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)...
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...
“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 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...
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.