small thoughts from the chair about big things outside the room
And if you tolerate this then your children will be next The Manic Street Preacher’s lyric unbidden, strikes its melancholy tone in my mind. The song is a rock music lament about fascism. They penned it 30 odd years ago. It alludes to events another 60 odd years before that....
Featured / Socio-cultural Comment
by Shrink · Published 20 September 2025 · Last modified 2 October 2025
The strength of emotion that welled in my chest as I watched the New Zealand rugby team perform the Ka Mate haka before their test match against the South African team surprised me this morning. The haka is a Māori spiritual practice. It aligns wairua (spirit) and mauri (life force)...
Photography / Socio-cultural Comment
by Shrink · Published 21 November 2024 · Last modified 2 October 2025
A question has popped into my mind many times over recent years – “Where in god’s name are the artists?” Here’s two examples of what The Guardian proffered as an answer in recent weeks and it very much looks to me that the answer is that they have, just as...
Op-eds tritely observe that these are turbulent times. I have come to think of this escalating turbulence and volatility, the rushing winds of climate change, the bluster and simpering of politicians between whose polarised opposites the surging eddies of mob thought rush, as the mighty wind of Vishnu inhaling. As...
I believe that feminism has failed in its revolutionary promise. Perhaps naively I assumed that feminism’s project was to reprioritised in our culture’s value system in such a way that the qualities archetypally associated with the Feminine might be valued and privileged as much as qualities archetypally associated with the...
“Words were originally magic” said Freud in his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Words like “evil” and “devil” are becoming commonplace in political rhetoric around the middle east. Biden called the Hamas attack “evil unleashed”. Hezbollah and Hamas routinely refer to Israelis as devils and News24 headlines that Israel has said...
I have been reflecting that I need to be careful how much I discourage children. By children I mean the generation of late teenagers and early adults who are coming of age this very confusing time. I transitioned from adolescence into early adulthood in the late 1980s and early 1990s....
I have spent the afternoon lying in bed with swine flu watching King Arthur: Legend of the sword from 2017 and comparing the film’s mythopoetic depiction of psychic maturation with the psychology advocated by managed health and PMB forms. Also thinking that we could do worse than picking the next...
I visited the shopping mall at Cavendish square for the first time in a long while today to get a UPS system for my home internet connection. The man in the computer shop said he had just the thing for me, a three power source solution for the router, the...
A young male client that I have been seeing for some time passed his cell phone across the room so that I could have a look at a photograph posted by a female acquaintance on Instagram. As he leant across the room, he told me it was inappropriate for a man...
Psychologists are usually sensibly clothed. Some are more stylish than others but their haberdashery is reliably demure with only occasional splashes of sartorial libido spilling over into brightly coloured socks, an eccentric waistcoat or outlandish hat. On this site, the doors of the perceptual wardrobe are thrown wide open and the shrunken bits are allowed to hang out.