Latest news with #psychoanalysis
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
My co-worker thinks her single friend should lose weight. Is not caring about looks ‘giving up'?
Hi Ugly, I recently chatted with a middle-aged co-worker about her friend who is unhappy being single and thinks she should lose weight. As Gen X women growing up in the 1980s, our biggest concern was weight and calorie counting to control it (now we can add wrinkles, yellow teeth and odd body hair to the list). When I (flippantly?) suggested encouraging the friend to accept her body as it is, my co-worker said, 'Well she can't just give up!' Giving up – that's another thing we Gen X women have always tried to avoid. Like looking at our moms in sweatpants and no makeup and thinking they weren't trying to be beautiful any more. My question: are there other words to describe acceptance of your looks as they are, at any age, or are we just truly 'giving up'? – Gen Acceptance One reason talk of 'giving up' leaves a bad taste in the mouth, writes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his book On Giving Up, is that it 'is felt to be an ominous foreshadowing of, or reminder of, the ultimate giving up that is suicide, or just the milder version of living a kind of death-in-life'. In other words: your co-worker unconsciously believes that a woman who gives up dieting might as well be dead. Forgive me (and Phillips – and, indirectly, Freud, the father of psychoanalysis) for being dramatic. But I think it's true! Maybe doubly true when it comes to physical beauty, which has long been framed as less ornamental than essential, particularly for women and gender non-conforming people. We often think of beauty as a declaration of self, a means of survival, a signifier of societal worth. It increases our economic and social potential. It opens doors and buys grace; it affords access and attention. To fall short of it, conversely, is to edge toward a kind of cultural erasure. Naturally, when one's appearance is rewarded and/or punished like this, it starts to seem as important as life itself. Or more important. Consider a quote from a 2024 Washington Post story on the renewed popularity of tanning beds, known to heighten users' risk of skin cancer: 'I'd rather die hot than live ugly.' (A rebuttal, if I may.) This conflation of beauty and life comes up quite a few times in your question, albeit in less extreme terms. You categorize weight loss and stray hairs as some of your 'biggest concerns'. You recall worrying about your mother not wearing makeup – which only makes sense if makeup is a symbol of something more. (The will to carry on, maybe?) Your co-worker implies that giving up on thinness must mean giving up on dating, which must mean giving up on love, which, well – why bother going on, then? Sign up to Well Actually Practical advice, expert insights and answers to your questions about how to live a good life after newsletter promotion This is a bit absurd. (The unconscious is nothing if not irrational!) 'The daunting association' of giving up, Phillips writes, 'has stopped us being able to think about the milder, more instructive, more promising givings up,' of which there are many. Like giving up on maintaining beauty standards, for example. The pursuit of an unrealistic, often unhealthy and ever-shifting appearance ideal is something that paradoxically 'anaesthetizes' us to life, as Phillips might say, even as we think of it as offering more life (or more opportunity). Skipping meals to lose weight can deprive the body of nutrients it needs to function properly. Getting Botox to look younger can 'alter the way [the] brain interprets and processes other people's emotions'. Self-surveilling can train us to prioritize how we look over how we feel. 'In order to feel alive one might have to give up, say, one's habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself,' Phillips writes. In this sense, 'giving up' is exactly the phrase you're looking for, Gen Acceptance. Give up, you know, starving. Give up vitamin deficiencies. Give up calorie-counting, step-counting, mirror-staring. Give up sucking in and Spanx-shaped skin indentations. Give up middle-aged men who demand someone do any of the above in exchange for happy hour apps at Applebee's. More from Jessica DeFino's Ask Ugly: My father had plastic surgery. Now he wants me and my mother to get work done How should I be styling my pubic hair? How do I deal with imperfection? I want to ignore beauty culture. But I'll never get anywhere if I don't look a certain way If 'giving up' still doesn't sit right, try recontextualizing it as getting something back: time, money, energy, brain space, health – life, one might say. I'm not saying it's easy. Giving up can prompt 'very real suffering', as Phillips puts it. Quitting involves reassessing what we value, and this can get more painful with age. Maybe that's why your co-worker is so resistant to the idea of her friend accepting her body as-is. It might force her to ask herself: could she do the same? Should she? If so, what does that say about how she's lived thus far? Did she waste her one wild and precious existence thinking about dressing-on-the-side salads? Who is she if she's not thin, or at least trying to be? But if your co-worker isn't interested in reconsidering her beliefs, I'd give up trying to convince her. Because sometimes, giving up is good. Do you have a beauty question for Ask Ugly? Submit it anonymously here — and be as detailed as possible, please! Anonymous if you prefer Please be as detailed as possible Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian.
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Not ‘giving up': Is there another way to describe accepting how I look as I age?
Hi Ugly, I recently chatted with a middle-aged coworker about her friend who is unhappy being single and thinks she should lose weight. As Gen X women growing up in the 1980s, our biggest concern was weight and calorie counting to control it (now we can add wrinkles, yellow teeth and odd body hair to the list). When I (flippantly?) suggested encouraging the friend to accept her body as it is, my coworker said, 'Well she can't just give up!' Giving up – that's another thing we Gen X women have always tried to avoid. Like looking at our moms in sweatpants and no makeup and thinking they weren't trying to be beautiful anymore. My question: are there other words to describe acceptance of your looks as they are, at any age, or are we just truly 'giving up'? - Gen Acceptance One reason talk of 'giving up' leaves a bad taste in the mouth, writes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his book On Giving Up, is that it 'is felt to be an ominous foreshadowing of, or reminder of, the ultimate giving up that is suicide, or just the milder version of living a kind of death-in-life'. In other words: your coworker unconsciously believes that a woman who gives up dieting might as well be dead. Forgive me (and Phillips – and, indirectly, Freud, the father of psychoanalysis) for being dramatic. But I think it's true! Maybe doubly true when it comes to physical beauty, which has long been framed as less ornamental than essential, particularly for women and gender non-conforming people. We often think of beauty as a declaration of self, a means of survival, a signifier of societal worth. It increases our economic and social potential. It opens doors and buys grace; it affords access and attention. To fall short of it, conversely, is to edge toward a kind of cultural erasure. Naturally, when one's appearance is rewarded and/or punished like this, it starts to seem as important as life itself. Or more important. Consider a quote from a 2024 Washington Post story on the renewed popularity of tanning beds, known to heighten users' risk of skin cancer: 'I'd rather die hot than live ugly.' (A rebuttal, if I may.) This conflation of beauty and life comes up quite a few times in your question, albeit in less extreme terms. You categorize weight loss and stray hairs as some of your 'biggest concerns'. You recall worrying about your mother not wearing makeup – which only makes sense if makeup is a symbol of something more. (The will to carry on, maybe?) Your coworker implies that giving up on thinness must mean giving up on dating, which must mean giving up on love, which, well – why bother going on, then? Sign up to Well Actually Practical advice, expert insights and answers to your questions about how to live a good life after newsletter promotion This is a bit absurd. (The unconscious is nothing if not irrational!) 'The daunting association' of giving up, Phillips writes, 'has stopped us being able to think about the milder, more instructive, more promising givings up,' of which there are many. Like giving up on maintaining beauty standards, for example. The pursuit of an unrealistic, often unhealthy and ever-shifting appearance ideal is something that paradoxically 'anaesthetizes' us to life, as Phillips might say, even as we think of it as offering more life (or more opportunity). Skipping meals to lose weight can deprive the body of nutrients it needs to function properly. Getting Botox to look younger can 'alter the way [the] brain interprets and processes other people's emotions'. Self-surveilling can train us to prioritize how we look over how we feel. 'In order to feel alive one might have to give up, say, one's habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself,' Phillips writes. In this sense, 'giving up' is exactly the phrase you're looking for, Gen Acceptance. Give up, you know, starving. Give up vitamin deficiencies. Give up calorie-counting, step-counting, mirror-staring. Give up sucking in and Spanx-shaped skin indentations. Give up middle-aged men who demand someone do any of the above in exchange for happy hour apps at Applebee's. More from Jessica DeFino's Ask Ugly: My father had plastic surgery. Now he wants me and my mother to get work done How should I be styling my pubic hair? How do I deal with imperfection? I want to ignore beauty culture. But I'll never get anywhere if I don't look a certain way If 'giving up' still doesn't sit right, try recontextualizing it as getting something back: time, money, energy, brain space, health – life, one might say. I'm not saying it's easy. Giving up can prompt 'very real suffering', as Phillips puts it. Quitting involves reassessing what we value, and this can get more painful with age. Maybe that's why your coworker is so resistant to the idea of her friend accepting her body as-is. It might force her to ask herself: could she do the same? Should she? If so, what does that say about how she's lived thus far? Did she waste her one wild and precious existence thinking about dressing-on-the-side salads? Who is she if she's not thin, or at least trying to be? But if your coworker isn't interested in reconsidering her beliefs, I'd give up trying to convince her. Because sometimes, giving up is good. Do you have a beauty question for Ask Ugly? Submit it anonymously here — and be as detailed as possible, please! Anonymous if you prefer Please be as detailed as possible Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian.
Wall Street Journal
16-06-2025
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
Why Is Everything an Existential Crisis?
So-called existential risks seem to be everywhere. Climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear war, pandemics and more threaten to return us to nothingness. Most people using this term aren't consciously evoking the philosophy of Sartre or Camus. Still, they may be drawing on associations with existentialism more than they realize and unconsciously expressing deeper concerns about morality and meaning. In psychoanalysis, it isn't unusual for a word to have an unconscious double meaning. For example, a patient in therapy might say that she can't 'bear' children. She could consciously mean that she's unable to get pregnant, while also unconsciously communicating that she can't stand children. Or a grieving patient who's struggling to find the right word might say, 'I'm at a loss.'
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Therapy isn't about life hacks. The best solutions are simpler
When people seek therapy – and I know this, because I too was once a person seeking therapy – we often want strategies, techniques and tools for our toolboxes. We want to be asked questions and to know the answers; we want to ask questions and to be given answers. We believe that these are the things we need to build a better life. Now that I am a patient in psychoanalysis, and I am a psychodynamic psychotherapist treating patients, I can see why my therapist needed to frustrate this desire, and offer me the opposite. What I wanted was to manage myself out of my emotions rather than feel them, to hack my life rather than live it – and that makes for a shallower existence, not a better one. Meaningful therapy has helped me to understand that what I wanted was not what I needed. That my search for the right answer, born out of my conviction that there is a right way to do life, could only ever keep me stuck. I see now that this powerful treatment can offer something far more valuable than strategies: a fertile environment in which a mind can grow, so that a new space can open up between sensing an emotional experience inside you and having to get rid of it immediately. In this space, you can develop the capacity to tolerate something that previously was experienced as unbearable – and this gives you time to feel, to think and to respond with agency, rather than remaining a slave to your reactions. This can be utterly transformative for our relationships, for our working lives, for our parenting and for our self-respect. It is not something we can try to do, it is not something someone can tell us how to do, it is not something we can read about in a newspaper article (even this one, I'm afraid). It is the outcome of a meaningful, sustained therapeutic relationship, and there is no shortcut. The fact is that strategies, techniques and tools are all out there for you to find if you want them. A quick internet search will serve up more studies than you could possibly wish to read showing that exercise is good for your mental health; that mindfulness can help to manage stress (and there are plenty of apps for that); and that if it makes you feel good, you can buy as many adult colouring books, gratitude journals and weighted blankets as you wish (before you feel so weighed down by all your stuff that it's time to de-clutter again). These things may or may not be helpful, but advice along these lines can also make a person feel worse, if what they really need is to address the underlying difficulties, anxieties, depressions and unconscious dynamics that rob them of the capacity to enjoy the good things in life. Because the thing about building a better life is that it is at the same time incredibly complex and incredibly simple. (One consequence of good psychotherapy – and parenthood – is developing the capacity to recognise and feel two opposing truths at the same time.) In a therapy session, an almost imperceptible movement or sigh from a patient might, when attention is directed towards it, open up a fascinating seam of memories and associations that reveal buried pain and love and heartbreaking assumptions about themselves, which developed in their mind in childhood out of compelling family dynamics and have continued to imprison them for their entire lives. And once these knotty, complex dynamics have been excavated and understood, and the feelings trapped within have been allowed expression, then the cell door can open, and as well as pain and anger and longing and other feelings, all sorts of beautifully simple things become possible. The blissful feeling of warm sunshine on your face. The colours in a David Hockney painting. The deliciousness of a chocolate Hobnob. The heart-swelling sound of a toddler laughing – yours or someone else's. The pleasure of exchanging a nod with a stranger who has also gone for a walk in the park. The joy of watching one of the greatest films of all time. Which brings me to my final point. We have to acknowledge that good therapy can be difficult to find (though there is plenty of information at And if you live in an area where psychotherapy is, outrageously, not available on the NHS, or about to be cut, then it can be expensive (though there are low-fee schemes available at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the British Psychotherapy Foundation, and elsewhere too). It may also be that this kind of therapy might not be useful to you at this moment. And, as I have written previously, good therapy takes time, and there are periods in our lives when that time may not be available to us. Fortunately, there is something else that can help. Here is the one strategy, technique and tool I have found that really does work – the answer to almost any question. Watch Midnight Run. And if you have already watched this exquisite 80s comedy with Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin and Yaphet Kotto, then watch it again. And when you have watched it, find someone else who has watched it – it may be that the greatest value of the internet lies in its facility to connect people who have watched Midnight Run – and swap your favourite quotes and scenes with them. And then make a cup of tea and dunk a chocolate Hobnob in it and eat it. You're welcome. Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
There's no excuse for chopping down a thing of beauty. And I don't just mean the Sycamore Gap tree
I was moved to read of the grief expressed by so many at the brutal felling of the Sycamore Gap tree. I found it surprising. Not the crime itself: I know well the unconscious drive we all have within us to destroy good things – the most valuable, the most beautiful, the most life-affirming things. What took me by surprise was the capacity that so many people found within themselves to express their devastation and anger at this painful loss, not only to us as individuals, but as a nation. On the day the perpetrators were found guilty, I was reeling in my own private grief. I'd just read a different news story that told of another brutal cutting-down: again the destruction of something beautiful and valuable with deep roots, that stood for growth and possibility and life. The article, on this website, told how among other 'savings', talking therapies services are to be cut 'as part of efforts by England's 215 NHS trusts to comply with a 'financial reset''. As a patient in psychoanalysis that I pay for privately because I am privileged enough to be able to afford it; as a psychodynamic psychotherapist working in the NHS because I passionately believe that people should have access to good, sustained mental health treatment regardless of their means; and as your columnist writing about how to build a better life – I find this to be morally wrong. Just as I was not surprised by the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree, I am not surprised by these further cuts to talking therapy on the NHS. The flesh is so thin on the bone already, there is precious little now to cut, with patients facing the (bad) luck of the draw of patchy, postcode lottery-style provision. Many of us as individuals have a tendency to diminish our own mental anguish – to feel that physical pain is somehow more worthy. This is why it is unsurprising that we tolerate such meagre offerings of sustained psychotherapy on the NHS. It is why we have to have a law that mental health and physical health should be treated with parity of esteem – because deep down, we do not do this within ourselves. That law, incidentally, is the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which states it is the Secretary of State for Health's duty to 'continue the promotion of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement […] in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness'. How can he possibly fulfil this duty if the already limited offer of psychotherapy is reduced even further? Whether talking therapy services are scrapped altogether, or treatments are shortened and cheapened and replaced with 'interventions', it seems important to see the truth of what is happening here. There will be cuts to psychotherapy. Psychotherapy in its different modalities is a potent treatment that has been proven again and again, in study after study and in patient after patient, to be effective for many people suffering with mental illness – and, in the case of sustained psychodynamic psychotherapy, to grow more effective over time after treatment ends. Patients can use it and get better. Do we understand this? That psychotherapy works? Of course it doesn't always work, and it is not always indicated for everyone – like any other treatment. But for many, it works. It saves lives. It keeps people out of hospital. It enables people to get back into work. It can repair relationships. It can restore self-respect. It can allow people to stand tall when they have previously had to drag themselves along the ground. It is a treatment that works, and it is being cut, so people will have even less chance of being offered it than they do now. We need to find within ourselves the kind of anger and sadness at cutting down our mental health services that some have found within themselves at the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree. This tree found its home in an empty hollow and grew strong and true and beautiful. Psychotherapy can help people do that too. And what will fill the gap left when psychotherapy is cut down? The usual things people turn to when they are struggling and they feel hopeless, uncared-for and forgotten – none of them good. Suicidality; addiction; relationship and family breakdown. If we want to build a better life, for ourselves and our families and our fellow citizens, we need to do something about this. We need to fight for our cause; we need to protest in the streets and bring legal challenges and write (politely and firmly) to our MPs. We need to demand the Health Secretary fulfil his responsibilities outlined by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. We need to stand up and make it politically impossible for this government that talking therapies provision be further diminished; the NHS must offer psychotherapy treatment for anyone who needs it and who can use it. Receiving and offering psychotherapy has taught me that we all have it in us to cut down and destroy beautiful things – but we also have it in us to come together in our grief, to repair, to help each other, to do good things, to stand up when we see that something is deeply morally wrong. That is how we build a better life not only for ourselves but also for each other. Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
