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“... The word​ ‘misogyny’ was rarely used when I was training to be a child psychotherapist in London in the late 1970s, but the question that invariably came up when children were being assessed was: ‘how much’ – or, rather, ‘in what sense’ – was the mother to blame? The question wasn’t explicit; even in those days people were mindful of the significance of political and economic conditions, racism and sexism, and transgenerational histories, and psychoanalysis was against blaming ...”

“... of all he is excluded from: his envy of God, of Christ his son, of the unrebellious angels, and of Adam and Eve in Eden. Hamlet becomes sceptical, while Satan abolishes scepticism. In Book IV of Paradise Lost, he says to his fellow angels:All hope excluded thus, behold, insteadOf us outcast, exil’d, his new delight,Mankind created, and for him this World!So ...”

“... Psychoanalysts after Freud have to acknowledge that the founder of psychoanalysis was never properly trained. He was not psychoanalysed in the conventional sense – that is, by someone else; and there was no one to tell him whether what he was doing with his patients was appropriate. That Freud, paradoxically, was the first ‘wild’ analyst is one of the difficult facts in the history of psychoanalysis ...”

“... The first chapter of Ernest Jones’s misleadingly entitled autobiography, Free Associations, ends with a bemusing paragraph about the Welsh ‘servant who acted also as a nurse’ during Jones’s early childhood: ‘One of my memories of this nurse was that she taught me two words to designate the male organ, one for it in a flaccid state, the other in an erect ...”

“... For anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis, or indeed, in how people start having new kinds of conversation, The Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society are an inexhaustible source of amusement and instruction. From 1906 to 1915, in his role as official secretary to the Society, Freud’s keen and earnest young student, Otto Rank, recorded the first formal psychoanalytic discussions by the first men who thought of themselves as psychoanalysts ...”

“... Passion and scholarship may enhance each other’s effects,’ E.M. Forster noted in his Commonplace Book with A.E. Housman in mind. Forster was always keen to reduce the incompatibles in life: Housman was less persuaded by such redemptive harmonies. He preferred the losing paradoxes to the winning ones: ‘ “Whoever shall save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life shall find it ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously. In 1941, Larkin refers to Thomas coming to the English Club at Oxford: ‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices ...”

“... There is a nasty, perhaps Freudian moment in Ford Madox Ford’s novel Some Do Not, in which, in the middle of a conversation, something occurs to the hero Tietjens: ‘Suddenly he thought that he didn’t know for certain that he was the father of his child, and he groaned.’ Tietjens, Ford continues, ‘proved his reputation for sanity’ by carrying on the conversation he was ostensibly having without reference to his daunting thought ...”

“... It’s never, in any way whatever, by another person’s excesses that one turns out, in appearance at least, to be overwhelmed. It’s always because their excesses happen to coincide with your own. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis Now that the Freud wars are over it seems a good time for a new translation ...”

“... I can swim like the others only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it my ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all. Kafka When H.G. Wells accused Henry James of having sacrificed his life to art James replied, with characteristically artful indignation: ‘I live, live intensely, and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it might be, is in my own kind of expression of that ...”

“... Lacan​ said that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves. Or you could say that, given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves: that is, with a good deal of cruelty and disregard ...”

“... You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable‘From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’ This is one of Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms, written during the war – between 1917 and 1918 – just after he received a diagnosis of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him ...”

“... One walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. T.S. Eliot to Conrad Aiken, 31 December 1914 Writing a London Letter for the Dial in September 1922, T.S. Eliot suggested that there were ‘at present . . . three main types of English novel’. There was the ‘old narrative method’, the traditional tale, represented by H ...”

“... What is the reward for knowing the worst?Donald Barthelme, Snow WhiteWhen Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism ...”

“... a modern approach to the problem. I thought of Sherlock when reading this brief new book by Adam Phillips, which might well be entitled Phillips on Death, and could justly be described as very elegant. Like Sherlock, Phillips thinks something should be done about death. We need ...”