Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it

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In Rosen’s thinking, talking about it, writing about it – it all helps. (Expel the ping-pong ball and regain agency!) Though in some ways his mother’s approach lingers in him. Eddie is buried in Highgate Cemetery, but Rosen doesn’t visit the grave. And he finds it troubling to watch videos of his son. “He did drama in the sixth form,” Rosen says near the end of our conversation, “and he’s in a video of one of the plays he wrote. I’ve never looked at it. I don’t think I can. He was wearing a helmet. It’s in that box.” In another chapter, he recalls a bag of letters written in Polish by two relatives to their teenage son during the Second World War, letters that come to a sudden, horrible end when the ghetto in which they were being written was “liquidated” by the Nazis. Rosen has the letters translated into English; an act of remembrance and a way to regain control of the narrative. “It felt good to do this,” he says. Opinion | Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song shouldn't have won the Booker 26 November, 2023 How They Broke Britain by James O'Brien is full of anger - and not much else 23 November, 2023 Jungle House by Julianne Pachico is an affecting AI mystery 23 November, 2023 Without at least a concept of cure, or conversations about cure, medicine wouldn’t make sense; likewise psychoanalysis, Freud would discover, only made sense with and without a concept of cure. And through psychoanalysis – always only a form of local knowledge – Freud would also discover, of course, the limits of the making of sense, and the competing claims about sense-making. It wasn’t long before psychoanalysts also had to imagine what psychoanalysis would be like without agreed aims, without an agreed concept of cure, of acceptable goals of change. As though psychoanalysis may have opened something up that couldn’t be foreclosed by compelling representations like concepts of cure. Contrarian arguments can be fascinating. This author was briefly mentioned in the New York Times' 2010 year-end “10th Annual Year in Ideas”, which also linked to his article in Foreign Policy from a few months ago: Best. Decade. Ever.: The first 10 years of the 21st century were humanity’s finest — even for the world's bottom billion.

A cure, then, is something we might aim for, if not always achieve. If you have a broken leg, or a fever, you know what is to be aimed for; if you have a broken heart or a sense of shame, it is not quite so clear. To understand psychoanalysis you have to see where the analogies for it do and don’t work. And how it makes you think and talk differently about getting better. Patients come to psychoanalysis with an idea of cure because, historically, they have been to medical doctors, and before that they have been to religious healers. A culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption. When Bion writes of ‘something better’ than cure, he is playing on the idea of cure as getting better, with all its moral implications. The fundamental question being: what is it for any individual to get better (better at what)? Where do we get our ideas about this from, and what can we do with or about them? So much depends upon the available pictures we have about what it is for us to be better than we are, to improve. This is easier to assess in, say, sport or business or medicine than in morality or art or, indeed, psychoanalysis (what is it for the psychoanalyst – or any so-called therapist – to improve, or get better?). Psychoanalysis, that is to say – and this may be both salutary and topical – allows us to have second thoughts about success and self-improvement. In his book Second Thoughts, Bion writes, apropos of psychoanalytic treatment, ‘It is necessary to be aware of “improvement” which may be denial of mystical qualities in the individual.’ Self-improvement can be self-sabotage. Too knowing; too knowing of the future. A distraction, a refuge from one’s personal vision. I’ll give myself a mark, shall I?” he says. “Right, fair enough. No, I think this is quite a good thing to do actually. Like they did at the Beeb. Every now and then you have to do a little…” It was quite a fascinating read with a wealth of experiences on what it takes to get better in one’s life and career. I have truly enjoyed it, and couldn’t agree more about the thoughts in this book. I did at first assume it would be a follow up from this book, documenting more about his recovery from COVID-19, and it is to a point, but it’s also about his life, the difficult things he’s had to go through and what lessons he has learned through them. get better at getting better is a great follow-up to the Catalyst. It is about building the capability, to build a model to be successful. The book talks about the “what to get better” and “how to get better” components which will help us to build a better and effective “Get Better Model (GBM)” to be successful. To excel in today's VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, it is not about how good you are; it is about how powerful and effective a model you have, to improve how good you are. If you have a strong model – then you will be able to multiplicate the model and achieve success in different roles and domains throughout your career. This is my takeaway from the book GBAGB.Michael Rosen has got through lots of crises in his life including the death of his parents, his son, jobs and a close shave with death with Covid. He also had a long-term illness for over a decade without realising it and Jewish relatives who he discovered died in Nazi concentration camps. Their memories he unearthed from the fragments available to him to make sure they were not forgotten. It is an example of how changes always involve tradeoffs. And one of the tradeoffs that women have been making is the option of pursuing careers, choosing to remain single, choosing their mate as opposed to having their marriages arranged of having more meaningful lifestyles that go being a homemaker and mother. This seemed like a partial return to form for Phillips, at least in my reading. I can’t help thinking that the last essay in the collection - on William James’ notion of belief - would have been better if placed in the other, ‘companion’ book, as there seemed a kind of fundamental break between that one and what had come before in this collection. But at least it gave me an opportunity for comparison, and more specifically comparing what I liked about the essays that came before it with what made me suspicious of this last one.

If I could prescribe Getting Better to the entire nation, I would... It's a book that inspires hope, courage and belief in humanity. Basically, it reminds you how to live. I loved every single word' Dr Rachel Clarke No,” he says. “It’s different. Sometimes he’s wearing clothes I’ve forgotten about, so I wake up and go, ‘Oh my God, I remember that shirt!’” It is almost certain that we won’t or can’t get what we want, partly because, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we are largely unconscious, unaware, of what we want, and what we want is, as Freud wrote, in excess of what any object can provide (the exorbitance of desire is his theme). But if much analysis and more psychotherapy – not to mention its theory – is ‘ludicrously omnipotent and optimistic’, it is because the analysts are, consciously or unconsciously, complicit with their patient’s omnipotence and optimism; omniscience and optimism, like omniscience and pessimism, tending, rather, to go together. We may only know that we want to change, but not how we want to change. And yet, it should be noted, Bion broaches, despite his patent misgivings, the idea of ‘something better’ than a cure; thereby inviting us to imagine what might be better than a cure, what might be a better aim for someone going into psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis may be able to provide something better than a cure. It has certainly enabled Bion to think and write of there being something better than a cure. Comedian Cariad Lloyd said of this book that it’s “like having a cup of tea and a chat with Michael himself”, and I’d have to agree. There’s no ego here, no ulterior motive, and he’s not trying to prove anything. It’s just him talking about his own experience and how he might be able to help others, and its just warming, humorous, silly, natural, and above all, honest. Really honest. And we all need that. Knowing is different from embedding. Learning doesn’t end with reading, but by imbibing and integrating the distilled wisdom into your life and thus create inflection points. Take quality time to exploit the learnings.Get better by leveraging others: This is about deliberately leveraging all external resources available to you to get better. Having finished the book, I am still unsure what exactly to think of it. The premise is interesting and gives a different view on the question of development, predominantly in Africa. The general theme is that development in Africa has not failed, quite the contrary. When not taking GDP per capita into account as a tool of measurement, Africa has seen spectacular improvement. The main indicators that Kenny looks at are levels of education (i.e. literacy), healthcare (i.e. life expectancy and child mortality) and social and democratic rights. They talk about the talking cure. Well, there is a sort of doing cure, too.’ The photo of Rosen’s son Eddie, who died unexpectedly in 1999, at the age of just 18. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer It is an increasing theme within journalism, and many journalists are quite upfront about it. They believe that any positive development is not serious journalism but is corporate public relations or government propaganda. The subtitle of the book is 'life lessons on going under, getting over it and getting through it', which reminds me of the refrain in We're going on a Bear Hunt. 'Can't go around it Can't go over it Can't go under it We have to go through it.'