Susie Orbach

Psychoanalysis and psychological theories of development see the capacity to hold complexity in mind - which is to say when thinking is not arranged in banishing binaries - as a hallmark of psychological selfhood.

This is not to say that right and wrong and not useful categories but they are not uniformly useful categories. They pertain to certain situations, ethics, morality, and so on, but in the realms of emotions, and often politics, over-simplification is a detriment. It diminishes our capacity to hear another. It dilutes the richness of our inner life and opinions. It weakens our resilience and it flattens public discourse.

Therapy takes so very long because the structures of mind we develop in infancy, childhood, and adolescence are quasi-material structures. They are who we are and although the human mind and brain have great plasticity, desired change can be very difficult. Psychoanalytic therapy, with its emphasis on looking behind our defence structures to the beliefs and feelings that can appear dangerous and unknown, involves the therapist serving as an external anchor (hence the caricature of being overly dependent on the analyst) while the work of deconstructing and reconstructing follows. In therapy you don't just learn a new language to add to your repertoire, you relinquish unhelpful parts of the mother tongue and weave them together with the knowledge of a new grammar. The curiosity a therapist has towards the analysand's structures designate us as anthropologists of the mind. Each individual mind embodies complex understandings of social relationships - the interplay between self - what is allowed and what is sequestered and what to do with what isn't allowed. To know an individual is to know some of their time in history, in place, in class, gender, class, race, and society and family constellation they have emerged from. An individual is the outcome of her engagement with others from birth (and some would argue, the womb) onwards.

But I haven't answered the question of whether therapy is for everyone. For me the answer is no. Therapy is one vector into that wonderful adventure, an examined life. It is an intimate and delicate route but makes little sense unless one is in psychological trouble. Yes, we can all benefit from becoming emotionally literate, and social programmes which help expectant parents, educators, doctors, nurses, and so on expand their own emotional knowledge are effective ways to enable us to know ourselves, to connect well with other(s) and to be alright in our own skin.

For others, art, literature, bonding through sport, political or spiritual creativity, satisfying enough work and so on, will provide meaning. But it is an arduous struggle in a time of political cruelty which wreaks extreme economic and social division, while despoiling our environment and creating divisions inside of us.