represented the art of personal ‘interaction,’ they meant that marriage, like everything else, rested on proper technique.” Progressives, Lasch continued, envisaged a day when parenting would be professionalised and “licensed” and the “unfit of the human species” would “cease to reproduce their kind”.

While obviously not everyone took their conclusions to such eugenicist extremes, many members of a new and growing “knowledge class” expressed a similar exasperation with the ordinary individual’s inability to manage his life. Hence even a figure such as Bronisław Malinowski, critical of Freud’s excessive focus on the nuclear family, could see “only one way out” of the “cultural crisis” of his time, the Thirties, as “the establishment of a… scientific control of human affairs.” Since that time, this class has only grown, both responding to such “crises” and, implicitly, responding to its own failure to really solve them.

Part of the difficulty, then, is that ordinary people don’t realise just how stupid they are. They have to be convinced of their incapacity, lest they have no idea that they are going about their lives all wrong. Hence at the beginning of nearly every new psychotherapeutic fad, advocates emerge informing audiences of their perilous inability to do things correctly. And so, a key part of the gospel of emotional vulnerability is the constant preaching that the uninitiated “layperson” is sorely ill-equipped to manage the tough business of living. They need the growing piles of books, apps, and even “wellbeing curriculum” produced by proliferating therapeutic entrepreneurs whose business it is to make a problem of the minutiae of everyday life. In all this, vulnerability has become a sacred ethos, preached to young people and their parents at every turn.

All of which means that we parents are told we cannot simply rely on our own experiences and those of generations before us. After all, that’s where all the problems started — with people who just didn’t know what “we know now”. The result is a complete denial of agency: parents are constantly enjoined to doubt themselves and to “listen to the experts” — and yet, paradoxically, no one seems to look to the experts when things go wrong.

Encounters such as these, in which a dying person is “brought home” by someone who loved them earlier in their life, are one of the many fantastical experiences commonly reported by people close to death. For several decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have been studying “near-death experiences”, to understand what causes them and what they might mean. Some of the most remarkable reports have come from patients who clinically died before being resuscitated — and saw things that changed their lives.

Researchers say that 10-20% of those who have returned from the brink of death have clear memories of what they went through. The same stories come up over and again. They have left their body and are looking down from above. They’re in an infinite void, or approaching a border from which there is no return. They feel a deep sense of harmony with something much bigger than themselves. Scenes from their past are played out in front of them and they see how their actions affected others. They’re passing through a tunnel towards a bright light. They’re in a beautiful garden with people who have died before them.

These visions are quite different from everyday dreams or drug-induced hallucinations, which tend to be fractured, disordered and difficult to interpret. They almost always have a narrative arc, a distinct reality and a clear purpose or moral intent. They are often exquisitely detailed. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, has collected hundreds of graphic accounts that he describes as “quite real and quite profound in their impact”. The following example, recounted in his 2021 book After, is from a 23-year-old woman who almost died during a bad reaction to an anaesthetic during childbirth: “This was a beautiful green meadow with beautiful flowers, beautiful colours … colours that I’d never seen before … I realised I was seeing the inner light of all the growing things, just utter glory in colour.”

Another of his patients, a firefighter at an air force base, recalled being in some kind of tunnel after being severely injured in an explosion: “There was a light in the distance and I saw the spiralling strings of blue-green light coming and going like the aurora borealis. The light was drawing me to it. I moved exceptionally fast down the tunnel and it took no time at all to reach it … The light was emanating from a being … He was beautiful to look at, and projected the feelings of unconditional love.”

More from this author

Can a psychologist find you love?

By Michael Bond

Most people who report near-death experiences describe them as pleasant or even transcendent. Recently, Sam Parnia and his colleagues at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine interviewed survivors of cardiac arrest. Many recalled a pervasive sense of peace. “It was so calm and serene with an incredible amount of tranquility,” one of them told the researchers. Another described feeling “nothing but love, goodness, truth, and all things to do with love. There was no room for fear or evil … I was so happy to be there.”

It is tempting to think that these upbeat assessments tell us something about death itself — that there is no reason to dread it, that some part of us survives it. But near-death experiences are reported exclusively by people who survived. They may describe the process of dying, but not what comes afterwards. Moreover, not all of them are tranquil. Greyson and a fellow researcher, Nancy Evans Bush, have recorded dozens of reports of negative experiences which they say contain many of the same phenomena as positive experiences but differ greatly in “emotional tone”. Patients who float outside their body can find it terrifying. The oft-reported infinite void can trigger feelings of desperate isolation. A few people have had the sensation that they are plunging through the gates of hell. One woman who passed out during a traumatic childbirth found herself floating on water, a feeling she described as “pure hell. I had become a light out in the heavens, and I was screaming, but no sound was going forth. It was worse than any nightmare.”

The long history of these accounts upends much of what we believe about the relationship between the mind and the brain. In the prevailing orthodoxy of medicine, the mind should not be capable of heightened, lucid states when the brain is barely functioning or clinically dead. But when Parnia and his team at New York University monitored the electrical activity in the brains of cardiac arrest patients as they underwent CPR, they found surprising evidence of high-level cognitive functioning in many of the patients up to an hour after cardiac arrest — even though blood flow and oxygen levels diminished drastically within seconds of their heart stopping. The researchers think the brainwaves they recorded were “biomarkers of consciousness” — neural correlates of the near-death experiences reported by some of the surviving patients when they woke up. They suggest that instead of completely dying when oxygen levels fall off, the brain enters a state of disinhibition that allows “lucid understanding of new dimensions of reality — including people’s deeper consciousness”.

Whatever we encounter when we die, it is likely the same for all of us. The central elements of near-death experiences appear to be universal, though they are often filtered through the lens of culture or religion. For instance, the Tibetan delogs — people who have “returned from death” — have the sensation of looking down on their body, but they are more likely to see it as the corpse of a pig, a symbol of ignorance and delusion in Tibetan Buddhism. And their journey through the after-world is often populated with formidable or horrifying deities, as in this account of a Bhutanese delog from the mid-17th century in which she witnessed “an ox-headed acolyte of the Lord of Death beating some tied-up victims for having eaten meat”.

A grand theory of near-death experiences is almost certainly beyond us. They may be a mechanism to allow us to make sense of the life we have lived. They may hint at hitherto unrealised levels of consciousness. It’s hard to imagine them having an evolutionary purpose, unless their function is to rescue us from the brink of death. But one thing they tell us for sure: the mind is more than a function of the brain, and we still don’t know the full extent of what it is capable of.

We do know that such patients lose their fear of death. They become more loving, more tolerant, more interested in the suffering of others. They care less about material possessions and appreciate the everyday things more. They live more fully in the present. Greyson thinks everyone should live life as if they’ve had a near-death experience, since — as he says in his book — “they tell us that life is more about meaning and compassion than about wealth and control”.

My father died surrounded by people who loved him, but I rather hope they weren’t the last people he saw. I like to imagine he was greeted by friends and family who had gone before him, who ushered him through the tunnel of light, introduced him to the radiant figurehead and settled him into the beautiful garden. Who knows, maybe he’ll be waiting for me there.

I flick through the papers on my lap. There it is, at the bottom: “Autism, without accompanying intellectual impairment and without accompanying language impairment.” I read that I fulfil all seven diagnostic criteria for what used to be known as Asperger’s Syndrome. In fact, on one of the rating scales where a score of more than 77 points supports a diagnosis, I come in at 154. I feel I’ve done well, by being such a clear-cut case.

Then, my past unfolds. It’s like watching a film with a twist at the end. The signs were there all along: literal thinking, obsessive interests, anxiety, struggles with change. I have always known that I’m autistic. And yet, I haven’t had a clue.

The assessment that led up to my diagnosis lasted for three months. The psychologist interviewed me and spoke to my close family; I did tests and filled out questionnaires. The self-report inventories were a little antiquated in their view on autism, the psychologist told me apologetically. He was right. The questions were based on stereotypical male interests, such as playing boardgames, noticing number plates on cars, or collecting information about different categories of trains.

I envisioned the person whom the questionnaire was aimed at: an anaemic male gamer who rarely leaves his apartment, collects soda cans, can solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute and monotonously drones on and on about the Cretaceous period. I thought about male geeks in popular culture, characters in TV shows like The Big Bang Theory or Atypical.

Until the Nineties, autism was regarded as a condition mostly found in boys — simply because all the early scientific research on autism was done on boys and men. This gender imbalance meant the diagnostic tools established were skewed. Doctors such as Hans Asperger noted that the boys he examined had limited, strong interests, and came to the conclusion that this was an autistic trait. Therefore, only “boyish” special interests came to be associated with autism.

In 1992, the Swedish child psychiatrist Svenny Kopp — one of the first authors to write a scientific article arguing that there were more autistic girls than previously believed — noticed that if a girl was obsessed with, for example, My Little Pony, her male colleagues wouldn’t recognise this as an autistic special interest. Instead, the girls were given other, less specific diagnoses like Semantic Pragmatic Disorder or “learning difficulties”. Autism was only recognised in a girl if the case was very severe.

Medicine did ask itself, at the time, why there seemed to be no girls with so-called “high-functioning” autism — that is, autism without accompanying intellectual impairment. The explanation, doctors decided, was that girls must have to experience a more extensive brain injury, a more profound intellectual disability, before they could develop autism. But Svenny Kopp didn’t buy it. Being female herself was pivotal to her scepticism, she says today. Her ground-breaking thesis, “The Girl Project”, showed that not all autism looks like the kind observed in boys. She is currently conducting a follow up-study of the girls she worked with in the Nineties, who are all now around 35. Her work has received an incredible amount of attention — and offered salvation to many autistic women.

Suggested reading

Who decides if you're mentally ill?

By Hannah Baer

Autistic women are often good at masking their social shortcomings, because from a young age girls tend to be drilled harder in social intercourse than boys. Masking happens unconsciously, and from an early age; children with autism withdraw and make themselves invisible, as they carefully observe the play and speech of their fellows, before attempting to copy them.

When I was a child, my peers sometimes resented me without me understanding why. I realised that I must have been misunderstood somehow, but couldn’t see when or how. A fear took root in me. Without knowing it, I studied social interaction through the books, TV shows, plays and films that I devoured. I began to minimise risks in my friendships by letting others make decisions, so that no one would get annoyed. I often found myself in constellations that may have looked like a trio from the outside, but were really two best friends and one backup: me. I listened, asked questions, said yes to every suggestion, expressed almost no needs of my own, kept confidences but rarely offered any in return, and became everyone’s most amenable friend.

Girls with autism are often interpreted as “sweet”, shy and acquiescent. They don’t take up space in a group or stir up trouble. By adulthood, their masking can be so honed that they become social chameleons, who blend in seamlessly in any company. But the long-term suppression of their own true self often leads to exhaustion and poor mental health. Those who seek out an assessment almost always have a history of anxiety and depression, my psychologist tells me. If you don’t interpret reality in the same way as those around you, of course you will feel unwell. Research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry states that, in the UK, “10% of those who died by suicide had evidence of elevated autistic traits, indicating likely undiagnosed autism”.

Suggested reading

Big Fertility profits from women's pain

By Victoria Smith

Nevertheless, moving through the world without masking at all is near-impossible for an autist. There would be too many conflicts and misunderstandings, as neurotypical people have a hard time grasping that not everyone is like them. In search of relief, as an adolescent I spent all my time at the stable. My relationship with horses felt peaceful and undemanding compared to my relationships with other people. I couldn’t decipher the codes, couldn’t understand what was implied. It was as though something went on between others that was imperceptible to me — something subtle and ever-changing.

The more “high functioning” you are, the easier it is to study expected behaviours, mask your autism and behave on the majority’s terms — in social relationships, in the schoolyard, and on the job market. After university, I transformed my special interests into a profession and started working in radio and television. There, communication was simpler; there were rules. You wrote a script before speaking and all you had to do was read it aloud. No one was allowed to interrupt. When the green light came on in the studio, the floor was mine.

But the better you are at “acting normal”, the less seriously you will be taken when explaining your difficulties. “Intelligence can compensate for so much,” the artist Linn, who was diagnosed at age 22, told me. The way her strengths have obscured her difficulties has been a constant frustration in her life. “If I hadn’t been so smart, they might have noticed something sooner. When others perceive you as intellectually clever, they struggle to understand that you can have all these problems. It doesn’t add up that someone who is good at thinking can fail so utterly at things that are easy for others.”

After my assessment, I searched for books on autism in grown women, but couldn’t find many. Most books focused on children and adolescents, but autism is not something you grow out of. You can get better at coping, but it can’t be trained away and there is no medication. It is a life-long condition.

And so, I decided to write a book to fill the silence, The Autists: Women on the Spectrum. I interviewed autistic women in Sweden, including Linn. Their stories echoed mine: growing up feeling different without understanding why; experiencing bullying in school and constant misunderstandings in communication with others; suffering from depression and anxiety as an adult; and then finally finding peace in being given the right diagnosis.

Suggested reading

Who decides if you're mentally ill?

By Hannah Baer

Autism has always been present in humanity, according to neurologists such as Oliver Sacks. But throughout history, the language used to describe autistic people has varied, from “withdrawn” and “eccentric” to “odd”. The earliest descriptions of what is thought to be autism date back to the 13th century, and refer to the Italian monk Brother Juniper, one of the Grey Friars in St Francis’s following. Of course, we can never be sure about a posthumous diagnosis, but scientists have researched the lives of famous historical individuals — using source materials such as diaries, letters, testimonies from relatives and medical assessments — and tried to determine whether they might have received an autism diagnosis had they been alive today. Women often mentioned are poet Emily Dickinson, philosopher Simone Weil and author Patricia Highsmith.

But autism as a concept wasn’t born until the early 20th century — and back then it only really applied to men. To have grown up with undiagnosed autism is to have suffered difficulties that didn’t exist. I close my eyes and rewind my own tape again, seeing the clues from my childhood and teenage years and life as a young adult. What if I had known sooner? How would my life have turned out? I tell myself that the alternative is impossible: during my childhood, female autists without intellectual impairment, as a recognised category, didn’t exist. No one could have given me a diagnosis. My life thus far is not a series of years lost. But still, I mourn not being able to decipher the signs before. I repressed everything that was true in me, and kept striving towards further defeat.

My diagnosis is the best thing that has happened for my self-esteem. After the assessment, I went from failed neurotypical to regular autist. I understood who I was, and the relief was indescribable. My anxiety receded, and I lowered my dosage of antidepressants. I started to like my quirky sides. I found the strength to say no to things I had previously thought I must do. I shrunk my life, peeling away things and musts, protecting everything that made me feel good. I became proud of my difference.

It’s a new year. One day when parents are invited to join the children in class, I visit my daughter’s school. I watch the children colour in drawings of animals. When the bell rings for lunch, we walk to the canteen, where chilli fish and boiled potatoes are on the menu. We choose the table in the farthest corner. Sitting there, alone, is a girl from another class. I take a seat across from her. On her plate are three pancakes. No toppings. She looks at me.

“I get to eat this because I’m autistic,” she says, and puts a piece of pancake in her mouth.

“Me too,” I say.

There is something dystopian about people competing for the attention of a famous podcast host to solve their most intimate problems. Hundreds of couples apply for a handful of opportunities to share their stories with Perel, along with her legion of listeners. Her 2006 bestselling guide to marital relations, Mating in Captivity, established her as TED-talking international authority on relationships. By the time Where Should We Begin? launched in 2017, Perel was listed in Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul 100 list of “spiritual luminaries”. Her podcast has been downloaded 50 million times since its launch.

It’s not hard to see why. As radical new ways of ordering relationships have proliferated, we no longer hold a set of principles for living in common. Liberalism’s marketplace of ideas has given rise to a marketplace of moralities: as free unbounded agents, we get to decide what is right for us. But when our bespoke moral stories clash with those adopted by other people in our lives, things get tricky: how do you resolve a conflict when you cannot agree on the rules that mediate it? Who do you turn to, to help you decide?

Enter Perel. She is fair, philosophical in encouraging a big-picture view of how to live well, and gently tough at making sure that the dynamic never falls into that of victim and aggressor. Nothing is sensationalised, and no one is demonised. She is something of a radical in the Anglosphere, where our one-strike-and-you’re-out attitude to cheating has remained intransigent even as non-traditional, non-monogamous relationships have become increasingly common. With divorce rates estimated at 42% in the UK and 45% in the US, and 27% of US adults estranged from a close family member, Perel’s more charitable approach to conflict might have merit.

She is also part of a trend. Therapists are increasingly becoming a kind of free-market priesthood, jockeying for the territory that actual priests once oversaw. With the decline of religion, we have lost any sense of a unifying story about how to live, without which we’re more likely to be miserable — as the mental health gains from being religious can attest. The claim of therapy is that it helps you shape the overarching narrative with which you make sense of the world, and how to live well in it. At best, going to one’s therapist is a substitute for confession, a time for honest reckoning; too often, though, clients see it as an indulgence, a means to divest one’s conscience of interpersonal responsibility. Once, we could have taken solace in doing the right thing by others; now, the feeling of solace comes first.

More from this author

Why CBT won't set you free

By Nina Lyon

Perel is too tough, and too professional, to let her clients avoid hard truths. But other therapy-as-content offers people that easy way out, dwelling purely on the solace. If Instagram laid the groundwork for the therapy influencer phenomenon, all pastel-coloured quotes and exhortations to set boundaries, TikTok took it to the next level. Therapists on the video-sharing site seem to see everything as a sign of trauma: transient negative emotions, feeling under-motivated, feeling over-motivated, feeling uncertain. Things that cause trauma include having to do homework, dead celebrities, and understocked supermarkets. If anyone suggests that these things might not actually cause trauma, TikTokers argue that they are “invalidating” that trauma — which, they insist, causes further trauma. The therapists who say things like this make their followers feel understood, offering sweet relief from the harsher offline world — and building their influence as they do.

An obvious concern of the influencer model of therapy is that anyone can set themselves up as a mental health expert, without any training or expertise. But most successful influencers on TikTok and Instagram are verifiably qualified therapists or psychologists. They’re careful with disclaimers too, reminding their audience that their content isn’t therapy.

But if it isn’t therapy, what is it? And who does it serve?

In The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche describes the emergence of a priesthood class that gains its influence by stirring up resentment. Until the priests come along, you may not even have understood that you were suffering. It is only when they point out injustices that the extent of your distress becomes apparent. They present you with a new, inverted moral code in which suffering is honourable and weakness is good, while the previous virtues of strength are abandoned.

The therapy influencers peddling trauma are straight out of the priesthood playbook. If the Nietzschean priesthood is all about radicalising the underclass against its oppressors, TikTok therapists have identified a vast new audience for this. Whipping up new flavours of trauma with every new social justice movement, they target a demographic who genuinely lack full autonomy, who have resented this since forever, and who spend a lot of time online: teens.

The #teentherapists’s USP is that they get it — your parents don’t listen, they don’t validate your experiences, they’re actively undermining you. The demands of school are too much right now. Setting consequences for your behaviour is abusive parenting, and it doesn’t work anyway. They’ll even shout at your mum for you. They argue that “reparenting” is required to fix all this trauma, setting themselves as the adults you really can trust.

Much of what these #teentherapists identify as abusive behaviour looks alarmingly like differences in opinion in how to navigate the world, or jarring communication styles. The information they’re sharing is bitesize, in videos that aren’t usually longer than a couple of minutes. It’s also general: whereas Perel offers insight into a specific relationship dynamic or individual psyche, TiKTok therapists are presenting universal “life lessons”. The brevity of the messaging and its attempt at catch-all appeal does little to help its audience discern abuse from ordinary conflict. There’s also something uncomfortable about adults cultivating mass parasocial relationships with kids, especially when the implication is that these distant adults are better authorities than those who are present in a teenager’s life lives.

Suggested reading

The importance of repression

By Park Macdougald

The TikTok therapists have an appealing moral sales pitch — they can reach out to a massive audience who would otherwise have been ignored. The app is more accessible than therapy. But in order to get their voices heard, therapists have to actively seek followers. If a TikTok influencer takes a strong line, viewers feel heard and vindicated, they get to blame someone else, and they want more of the same kind of validation. TikTok therapists get validation, too, from follower counts, and the book deal that might accompany them. They might even get to be the new Esther Perel.

But Perel isn’t speaking to you; she’s speaking to the couples in her session. Where most therapy-as-content cares little for the public good — it tells stories about our inner lives that can only atomise us further — Perel focuses on building, rather than destroying, social relations. Her branch of therapy is closer to genuine spirituality than the TikToker’s: the sociologist Émile Durkheim saw religion as a force for ordering interpersonal relationships, creating meaning and bringing people together to communicate and affirm shared values. It’s a version of spirituality that only works when it works in common, and you can’t achieve that in a me-centric universe.

Then again, the marketplace of meaning isn’t a uniquely postmodern phenomenon. The decline of the traditions of the Roman republic brought in weird new religions, which were mixed and matched to suit people’s temperament and station, just as elements of spirituality are today. Individualist spiritualism is nothing new, either: William James wrote about the cheesy affirmations of wellness-adjacent New Thought at the turn of the 20th century.

What is new is the impact of technology. The internet gives would-be priests access to souls worldwide, and allows them to repackage their advice into compelling, publicly-available content. The reality TV show Couples Therapy has had 50 million viewers, for instance. While Perel’s episodes conceal the identity of their subjects, Couples Therapy has not only real names but faces. A misanthrope might wonder whether that accounts in part for its wild success — there’s nothing like watching a real relationship melt down in real time. We watch Love Island for the drama of hot 20-somethings cycling through new relationships. How different is it to watch a 30-something couple conclude on TV that this is probably the end, skilfully assisted by a therapist?

Suggested reading

Can depression be cured?

By Ann Manov

Perhaps it’s about how the therapy-as-content is presented. If it exists only as emotional pornography to feed our outrage, resentment, or lust for drama, there’s nothing very therapeutic going on. When it gives us the opportunity to think expansively about what sacrifice, loyalty or trade-offs mean in our interactions with one another, then it carries both personal and social benefits.

The way those stories are packaged and sold inevitably shapes the way we use them in the wild. Create shorts for kids that introduce a layer of conflict to ordinary hardships, and they’ll probably end up more lost and distressed. Edit a day of footage showing couples bickering by the poolside into a half-hour show of shallow emotions, and you’re arguably complicit in manipulating them for malign ends. Carefully stitch together real-life therapy sessions to represent a couple’s deepest challenges, with their informed consent, as Couples Therapy does, and you’ll have a largely thoughtful audience who, though titillated, are also inclined to care about the interpersonal conflict presented, and its broader social implications.

Likewise, Where Shall We Begin? avoids the hyperinflated trauma, lurid revelations and psychobabble that get the attention on TikTok or television, instead teasing out nuance and deep understanding from its subjects. Like a good priest, Perel offers her flock pastoral care, even when she is saying things it’s hard to hear. Perel’s clients are parables for her congregation. Every session, focused on one interpersonal relationship, poses big-question questions: about what it means to be a man, or married, or loyal. Each encourages us, therefore, to think a little harder about the principles for which we no longer have a blueprint.

REBT is characterised by a kind of rugged psychic individualism. In this view, if you hope to be psychologically fixed by relying on others, if you seek healing from interpersonal woo-woo like transference, you’ve already made a key philosophical error. You’ve outsourced your agency. And that’s before getting into the most eccentric elements of psychoanalytic theory — penis envy, the Oedipus complex, Melanie Klein’s baffling idea of the bad breast as persecutory object. To read Freud is to grit one’s teeth at the relentless dogmatism of his prose, the certainty with which assumptions that look absurd in the context of observable reality somehow grew legs and ran for decades. If you are looking for relief from mental distress, is it wise to procure it from people who believe in resentment-drenched theories that could only ever make sense to the pathologically horny and disturbed?

More generously understood, psychoanalysis is based on the idea that mental distress tends to arise from unconscious inner conflicts, and that past experiences — especially those of early childhood — exert a long-term effect on our thoughts, feelings and actions. The analyst assists the patient in exploring the depths of their mind, unearthing hidden meanings. Change happens by means of the therapeutic relationship, with the patient unconsciously acting out past conflicts. The process can take years.

Albert Ellis, the originator of REBT, was a psychoanalysis refusenik, as was Aaron Beck, the father of CBT as we know it today. Their early careers were largely an accident of history: both happened to train in clinical practice in the post-war era, when psychoanalysis was dominant. Both soon observed inconsistencies between the theoretical claims of how analysis worked and their own observations of patients. Beck noticed that negative views of the self, the world and the future characterised depressive episodes in patients, rather than the repressed feelings that Freud held to be their cause. The psychoanalytic process was only supposed to work if you saw the patients daily, maintaining the relational magic, but Ellis noted that his patients who only came in once a week did just as well, and that they did even better when he ditched the psychoanalytic theory and talked to them about philosophy instead.

What emerged from this was cognitive behavioural therapy. Rather than getting stuck into the past, it operated in the here and now, looking for the habits of thought and behaviour that maintain our distress, and finding ways of thinking and behaving that might work better. The therapist’s role was not as ersatz parent or interpreter, but as Socratic teacher, helping guide the patient’s reasoning to more pragmatic ends. This seems to have worked well: in the English-speaking world, the dominance of CBT makes Freud look more like a kooky curiosity in the history of ideas than the father of psychology.

Suggested reading

Who decides if you're mentally ill?

By Hannah Baer

The ideological descendants of Freud have strong feelings about this. They’re not all psychoanalysts: there’s a genealogy of therapeutic styles that see human distress as the product of relational problems, from maternal attachment to structural oppression. They tend to see the solution as lying in the deepest layers of the self. Another thing they often have in common is really, really hating CBT.

The arguments vary. Psychodynamic psychologist Jonathan Shedler has suggested that its evidence base for CBT is skewed by selective reporting. Its heavy reliance on manuals, which therapist Nancy McWilliams criticises as rigid and simplistic, leads it to be mistakenly thought of as scientific. By focusing on the individual locus of control, CBT is a tool of neoliberalism, ignoring the systemic inequalities that shape people, telling us to grit our teeth and smile rather than try to change the world. For Jungian psychotherapist Paul Atkinson, CBT mostly serves industry, rather than the people it’s supposed to treat; it’s designed to make you a better cog in the machine. Since 2008, it has been provided for free by the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, conceived by New Labour’s “happiness czar” Richard Layard, to improve economic productivity by way of public wellbeing. As a public investment, CBT was a good one: it is short-term, taking as few as six sessions to complete in straightforward cases, and therefore cheap. It is also highly structured, gathering its own data via regular symptom inventories, meaning it could be accountable to the public purse. Choosing CBT was following the science.

This infuriated CBT’s detractors, provoking a backlash against IAPT and CBT in general. Doubts have been raised over whether IAPT data supports the impressive results it claims; studies of CBT’s efficacy elsewhere have found it to fall over time, with one finding it no more effective than its nemesis. Given that it’s being offered for free to anyone who wants it, if CBT worked, you’d expect things to be going pretty well by now. Instead, we are less happy than we have ever been, with the ONS finding the UK prevalence of moderate or severe depressive symptoms at 21%. If, as the accusers declare, CBT isn’t really therapy but a coercive lever to make people economically productive, it’s not working: record numbers are out of work due to mental ill-health.

Each era brings its own problems. In Beck and Ellis’s time, sexuality was repressed in favour of propriety, which fed depression. In the 21st century, our wellbeing has been eviscerated by technology; the impact of the internet and smartphones is well-documented. Relationships, as we used to understand them, have collapsed. The world of work has changed: there are fewer casual, pleasurable digressions between colleagues; work is increasingly seen as something that happens in isolation, rather than in concert with people you care about. If the online world turns out to have rewired our attention, this may undermine our ability to maintain the cognitive control that allows the mechanics of CBT to happen.

Economics plays its part, too. Even before inflation and housing shortages piled on extra pressures, it was hard for a family to keep a roof over its head without two adults working full-time, which impacts time spent with loved ones. You can blame this on the capitalist pursuit of profit, or the creep of technological slavery, but the outcome is the same either way. We’re swimming in material goods, and relationally impoverished. This is where the psychoanalysts might have a point. Even if cognitive-behavioural therapists can train our thoughts, downplaying the influence of the external world on our wellbeing is unwise. Psychological studies are in agreement: the quality and quantity of our relationships strongly predict our wellbeing.

But there’s something perverse about the very idea of therapy when we think about it, as the psychoanalysts do, in the terms of a relationship. We have always spent money on the services of soothsayers, acupuncturists or hairdressers, but those transactions weren’t intentionally about paying for human contact. We have also always exchanged money for sex, though it has usually been social taboo. Now we pay similar prices for the more basic intercourse of being listened to. We don’t trust people who sell sexual affection, because that affection lasts only while they’re paid, but we place uncritical confidence in those who sell us empathy.

CBT may not be the panacea it was hoped to be, but psychoanalysts accusing it of neoliberalism are being hypocritical. Selling committed, long-term relationships looks a lot like commodifying humanity. And if state-funded therapy threatens your livelihood, you’re more likely to get cross about it.

Beck described the therapeutic relationship as necessary but not sufficient for change, which comes, first and foremost, from the patient methodically practising new habits of action and mind. By contrast, the labyrinthine doctrines and relational focus of psychoanalysis make it easier to abandon agency: you can hand over your wellbeing to someone with a parental-style command of what is really going on in your head, who can give your world meaning and keep you feeling safe. It’s more comfortable, at least in the short term, to be told that our problems came from others, but it carries interpersonal risks. Being told we’re victims of fate tends to make us resentful. If you’re feeling low and you’re told that the reason is probably a failure on your mother’s part, your attitude to relationships probably won’t improve. The same is true if you’re feeling bruised from a tricky break-up and are told that you’ve been traumatised.

CBT is, in some sense, classically liberal, in that it sees the individual as having autonomy over one’s own mind. It’s harder to pin down a single position for its detractors. A relational view of the world — especially one where attachment to the mother dictates later wellbeing — is fundamentally conservative. Current discourse around attachment and trauma, rooted in socio-economic forces, is mostly Leftist in character. The philosophies underlying therapeutic approaches should, in theory, have a profound impact on patient outcomes. But this doesn’t happen.

Suggested reading

Is liberal society making us ill?

By Gurwinder Bhogal

Psychological studies find that there’s remarkably little difference in outcome between wildly different therapeutic styles. This is known as the Dodo-bird effect, from the famous scene in Alice in Wonderland where all must have prizes. The stories we tell about our minds may have social consequences, depending on what or whom we find accountable when things go wrong, but they don’t make much difference to therapy itself. Individual studies of this or that approach will continue to make grand claims of their power. Other studies will erode them. But therapy’s value seems to stem from sitting in a room being listened to by someone we like. In which case, can’t we replicate this experience with friends or relatives in our lives?

What we can say with certainty is that in the decades since we normalised paying to be listened to, we haven’t become any happier. We know, too, that we do best when our lives are rich with relationships and meaning. Maybe it was always a stretch to think that these things could be bought, or provided by the state. Internecine squabbles between opposing forms of therapy might disguise a conclusion that looks bad for all of them. We don’t need shrinks or ever-growing datasets to work out if we’re okay: we’ll know things are looking up when we stop employing people to listen to us talk.

Given that Covid tends to affect men more than women, why would long Covid affect women more than men? And given that Covid complications are extremely rare in the young, why would teenage girls be disproportionately affected by long Covid? Finally, given that we can’t accuse a virus of transphobia, why would long Covid affect transgender people most?

The answer lies in the fact that long Covid is not a strictly physical phenomenon. A study of nearly two million people published in Nature found that people who reported three or more symptoms of long Covid included: 4.9% of people confirmed to have had Covid, and 4% of people with no evidence of having had Covid. So, reporting the symptoms of long Covid is only moderately associated with a prior Covid infection. In fact, long Covid correlates about as much with mood disorders as with Covid itself. One study found that people prone to anxiety and depression before Covid infection were 45% more likely to develop long Covid after infection, and the Nature study found that having anxiety and depression before getting Covid almost doubled the chances of reporting long Covid.

This would help explain why women and trans people are disproportionately reporting long Covid: these two demographics have particularly high rates of anxiety and depression.

But why exactly would mood disorders increase the likelihood of long Covid? Some experts have speculated that stress may affect the immune system’s response to Covid and lead to more serious infections. However, a Turkish study found no evidence that anxiety or depression alters the body’s immune response to the virus. A much likelier explanation could be that, since symptoms of mood disorders overlap with those of long Covid, people are mistaking psychological distress for the side-effects of viral infection.

This is part of a broader phenomenon. Young people are reporting despair and distress at an unprecedented rate, and this mental health crisis is a symptom of a malfunctioning society — a society that is making people sick, by teaching them to feel sick. The tendency for people to misdiagnose their despair as a medical disorder can be observed far beyond reports of long Covid. Consider the surge in cases of gender dysphoria. Between 2012 and 2022, the number of adolescents referred to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) increased by over 2000%. If the increase were simply due to decreasing stigma around being trans, it wouldn’t be mostly restricted to a single sex and age range, but it has been driven almost exclusively by young people and natal females.

Suggested reading

Mental illness doesn't make you special

By Freddie deBoer

The group that’s disproportionately reporting gender dysphoria — adolescent girls — appears to be the same demographic as the group deemed in the German study to be disproportionately at risk of long Covid. This is also the group, besides trans people, deemed most at risk of mood disorders. So, again, it seems many young people, particularly girls, are confusing general distress for another illness.

And it’s not just reports of gender dysphoria that have multiplied among young people. Increases have occurred for major depressive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and various eating disorders. It seems that young people, and their doctors, are viewing personal issues as medical disorders: we are living through a pathologisation pandemic.

Why are so many people confusing sadness for sickness? It’s human nature to look for single causes to complex problems. The physician’s habit of ascribing all a patient’s symptoms to just one diagnosis led to the formulation of Hickam’s dictum, which states: “A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases.” Likewise, it’s tempting to look for a neat and simple reason for people blaming their troubles on a single disorder, but to do this would be to make the same mistake as them. Pathologisation can have as many causes as it damn well pleases.

One may be cyberchondria, the phenomenon whereby people anxiously google symptoms, and, due to confirmation bias, ignore those that don’t apply to them while focusing on those that do, until they become convinced they have the disorder they’re reading about. Another cause may be social contagion, whereby panic spreads through the power of suggestion. According to a UK study, adolescents who reported parents suffering from long Covid were almost twice as likely to report experiencing long Covid symptoms themselves, regardless of whether they’d actually had Covid.

It’s known that social contagions tend to affect girls more than boys, a disparity that could be exacerbated by girls tending to use social media more than boys. But the problem with social contagion as an explanation is that it’s a how, not a why; it offers a means without a motive.

Some have attempted to discern a motive. One is that girls are trying to escape unattainable ideals of femininity. As the arms race of plastic surgery and beauty filters ramps up, natural bodies seem ugly by comparison. This “selfie dysmorphia” may lead to anxiety and depression, as well as symptoms of gender dysphoria, as pubescent girls become desperate to defy the metamorphosis of their bodies into sexual objects. But this explanation doesn’t shed much light on the rise of conditions like long Covid, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, a deeper dive into the data does.

When we include politics in the mental health data, it becomes clear that this isn’t simply about gender. A 2020 Pew survey of over 10,000 people found that self-described liberals aged 18-29 were more likely than self-described conservatives of the same age to report suffering psychological problems over the last week. They were also more than twice as likely to say they’d ever been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Furthermore, those who were “very liberal” were more likely than those who were just “liberal” to report poor mental health. The group most likely to report poor mental health was white liberal females, an alarming 56% of whom reported having received a mental illness diagnosis.

Crucially, controlling for worldview narrowed the gender gap considerably: liberal men were more likely to report poor mental health than conservative women. It would seem, then, that the mental health epidemic among girls and young women is associated with their tendency to have a more Left-liberal mindset than boys and young men — a difference that’s becoming more pronounced over time.

But why would Leftism be associated with poorer mental health? An analysis of data from 86,138 adolescents found, in line with the Pew survey, that between 2005 and 2018 the self-reported mental health of liberals had deteriorated more than conservatives’, and that this deterioration was worst for girls. The researchers blamed this on “alienation within a growing conservative political climate”. However, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg debunked this explanation by pointing out that liberals’ mental health woes began while Obama was in power and as the Supreme Court voted to extend gay marriage rights — hardly a conservative political climate.

The real reasons may be deeper. One idea, more than any other, underpins the difference in outlook between liberals and conservatives. Central to Leftism is equality, backed by the idea that people’s fortunes and misfortunes are not their own doing, and therefore undeserved. As such, Leftism de-emphasises the role of human agency in social outcomes, while overemphasising the role of environmental circumstances. As the West has shifted culturally Leftward — due to most writers and artists leaning Left — the depiction of people as hapless puppets has become dominant.

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their problems are not their own fault, but rather the product of various systems beyond their control. These systems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly, they are medical. A common example is “trauma”, a psychiatric term that has become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused that even clinicians fear it has lost its meaning. Most people, however, are happy to have their personal failings blamed on medical issues, because it absolves them of responsibility. It’s not your fault you violently lashed out, you have trauma. It’s not your fault you lack energy, you have long Covid. It’s not your fault you hate the way you look, you have gender dysphoria.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

Pathologisation is also an effective way to manufacture sympathy. The co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, responded to accusations she’d used donation money to enrich friends and family by claiming that the accusations had given her post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis once reserved for rape survivors and war veterans.

Claims like Cullors’s are instinctively met with sympathy and even awe on the Left, where overeager attempts to destigmatise mental illness can end up glamorising it. On social media, young liberals now engage in “sadfishing”, a kind of digital Munchausen’s Syndrome, where people fabricate ailments for pity and clout; some, such as the TikToker “TicsAndRoses”, fake Tourette’s, while others fake multiple personalities. The power of mental health disorders to attract attention online has turned them into fashion accessories, cute quirks to help kids stand out from the crowd, or “part of my dating appeal”.

Unfortunately, these designer disorders are not just harmless labels; intentional pathologisation by influencers is causing unintentional pathologisation among viewers. Reports tell of adolescent girls suddenly developing “TikTok tics” after viewing videos of alleged Tourette’s sufferers. Others tell of adolescents presenting with multiple personalities after watching videos of people claiming to have dissociative identity disorder. As atomisation makes people more desperate for sympathy, and competition makes them more desperate for attention, it’s likely that sadfishing and its consequences will only worsen.

But as disturbing as all this is, victimhood culture is not the only force behind the pathologisation pandemic. It’s been abetted by a medical industry that has its own incentives for exaggerating the prevalence of mental disorders.

Medicalisation — the tendency for clinicians to recategorise ever more things as medical issues — occurs because clinicians are just as human as their patients, and are therefore just as influenced by culture and their own personal biases. The 1973 Rosenhan experiment showed that psychiatrists who have been told that a healthy person is insane will begin to reinterpret that person’s ordinary behaviours, such as note-taking, as manifestations of their mental disorder. We saw this in the Tavistock scandal, where the staff of the infamous Gids clinic, conditioned by ideologues to look for gender dysphoria, became increasingly hasty to diagnose it.

Suggested reading

The media is spreading bad trans science

By Jesse Singal

The ability of clinicians to see precisely the symptoms they’re looking for is facilitated by concept creep, the tendency for the definitions of disorders to gradually expand to encompass more people. The rise in autism diagnoses, for instance, can be largely attributed to a diagnostic widening of the autism spectrum. Concept creep occurs largely due to the Shirky principle, which states: “Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.” The motive is often financial; the number of pregnancies deemed to require caesarean sections has increased because this method of delivering babies is more profitable. Likewise, if you’re simply sad then medical companies can’t monetise you, but if your distress is reclassified as, say, gender dysphoria, those companies can sell you puberty blockers or surgical procedures. By 2021, GIDS accounted for a quarter of the Tavistock trust’s income. In the States, the sex reassignment surgery market was valued at $1.9 billion and is projected to have a lucrative annual growth rate of 11.23%.

So, we have a medical industry that is both financially and ideologically motivated to overstate the prevalence of illness, and we have a victimhood culture that encourages people to view themselves as oppressed by things they can’t control. In the middle of this we have ordinary people tempted to blame their problems on medical issues for the sake of easy answers.

These three entities together form a mutually reinforcing system. The late philosopher Ian Hacking, in his book Rewriting the Soul, details how in the 20th century, the press, the public, and the medical industry operated in tandem to create new forms of madness out of mere gossip. Prior to 1970, there were almost no cases of multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder), but after one case was well-publicised by the media, people began using the concept of multiple personalities to make sense of their own problems. In so doing, they began to conform, wittingly or otherwise, to the official symptoms of the disorder. When clinicians speculated that people may invent multiple personalities to deal with childhood sexual abuse, people began to do just that. Some even suddenly “remembered” being sexually abused, even though the concept of repressed memories has no basis in fact. Initially, patients reported having two or three personalities. Within a decade, the average number was 17.

Thus, patient reports influenced clinicians’ diagnoses, but clinicians’ diagnoses also influenced patient reports. Diagnostic criteria became prescriptive as well as descriptive; they told patients how they were supposed to feel and act. Hacking called this cycle of mutual reinforcement a “looping effect”, and it proved so powerful that it turned a couple of isolated cases into an epidemic. A similar looping effect, facilitated by a hyperconnected world, seems to be driving the rise in reports of mental illness today.

Suggested reading

Who decides if you're mentally ill?

By Hannah Baer

This is a problem because imagined sickness can cause real sickness. This occurs in two ways. The first is direct: in rural India, folklore tells that being bitten by a pregnant dog can make one pregnant with the dog’s puppies, and this urban myth has created a new illness: puppy pregnancy syndrome. Victims become so convinced they’re pregnant with puppies that they suffer panic attacks and even manifest symptoms of pregnancy, from persistent nausea to the sensation of puppies crawling in their bellies.

But the second way fake sickness becomes real is far more common and insidious.

Remember how Leftism de-emphasises human agency in the name of equality? Research shows conservatives tend to have an internal locus of control, which means they believe that their decisions, as opposed to external forces, control their destiny. Liberals, meanwhile, tend to have an external locus, which means they believe their lives are determined by forces beyond their control.

The American psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge used national survey data of adolescents to map their locus of control. Their findings were based on the proportion of respondents who agreed with statements such as: “People like me don’t have a chance at a successful life” and “Whenever I try to get ahead, something stops me”. They concluded that, since the Nineties, the locus of control for all teenagers has become more external, but the shift has been greater for liberals, and greatest for liberal girls. Further, when the self-worth of teenagers was mapped, using responses to statements such as “I feel my life is not very useful”, the data showed a universal decline in self-worth since 2012. Again, the decline was stronger for liberals, and strongest for liberal girls.

People with an internal locus of control, believing they control their destiny, tend to be happier and have healthier habits, like good diets and frequent exercise, while people with an external locus of control, believing they’re at the mercy of fate, have higher rates of anxiety and depression and are more likely to abuse drugs and neglect their health. When you believe you have no control, you don’t.

And thus, as society has liberalised, and medicalised, young people have lost both self-belief and resilience. Many have subsequently become trapped in a cycle where they feel distress, and pathologise it, causing more distress, leading to more pathologisation and more distress, which eventually becomes textbook anxiety and depression. The rise in diagnoses is therefore not simply an illusion caused by medicalisation; society is teaching kids to develop real dysfunctions.

This is the greatest danger of the pathologisation pandemic: belief in one’s sickness is self-fulfilling. It’s a disease not of any bodily organ but of hope itself, and it harms its victim by crippling their immunity to everything else.

If there’s a vaccine for the pathologisation pandemic, then the best candidate is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This is a form of talk-based treatment based on the Ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Contrary to modernity, it teaches that our feelings are not always valid, but often deluded and self-destructive. The aim is to reframe harmful thoughts into alternatives that are more accurate, agentic, and soluble. So, instead of “The world sucks”, one could think “I feel like the world sucks right now”. Where pathologisation places problems outside your control, CBT places them within your control. Where pathologisation bundles many small issues into one giant insurmountable problem, CBT breaks down giant problems into small manageable pieces.

Suggested reading

Can depression be cured?

By Ann Manov

No form of psychotherapy has been as rigorously tested as CBT, and its effectiveness in restoring agency and reigniting hope is documented by decades of research. Some studies suggest CBT is gradually losing effectiveness, but this is mostly because CBT, like everything else in the social sciences, has been corrupted by amateurisation and the desire to be “inclusive” and inoffensive. The newest forms of CBT, such as “Transgender-Affirmative CBT”, are the opposite of classic CBT because they seek not to cultivate strength but to validate feelings.

More than ever, a return is needed to the original, Stoicism-based form of CBT, which has helped everyone from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, who governed Rome during a time of war and plague, to Vietnam POW James Stockdale, who used it to withstand torture at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton”. The ultimate cure to rampant pathologisation is to prepare the young to do battle against their greatest foe — their own minds — and to teach them a time-tested truth, bequeathed to us by history’s survivors: you are more than the things that happen to you. And you have as much control over your life as you believe you do.

Many of the misfortunes that befall you will not be your fault, but if you seek explanations for your suffering in things beyond your control, you risk falling prey to a culture and industry that are motivated to keep you feeling ill. Look within for the causes and, most times, you’ll find the cures. Modern society will tell you otherwise, of course, but it’s within your power to defy it, for you are not a helpless leaf in the wind but a mind that holds a world, which, depending on how you think, could be a Hell in Heaven, or a Heaven in Hell.

At the start of November, an assortment of 29 high-profile UN representatives, human rights lawyers, academics and LGBTQ lobbyists flocked to the sultanate city to attend a conference at the Gadjah Mada university. There, over four days, they hunkered down to craft a document they would call the Yogyakarta Principles.

Having tried and failed to convince conservative countries to include protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity in UN resolutions, the drafters, led by Irish ex-priest Michael O’Flaherty, sought to demonstrate how any country that had signed up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was obliged to grant them anyway. Their ambitious interpretation claimed “the right to recognition as a person before the law” automatically included the right to legal gender self-ID, while “the right to health” obliged states to “facilitate access by those seeking body modifications related to gender reassignment”.

The Principles were not legally binding, nor did they cite any legislation. Indeed, according to one of its signatories, O’Flaherty insisted that his fellow drafters ignore the legal reality. The Yogyakarta Principles, then, were simply a wish list. Perhaps it was hoped that the heft of the reputations of the drafters would be enough to cajole NGOs, legal professionals and governments into taking them seriously. If so, they seem to have been right.

Sonia Onufer Corrêa, a Brazilian activist and one of the attendees, later admitted that Indonesia was only chosen because the drafters wanted a Muslim country, so as to avoid the impression that the edicts came from the decadent West. It bears noting that the Sultan of Yogyakarta himself never adopted the Principles for his own city; in fact, the situation for LGBT people there had become so untenable by the time the Principles came up for review in 2017 that they had to find a friendlier host city, Bangkok.

Never mind. The location was always just a smokescreen. The real unveiling of the Yogyakarta Principles came in 2007, when they were officially launched in New York and Geneva. It was undoubtedly a triumph. While O’Flaherty and his crew were unable to convince conservative African and Islamic countries to adopt the Principles, Western nations were more than eager to get on board. Pick a country and evidence abounds; from legal self-ID, to hate speech laws, to conversion therapy bans, the drafters have had more success than they surely could have hoped for.

At the heart of their campaign was a raft of evidence alleging to show the use of torture against gay, lesbian and trans-identifying people. Such abuse had been reported as early as 2001 by Amnesty International, who described the brutal violence suffered by the travestis of Central and South America at the hands of police and the johns who paid them (or not) for sex.

According to Article 5 of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. The Yogyakarta drafters interpreted this to cover conversion therapies based not just on sexual orientation or sex characteristics, but also gender identity and even gender expression. Expanding on their rather short interpretation, one of the key organisations behind the Principles, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), helpfully provided a more detailed technical guide for legal professionals in 2009.

There was one problem, however. “International human rights systems,” warned the ICJ, “have not yet dealt with an individual petition or communication specifically relating to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity in relation with the prohibition of torture.” In other words, there wasn’t sufficient evidence.

But a group of lawyers in the US, led by the National Council for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) in collaboration with the Trevor Project, was working on it. Since 2009, a movement to expose the horrific practice of conversion therapy against gays and lesbians (though not trans-identifying people) had been underway in America. And in 2013, the NCLR began planning a campaign to convince lawmakers that conversion therapy constituted a breach of the Convention against torture, to which the US was a signatory.

With the support of the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, who had just issued a report on ill-treatment in healthcare settings that included “reparative therapies” carried out on LGBT people, they sought an audience with the bodies that oversee the UN Convention Against Torture (UNCAT). These were made up of committees of experts in torture from around the world, one of whom was Victor Madrigal-Borloz.

At the time, Madrigal-Borloz was secretary-general of a Danish NGO called the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims. According to an anonymous source, once in the job, he began planning an expensive multi-day showcase event in Mexico City which plunged the NGO into an extremely precarious financial situation. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that the NGO was not producing results, and funders were pulling out.

Suggested reading

Why should lesbians sleep with men?

By Kathleen Stock

An FOI request by journalist Dorte Toft later found that the Danish development ministry, DANIDA, ordered an external investigation that concluded IRCT’s travel budget didn’t make sense based on the activities of the organisation. They also said the secretary-general’s salary was too high and that he had too much power over budget decisions. Overall, they concluded, the management of IRCT — financial and otherwise — was a disaster. By this point, however, Madrigal-Borloz had skipped off to this next appointment as the UN’s “independent expert”.

In November 2014, around the same time that the IRCT was haemorrhaging money intended for torture victims, the NCLR had been granted an audience with Convention Against Torture treaty experts in Geneva. They brought along a star witness, who tearfully spoke of the horrific electric shocks and beatings that his therapists and parents had subjected him to in an effort to turn him straight. His name was Samuel Brinton, and he would later become known as the non-binary Biden staffer caught stealing women’s suitcases from airports.

According to one of the lawyers who brought Brinton to Geneva, his testimony elicited gasps from the UN panel. How could this still be going on in 2014? After all, state-level efforts were already underway to outlaw conversion therapy. And media reports from the time suggest that existing bans covered “ex-gay” practices familiar to most people: the religious ministries and pseudotherapy sessions that sought to turn homosexuals straight.

But this wasn’t just about gay conversion therapy. “Gender identity” had also started to appear in legal texts around the subject, despite the fact there was scant evidence that praying away gender identity was a thing. This was about to change. Just a few weeks after Brinton’s performance in Geneva, the contents of which journalist Wayne Besen has convincingly called into question, a trans-identifying teenage boy allegedly walked out in front of a tractor-trailer on a highway in Ohio. In a Tumblr suicide note, Leelah (born Joshua) Alcorn criticised his parents, who chose “biased” Christian therapists to help him deal with depression, and who wouldn’t allow him to medically transition.

His mother, a Christian, was vilified for misgendering and deadnaming him. She told reporters that he had only mentioned being transgender once, that she had never even heard him use the name “Leelah”. She also claimed that he was deeply depressed. His neighbour, apparently a close friend, also used male pronouns throughout his TV interview.

But while it wasn’t the Brinton-style torture story the transactivists had perhaps been waiting for, it was enough. A few days after his death, a White House petition calling for “Leelah’s Law” was launched. By March 2015, Obama said he would support a federal ban. By September, UN agencies officially began officially referencing torture in relation to violence against LGBT people.

Malta was first out of the gate in December 2015 with a ban; Germany, France, Belgium and some parts of Spain have all since followed. Mardrigal-Borloz, who had by this point taken up a gig as the UN’s independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity, immediately started pushing for states to legislate for conversion therapy bans.

Suggested reading

Trans counselling is not conversion therapy

By Tom Chivers

In 2017, the UK first commissioned research into the practice. Organisations such as Stonewall exaggerated the results of that research, even leading their coverage of polling on the subject with the claim that one in five trans people have suffered conversion therapy, when the data reveals nothing of the sort. The proportion, according to the survey results, of LGBT people “pressured to access services to question or change their sexual orientation when accessing healthcare services” was 5%.

Interestingly, after a failed first attempt to introduce a ban in 2018, Ireland is now having another go. This time it is backed up by an all-island (including Northern Ireland) group called the Anti-Conversion Therapy Coalition. While, from the outside, this might look like an inspiring cross-border initiative, it’s more likely to be because no evidence was found in the Republic, leading Irish activists to look forlornly to the North’s fire-and-brimstone protestants who have been known to offer (though not force) pray-away-the-gay services.

In France, things were even more weird. Lawmakers wanted proof that the country was suffering from an epidemic of conversion therapy that would necessitate a new law. In response, Laurence Vanceunebrock, parliament’s rapporteur on the subject, insisted that they had to pass the law in order to reveal the crime. As evidence, Vanceunebrock repeatedly claimed that there was a secret clinic carrying out electroconvulsive therapy on homosexuals in Montpellier. This drew the ire of the region’s medical association, which claimed that such a clinic would require specialised equipment and expertise that couldn’t possibly have passed under their radar. No witnesses ever came forward, despite an appeal.

Suggested reading

Biden's cowardly war on conversion therapy

By Kat Rosenfield

Then, in 2021, when the law was already a done deal but not yet in force, a teenage trans-identifying female called Enzo was kidnapped, brought to a barn in the French countryside and tortured, in order to exorcise her of her transness. The rainbow NGOs kicked into high gear; #LiberezEnzo trended on social media, activists scoured the countryside looking for the barn, and Vanceunebrock was finally vindicated.

It soon transpired, however, that Enzo was at his grandmother’s house the whole time, and the family were working through their issues. The police, and Enzo, asked everyone to calm down and leave them alone. The barn was never found. Yet the law is now in force in France; efforts to modify or reprimand a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity can be punished by up to €45,000.

As for the Yogyakarta Principles, they received an upgrade in 2017, when Victor Madrigal-Borloz came on board as a signatory. And the newer version is even more extreme; it explicitly calls for an end to sex registration at birth.

Madrigal-Borloz, meanwhile, will step down from his UN mandate at the end of this year, and the extent of his success is currently being evaluated. All the signs suggest he will be lavished with praise. But as the 16 years since that fateful meeting in Yogyakarta have demonstrated, making a crime out of conventional therapy for gender-distressed teens has hardly been a victory.

I first learned about therianthropy while talking to Kathy Gerbasi, a social psychologist who specialises in relationships between humans and animals. She has an interest in furries, a fandom that dresses up as anthropomorphic animals. Gerbasi conducted a survey at a furry convention that included the following two questions: “Do you consider yourself to be less than 100% human?”, and “If you could be 0% human, would you be?” Furries feel an affinity with animals, but that’s generally as far as it goes. So, when a few of her respondents answered yes to both questions, she realised that she was dealing with people who were fundamentally atypical.

Since then, Gerbasi has held several discussion groups with therians, who she describes as “very sincere”. “They look like people,” she says. “They mostly behave like people… But if you really talk to them, they’ll tell you that deep inside they are not a person.” My friend the bear, who goes by the sobriquet BearX, lives an improbably normal life. He is married. He has two children. His career in engineering has afforded him a nice house and a comfortable middle-class life. As he says: “If you didn’t know something was up, you wouldn’t know anything was up.”

When psychologists investigate an unusual pattern of behaviour, they look for common attributes that may help explain it, such as age, gender, class or geography. So far, Gerbasi and the handful of other psychologists who have studied therians have failed to find any. While researching my new book, I talked to therians in their teens and in their seventies, of female, male and undetermined gender. The only thing that can be said about almost all therians is that they realise at a young age that they are different in body and spirit from those around them. They feel “off”, separated from humanity, and this estrangement defines the rest of their lives.

“I had an internal sense as a kid that I was supposed to be bigger, heavier,” says BearX. “Later, I worked out that bears fit everything that I felt. It led me to think that maybe I was supposed to have been born a bear and there was some kind of cataclysmic failure in the universe’s sorting system.” Caesar, a communications technician in his mid-thirties who identifies as a coyote, remembers feeling “very animal” as a child. “Maybe the best way to put it is that humans think with their emotions or on a higher level of cognition, but the way I responded to a situation was more instinctual, not calculating.”

As they grow up, therians move from having a general sense of feeling not quite human to a more concrete awareness of the kind of animal they are: their “theriotype”. The most common theriotypes are predator species such as wolves and large cats. As with furries, culture plays a role here: jaguars are more common in South America, and foxes in Japan, whose folklore contains many stories of people being possessed by a fox. Mythical or fantasy creatures are no less valid, though their owners are differentiated in the community as “otherkin”. While researching, I spoke to a couple of dragons.

Suggested reading

The bloody truth about animals

By Mary Harrington

Finding your theriotype can be a struggle. Most therians make their decision only after a great deal of research and thought. The community encourages its members to be scientifically rigorous: outlandish claims that would give ammunition to sceptics, such as the idea that it’s possible to physically transform into an animal, are dismissed as “fluff”. On therian forums, moderators frequently rebuke contributors for promoting theories that would break the laws of physics, and they are quick to correct errors in morphological or behavioural descriptions of species, such as the suggestion that wolves have red eyes, or that all canines hunt in packs.

A peculiar and often alarming characteristic of being a therian is the feeling that you have phantom body parts. Blayz, a wolf-dog hybrid, lives with the permanent sensation of a tail that wags or droops on command. “Going around corners, I will alter the movement of my frame to keep my tail from getting caught in doors or swiping cups off the table,” he says. Caesar, the coyote, is often convinced he has outsized ears that he can manipulate like antennae. I spoke with a snow leopard — an American woman in her early twenties — who has been saddled with the full range of phantom phenomena. “Even as a kid, I remember feeling like I had a tail and telling people it was invisible,” she explained. “It’s as much a part of me as my arms and legs, really. I also have constant phantom paws and a muzzle, which can make eating and drinking funny sometimes. I’m likely to miss my mouth if I’m not thinking about it.’

To feel body parts where none exist is not as biologically improbable as it sounds. Studies of people born with missing arms and legs have shown that limbs that have always been absent can still be represented in the sensory and motor regions of the brain. The psychologist Ronald Melzack, an expert on phantom pain, proposed that the brain continuously generates a pattern of impulses that indicate that the body is intact and “unequivocally one’s own”, even if it isn’t. This pattern, which Melzack called a “neurosignature”, is genetically determined and characteristic of each individual. It is not inconceivable that someone born with an atypical neurosignature might experience a body that is out of kilter with the one they possess. So far, no one has systematically examined the brains of therians to see if their neural patterns reflect what they feel.

Therians who are acclimatised to their animal side often find their phantom experiences reassuring, since they confirm an identity they have been trying hard to accept. But it can be a let-down when they recognise they don’t have the superpowers they thought they did. When Caesar realises yet again that he cannot direct his ears to hone in on a distant sound, he has the sobering thought that what he is trying to do is “in direct conflict with my own biology”. Kathy Gerbasi, in one of her studies, asked a therian who felt they had “wings” what it felt like when those wings were fully out; they told her it made them frustrated because they knew they couldn’t fly. Many therians avoid looking in mirrors because it reminds them that they are not what they think they are.

Suggested reading

You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

Some psychologists believe that the distress suffered by therians is similar to the distress suffered by people whose sex at birth does not match the way they feel. The comparison is often made by therians themselves, a minority of whom are transgender as well as “trans-species”, as they sometimes put it. (Not all transgender people are comfortable with this analogy, fearing that it complicates the public discourse and undermines their movement’s drive for recognition.) The obvious difference is that while you can change your gender, you cannot do anything about your species.

For therians, “finding yourself” — that nebulous ideal promoted by the self-help industry — is obligatory. Although discovery may bring relief, it does not help with the bigger question: why am I this way? Science doesn’t provide many answers, so they can only speculate. Therianthropy may be a developmental response to early trauma or a childhood fixation on animals, or it may be a result of abnormal brain wiring. People of a spiritual inclination might think of it in terms of reincarnation or a “misplaced soul”.

In psychiatry, therianthropy is often erroneously considered to be synonymous with clinical lycanthropy — a condition related to schizophrenia, where delusions and hallucinations convince a patient that they have transformed into an animal. In her book Unthinkable, Helen Thomson describes meeting a lycanthrope who periodically believes he has turned into a tiger; her interview with him was cut short when he suddenly started growling and threatening to attack her, a relapse his doctors blamed on his failure to take his anti-psychotic medication.

But therians are not delusional or psychotic. Their animalistic feelings are a perpetual feature of their lives and are not alleviated by medication. They are aware, often to their profound disappointment, that they can never transform into animals. The medical profession’s impulse to diagnose them as lycanthropes has less to do with clinical evidence than the age-old tendency to pathologise behaviours and conditions that challenge social norms. The most we can say about the medical status of therians is that they are neurological outliers — hardly a signal of illness.

In 2019 Helen Clegg, a psychologist at the University of Buckingham, led the first comprehensive investigation into the well-being and mental health of therians. She recruited 112 across a broad range of ages, genders, ethnicities and species. Among them were wolves, foxes, dragons, birds, a snake, a shark and a couple of dinosaurs. Clegg’s team found that a disproportionate number of them had been diagnosed with autism (7.69%, compared with 1.5% in the general US population), though it is not clear how the two conditions could be linked. They also found that, compared with a control group, many therians struggle with relationships and social skills. This could be due to cognitive factors, or it could be because social taboos around therianthropy make it difficult to talk about. When you are forced to hide your true nature, communicating with others can be a challenge.

Their study also noted that many of the therians displayed “schizotypal” personality traits, such as a tendency to have unusual perceptual experiences. But these therians mostly found their experiences enriching rather than distressing. Clegg suggests that this is because they have found a way to integrate their fantastical thoughts into a coherent narrative that allows them to make sense of the way they feel. The therians in Clegg’s study scored just as highly as non-therians on several standard measures of psychological well-being, including personal growth, purpose in life and self-acceptance. The researchers concluded: “The findings suggest that therians are functioning well.”

Azi, a Mexican wolf living in Tennessee, experiences altered states of consciousness around 30 times a day. Therian friends of his told me that his experience is more extreme than anyone they know — for much of the time, he is more wolf than human. When we initially corresponded, he was apprehensive, fearing negative publicity; when we finally spoke via video call, he was open, eloquent and precise. His perceptual changes arrive suddenly and can pass just as quickly. When they happen, he says, “the human part of me is turned off. Mentally, I’m gone. The wolf mindset is running this body… It’s very dissociative.” He often finds himself growling, snarling, down on all fours, walking on his toes or, if the opportunity presents itself, chasing deer. It can be physically exhausting. Towards the end of our video call, my cat Cecil jumped up onto my laptop and started nuzzling the screen. Azi looked away and appeared to disengage for a moment. When I asked him about this, he admitted that as a wolf, few things are more inflammatory than being stared at by a cat. He has to contend with provocations like this whenever he goes out in public — a loud noise, a fleeing animal, a bothersome human. He must always be on his guard to stop himself shifting to wolf.

Suggested reading

The empty promise of pop psychology

By Sarah Ditum

The reality of therianthropy can be hard to live with. Elizabeth Fein, a clinical psychologist who has worked closely with Kathy Gerbasi, observed that acceptance of therianthropy often brings sadness or a sense of estrangement. “It’s like, ‘I’m always going to be different, I’m always going to be kind of separate from humanity. I’m never going to have the right body.’” The scale of the challenge that therians I interviewed face in trying to reconcile their human bodies with their animal minds may be partly a function of the culture in which they live. In the West, for much of the past two millennia, we have considered ourselves distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, elevated by cognition, intelligence, language, morality and culture. The Christian God granted humans “dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth”, and philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have emphasised our superiority over nature.

But over the tens of thousands of years of human existence, the line separating us and other has not always been so well-defined. Many cultures recognise animals as ancestors. A popular Tibetan creation myth maintains that people are descended from a meditating monkey, while in Turkic mythology people originated from a she-wolf named Asena. Meanwhile, stories about people who “shape-shift” between human and animal form have persisted throughout recorded history.

A world in which animals were treated as human and humans were treated as animals would be a lot easier for therians to live in. Their experience and their psychology are so different to most people’s that they often feel profoundly isolated. “Our lives would be immeasurably improved if people accepted it, if it wasn’t considered strange,” BearX told me. Thankfully, therians have each other. The community’s origins lie in the Nineties message boards of an online werewolf fan group called alt.horror.werewolves, and it has since evolved into a vibrant network of discussion forums and advice boards, with thousands of active participants.

Therians do disagree — about the causes of therianthropy, the distinction between therians and otherkin, and whether it is appropriate to discuss the sexual feelings some therians have towards animals. Nevertheless, Caesar the coyote told me that his introduction to the community was “unquestionably one of the happiest moments of my life: finding out that you’re not alone”. Blayz, who spent years trying to figure out his strange canine sensations, came close to dismissing them as “the delusions of a madman, nothing more than a side-effect of mental illness”. When he discovered that he wasn’t the only one who felt this way, it was revelatory. “So many of my own experiences and conclusions were echoed by this group of real people out there in the world.”

“Therians are really weird,” one of the coyotes says to me in a moment of exasperation. But in certain cultures, and in certain eras, they have been regarded as less weird — and among other therians, their behaviour is absolutely normal. Most therians want to be accepted by the wider world. In the meantime, it’s reassuring for them to always be accepted by their own. Life looks different when you’re part of a pack — whether you’re a bear, a coyote, a leopard, a dinosaur or a dragon.

This is an edited extract from Fans: A Journey Into the Psychology of Belonging, out 11th May.

In the 1990 reissue of The Culture of Narcissism, he called on Americans to rediscover the tradition of “populism”. Based on values of “competence”, “discipline” and “work ethic”, the populist tradition in America was associated with aspirations of economic self-sufficiency and social stability. It had often found expression in apparently backward-looking political movements aimed at protecting small farmers and artisans from the encroachments of industrial capitalism.

Lasch’s defence of populism, however, contradicted key aspects of his analysis of postwar American society. He recognised, for instance, that the vanishing worldview of Middle America was primarily an ideology by which elites of the 19th and early 20th centuries manipulated the masses. Instilling in ordinary people a love of work and aspirations to property ownership was not necessarily in their interests, but it did reflect the needs of the American economy at the time. By the mid-20th century, as the US transformed into a consumer society, elite ideology shifted towards an emphasis on “authenticity” and an obsession with self-image. Lasch understood this, but nevertheless insisted that the ideology of the “old order” would be indispensable in escaping the present. This amounted to the sort of “Ghost Dance” mode of resistance Kurt Vonnegut parodied in his early novel Cat’s Cradle — the elevation of nostalgic pieties into a political programme.

Lasch’s sympathy for populism also conflicted with his psychoanalytic perspective. He emphasised in The Culture of Narcissism that our capacity for rational collective action — that is, for decent politics — is being degraded by our increasingly thin and inward-looking sense of selfhood. We have withdrawn from associational life (political parties, unions, clubs, churches) and immersed ourselves in short-lived, increasingly virtual pseudo-relationships. And so we are less and less able to see the public sphere as an area for substantive debate and action toward common ends, rather than as a stage for narcissistic self-expression.

We are, in turn, enthralled by a new kind of elite who rule us through their celebrity. We have replaced the traditional patron-client structure of politics (we follow elites because they advance our material interests) with a kind of cheerleading (or simping) for figures who represent our “values” in a political theatre. Our populist politicians, from Donald Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and their supporters exemplify this narcissistic new politics.

It is, in a sense, both too late and too soon for populism as Lasch envisioned it. Populism was the expression of an economic order that no longer exists. Nor can we revive or replace it until we have escaped our infatuation with the self. What we need, to escape this vicious cycle, is a politics that makes us capable of politics.

More from this author

How to save sex

By Blake Smith

In 1984, Lasch wrote a sequel to The Culture of Narcissism, The Minimal Self, which remains relatively neglected. In it, Lasch explored this paradox. He points beyond the shallow populism with which he is sometimes identified, and towards a politics aimed at the restitution of our psychological integrity. Arguing that the division of the political field along a Left-Right axis was outmoded, he tried to replace it with a new typology organised around different approaches to what he called the “politics of the psyche”.

Lasch saw three camps in this emerging psychopolitical spectrum: the “party of the superego”, “the party of the ego”, and the “party of Narcissus”. The emblematic figure of the first was Philip Rieff, who, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1967), had articulated a powerful critique of our norm-less and atomised society. His 1973 follow-up Fellow Teachers, unjustly overlooked today, was a powerful defence of the Freudian superego — the part of the psyche that enforces personal moral responsibility and respect for the “inhibitions” that make culture possible. In a rather cruel mischaracterisation, Lasch portrayed Rieff as a cultural conservative whose morality was based on conformism and “fear”, rather than a properly individuated awareness of one’s obligation to help others.

The “party of the ego”, by contrast, sought to empower individuals to survive in a competitive, isolating society by bolstering their capacity for self-interested competition. The watchword of its adherents — mainly members of the psychoanalytic tradition of “ego psychology” that dominated the United States in the decades following the Second World War — was “adjustment”. This tradition can be seen as the predecessor of the therapeutic movements of today, aimed at helping patients avoid emotional dependence on others, anxiety over the future, guilt over the past, and other barriers to being dynamic, “well-adjusted” economic agents.

Suggested reading

The importance of repression

By Park MacDougald

The trouble with this advice, as Lasch notes, is not so much that it is ineffective as that it reinforces the social dynamics that create our psychological problems in the first place. Whether framed in more feminine and pseudo-progressive terms as “self-care” or in more masculine and Social-Darwinian terms as “grindset”, the “party of the ego” invites us to become more of what we already are: self-absorbed competitors who imagine that we must overcome our last shreds of decency to achieve happiness.

Lasch had the most sympathy for what he called the “party of Narcissus”, which may seem ironic, given his critique of narcissism. This group emerged out of the New Left of the Sixties, and particularly its radical feminist and ecological strands. It saw the basic problem of contemporary psychology not as a deficit of moral authority or the vulnerability of the ego, but as the alienation of the self from others and the world, driven in large part by our reliance on technology.

This rhymed with Lasch’s own critique of the 20th century as an era in which the technological domination of nature was now redounding on humanity itself — which had become, in the hands of doctors, psychiatrists, marketers and bureaucrats, a manipulable object. Through the critique of technology — and what, in the jargon of that period, was sometimes called the “technostructure” of government by unelected experts — the party of Narcissus, like Lasch himself, expressed its hopes for a new, more humane form of society oriented towards harmony rather than progress.

More from this author

René Girard's apocalypse is now

By Blake Smith

It is perhaps on the political Right that such ideas are most forcefully expressed today. Lasch emphasised that his new typology superseded the political binary, but fantasies of simple agrarian living, unprocessed food, and escape from modern technology now strike many as “conservative”. But whether its politics are coded as “Left” or “Right”, Lasch warned that the “party of Narcissus” aims at an impossible ideal. Seduced by the image of a self free from the contradictions of post-modernity, it is drawn into a retrograde fantasy politics.

What we need, Lasch insisted in the conclusion to Minimal Self, is not a doubling down on outmoded moral strictures, nor the shoring up of our brittle, anxious egos — nor, for all its desirability, the pursuit of a self wholly integrated in a post-technological society at peace with nature. Rather, we need to develop the psychic strength to bear the tensions of post-modernity: the searing gap between what we desire and what we can accomplish at present. The kind of person capable of political action in this environment is someone who can endure, without illusion, the growing desert — and looks beyond superannuated political identities for friends with whom he might find a way out.

The education of such individuals was in fact Rieff’s own project, as articulated in Fellow Teachers. It remains the task of some critical theorists on the Left, such as Benjamin Fong, who calls in his Death and Mastery (2016) for a pedagogical “politics that makes politics possible”. If we look past the dead-end of populism, we can see the road Lasch did not follow after Minimal Self — the search for a new kind of meta-politics aimed at the restoration of the psychological resources necessary for normal life. That search, one presumes, will bring us into company with strange fellow travellers and teachers.

And yet I worry, too. I worry because selling a book, especially for any kind of decent advance, is a tricky business, and the temptation to be prurient and sensationalist must be considerable. I am a committed enemy of romanticising mental illness, which contributes to the impression that the mentally ill are somehow living deeper, more “intense” lives, rather than more painful ones. I want mental health memoirists to understand their profound responsibility to tell the grubby, sad truth about this life.

But mostly, I envy people who write mental illness memoirs. I envy their memories. They can recall the details of their psychiatric histories; I often can’t. Years have passed, faster and faster, since the major incidents in the history of my condition. For important portions of that history, I was brutally depressed, or grindingly manic, or actively psychotic, conditions not conducive to the formation of lasting memories. I have spent 15 years on and off (though mostly off) memory-destroying medications, and have now been on them for five years straight. And for most of that time I was actively in denial, about all of it, to the point of believing at points that it wasn’t real. I did not tell my siblings, those I was always closest to, for more than a decade after my first diagnosis. Sometimes I’d assert that I was finally on the straight and narrow, finally cured — an assertion that always, always preceded the next ruinous crash.

Some things I remember like they were yesterday. Some I don’t remember at all. When I write about my own mental health history, I write in ellipses and at a Dutch angle — for aesthetics, yes, to satisfy my own standards as a writer, but also because to tell it otherwise would make me feel like a liar. I just don’t trust my memory of some details.

More from this author

Mental illness doesn't make you special

By Freddie deBoer

I have spotted a similar instinct in other mental health memoirs. Girl, Interrupted is imagistic and ruminative, much less a recounting of the day-by-day events of Susanna Kaysen’s commitment to McLean Hospital, and much more a series of pleasantly meandering meditations on the concept of sanity and the self. Kaysen also includes original forms and files from her hospital stay; George Scialabba’s brilliant and haunting How to be Depressed consists of little else.

And then there’s Strangers to Ourselves. It’s not a straightforward memoir but rather a collection of brief vignettes, or case studies, about mental illness, written by Rachel Aviv. Her own story opens the volume. She became anorexic as a six-year-old, barely literate, and mostly unable to define what was happening to her. Aviv leaves unsettled the question of whether she was “really” anorexic — her age and stated motives for not eating complicate the question — and instead contrasts her own condition with those of the older patients around her. By reproducing her own experience of mental illness, Aviv brings a little skin to the game in a text that’s mostly about telling other people’s stories for them.

More important, her personal history segues into Aviv setting the boundaries of her project. The book is about people whose “lives unfold in different eras and cultures, but they also share a setting: the psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience, where language tends to fail”. She explains her holistic approach:

“the book draws not only from conversations with them but from their diaries, letters, unpublished memoirs, poems, and prayers… It’s impossible to go back in time and uncover what baseline feelings existed before a story was told — when a person’s angst and loneliness and disorientation had yet to be given a name and a vessel — but I find myself searching for the gap between people’s experiences and the stories that organise their suffering, sometimes defining the course of their lives.”

This is what I needed, from this book, up front: both information about how these individual stories were compiled and an acknowledgment that we all, as patients, construct truths with the raw material of memories that so often refuse to cohere, and therefore use the textual record to confirm and supplement our stories. In the opening section, she quotes her younger self as writing: “I had some thing that was a siknis its cald anexorea.” I was initially sceptical: it sounds like an adult writing the way they think a child would write. But Aviv later explains that she had dug out her childhood diary. I didn’t need her to do so to make her recollection of her illness more real; it just helps to know that the exact wording came from the page and not her memory.

Suggested reading

Don't punish Kanye West

By Hadley Freeman

Sometimes, texts are all there is to go on. Aviv can’t speak to some of her subjects, such as Ray, a depressive who has been dead for years. Instead, she pulls significantly from his unpublished memoir, which follows his decision to sue a psychiatric facility where he was committed. Ray struggled through psychoanalysis at Chestnut Lodge, where he lived in for long months, only to come later to feel that he had been fooled by a broken paradigm that forbade the use of antidepressants. As Aviv tells it, Ray’s psychiatrist seemed to think of such drugs as a shortcut rather than a cure, and therefore avoided their use.

Aviv tells Ray’s story both for its own sake and to consider the fundamental conflict in late 20th-century psychiatry. The Freudian assumption that all psychiatric conditions could be traced to discrete events in childhood, and cured through excavating these memories in psychoanalysis, dominated American psychiatry for decades. It led a lot of patients to endlessly recite early traumas, without much therapeutic gain. That approach was overtaken by an ascendant hope that new drugs could fix chemical imbalances in the brain and turn psychiatry into a medical field like any other. Now, we appear to have swung back the other way: decades of disappointments in psychopharmacology have inspired many to declare that “there’s no such thing as a chemical imbalance”, which has become an inescapable social media bromide.

What frustrates me is that people seem unable to accept that the interaction between the brain and the mind is extremely complex. That the simplistic not-enough-serotonin theory of depression appears to be wrong does not imply that all neurological explanations are off-limits. We don’t have to yaw constantly between “all brain” and “all mind” explanations. Aviv, thankfully, settles on no pat answers to these questions, instead, simply meditating on them via Ray’s strange story.

Likewise, she uses every case study to examine the nuances of some broader social or economic or political issue. There’s Bapu, a Brahmin-class Indian woman whose religious adherence straddles the line between faith and madness; her story considers the conflict between Western medicine and spiritualism. There’s Naomi, a young black mother whose deepening paranoia compels her to attempt to drown herself and her two young children; her story illustrates how entrenched racism complicates psychiatric care for people of colour. There’s Laura, an affluent young woman who starts taking a cocktail of medications at a young age and finds it very hard to stop; her narrative helps explore the thorny questions of how long patients should stay on drugs. It’s never advisable to draw too deeply from individual stories in analysing societal trends, but the connections Aviv draws to such trends give the book teeth, making it more than merely poignant.

Suggested reading

Can depression be cured?

By Ann Manov

The final section enables us to consider Aviv’s responsibility to her subjects and the difficulties of telling their stories. It focuses on Hava, an anorexic who Aviv encountered at a young age and whose life she sees as something of a road untraveled, given her own early struggles. Hava appeared to be making clear progress in her life, finding a steady boyfriend and planning for her future; sadly, years of making herself sick had damaged her body’s ability to regulate the reflex, and one night she choked on her own vomit in her sleep. She is one the three people profiled who were dead prior to the completion of the book, but Aviv’s deference to their own words makes their stories seem like memoirs all the same.

Perhaps it’s a sign of solipsism that this book often provoked me to wonder what Aviv would make of my story. I crave the simplicity of having my life printed out in black and white text; I also dread the inevitably reductive nature of such an exercise, and I’m scared of what someone else’s eyes might see in my narrative. For me personally, mysteries abound. I couldn’t possibly tell you the name of the doctor who diagnosed me as bipolar. At the time, I was not conscious in a conventional sense and everything that happened seemed to happen somewhere outside of me, people puttering around and talking in strange language I didn’t understand. There was an ER, there was a shot of haloperidol, and there was a stretch in a grey and muted psychiatric facility. Someone must have written my diagnosis down on a chart. Who that was is known only to God and, I imagine, to some mouldering file somewhere that I have absolutely no interest in digging up.

There are a lot of things I don’t understand about my own history. Worse, I can’t remember if the weight of years, mental illness and medication has simply obscured that knowledge, or if I never knew. In general, my time in the mental health system has been marked by constant confusion; I would feel like a liar if I said, “and then this month, in 2011, this happened”.

Suggested reading

The curse of Miserable Older White Women

By Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Do the subjects in Strangers to Ourselves struggle the same way? What must it feel like, for those who are still living, to read this book? Aviv tends to avoid the overly literal, rescuing the book from questions of simple authenticity and making it, usefully, a record of how foggy our recollections can be. But I can also imagine readers who might be frustrated by the lack of clear lines between certain truth and imperfect memory. All of us long for order in the stories we read. I think that’s why people gravitate towards mental illness narratives, to clarify something that has been obscured by instability. But how do you faithfully translate what is by its nature not translatable?

I honestly don’t think writers tell lies in mental illness memoirs. I wouldn’t even say they bend the truth. I would suggest, perhaps, that they take the fragments of what they know happened, and through them assert a kind of truth, as part of a therapeutic process. That asserted truth might not look exactly like that of a dispassionate observer — say, one of the many doctors who wander into our lives, speak to us condescendingly, make marks on a chart, and shuffle out of our story. But I can’t see much harm done, when patients tell it themselves. The conceit of a memoir is that other people will be entertained by our misfortune; so long as we tell our stories with integrity, those who suffer through the instability and boredom and deprivation of dignity common to serious mental illness are entitled to our own frames. I only hope that both writers and readers know that the attempt to organise the experience is quixotic and we are narrativising the un-narrativisable. I understand the feeling that we must try anyway.

Aviv, like me, is wary of the way that definition can trap and limit us. In our online culture of mental illness, diagnoses are celebrated: young people wield them like talismans for a sense of validation. And I am not entirely a stranger to the seductive power of becoming one’s diagnosis, letting it become the load-bearing element of your personality. But I am also no stranger to the way that, further down the road, that self-definition becomes cramped and uncomfortable, even horrifying, as you start to want to be something else. (To the newly-diagnosed, I urge you, do not become your illness.) For years I resisted writing anything about my mental illness; now I worry constantly that when I do so, I pigeonhole and limit myself.

“People can feel freed by these stories,” Aviv writes, “but they can also get stuck in them… a role that at first seemed freeing, but it began to destroy them.” This is the most recurrent theme in Strangers to Ourselves: the double-edged sword of the stories we tell to make our disorders comprehensible. Aviv’s is the kind of mental illness narrative I trust and value the most: suspicious of narrative itself. It’s perhaps a kind I could even write myself. The bigger kind, the longer kind, the “and then this happened on this date” kind, is both beyond my abilities and against my best interest. As Aviv writes, “there are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which”.

Of the primates, humans spend the most time dreaming: 20-25% of sleep. Sigmund Freud’s probably erroneous theory that dreams are unconscious, censored, unfulfilled wishes, to be analysed and interpreted for their true meaning, has dominated culture for more than a century. But since the Sixties, many other dream purposes have been theorised, tested, and confirmed.

In newborns, dreams stimulate neurons to form networks. In children and adults, dreams rehearse coping behaviours; convert new learning and experiences into long-term memory; assist in problem-solving and creativity; maintain and update our unique identities; and allow for emotional acuity, so that we don’t slip into fear bias, viewing neutral facial expressions as menacing.

My favourite dream purpose is that dreams improve mood. Called the “mood regulatory function of dreams theory”, this covert, complex, antidepressant effect was most researched and elucidated by Rosalind Cartwright (1922-2021), a psychologist and neuroscientist known as the Queen of Dreams.

Over a period of 40 years, beginning in the Sixties, Cartwright did a series of studies on depressed people. “I wanted to study whether there is a natural healing process that could be detected in dreams,” she wrote in The Twenty-Four Hour Mind (2011). She had people sleep overnight in her lab, where she repeatedly woke and interviewed them about their dreams. She found that dreams were filled with negative, troubling material, but that they became increasingly positive throughout the night, “drawing together more and more remote associations”. By morning people felt happier, calmer, and better prepared to live.

More from this series

Can depression be cured?

By Ann Manov

I hadn’t heard of this auspicious purpose, which doesn’t seem to have ever been theorised before the 20th century, until I read Cartwright’s book. When we get a full night’s sleep, our minds tell us around two hours of interconnected stories over three to five dreams, cycling between NREM — non-rapid-eye-movement — and REM sleep. The process “works well only if sleep is intact, regular, and long enough to complete its nightly tasks”, wrote Cartwright. If we interrupt our mind’s storytelling, each night is like one to three disturbing, depressing, nihilistic short stories, instead of one weird, fantastical, autobiographical, ultimately uplifting novel.

Dreams also work on problems over weeks and months. Studying divorcees with untreated depression, Cartwright compared those who recovered after five months with those who did not. The dreams of the people who didn’t recover were simple and brief, with few characters and little to no emotions. The dreams of those who did recover were long and dramatic, with numerous characters and complex plots, involving many emotions, scene changes, and references to past events.

More from this series

All revolutionaries are selfish

By Sean Thor Conroe

Dreams are just one benefit of sleep. In Why We Sleep (2017), self-described “sleep diplomat” Matthew Walker shared sleep’s many other benefits. Sleep maintains a healthy microbiome, balances the body’s insulin and blood sugar levels, cleans the brain, maintains healthy testosterone levels (helping us focus), protects our DNA, enhances the function of every major organ, and strengthens our immune systems.

A 2015 study, in which the cold virus was squirted up the noses of 164 people, found that 45.2% of those who’d slept an average of less than five hours the previous week became infected, as opposed to only 17.2% of those who’d slept seven or more hours. Walker wrote: “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.”

People who chronically under-sleep experience microsleeps, in which conscious perception — in all channels, from visual to audio — shuts down for a few seconds, often without the person knowing it. “A two-second microsleep at 30mph with a modest angle of drift can result in your vehicle transitioning entirely from one lane to the next,” wrote Walker. More car accidents are caused by “drowsy driving” like this than by alcohol and drugs combined.

More from this series

Welcome to Philip K. Dick's dystopia

By David Samuels

Unfortunately, the sleep-deprived do not know they are operating at suboptimal levels. Studies have found that people consistently underestimate their “performance disability”, wrote Walker. The underslept do not know that if they slept a fraction more they’d be physically healthier; less depressed, anxious, irrational, and moody; less dangerous to themselves and others.

Our ancestors slept seven to eight hours a night, beginning at around 9pm, and, except in the cooler winter months, 30 to 60 minutes each afternoon, according to studies on the Gabra in Kenya, the Hadza in Tanzania, and other aboriginal groups. Some modern cultures retain this schedule, with siestas. A Harvard study done in Greece found that individuals who did not have daily naps suffered a 37% increased risk of death from heart disease.

Arguably much worse than death, lack of sleep and dreams can lead to unconscious murder of loved ones, committed while sleepwalking. A 2012 study in Neurology found that 3.6% of US adults sleepwalk, while a survey of around 5,000 people in the UK found that 2.1% had violent behaviours while asleep. Cartwright served as a sleep expert in two sleep-murder cases. In 1987, a 6’5”, insomnia-ridden man named Kenneth Parks drove 14 miles to his in-laws’ house, where he choked his father-in-law unconscious and fatally stabbed his mother-in-law. In 1997, a chronically sleep-deprived, caffeine-tablet-using man named Scott Falater stabbed his wife 44 times, rolling her body into a swimming pool.

More from this series

Will we escape our age of failure?

By Martin Gurri

In court, Cartwright argued that Parks and Falater were innocent. Both men were “bewilderingly motiveless”, both displayed “profound remorse”, and both were unconscious of their actions. Falater is now serving a life-sentence in Arizona, while Parks was acquitted by a Canadian court, which called his behaviour “non-insane automatism”.

We are always partly dreaming according to Cartwright. Our 24-hour minds, like our bodies, are self-healing systems, which modern society disrupts. Cartwright wrote that “most of the medications that are prescribed to relieve depression also suppress REM sleep”. Sleeping pills, Walker explained, do not provide natural sleep. Ambien produces a destructive kind of sleep, causing a 50% weakening of the synaptic connections formed during learning. Artificial lights, especially LEDs and electronic screens, disrupt the circadian rhythm.

More from this series

The problem with being uptight

By Will Storr

A hundred years ago, less than 2% of Americans slept six hours or less a night; now, almost 30% do. Children are sleeping two hours fewer per night than kids 100 years ago. The problem seems worst in the US and the UK. This is good news. It means that life, for many people, can easily be improved. Mental illness and physical health problems can be alleviated night-by-night, at home, in bed.

Walker wrote that Freud made a “remarkable scientific contribution” to dream research by situating them in the mind, but that his theory of “wish fulfilment” had been rejected by modern science. Dreams are not just an epiphenomenon, nor simply a place where we try to fulfil our unconscious wishes. Dreams are “an internal psychotherapist”, wrote Cartwright.

Cartwright was “as much a pioneer in dream research” as Freud, according to Walker. Her research shows that our minds, evolved over hundreds of millions of years, are smarter, more complicated, and more caring of us than anyone ever thought.

If this is your conclusion, you’re not alone. Allegations of gaslighting are all the rage these days, whether about Ryan Giggs towards his ex, Kylie Jenner towards her fans, Love Island contestants towards each other, or Liz Truss towards everyone.

As it pertains to illicit psychological influence rather than seeing in the dark, the concept of gaslighting has been in use since at least 1981, though it seems to have really got going around 2012 (interestingly, at around the same time as “mansplaining” took off — another term heterosexual women tend to hurl at uncomprehending men). The term was first coined in tribute to Gaslight, a 1944 film based on a play by Patrick Hamilton and dramatically billed at the time as “a story which reveals a man’s secret and unholy desires”.

In the film, Charles Boyer deliberately drives Ingrid Bergman to the edge of insanity in order to steal from her. He sets up the gaslights in the house to flicker, then disputes the effect when she notices it. He accuses her of being a kleptomaniac and then frames her with stolen items. He tells her she is going mad, the easier to have her institutionalised and take her jewellery. In other words, he is almost parodically evil and calculating.

Fast forward to today: are we really beset with toxic Charles Boyer-types everywhere we look? Such villainy is hard to credit. Fairly predictably, the answer is no. As with terms such “trauma” or “abuse”, concept creep has transmuted the original idea of gaslighting, once reserved for genuinely sinister behaviour, into something much more mundane and everyday. In some visions, it has migrated from evil mind-control to simply arguing with someone. The charity Relate, for instance, initially defines gaslighting as “trying to convince someone they’re wrong about something even when they aren’t”. Most commonly, we’re told, “it takes the form of frequently disagreeing with someone or refusing to listen to their point of view”.

More from this author

Why the Tavistock had to fall

By Kathleen Stock

But this glosses over a crucial fact about arguments, which is that when you are in the middle of one, you are almost always trying to convince the other person they are wrong, often while “failing to listen to their point of view”. And yet quite often, the person with whom you are arguing isn’t actually wrong. The emotions surrounding arguments simply make us all less good at objectivity (and let’s face it, most of us weren’t that good in the first place). Human relationships are routinely full of self-deception, misunderstandings, shame, and projection — and that’s just the successful ones. For a national “relationship support” charity to pathologise the ordinary murk of romantic interaction like this therefore seems unhelpful. Emotional granularity — in other words, increasing our vocabulary to describe the full range of human emotional experiences — is all very well, but should we really slap an accusatory label on something that most of us do from time to time, and most of us cannot help doing, being the frail humans we are?

And then there’s the fact that — just as a blue-faced denial that a certain thing ever, ever happened can be useful ammunition in a blazing row — so too, on the other hand, can the accusation that the person you’re having the row with is “gaslighting” you. Though it’s often presented otherwise, it’s not as if the charge of gaslighting is itself inevitably accurate or offered with the purest of intentions. Clearly, it too can be a useful passive-aggressive tool with an eye to winning a fight.

A revealing example of how accusations of gaslighting don’t necessarily illuminate much was found last week in The Times. Readers were offered the putatively touching story of millennial Olivia, gaslit by “Ben”, a man she thought she was dating. After sleeping with her, telling her she was the best person he’d met in years, and talking about going to Italy together, Ben told her they had only ever been “hanging out” and not dating after all. Later, she found out that Ben had been dating someone else all along.

Clearly Olivia thought this was egregious enough behaviour to write an article in a national newspaper, comparing Ben to Ryan Giggs, now on trial for much more serious charges. But what if, in these officially polyamorous times, it was just that Ben was a bit confused about what he wanted? What if he sincerely wanted to go to Italy with Olivia when he said it, but afterwards changed his mind? What if he had never really been clear in his own mind whether they were merely hanging out or dating, and what if Olivia had never really forced the issue in conversation either? In other words, what if this was all entirely the result of standard human ambivalence, indecision, and poor communication skills? In this sense, we are all gaslighters now, and we are all being gaslit.

More from this author

Boris can't keep a story straight

By Kathleen Stock

Meanwhile, over in the land where a non-negligible number of the population believe that lizard people are taking over the planet, the NBC news website defines gaslighting just as broadly as involving “trying to get someone else (or a group of people) to question their own reality, memory or perceptions”. According to Robin Stern PhD, the author of a book about gaslighting and who, perhaps for that reason, is apparently in no way tempted to play down its ubiquity or significance: “This is always dangerous… The danger of letting go of your reality is pretty extreme.”

Here too, in an age (and a country) hardly known for rampant epistemic humility, the wisdom of encouraging people to cling tightly to potentially mistaken beliefs or even outright delusions seems unclear. Philosophers sometimes talk about what mental states feel like “from the inside” — as opposed to the clashing perceptions or knowledge that others have, either of you or of the world or both. From the inside, then, believing something makes it feel true. That feeling is built into what a belief is. You can’t believe something and also feel with conviction that what you believe is wholly false. So if another person has evidence that you’re wrong, then he is going to seem wrong to you, at least initially. But of course, he still might be right. In many cases, then, “letting go of your reality”, as Stern puts it, might be a very useful thing for you to do, even if it feels uncomfortable to do it.

Of course, there are still extreme versions of gaslighting behaviours out there, though I assume they are relatively rare, or else folded into a collection of other more unambiguously abusive behaviours. In one recent legal case, described as a “milestone” by the barrister who won it for her client, a woman was convinced by her partner, a mental health professional, that she was bipolar when she was not. Still, it seems to me that for a connection to be made between “undermining someone’s reality” and criminalisation, the case has to be made very, very carefully. Unlike rape, or physical violence, or even the characteristic behaviours of what is now known as “coercive control” — isolation from friends, sexual coercion, humiliation, and so on — what commonly passes for gaslighting is a relatively benign feature of human interaction rather than a bug.

So, the next time someone accuses you of gaslighting, remember you have options. The mature choice would be to acknowledge that, yes, you might simply be in the wrong. A less mature option would be to tell your accuser that, by saying that you are gaslighting them, they are in fact gaslighting you. Finally — and I wouldn’t necessarily endorse the escalation – you could opt for the least mature option of all: which is to reply, as in Rick and Morty, that “gaslighting doesn’t exist… you made it up because you’re fucking crazy”.

There’s a reason this setup is a classic. Most of us feel that there’s an “us” conceptually distinct from the body we inhabit. In fact, anthropologists suggest it’s a belief held in some form or other across all human cultures.

This ancient dichotomy crops up in Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender, a new book from primatologist Frans de Waal. Most of the book is about sex differences in our closest cousins. But de Waal briefly touches on the experience of transgender humans as evidence, supposedly, of innately gendered brains that can be effectively the opposite sex to the rest of the body.

The hypothesis he advances is a steelman of gender identity theory: the idea that whether we’re “really” a man or woman depends on an internal state knowable only to ourselves. In de Waal’s conception (the “scientific” version of the theory), gender identity isn’t an immaterial essence but is physically located in some part of the brain. Supposedly this brain module develops in utero and tells women and girls “this brain is in a female body”, and men and boys that their body is male — but it is possible for this module to find itself in the “wrong” body. De Waal suggests that “in a fraction of human pregnancies, the body takes off in a different direction to the brain”, and this physical mismatch is the cause of gender dysphoria.

De Waal’s argument rests on claims, made by a number of studies, that the brains of transgender people are closer in structure or function to their target sex than to their natal sex. But, unsurprisingly, this is far from settled science.

Suggested reading

The taboo trans question

By Sarah Ditum

For one thing, studies of the brain involve either the very expensive process of imaging living brains, or brain tissue from deceased donors. It’s hard to get a decent sample size — and harder still when the group you’re interested in makes up just a tiny minority of the population. Plus, the pressures on scientists and journalists to produce eyeball-grabbing #content to keep their careers afloat can lead to conclusions being brazenly over-interpreted, especially in areas in which research often attracts media buzz.

On top of this, there are a number of complicating factors, which most of these studies are much too small to control for (if they even attempt to — plenty don’t). Hormones are one such complication: if people have medically transitioned, it’s difficult to say whether any resemblance to their target sex is because they were born that way, or because of their newly cross-sex hormonal profile. Many studies acknowledge this problem, but small sample sizes mean that their efforts to address it are often not statistically meaningful.

The fact that trans people are more likely to have autism or mental illnesses is another potential confounder, one that’s rarely mentioned. These diagnoses are thought to be associated with physical changes in the brain, so any study of average differences between trans people and control groups would need to rule them out as explanations.

Sexual orientation, too, should be taken into account. People who are trans are much more likely to be non-heterosexual pre-transition; if they are only compared to heterosexual controls, then it’s impossible to tell whether differences are down to gender identity or sexuality — especially if your experiment, like this one, is based on volunteers’ responses to an erotic film. This particular study found that trans women responded differently from straight men and similarly to straight women. Is this a sign of a “female brain”, or could they just be attracted to men, like straight women are? We don’t know, because the paper doesn’t say.

More from this author

Feminism has a biology problem

By Ellen Pasternack

Since sexual orientation is the single most binary psychological variation between men and women (well upwards of 90% of women are attracted to men, and vice versa — a fact often considered so obvious that it goes without saying), you’d think it would be important to carefully control for. Most studies don’t adequately do this, though, and at least one actually does the opposite. The methods section of this paper published in Nature explains that for trans women to participate as subjects, they had to be exclusively attracted to males (i.e. they had to be homosexual), while to be in the male or female control groups, participants had to be heterosexual. The confounding variable of sexual orientation is therefore completely baked into the study, so that it’s impossible to draw separate conclusions about gender identity.

On the other hand, the first study to explicitly factor this into the experimental design reports that once sexual orientation is accounted for, the brains of trans people were sex-typical in most of the variables measured. In other words, comparing like for like, trans people’s brains were similar to people of the same (natal) sex and sexual orientation, rather than the opposite sex.

I don’t think it’s implausible that gender dysphoria could be caused in some cases by some kind of neurological similarity to the opposite sex —just that the evidence for it is currently not especially convincing. On top of this, there are a few troublesome observations that suggest the “brain in the wrong body” narrative can’t be the whole story.

Why have gender clinic referrals skyrocketed for girls in particular — in the UK, there’s been an increase of 4,400% in less than a decade — when gender dysphoria used to be diagnosed primarily in boys? This looks suspiciously similar to documented cases of peer-to-peer social influence in teenage girls (which can be facilitated by social media), but is usually explained away as a decrease in the stigma that would otherwise prevent people coming out. If this is the case, though, then where are all the middle-aged women who should also be coming forward after years of repressing a trans male identity?

And what about the large numbers of male-to-female transitioners who do not seem to suffer from gender dysphoria, may have no desire whatsoever to alter their male anatomy, and behave in strikingly male-typical ways? News of women arrested for sexual crimes — especially those involving a penis — used to be a rarity; now it is increasingly commonplace. One such headline from a few weeks ago reads: “Ex-soldier exposed her penis and used wheelie bin as sex toy in public”. Are we really meant to believe this is the behaviour of a “woman trapped in a man’s body”?

Suggested reading

Why I stopped being a good girl

By Hadley Freeman

Undeterred, however, de Waal concludes that “it seems […] the brain offers a better indicator of the gender people claim for themselves than their genital anatomy.” This statement borders on the pseudoscientific. How can we believe that the brain, with all its vagaries, is a “better indicator” of whether the average person describes themselves as a man or a woman than the simple binary of what’s in their pants?

But let’s say it’s true that gender identity is an immutable physical property of our brains, and one day we will be able to point to it on a fancy type of scan. Even with this newfound neurological knowledge, wouldn’t we still need to recognise that male and female bodies are different, for instance in contexts such as sports?

De Waal doesn’t think so: to him, rulings that restrict female sports to people with female bodies are no more than “attempts to demonise [transgender people] and make their lives more difficult”. This is despite a less conspiratorial explanation being within reach — as he himself states in another chapter: “body strength is a glaring exception to the general rule that gender differences are gradual and overlapping […] More than two out of three men can lift 110 pounds directly off the ground, but only 1% of women can do the same.”

De Waal refers here to a gender difference, though actually it’s a difference of sex, caused by the physical characteristics of our bodies. Such mix-ups are not infrequent. And matters are not helped by a glossary inset. “Sex”, we are told, refers circularly to “the biological sex of a person”; “gender” is “the role and position of each sex in society” (emphasis mine), while a “gender role” apparently is something else entirely. With a guide like this, the blind are led by the blind.

Suggested reading

How philosophy sacrificed the truth

By Kathleen Stock

Perhaps the strangest thing is how at odds this all is with the rest of the book, in which de Waal is scathing of over-simple politicised narratives from all sides. In a final chapter titled “The Trouble with Dualism: Mind, Brain, and Body Are One”, he argues that thinking the human mind can be separated from our bodies and our animal natures is an arrogant form of “neo-creationism”. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio is approvingly quoted as saying that “a mind is so shaped by the body and so destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it”. In other words, you are your body, and the idea of being born in the “wrong” one is a logical impossibility.

It’s hard to believe this chapter is written by the same man who uncritically adopts the language of “boys born with female anatomy”. It’s as if there is a set of beliefs on gender identity which have been downloaded as a self-contained unit, prevented by some kind of firewall from mingling with pre-existing knowledge.

Perhaps this makes sense. Many universities officially subscribe to this set of beliefs (in fact, in the UK they’re likely to pay money to do so, via Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme), and increasingly ask that new hires do, too. Students enforce the beliefs among their own ranks and among their lecturers. Research that asks the wrong questions may be pulled from publication, or have ethical approval retracted. You don’t have to understand — just profess your allegiance so that we all know you’re on the side of decency.

It’s no wonder that some intelligent and well-meaning people seem to decide, consciously or unconsciously, to think the right thing and reach the right conclusions without worrying about whether they’re sound.

When it comes to sex, gender and trans issues, it’s hard to know which information to trust. There is a clear market for non-partisan scientific expertise, to help us sift through the propaganda and hype. In books like Different, we trust that the authors will hand-pick reliable facts for us, rather than buying them wholesale from the merchants. But if even the experts are too befuddled to look at the evidence with a critical eye — or worse, self-censoring — then there is little hope for the rest of us.

This isn’t the case. In fact, I think the Bill’s proposals on this kind of internet content are a dog’s dinner. If implemented, they will undoubtedly suppress desirable levels of freedom of expression on the internet, and cause more problems than they resolve.

Following scrutiny from the Joint Committee, the Bill — which received its second reading in the Commons yesterday — takes recent Law Commission proposals to introduce a “harm-based” communications offence, and places a duty of care on internet providers and websites to restrict content which meets the definition of this proposed offence, give or take a few tweaks. Specifically, they will be required to restrict any content where there’s a “real and substantial risk that it would cause harm to a likely audience”, the sender “intended to cause harm to a likely audience”, and the sender has “no reasonable excuse for sending the message”. Harm is defined as “psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress”. What counts as a “likely audience” comprises whichever individual is reasonably foreseen as encountering that content.

The flaws here were also present within the Law Commission proposals that inspired the Bill. Take the criterion of “psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress”. As many have noted — though apparently not in Westminster — concepts such as “psychological harm” and “distress” are moving targets, semantically speaking, in the sense that the sort of thing they refer to changes over time. For instance, in a society whose primary concern is with the alleviation of negative experience, concepts associated with negative experiences tend to expand their semantic range and become increasingly diluted. So for instance, over time, the category of “abuse” has moved beyond physical events to include emotional ones as well; and the category of “trauma” has extended from atypically catastrophic life events to relatively common happenings like childbirth and bereavement.

At first glance, “experts discover new form of trauma!” looks reassuringly scientific, a bit like “experts discover new kind of dinosaur!”. But whereas the existence of a dinosaur is completely independent of the activities of the experts who discover it, this is not the case with trauma. The more generous experts are willing to be in their definitions, the more people will then count as traumatised; the more people who count as traumatised, the more people will define themselves in terms of membership of that group, and so become more able to exert political pressure on others — including upon the experts themselves, of course — to recognise the precise nuances of their suffering.

More from this author

Five rules for fighting transactivism

By Kathleen Stock

This is one of what philosopher Ian Hacking has called the “feedback loops” within psychological classification. Of course, this trajectory towards dilution is not inevitable, and partly depends on wider political sensibilities within a given society. In a culture which prioritises personal resilience towards negative experiences rather than their automatic accommodation, the sphere of traumatic events might ultimately contract rather than expand. But we don’t live in this kind of a place.

As with trauma, so with psychological distress. Things that were felt as minor ripples centuries ago, if at all — misgendering, for instance, or cultural appropriation, or the mere mention of a slur in quotation marks, or even just free speech arguments themselves — are now crushing blows for many. This isn’t to deny that strongly unpleasant feelings are generated, even as the category of distressing events and experiences expands. Feelings have a habit of rushing in to fill whatever gap has been culturally opened for them.

The point for present purposes is that the number of forms of communication that meet the Bill’s criterion of risking psychological distress is getting bigger all the time. And as the list of things to be distressed about grows by the year, the range of socially permissible speech contracts. One author cited in the Joint Committee report inadvertently underlined this point, insisting that the Bill should “ensure that a broad range of forms of online abuse are acknowledged (e.g. including, but not limited to, ableism, ageism, racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, and transphobia)”. Such a sentence would be incomprehensible to readers even 20 years ago.

And it’s actually worse than this: for the type of content to be removed, according to the Bill, is not that which actually reasonably causes harm in the form of severe psychological distress, but that which is anticipated by others may do so. This point needs to be considered in tandem with the apparent assumption of legislators that harmful internet content is most likely to be aimed at people in virtue of their race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, and so on — that is, in terms of membership of protected groups such as those listed in the Equality Act.

Suggested reading

Why Twitter is so awful

By Mary Harrington

The problem here is that the methods likely to be used by internet providers to gauge what would distress a particular protected group are bound to be clumsy. When trying to work out how some group feels, many of us project onto them the feelings we think they should have, or the feelings we think we would have, rather than the feelings they actually do have. And when it comes to trying to reconstruct the feelings of members of minority groups of which we personally are not members, it seems that many of us err on the side of moral caution, and go dramatically over the top on their behalf, anticipating any anticipated sleight as a deeply felt wound without checking we are right. Things won’t necessarily be improved in this regard by internet providers consulting campaigning groups and charities who claim to speak for a given protected group — as the Bill indicates in at least one place that they should — because many of these have a huge financial interest in giving as dramatic an account of a protected group’s feelings as possible.

Perhaps the Bill’s authors believe this all can be easily overcome by the insistence that the sort of content to be removed is only that which is intended to cause psychological distress to a likely audience. This is a false dawn, however. Gauging the intention behind a given statement — what the author meant by it, and what effect they meant to produce by it — requires a relatively deep understanding of linguistic context. But this is the internet we are talking about, where often you only know an author’s name and sometimes you don’t even know that. Character limits truncate explanation, edit buttons are often in short supply, and disembodied statements float around the internet. The Bill even tells us that “an offence may be committed by a person who forwards another person’s direct message or shares another person’s post”, but this ignores multiple ways in which the intent of the original author and the intent of the person forwarding or retweeting it might diverge.

More from this author

The fictional world of trans activism

By Kathleen Stock

Here, too, given the current cultural climate, providers are likely to err on the side of caution and ban or restrict rather than leave alone. And here, too, there’s likely to be expansion not contraction in the frequency with which a statement is judged as possibly indicative of the intention to distress. For just as the concept of distress is subject to feedback loops which shift it unstably towards semantic dilution, so too judgements about the presence of an intention to distress are a moving target, depending as they do on prior judgements about what other people conceivably might find distressing. Fifty years ago, it would have been pretty much inconceivable that saying “men can’t be women” could be distressing to anyone, and so equally inconceivable that someone could seriously intend to distress another person by saying this. These days, you can get banned from Twitter because of it.

If their recent behaviour proves anything, it’s that these online giants don’t need another reason to crack down on content they think will distress certain groups of people. After all, they are already doing this, albeit in a way which reflects the priorities of Silicon Valley technocrats: putting up pictures of penises is fine; saying women don’t have penises isn’t. The result is an impoverishment of public conversation, a sense of burning injustice on the part of many good-faith conversationalists, and huge and unnecessary toxicity between identity groups. Delivering people from psychological distress is the business of therapists or priests, not lawmakers.

When Byron was 20, Boatswain died of rabies. Devastated, he composed a poem that captures his grief and the sense of losing an irreplaceable relationship:

To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.

Byron made provision in his will to be interred with Boatswain, but he was hardly the first human to form such a bond; the earliest known remains of humans and dogs buried together date from 14,000 years ago.

Until last week, I’d only ever kept cats, and didn’t really get the dog thing. Then we got a nine-week-old Labrador puppy. Now, my every moment and mood is shadowed by a creature who thinks I’m some kind of divine being, and who wees on the floor whenever she gets excited, which is often. It’s been intense.

But as intense as a baby? A few days into dog wrangling, a friend texted me to ask how “new motherhood” was going. There are plenty of articles which will tell you parenthood and dog ownership are comparable, or that you should try raising a puppy before you try raising a baby as a sort of trial run, or that the former is even harder.

And some dog-owners insist flat out that dogs and kids are on a level. “Am I comparing my dog to your kids?” asks young dog-owner Eva Hall. “Yes, yes I am”, because “I love him as much as you love your kids” and “let’s face it, he’s just better than your kids”. For those, like Hall, who see no distinction between dogs and kids, a puppy isn’t like parenting: it is parenting.

My already well-thumbed copy of Puppies for Dummies reinforces this, referring throughout to “dog parents”. Some of the products that cater to these “dog parents” are startlingly expensive and similar to the baby kit now in my loft. I’m not sure why a dog would need a pushchair, as puppies can walk from three weeks old; but you can still spend £350 on a deluxe dog buggy. There are slings, too; this one has a thousand or so positive reviews, many of which include photos of delighted owners carrying baffled-looking canines, slung like babies on their chests.

It’s true that in the case of both babies and puppies, you build an attuned relationship on caretaking and body-language cues rather than — as with adult friendships — conversation or shared interests. There are also broken nights, the cleaning up of bodily waste, and the sense that you’re in charge of creating a routine for a dependent other.

But I scarcely need list the reasons why a dog is a dog, and a baby is a baby. Yet many seem determined to flatten the distinction. And while it’s common to decry this as “selfish”, or blame the housing crisis for making human offspring unattainable, this trend has also paralleled a wider one, now decades old, away from boundaries, distinctions and formal hierarchies in the way we organise our social life.

More by this author

Putin doesn't have mummy issues

By Mary Harrington

Today household-name management consultancies extol the benefits of “unstructuring” your corporation, and “unschooling” advocates wonder if parents imposing rules on kids creates more problems than it solves. Beneath it all lies a profound ambivalence about authority that’s percolated even into the asymmetrical relationship between owners and their pets.

But while many now seem uncertain about whether love is compatible with being in authority, radical equality even with kids or pets doesn’t always mean more love. Or, at least, it doesn’t always mean the right kind of love.

Over my lifetime, the trend has been away from formal acknowledgement of hierarchies in schools, families and the wider social fabric, toward a more egalitarian style. Parenting norms have shifted toward empathy rather than pulling rank. Advocates of “gentle parenting”, for example, suggest “negotiating limits” with your kids instead of telling them what’s going to happen: not “we’re leaving the park in five minutes” but “how many more goes on the swing shall we have before it’s time to go?” “Peaceful parenting” challenges the idea that “kids are less than”, arguing that it’s wrong to use “privilege as an adult” to control children’s actions and feelings. Instead, the child’s autonomy is emphasised; some even advocate asking a baby or toddler for consent before changing a nappy.

And as more parents seek to place kids on the same level as them, something similar is afoot with pets. The “multispecies family” is so pronounced a trend it is the subject of books and academic research, and three American states have recently passed laws obliging courts to treat pets as family members rather than possessions in divorce cases.

This all suggests a deep ambivalence about whether love and authority are compatible full stop. For the egalitarians, this is never the case. Children are an oppressed class; and pets are “infantilised objects of resource in a speciesist society”, forced to live in environments that do “psychological violence” to them.

This would, I suspect, have baffled the aristocratic Byron, for all that he loved his dog. If Boatswain’s epitaph is anything to go by, for him the dog wasn’t a substitute baby but something more like a deeply-loved feudal retainer:

The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone

It would have flummoxed my farming grandparents, too. They kept a working dog, a relationship that has the same feudal undertone as the one Byron describes. Their dog was a member of the household, scrupulously well-cared-for but given clear rules that marked her out as absolutely not on a level with the humans.

More by this author

The abject failure of Cool Britannia

By Mary Harrington

In contrast, a growing number of dog owners shrink from the idea of such a distinction in status. Such people would reject the term “owner”, preferring to anthropomorphise their canines, or otherwise emphasise the parity between them: for example by donning a matching dog costume to play with them or letting them into the bed.

But this comes with downsides, too. The arguments against swapping authority for empathy in parenting usually point to badly-behaved children. And if poorly-managed children may cover your walls in Sharpie, poorly-managed dogs may just be sharp. These are the creatures that gnaw at furniture, or maul livestock or humans — and who end up being euthanised.

And along with the risk that too-egalitarian a relationship will make for open season on misbehaviour in kids or animals, comes the creeping possibility that it will do so for adults as well. For once you argue that kids and animals are on a level with adults, and their autonomy a key factor in the relationship, you’re close to claiming — as the advocates for nappy-changing permission do — that we should elicit the consent of children or animals to the way we treat them.

If you’re arguing that kids and pets should consent, though, that implies they can. On the face of it, this sounds good and compassionate. But “consent” also implies a relationship between relative equals, in which both parties have similar levels of autonomy. Where this is understood to be the case, between adults, the modern world routinely treats consent as an adequate substitute for moral rules: we don’t need to say any action is wrong in an absolute sense, if everyone affected agreed to it.

Most people understand that the difference in capacity between an adult and dependent pet or child is so great that such a “consent” model only applies in a very limited sense. But the radical push to flatten all structures pulls us in the opposite direction — and for a minority, this leads to dark places.

Suggested reading

How Buffy revamped teen sex

By Kat Rosenfield

For it’s also now a mainstream view that consent is the sole arbiter of whether a sexual act is acceptable. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that as parenting and pet-care have become more radically egalitarian, a few are tempted to imagine the capacity for “consent” some now ascribe to children and animals in other areas of life might apply here as well.

One recent book by a UK academic argues that while sexual intimacy between humans and animals is often abusive, it needn’t be by definition. And it may or may not be a coincidence that the same writer who declared “‘parent’ is an oppressive class” worked as Communications Director for Prostasia, an organisation that supports the “liberation” of “minor-attracted people” from stigma.

For most, the retreat from authority is not a step toward abuse, just a well-intentioned effort to avoid undue harshness when in a position of authority over kids or pets. But while authority may be misused, asymmetries of power and responsibility don’t go away just because you wish they weren’t there. Children and domestic animals are genuinely in need of adult guidance if they are to integrate into the human social fabric. Refusing to provide this isn’t compassion, it’s cowardice.

More seriously still, abdicating our responsibility to accept the obligations that come with being in authority over dependents risks abuses far worse than badly-behaved kids or pets. For pretending we’re on a level with our pets or kids doesn’t diminish the power we have over them. It just makes it easier to conceal that power, and convince ourselves they’ve consented, as equals, to whatever it is we desire. And very few individuals have no desires they’re ashamed of.

It’s not just unruly dogs that need to be kept on a leash, but also the dark side of humans. If we’re to wield power responsibly in our households, we owe it to our dependents to acknowledge where it lies.

Those squirrelled library loans formed a tiny part of a vast collection amassed by the Soviet dictator, estimated by historian Geoffrey Roberts at 25,000 items. Joseph Stalin’s books, as Roberts recounts in his new study Stalin’s Library, belonged to “a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power”. He spent a lifetime as a “highly active, engaged and methodical reader”. His tastes and interests spanned not only politics, economics and history but literature of many kinds. The book-loving shoemaker’s son from Georgia grew into an absolute ruler who deployed his library not as a prestige adornment but a “working archive”. Its bulging shelves stretched across his Kremlin offices and quarters, and around his dachas outside central Moscow.

Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.

Stalin also drafted, wrote, and re-wrote, keenly and tirelessly — everything from Communist Party propaganda to Soviet legal edicts and textbooks in history, Marxist-Leninist philosophy and economics. He loved to edit and, as Roberts shows, he did it very well, slicing through the verbiage of sycophants to achieve greater “clarity and accuracy”. Although not an original thinker, “his intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser”. Robert Service, in his biography, calls the dictator “an accumulator and regurgitator” of ideas. Stalin never returned to the verse of his adolescence, but the young poet known as “Soselo” had won anthology places for the fragile tenderness of Georgian lyrics such as “To the Moon” (translation by Donald Rayfield):

Know for certain that once
Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man
Strives again to reach the pure mountain,
When exalted by hope.
So, lovely moon, as before
Glimmer through the clouds;
Pleasantly in the azure vault
Make your beams play.

Later, as a vigilant, hands-on editor, Stalin knew how to cut the theoretical waffle, keep things concrete and tell a striking story. In mass-circulation works such as the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with its 36 million copies printed in the decade after 1938, he especially liked to strike out “laudatory accounts of his own role”. He insisted that cloying hero-worship made his stomach turn. “What are people supposed to do?” Stalin asked sarcastically as he toned down the official Short Biography of himself published in 1946. “Get down on their knees and pray to me?” No court jester dared answer: “Yes”.

More from this author

Can France resist tribalism?

By Boyd Tonkin

Of all the mind-scrambling glimpses of the despot as an “emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual” gathered in Stalin’s Library, none quite matches the record of a Central Committee meeting, held in September 1940, about the limits of artistic expression. The General Secretary spoke up firmly on the side of freedom. “You have to let people express themselves,” Comrade Stalin argued. Artists should avoid fairy-tales that toe the party line.

Take the wonderful Chekhov, who “has no heroes but rather grey people”. Stalin approves. Even the enemies of the Soviet Union should not be depicted as monsters “lacking all human traits”. Even Trotsky — here you imagine stifled intakes of breath around a smoky Kremlin chamber — was a “capable person” who must be shown with all his “positive qualities”. Was a capable person: just a couple of weeks earlier, Ramón Mercader had, on Stalin’s orders, buried an ice-axe in Trotsky’s skull in Mexico City. Thus putting a definitive end to his character development, positive or negative.

How many other people did Stalin kill? If Cold War-era historians such as Robert Conquest laid 15-20 million deaths at his door (in The Great Terror), post-Soviet research has led scholars such as Timothy Snyder to suggest a revised estimate of between six and nine million (Bloodlands). Even the lowest figure freezes the imagination. For almost a century, allies, enemies, victims and a wondering posterity have struggled to understand how this gigantic annihilation of life and hope emerged from the ideas and deeds not of a “psychopath” — Roberts rightly rejects the term — but a shrewd, calm, widely-read and thoughtful politician-manager who had learned both to “rationalise and abstract himself from his terrible rule”. Trotsky lies dead in a Mexican morgue. A shame: such a smart guy…

Suggested reading

The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Stalin, then, presents a challenge to anyone who claims a specific link between deep reading and the pursuit of ethical or social virtue. Learning nurtures wisdom in many ancient traditions. But the years since the millennium have seen a small explosion in research that tries to prove a non-trivial link between consistent reading and the empathy that allows us to inhabit other souls and walk a verst (or many) in their shoes. If literature doesn’t exactly make you better, runs the refrain of many experimental papers in psychology and neuroscience, then regular exposure to it — especially fiction — will enhance those social skills that demand an understanding of the world perceived through other eyes.

“Specifically, engaging with narrative fiction and mentally simulating the social experiences represented may improve or maintain social skills, especially skills of empathy and social understanding,” reports one widely-cited Canadian paper from 2009, referenced in the back-up materials for World Book Day (celebrated on 3 March). Toronto novelist-psychologist Keith Oatley, one of its authors, has emerged as a leading champion of reading as an empathy shot. (Interestingly, his University of Toronto co-researchers on that paper included Jordan B Peterson, later to find wider fame elsewhere.)

A survey of the evidence from 2016 affirms that “Readers of fiction score higher on measures of empathy and theory of mind (ToM) — the ability to think about others’ thoughts and feelings — than non-readers, even after controlling for age, gender, intelligence and personality factors”. The World Book Day outreach projects aim to put books into non-readers’ hands, on the basis that “Reading for pleasure is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success — more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.” Here, empathy as social asset takes a back seat as voluntary reading becomes a sort of educational superpower.

Suggested reading

Books won't save you

By Sarah Ditum

Stalin, by the way, did read plenty of fiction, drama, poetry and narrative history in addition to political and economic analysis. He loved the novels of Émile Zola, made writer Maxim Gorky the most fêted private citizen in the USSR, and ran the Stalin Prizes for creative writing from his own office. Dmitry Shepilov, Pravda editor and court intellectual, later wrote that Stalin “was probably better prepared for the meetings than anyone else”. Sinister tales abound of his creepily close-focus attention to the literary arts in Soviet Russia.

One of the best known, not mentioned in Roberts’s book, concerns the arrest and persecution of the poet Osip Mandelstam. In 1934, Stalin phoned the detained poet’s friend, Boris Pasternak. “Mandelstam’s case is being analysed”, Stalin reassures Pasternak:

“Everything will be worked out. Why haven’t the writers’ organisations come to me? If I were a poet and my friend had fallen into disgrace, I would climb the walls to help him.”

Then Stalin dons his critic’s hat to ask “But is he or is he not a master?” Pasternak replies “That’s not the point!”, and requests a meeting. But Stalin hangs up. In the event, the Kremlin Mountaineer — the title of Mandelstam’s famous anti-Stalin satire — did not exactly murder the poet. Exile, jail and illness killed Mandelstam in 1938. It was not quite an execution; not an exoneration either. More a lethal “m-da”.

Although it lies beyond the author’s remit, Stalin’s Library tests to destruction the consoling notion that long, wide, extensive reading confers the gift of empathy — or rather, that empathy is a value to cherish. Roberts, though, maintains that whatever vital sparks of humanity the Soviet autocrat lacked, the ability to conceive the independent life of other minds was not among them. Indeed, he credits Stalin with “too much human empathy” as the grand paranoiac envisaged the hearts of his rivals seething with non-existent plots and stratagems to oust him. What the ultimate scholar-slayer missed was any shred of the “compassion or sympathy” that might stay his hand before he sent the bodies of those minds to a slow, cold fate in the Gulag or a quicker end in the basement of the Lubyanka.

In his reading, Stalin preferred strong characters — real or fictional — with firmly-marked personality and agency, not blurred ciphers of a class or an epoch. “Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine,” he proclaimed about the great Tsars in the course of a critique of the over-theoretical Soviet textbooks of the 1930s, “They rested on certain classes … but they acted, they were historical figures”. Stalin may never actually have said anything like “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic” (though the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky did). But the apocryphal wisecrack at least captures an empathetic reader’s ability to feel the weight of individual lives and minds.

Suggested reading

Young Russians love Stalin

By Daniel Kalder

Stalin did not lack empathy, then, for writers or their work. He grasped too — as censorious heresy-hunters still do not — that books acquire meaning and value separate from their creators’ beliefs. Defending the genius of the “reactionary” Nicolai Gogol, he urged that “the world views of writers should not be confused with the impact of their works on readers”. Nothing in Stalin’s long, complex and sometimes subtle engagement with culture disproves the advocates of intensive reading as a highway to empathy. The flaw, rather, lies in treating that quality as a firm proxy for interpersonal goodwill.

However robust and reliable on its own terms, research on the reading-empathy connection comes out of a cognitive science that finds it hard to define and describe a social world far beyond its probings of the story-stimulated mind. The 2016 paper I cited on “Reading fiction and reading minds” leaps from a scrutiny of the brain’s “default network”, and its activation by reading, to the assertion that: “Historically, highly literate societies, especially societies that produced psychologically rich literature, function more empathically and less violently than less literate societies.”

Show me a society with a greater “psychologically rich literature” than Russia. Now show me one that, in modern times, has brutalised its own people and its neighbours with more savagery. China, perhaps, or Germany? Both are also powerhouses of “psychologically rich literature”. Without the norms, laws and institutions to scale up private understanding into public civility, the solitary reader’s empathy will be, at best, an advantageous knack. After all, every low-grade swindler, conman and fraudster depends on a serviceable theory of other minds and how they work. And, if your milieu and your ideology impose no veto on mass persecution and state murder, the ability to mess with your victims’ heads simply adds another weapon to the oppressor’s armoury.

Perhaps the empathy that books deepen can only do collective good if a community — whether a household or a nation — decides to reward the sort of fellow-feeling that brings help and not harm to others. Whereas in the moral wasteland of Stalin’s Russia, the insight into other minds conferred by some of these 25,000 volumes served as just another manipulative tool of domination. Reading alone, could not make Stalin less Stalinist. If anything, his lifelong bookworm’s habits seem to have turned him — to quote his own formula for the writer’s role — into a more cunning and devious “engineer of human souls”.

Munchausen’s Syndrome, or as it’s referred to in the medical literature, “factitious disorder”, is one of those conditions that’s rare enough that we don’t know how rare it is. It usually goes unnoticed for years or decades. Patients often visit many different doctors and hospitals, sometimes abruptly disappearing if anyone questions the reality of their illnesses, means it’s difficult to diagnose, let alone study. But there’s plenty of evidence of these fake illnesses ruining real lives.

At the end of last year, Helen Naylor published a memoir, My Mother, Munchausen’s, and Me. The final word in the title could be referring not only to the author, but also to ME — Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome — which Naylor’s mother Elinor claimed to have all the way through Naylor’s childhood. She required, she said, long bed rest every day, meaning she was rarely around to look after Naylor. Years later, Naylor discovered that her mother had regularly gone out shopping and on day trips while she was at school.

Over time, Naylor’s mother seemed to forget the ME, instead seizing on a diagnosis of “mild Parkinsonism” — a set of minor symptoms that are related to the vastly more serious Parkinson’s Disease, but are absolutely not the same thing. Doctors told her that it would be decades, if at all, before the symptoms had an impact on her life, and yet she obsessed over it, blowing it out of all proportion, mentioning it at every opportunity and becoming terribly offended when anyone tried to change the subject.

More from this author

Does depression exist?

By Stuart Ritchie

Her diary, which she’d diligently kept for decades, was focused on her never-ending sicknesses. Her daughter’s life, her husband’s death, the birth of her grandchildren: these were side issues, in which she showed little interest — her focus was always on herself, her fragilities, and her visits to the doctor. But her diary entries didn’t display anything like the normal reaction to being ill, which might involve anxiety, stress, or some form of coping mechanism like denial. This was glee: Naylor’s mother delighted in every potential disease she might have caught and symptom she might be showing, regularly researching conditions to find out more of the grisly details.

There is no known treatment for Munchausen’s. It presents all sorts of challenging questions — for instance, whether doctors should confront a patient about their fake illnesses, or whether that would make things worse. Since symptoms vary so much, medical researchers have to rely on small amounts of case experience — doctors describing their experiences with individual patients — rather than any larger-scale samples.

Those case studies often make for grim reading. For instance, one report from 2019 describes a man in his 20s who went from hospital to hospital across the whole of Italy — and sometimes abroad — complaining of a wide variety of symptoms and pains that required investigation. He had a total of 41 known hospitalisations in a four-year period, and managed to convince enough doctors to perform invasive surgical tests that his torso was covered in scars. He was taking a variety of drugs, including testosterone — which was necessary since he’d had both of his testicles removed in one of his numerous unnecessary operations. When asked by aghast doctors the reasons behind this “mutilating operation”, he could only give a vague, noncommittal reply.

As the Italian doctors pointed out, patients like this aren’t delusional per se; nor are they delirious, suffering from some kind of altered state of consciousness — they’re not mistaken about the illnesses they claim to have. And they aren’t “malingering”, which is when people fake illnesses for a specific reason, like avoiding military service or gaining benefits. Neither are they hypochondriacs — neurotics who worry too much about their health (indeed, like Naylor’s mother, they often get great pleasure from the idea that they’re sick). Instead, they have a compulsion that’s more difficult to pin down — an irrational, uncontrollable desire to have more consultations with medical professionals, more hospital visits, and above all more attention.

Suggested reading

Mental health is a lucrative business

By Julie Burchill

In 2016, two psychiatry researchers collected together all the published case studies of adults with factitious disorder. They tried to draw out some broad patterns from the 455 cases they found. The first thing they noted was that 66% of patients were female — strange, since a previous edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatry’s Bible, claimed on the basis of no stated evidence that the disorder was more common in men.

The second interesting observation was that the factitious patients often claimed to have previously worked in healthcare — as a lab assistant in a hospital, say. This makes sense: people who are obsessed with illness might gravitate to jobs where they can observe and research it closely.

But just putting together case reports only gets you so far (even though other case reviews find a similar pattern of results). All the numbers the researchers could provide are subject to huge margins of error — and might be tainted by bias. For instance, cases that are particularly outrageous or extreme are more likely to be written up as case reports and sent to journals, so we might get a skewed image of what the average patient with the disorder looks like. This is, ironically, a kind of scientific Munchausen’s-by-proxy, where doctors hype up the illnesses of their patients, or at least focus on the most shocking ones, to gain attention for themselves.

A suite of studies — again, mainly case reports — now exists on “Munchausen by Internet”, where someone with factitious disorder uses the internet to build a fake persona as a sick person — as well as sockpuppet accounts for fake relatives or friends to buttress their story. They might infiltrate support groups for an illness, or build a social media following, basking in the sympathy they receive from well-meaning commenters and supporters (“you are so brave — keep fighting!”).

More from this author

Never trust a scientist

By Stuart Ritchie

Whether this is a specific new disorder is arguable: it sounds more like a mutation of the old problem. But — and I won’t provide any links, for obvious reasons — there is definitely a new genre of social media account which the owner uses to provide regular updates on what’s often a long list of medical conditions. They post photos of medical equipment such as feeding tubes, and seem to be take a suspicious amount of pleasure in the trials and tribulations of having a long-term medical condition.

Just to be completely clear, I’m not arguing that disability advocates who discuss their conditions and raise awareness on social media are suffering from Munchausen’s. But clearly, in some cases, the internet can become a crucial crutch for a minority who have a tendency to exaggerate (or even fake) symptoms. Indeed, thinking of the often-perverse dynamics of who gets attention on social media, one could hardly imagine this not being the case.

The paradoxical thing about factitious disorder is that although it involves faking and overstating illnesses — and causes immense frustration and distress for family members and doctors who have to deal with it — it is itself a serious medical condition. Many sufferers start to deliberately harm themselves, out of desire for sympathy and medical attention. They might deliberately give themselves cuts and bruises — a relatively easy way to fake an injury. Reports abound of patients rubbing dirt or faeces into their open wounds in an attempt to aggravate them. And the Italian Munchausen’s sufferer who’d been mysteriously castrated actually died, suddenly, during one of his many hospital visits, of acute heart failure. All operations and medical procedures come with risks, and when you subject yourself to dozens of them, those risks begin to multiply.

And in the case of Helen Naylor’s mother, increasingly frantic attempts to fake illness — starving herself and refusing to leave her bed for any reason — eventually turned into the real thing. She was admitted to a nursing home in her 60s, with the frailties of someone far older, and died before her 70th birthday. Chest and mouth infections seem to have been the final straw that led to her death. And just like the doctors and researchers who have studied this disorder — so well-known in culture but so poorly understood by science — her daughter was left not with closure, or explanations, or even relief. There was nothing but sheer bewilderment.

You can even be treated for it. You can get specialist treatment at a dedicated NHS clinic. South Korea has gaming “rehab centres”. Gaming addicts have “lost interest in their own lives” and “​​do not feel the passing of time in the real world”, according to a doctor who treats the condition there.

But it is far from clear that “gaming disorder” or gaming addiction exists, at least as a well-defined condition separate from any other compulsive behaviour; and there is a hint that the WHO has made the decision under political pressure from China and other countries. 

The WHO says that its decision was based on “reviews of available evidence and reflects a consensus of experts from different disciplines”. But when you look at WHO-commissioned evidence, the studies are completely wild. This review of the literature carried out on behalf of the WHO found that “the prevalence of IGD ranged from 0.21-57.5% in general populations”. This one was rather less crazy, but the studies it was aggregating found that between 0.16% and 14% of people had the disease. Another found 0.7% to 25%.

For comparison, about 8% of people who take opioids in the US end up addicted. So video games might, if we take those numbers at face value, be several times as addictive as opioid painkillers, which seems… unexpected. Or, equally, it could barely exist at all.

More from this author

There is no spiking epidemic

By Tom Chivers

“The problem,” says Dr Pete Etchells, a psychologist at Bath Spa University and author of Lost in a Good Game, “is that depending on your definition, your understanding of who has or doesn’t have this disease varies wildly in the literature”. That is because, he says, “we don’t know what it looks like, we don’t know what it is, and we don’t know what its unique features are that separate it from other behavioural or impulse disorders”.

Obviously, some people have problems with playing video games too much. You will have read stories about South Korean teenagers wetting themselves rather than getting up from their gaming chair, or people developing blood clots. But rare anecdotes don’t tell us much about the wider problem, and people can develop problematic relationships with almost every form of enjoyable human activity — with exercise, with sex, with tanning.

The question is whether there is something unique to gaming which causes these problems. Dr Andy Przybylski, a psychologist at the Oxford Internet Institute, has worked on gaming addiction in the past, and argues that — as far as we know — there isn’t. He carried out a study in 2017, which looked at people who were classified as “addicted” to gaming at one time, and checked whether they still were six months later. If gaming “addiction” was comparable to, say, tobacco, gambling, or alcohol addiction, then you’d expect that most people would be. 

But as it turned out, of the 6,000 people recruited, none of them met the diagnostic criteria for gaming disorder at both the beginning and the end of the study. That is, no one stayed “addicted” for six months. Dr Netta Weinstein, another author of the study, told me at the time that it’s “a question of whether a diagnosis is stable”, and it suggests that internet gaming probably isn’t an addiction like smoking or alcohol.

Przybylski, then, was surprised to see that the WHO decided to classify IGD as a separate illness, and has been asking the WHO whether or not they have any more evidence. Recently he received an email which said: “It is challenging, if not impossible, to document and communicate through WHO channels the rationale and justification for each decision.” 

But obviously you can prove, or at least provide strong and convincing evidence for, the existence of most illnesses, and the WHO could very straightforwardly point to that evidence. There’s a reason why Covid denialists are considered crackpots and cranks: because it’s pretty straightforward to develop diagnostic tests which show you the presence of a virus, and you can tell that the presence of that virus correlates strongly with a particular set of negative health outcomes.

More from this author

The great climate change fallacy

By Tom Chivers

With psychiatric conditions, of course, the picture is often messier. You can’t swab someone and see if they have depression; you can only ask them a series of questions, or observe their behaviour. But there are established criteria by which to do so, and when you test someone with one twice, a week apart, they usually give the same answer.

But with gaming disorder, as we’ve seen, that doesn’t seem to be the case. So the WHO creating a new diagnostic category is a big deal. It gives clinicians licence to treat the disorder, and — perhaps more importantly — it tells people, and parents, that gaming disorder is a real thing. “It’s a very emotive topic,” says Etchells. “If you say suddenly that games can be addictive, so many people play them that that can be a really scary thing. We already know that parents are scared and concerned. Throwing it out there without any explanation or caveating, I feel it’s quite irresponsible.” He worries that the WHO decision will pathologise normal, healthy behaviour, like playing video games after work to destress.

The question, then, is why has the WHO done it? They didn’t need to; the American Psychiatric Association hasn’t yet added it to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists hasn’t formally recognised it. 

One possible answer is that the WHO has been pressured into doing it. Professor Geoffrey Reed, a medical psychologist at Columbia University and senior project officer for the WHO’s ICD-11, told another psychologist by email in 2016 that the WHO was “under enormous pressure, especially from Asian countries” to include IGD.

(I’ve asked both Professor Reed and the WHO about this; the WHO has declined to comment at short notice, and if Prof Reed gets back to me, I’ll include any response here.)

There has been huge concern about video gaming in several east Asian countries. In Japan and South Korea, there have been years of worries about the “hikikomori”, young adults who shut themselves off from society, living in their parents’ homes, never leaving, eating delivery food, watching Netflix, browsing the internet and playing games. The phenomenon has also been widely reported in China, Hong Kong and Singapore. These countries are huge consumers and producers of video games, and notably of spectator e-sports, and people have been quick to blame video games for the condition.

And this has led to a widespread reaction which looks suspiciously like a moral panic. South Korea banned under-16s from playing internet games between the hours of midnight and 6am in 2011 to improve children’s sleep, a decision that was only overturned in August. Etchells says that research showed the ban was counterproductive — it increased children’s time on the internet and “had no meaningful effect on increasing sleep”. China recently enacted an even more stringent law, banning under-18s from using internet games between 10pm and 8am. 

Societies are entitled to ban anything they want, of course. But the concern is that they’re hiding behind science to do it. “It’s an extreme example of people pathologising things they find distasteful,” says Dr Stuart Ritchie, a psychologist at King’s College London. “Some people find video games distasteful — they don’t like the idea of kids shooting at each other. But you have to ask what the quality of the evidence is.” Przybylski agrees: “If people want to create rules, they should create rules. But if you’re saying it’s based on evidence or science, you should show your notes.”

Suggested reading

Does Grand Theft Auto save lives?

By Stuart Ritchie

“We’re talking about very complex generational issues, and trying to explain them by looking at one simple factor, and that’s never the case,” says Etchells. If there was a simple causal link, he points out, given the billions of users, you’d expect to see enormous effects, not weird ambiguous trends in messy data.

The trouble is, as Przybylski says, that mental health provision is poorly resourced and expensive. If a teenager is diagnosed with a mental health condition in the UK, he says, “they can age out of being a teenager before you’re seen by a psychiatrist”. Video game addiction, on the other hand, is shiny and exciting, and it sounds cheap, because it seems like there’s an off switch — just turn off the console!

But it comes at a cost. For one thing, even if hikikomori is a real problem in China and other countries, and even if a causal link can be shown to video games, it makes no sense to create a global diagnosis for a highly region-specific problem. For another, it frightens gamers and their parents, perhaps unnecessarily, and gives cover to any old quack or charlatan who wants to promise to treat “gaming addiction” at their expensive clinic, despite there being no clear diagnostic criteria and no agreed treatment.

Most of all, though, there’s a reputational risk for the WHO. “It’s putting its credibility on the line,” says Przybylski. It’s supposed to be a neutral scientific body: it cannot be seen to be making scientific decisions for political reasons. For the last two years, it’s faced criticism of cosying up to China over Covid – praising the Chinese government for transparency and for “setting a new standard for outbreak response” even as it censured doctors for trying to spread the word about the disease. If it transpires that the WHO has put gaming disorder into the ICD-11 as a result of political pressure, whether from China or elsewhere, its credibility will be even more undermined.

The academic community and the WHO have “really dropped the ball” on gaming disorder, says Etchells, rather than being brave enough to stop, take stock, and work out whether it really exists at all as a coherent concept. “I can see how it’s difficult for the WHO to go against these strong opinions, but they need to,” he says. “They can’t come up with disease classifications built on politics.”

I wonder what Lumet would make of studios greenlighting entire movies to “state the reasons”. Largely thanks to Emma Stone’s spiky charm, the 101 Dalmatians prequel Cruella made $233m on its release in May. If Hollywood can rehabilitate a puppy-skinner who is basically called Cruel Devil, then all bets are off. Following prequels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ratched) and The Sopranos (The Many Saints of Newark), get ready for the origin stories of Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and Gru from Despicable Me. The ubiquitous Timothée Chalamet is currently shooting the Roald Dahl prequel Wonka. Now that Netflix has acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company, the only obstacle to a Young BFG movie is that he would sound too much like a rapper.

Blame, in part, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which bucked William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” maxim by building a series of interconnected movies into Hollywood’s dream scenario: a safe bet. Constructing a universe around beloved IP is the business model of our times, besides which inventing characters and worlds from scratch looks like a terrible bother. But the MCU has six decades of comic-book mythology to work with and, because it had a plan from day one, relentless forward momentum. Most IP-juicing requires starting with well-known movies and working sideways or, increasingly, backwards.

For the Star Wars empire, whose first three prequels notoriously depleted global supplies of exposition, that means Solo and Rogue One, both set prior to the Star Wars movies that people fell in love with. For The Wizard of Oz, the blockbuster musical Wicked asks how those witches ended up so mean. Meanwhile in the world of superheroes, Joker reaped 11 Oscar nominations by presenting Gotham City’s murderous chaos agent as the product of bullying, insufficient mental health care, urban decay and toxic showbiz. Not so judgemental now, Batman.

More from this author

Why Wes Anderson loves the New Yorker

By Dorian Lynskey

Some of these are successful entertainments but, nonetheless, ones that nobody asked for. I doubt that any child has ever watched the Wicked Witch of the West and thought, “Huh, what’s her story?” Most of these stories were originally written before the rise of pop psychology, when it was OK for a character to be wicked or bizarre without inviting an investigation into nature, nurture and the long-term consequences of trauma.

It’s not that there are no successful attempts to mine a character’s past for information that might decode their behaviour. Citizen Kane’s Rosebud or Vito Corleone’s salad days in The Godfather Part II are gold-plated arguments for the value of an artful backstory. But screenwriters are obsessed with providing damp-squib answers to questions that nobody was asking. I enjoy reading interviews with the people behind prequels as they try to justify the exercise without admitting that the only important question these movies are answering is “How can we squeeze more money out of this IP?” Ever wondered how Han Solo got his name? Me neither. Turns out he was alone a lot. Cool.

Television has its own version of rubber-ducky syndrome, now that flashbacks are de rigueur and grief has replaced alcoholism as a short cut to depth of character. Baptiste was already the most depressing cop show on TV — Camus of the Yard — before they killed off Baptiste’s daughter and his hallucinations of a stuffed toy elephant turned tragedy into accidental comedy. Another recent BBC procedural, Vigil, was grippingly assured in the present-day scenes but drifted off course in the flashbacks. It was as if writer Tom Edge didn’t trust us to believe that a woman would feel uncomfortable investigating a murder on a submarine (pretty stressful!) unless she had previously experienced her own watery calamity. Watching these shows back-to-back with Mare of Easttown, I began to wonder if a shocking bereavement was a requirement of the job. It feels a little crass to milk grief so frequently, and unnecessary, too.

More from this author

We're all playing Squid Game

By Dorian Lynskey

How much do we need to know about a TV detective to be invested in a whodunnit? Columbo had an indelibly eccentric personality (mostly improvised by Peter Falk) but no stated first name and no private life except for a wife we never saw (unless you happen to have watched the flop 1979 spin-off Mrs Columbo). Columbo was what he did, and that was enough.

What Lumet and Chayefsky were really getting at with their rubber-ducky quip was the pretence that explaining everything is akin to psychological veracity. We are all shaped by our experiences, good and bad, but rarely in a clear or simple way. Psychotherapists don’t identify one essential turning point in a client’s life (“Hmm, Dalmatians, you say?”) and then close the case. Sometimes, one can know every factor and still encounter a terrifying, unilluminable void at the heart of a personality. In real life, not everybody who does appalling things is misunderstood.

There is, of course, a humane liberal impulse to understand how circumstances can corrupt an individual; how the abused can become the abuser. It is the job of psychologists and the criminal justice system to get beyond the idea that certain people are irredeemably sinful, and the task of historians to fathom how seemingly ordinary people could become complicit in atrocities. Authors such as Gitta Sereny (who wrote about the Nazis Albert Speer and Franz Stangl and the 10-year-old child-killer Mary Bell) and Gordon Burn (who chronicled the serial killers Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West) dedicated their lives to interrogating the problem of human evil.

Disney and Warner Brothers, needless to say, are not engaged in that painful work but in the trivialising of trauma to give profit-seeking entertainment a veneer of psychological curiosity. It is both morally dubious and narratively absurd. In storytelling, villainy often has a theatrical boo-hiss quality that requires no elucidation.

More from this author

The dark origins of the Sopranos

By Dorian Lynskey

Why is Cruella a canicidal fashionista? Because otherwise Dodie Smith’s story would have been just a bunch of dogs running about. Why is the Joker a cackling killer? Because the joylessly uptight Batman needed an antithesis. In Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, a pompous psychologist appears on a talk show with the Joker to argue that he is not so much evil as horribly mistreated. The Joker promptly kills him, and everybody else in the room, with glee.

It’s true that Miller was a law-and-order conservative who enjoyed poking fun at bleeding-heart liberals but, like Christopher Nolan, he also knew that the Joker is compelling because he is beyond understanding. Ridley Scott squandered a great deal of time and money on making two prequels to his own Alien, even though the unknowable menace of the creature was what made the 1979 movie such a taut shocker. More often than not, additional information makes antagonists less intriguing.

As one of the showrunners of Lost, Damon Lindelof was as responsible as anybody for the backstory epidemic, creating a time-hopping narrative tangle that concluded with a crushing disappointment. He was then a co-conspirator on the Alien prequel Prometheus. On his next show, The Leftovers, he learned his lesson and leaned into his characters’ reactions to the mysterious disappearance of 2% of humanity rather than the reasons for the event. Trauma was the cake rather than the icing, and therefore taken seriously. In becoming so comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, Lindelof made one of the finest shows of the decade. The theme tune of the second series summed up the ethos of the whole show and the reason behind its success. It was a song by country singer Iris DeMent: Let the Mystery Be.

But this year’s winners would do well to consider what happened to many Nobellists after they accepted their prize. Take Kary Mullis, who won his Nobel as the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR (a fundamental technique that’s now used not just in Covid tests but in essentially all laboratory genetics research): he spent the last part of his life strenuously denying that the HIV virus causes AIDS. Or Luc Montagnier, who won his Nobel for discovering that very HIV virus — and went on to publish research on what amounts to homeopathy.

More recently, Michael Levitt won the Nobel in 2013 for important computer-modelling work relating to protein structure (his Twitter name “@MLevitt_NP2013”, NP for “Nobel Prize”, helps you see just what a big part of his identity the award is). Throughout the Covid pandemic, he has been drastically wrong in his rosy predictions — and sometimes conspiratorial-sounding theories — about the spread of the disease. In July 2020, for instance, he stated that Covid in the US will be “done in 4 weeks”.

All these brilliant scientists lost their grip on reality after they won their Nobel (and there are many other examples; there’s even a name for the phenomenon: Nobel Disease). But at least, in all those cases, the Nobel itself was awarded for a genuine scientific breakthrough. There’s one case where the prize was given, and has never been rescinded, for a disastrously misconceived “discovery” — one that went on to blight thousands of lives.

More from this author

Never trust a scientist

By Stuart Ritchie

In 1949 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the inventor of a disturbing procedure — an attempt to treat mental illness — where a surgeon either injected pure ethanol directly into the brain to kill a clump of neurons, or used a special instrument with a sharp wire to slice away the connections between parts of the brain’s frontal lobe. Oh, and before they did so, they had to first punch or drill a hole through the skull — usually somewhere near the eye.

The frontal lobotomy (or sometimes “leucotomy”) wasn’t the first ever attempt at “psychosurgery” — the treatment of mental disorders by operating on the brain. But its invention is most strongly associated with the Portuguese doctor, politician and general polymath Egas Moniz. Inspired at least in part by previous research on chimpanzees, who became notably less aggressive and more docile after their frontal lobes were chopped out, in 1937 Moniz reported a case series of 20 patients suffering from conditions like anxiety, depression and schizophrenia whom he’d had lobotomised.

According to Moniz, his “very audacious” and “always safe” procedure — which he couldn’t perform personally due to crippling gout in his hands — worked wonders: the patients were more placid, more rational — and easier to control. He declared some of them “cured”.

But was this evidence any good? As the psychologist Ann Jane Tierney put it on the 50th Anniversary of Moniz’s Nobel Prize:

“A contemporary scientist can find considerable fault in Moniz’s work, including the inadequate follow-up times, absence of control groups, and the superficial and subjective evaluations of patients performed by individuals least likely to be objective.”

That is, even setting aside the upsetting nature of the procedure — and we should set aside our “yuck” reactions, since there are many horrific-sounding medical procedures that are genuinely helpful — the evidence that Moniz put together to support the use of lobotomies was hopelessly unscientific and biased in favour of his desired conclusion that the technique was useful.

Suggested reading

The empty promise of pop psychology

By Sarah Ditum

And yet the Nobel committee, some years later, decided to give him the award. By this time, the lobotomy had skyrocketed in popularity and was being used across the world. The best-known proponent was the US neurologist Walter Freeman, an almost unreal character who seems straight from a medical-themed horror movie. Across several decades he performed thousands of lobotomies for an ever-widening list of complaints — not just psychiatric conditions, but also things like “being a badly-behaved child” — and did so theatrically, in front of an audience, often making the initial hole in the skull using an ice pick.

But, also by the time the Nobel was awarded, the horrific downsides of lobotomy were well-known: the fact that there was no evidence of any long-term benefits in the majority of patients was a quibble in comparison to the most obvious problem: the lobotomised were often changed entirely. Many emerged from the operation with altered personalities or slower-running brains; others lost physical abilities. Still others died immediately due to bleeds on the brain (Freeman claimed a 3.6% fatality rate but other sources suggest it was far higher). Most infamously, John F. Kennedy’s sister Rosemary, who had a learning disability, was lobotomised by Freeman and a colleague in 1941. The procedure, aimed at alleviating her seizures and aggression, was a disaster; it left her, permanently, with the mental capacity, independence, and continence of a small child. The story was hushed up, and Rosemary was kept in a psychiatric hospital and then a special school, far from prying eyes, until she died in 2005.

Even if he never intended for lobotomy to be used so terribly haphazardly, it does seem unlikely that Moniz deserved the world’s most prestigious scientific prize for inventing the technique. But there he is, on the official Nobel website among the other winners. We’re left with questions reminiscent of the ones being asked about statues of less-than-ideal historical figures: should we keep this reminder of a past that had very different values from our own? Should we somehow contextualise it? Or should we get rid of it altogether? Should we — more than 70 years after it was awarded — remove Moniz’s Nobel Prize?

Suggested reading

The disturbing history of statue-smashing

By Sean Thomas

It has been suggested before. There are still people alive today who were lobotomised early in life, often with tragic consequences, and it might be seen as a measure of justice for them and their families to remove the Nobel committee’s endorsement. It’s not unheard of in science: some journals have begun to remove or flag research papers, even very old ones, from scientists who are under serious suspicion of misconduct.

But Moniz’s research — while slapdash, especially by today’s standards — wasn’t deliberately fraudulent, at least as far as we know. If we were to go back and wipe out the historical science that now seems poor-quality to us, we’d have to disown huge swathes of the literature, and rescind any number of prizes awarded over the years. On top of that, context reveals that Moniz might technically have won the prize for lobotomies, but it’s at least plausible that the committee actually wanted to give it to him some years previously, for his work on cerebral angiography (a pre-computer technique, still used to this day, that allows doctors to X-ray the blood vessels in the brain).

Besides, it’s worth asking: what’s the point of rescinding a prize given to a long-dead scientist for a treatment that’s almost extinct? Everyone now knows how terrible a mistake the craze for lobotomies was; psychosurgery in general — almost entirely replaced by drug treatments during the latter half of the 20th Century — is nowadays vanishingly rare. Formally condemning it isn’t going to practically help any of its victims.

More from this author

You're more biased than you think

By Stuart Ritchie

Perhaps the least the Nobel organisation could do is provide better context about Moniz’s award. At the moment, his page on their site notes, with some understatement, that the operation “could lead to serious personality changes”. The only other discussion I could find about him on their website is a bizarre essay from a psychiatrist in 1998 who defended Moniz in no uncertain terms:

“I see no reason for indignation at what was done in the 1940s as at that time there were no other alternatives!”

His phrasing isn’t exactly sensitive (the exclamation mark is in the original), but does he have a point? Lobotomy came before reliable psychiatric drugs or other treatments were developed; not all doctors who used it were as flamboyant or clumsy as Freeman. It’s among the worst dead ends in medical history, but shouldn’t we expect missteps and mistakes in our march towards scientific progress?

Maybe the real moral of the story — as well as those of all the Nobellists, who went off the rails — about the pitfalls of honouring scientists. The Nobel Prizes have been criticised as “absurd” in a world of collaborative, cumulative science that relies less and less on individuals. And maybe we shouldn’t expect there to be enough Earth-shattering discoveries for major awards to be given every single year.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t honour our best and most creative researchers; we just shouldn’t turn them into heroes with opinions that are somehow above criticism (a bit more criticism of our top scientists would’ve helped in the early stages of the pandemic, to give one obvious example). Perhaps having Moniz listed among the Nobellists is the greatest reminder possible that even the best scientists don’t comprise a pantheon of divine beings: they’re just humans, and some humans make terrible mistakes. Winning a Nobel doesn’t make someone infallible. It doesn’t even make their prize-winning discovery particularly “true”. The only thing that can do that — the only thing a scientist should really care about — is the evidence.

The loss caused friction among his relations, but at least it fitted the family history. In 1947, Eugene’s dad had won big on the lottery. However, in August of that month, the Romanian government, with no prior announcement, replaced the currency. 20,000 old lei were suddenly worth a single new leu. A low limit was imposed on the amount it was possible to exchange. The name of this policy was the Great Stabilisation. It made Eugene’s dad the owner of an enormous pile of worthless banknotes.

Luck attends our sense of most events of consequence. The stories of whole families might be told through it. Only matters of complete indifference seem untouched. And yet, it’s very easy to argue it out of existence. Luck might best be seen as a fiction we inhabit because we don’t like the idea that many events in the universe are random. We’re attached to the idea of our own agency and merit. We also love patterns — an instinct of immense evolutionary value that leads us to see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or believe that if a roulette ball has landed on red ten times in a row, it’s more likely to hit black on the eleventh.

This is the ground of What are the Chances, a new book by the psychology and neuroscience professor Barbara Blatchley. One of Blatchley’s most persuasive arguments is that we are pretty loose and inconsistent with the language we use when we evoke the idea of luck. We confuse fate (which implies a universe in which invisible forces have determined everything in advance) with destiny (a concept with more room for human agency) and chance (which is beyond the control of gods or humans). But in our daily lives, none of this seems to matter much, because such thinking is usually the means to an end: “We look for the cause behind even the most mundane of events,” writes Blatchley, “because feeling as though we know why something happened helps us feel in control of that thing and, by extension, of the universe itself.”

More from this author

Could you spot a conspiracy theorist?

By Matthew Sweet

To see this in action, watch a quiz show. On an edition of Pointless a couple of weeks ago, a financial consultant called Helen knocked herself out of the quiz by declaring that Kat Slater in EastEnders was played by an actor called Jessie Williams. The totemic scoreboard gave its dreaded red negative twitch. “Very, very unlucky,” sighed Richard Osman, as he revealed that the correct answer was in fact Jessie Wallace.

But unless she had fallen under the influence of some invisible force that erases soap facts from the heads of random victims, Helen had not been unlucky. She had simply been wrong. Her knowledge of Queen Vic landladies was inadequate to the demands of the game. Should Osman have put it in these terms? Absolutely not. It would have been fatal to the pleasures of his own show. A game of skill that has no language of luck is no game at all.

It’s also harder to win. The former cricketer Ed Smith, who wrote Luck: What It Means and Why It Matters (2012), was once part of a team that decided it would abolish such consoling words and stop ascribing human fault to the imagined influence of cosmic forces. It took six weeks at the bottom of the results table to reverse the policy. Sometimes magical thinking gets magical results.

But what about games with higher stakes than Pointless, or Kent vs Middlesex? An attractively round 50 years ago, the philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice (1971), one of the few works of political philosophy to be adapted as a stage musical. The lottery was an important metaphor for Rawls. For him, life issued us with two tickets at birth. One for the natural lottery, in which the prize is a biological potential inherited from our parents. One for the social lottery, in which winners emerge from the womb into highly favourable material, social and political circumstances. Like all true examples of luck, these advantages have no dimension of desert or merit. Luck is unearned.

We can all think of figures in public life — dynastic columnists, aristocratic models, the progeny of 60s rock stars who clutter up ES Magazine — who owe at least part of their success to early receipt of a Rawlsian Thunderball. And in experimental situations, as in life, recipients of this good fortune do not always perceive their privilege. A famous study at Stanford University set up games of Monopoly in which one player took a double salary and rolled with two dice instead of one: winners failed to acknowledge their unfair advantage and reported that they had triumphed through merit.

I don’t much like Monopoly, but I do play the National Lottery. Since Covid came, I’ve bought tickets more frequently. I always let the app choose the numbers, because the pure aleatory nature of the process seems both the point and the pleasure. I’d never dream of gambling in anything where knowledge, skill or judgement plays a part. (If, like Sid James and Hattie Jacques in Carry On at Your Convenience, I owned an occult budgie that tweeted on hearing the winner of the 2.30 at Newmarket, I’d consider the bet a fraud on the bookie.)

Suggested reading

Americans are doomed to fail

By Justin Webb

The National Lottery is sometimes called a tax on stupidity — mainly by people who regard themselves as clever, many of whom wrongly attribute the thought to Voltaire. The seventeenth-century economist William Petty is a better source. In his 1662 Treatise of Taxes and Contributions he wrote that “a Lottery … is properly a Tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools.” (Thank you, QI elves.) But there are more accurate and less snobbish ways of describing its community of players.

A 2009 study by the ecumenical Christian think-tank Theos found that employed professionals spent around £40 a year on the lottery, £30 a year less than manual workers. Benefit claimants were the most prodigious buyers of scratch cards, and the lowest earners — those on £15k–20k per year — were laying out almost a week’s earnings on tickets for the main draw. Theos hasn’t updated these findings, but suspects, as scratch card sales have climbed and draw tickets fallen, that the Lottery now “leans ever more on sales to lower income players”. Camelot has produced no data to contradict this.

If the lottery is a tax, it is a tax on poverty. Those who pay it do not do so because they lack knowledge or are guilty of some kind of cognitive error. A person spending £1.50 of their £86 Universal Credit on a ticket knows what proportion of their income this represents. That money, however, purchases something powerful. Participation in a game that makes Rawls’s lotteries irrelevant. If, to choose a not particularly random example, David Cameron buys a ticket for the Set for Life draw, he is no more likely to win than anyone else.

More from this author

Was the British Empire a curse?

By Matthew Sweet

The machine that reduces an ordered stack of National Lottery balls to a random field of tumbling atoms is called Excalibur. This is one of Barbara Blatchley’s conceptual confusions. Excalibur, as any viewer Monty Python and the Holy Grail will know, is a sword of fate or destiny, not chance. The film’s group of soil-eating anarcho-syndicalists would see the contradiction. When one (played by Michael Palin) tells Graham Chapman’s King Arthur that “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government,” he is objecting to two things: a society in which outcomes are predetermined by supernatural forces, and one in which wealth and power are largely inherited. There would be less inequality in a world where mud-eaters were as likely to receive a magical sword as a royal figure who has an ancestral supply of ham and jam and Spam. (You might remember that this conversation ends with Graham Chapman attempting to beat Michael Palin to the ground.)

Most attempts to reduce economic inequality accept the results of Rawls’s social lottery and then try to ameliorate their effects. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever suggested working towards the same end by harnessing the power of chance. A massive increase in inheritance tax, for instance, which could be funnelled into the National Lottery, distributing unearned wealth randomly through the population. Having lost — again — on my most recent ticket, I’d be happy to consider it. We could call it the Great Stabilisation.