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

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Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine.

At its most minimal, the patient wants something they have been unable to get elsewhere – call it relief of suffering, enhanced freedom – and the analyst has a treatment that he values and wants to practise. To write of the concept of cure may involve the analyst in making controversial claims about the efficacy of his work; it may, at its worst, encourage the making of false or dubious promises; it may promote spurious success stories. And it may expose failure. But above and beyond this it raises the difficult questions that are at the heart of psychoanalysis, though not always at the heart of medicine: what has what the analyst wants for the patient got to do with the patient? And what is the significance, the history, of what the patient expects from the doctor? This patently replicates one of the essential perplexities of development: what has what the parents want for (and from) the child got to do with the child and her development? And at this point, as each psychoanalytic writer states the aims of psychoanalysis, everybody comes along with their specification: for Anna Freud and Winnicott, for example, the aim of analysis is to facilitate the patient’s development; for Klein it is for the patient to reach what she calls the depressive position; for Lacan it is to enable the patient not to betray their desire, and so on. This – as this brief menu of options and possibilities makes clear – is where the trouble starts, and where the real interest of psychoanalysis begins. Yes,” he nods, and goes on, “I don’t know how other people describe bereavement, but I always think of the thoughts as swirling, a bit swirly-whirly.”In our lives, terrible things may happen. Michael Rosen has grieved the loss of a child, lived with debilitating chronic illness, and faced death itself when seriously unwell in hospital. In spite of this he has survived, and has even learned to find joy in life in the aftermath of tragedy. Making and implementing a get-better plan: This is about deliberately making a plan and implementing it to get better in a few areas of focus. There are many events in retrospect that we see have turned out well. To give you a couple of examples:

We will all go through hardships in our lives, whether it’s a job loss, money worries, a bereavement, a relationship ending, an illness etc. And this book instils such hope that I think it would do the world some good if everyone had a copy. I wonder aloud why he has never previously told the story of Eddie’s death. Given what I’ve been through, I’ve done OK. If you were to mark it in terms of difficulty, I’m about a five Not quite the crusade because I am distrustful of leading an argument by passion or by my moral fervour. But I decided partly at the urging of leaders and critics to not let the book be completely bloodless and to muster some moral and emotional energy for the values that I argue in the book namely humanism. 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.One of the ways of describing how psychoanalysis revises (and reprises) the medical model of cure, I think – though Freud was not always either explicit about this or conscious of it – is to say that it re-presents the concept of cure as if it is, unavoidably, a question of morality, a moral issue; as though the so-called ‘good life’ of ancient and traditional philosophy has been somehow all too literally replaced, or displaced, by the criteria of health of modern medical science; the good person has been redescribed as the healthy person (without the question ‘What is health good for?’ being asked, health tending to be less controversial than goodness: health as the solvent, the redescription of morality). As though shared knowledge has replaced each individual, personal hope. As though to know what it would be to be cured would be to know more or less what a good life was, if only for oneself. As though, in a sense, medical science could cure us of the perplexities of morality (by telling us who we are, it tells us who we can be); what Foucault described in Madness and Civilization as ‘the doctor–patient couple in which all alienations are summarized, linked and loosened’.

Wisdom imparted by the author is applicable not just in sales and marketing ( business) but in any real life scenario where we just stop ourselves from going any further, the moment we know the answer rather than knowing the method of finding the answer.Chandramouli Venkatesan. The main concept of this book is how to get better at getting better as a book name. Once the symptom is seen as a making of meaning by an organism enigmatic to itself, rather than as a malfunctioning of a potentially well-functioning system, the treatment becomes a less obviously normative project; the aims of the treatment, the concepts of cure, are there to be argued about rather than merely consented to. As we shall see, psychoanalysis – which Freud wanted to be a part of medical science – was to expose the oversimplification of the concept of cure in medicine: at least when it came to so-called mental illness. Cure being a consensus, among any given group of people, about what health is, and so about the aims and objectives of certain kinds of medical treatment; and where cure may not always be possible, it is useful as an organizing aim, a regulative target (‘How do I know if I am cured?’ becomes a question of not simply whether my suffering has been alleviated but ‘Who am I going to ask that can tell me?’ or ‘Which criteria for cure can I assent to?’). The concept of cure, in other words, is quite literally a question of criteria; of whose criteria we are meeting, and of our reasons for those particular criteria as satisfying. Where there are ideas about cure, there are shared criteria in play, however tacit or unconscious; criteria, fundamentally, about what is good, what is of value, what about ourselves and our lives should be nurtured and encouraged. Try reading the book this weekend and try to reflect on what your get better method is and how you can leverage and inculcate it in your day to day life to accomplish a long-term success.

In spite of his adamant refusal to be caught up with any sort of therapeutic evangelism,’ comments Khan, ‘there is a definite, and progressive, theory of cure in the writings of Freud.’ ‘Progressive’ here depends on what counts as progress. We should remember, that is to say, at the outset, Freud’s disparaging remarks – disparaging about both his most inspired follower, and about the wish to cure – in his infamous obituary for Sándor Ferenczi, his colleague and collaborator, in 1933. ‘After this summit of achievement,’ he wrote, ‘it came about that our friend drifted away from us … the need to cure and to help became paramount to him.’ As though the wish to cure and help someone was itself a betrayal, a misunderstanding of psychoanalysis. This we might take as an emblem of Freud’s ambivalence about the concept of cure in relation to psychoanalysis. If you want to stay in the psychoanalytic fold, the wish to cure and help must not become paramount. This rather starkly dissociates psychoanalysis from medicine, and indeed, from the so-called helping professions.

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Why relationship building is essential for executing change. Why major company acquisitions fail and lose the best people – ability to spot what change is needed vs. the ability to execute the change. 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. Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.