E121 - Psychoanalysis, Adolescence & the Unconscious Lust for Control (w/ Dr. Alan Baban)

Dr Alan Baban is a writer, psychiatrist and BPC registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and he is the Chair of the Art and Psychiatry Special Interest Group at the Royal College of Psychiatry. 

Today we discuss:

- What makes psychoanalysis different from other therapies

- Different unconscious drives people have 

- What a psychoanalytic session looks like

- The many benefits of free association 

- How art can help people understand the human experience

- The acclaimed Netflix series Adolescence 

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

Give feedback here - thinkingmindpodcast@gmail.com - 
Follow us here: Twitter @thinkingmindpod Instagram @thinkingmindpodcast Tiktok - @thinking.mind.podcast 

Transcript

Welcome back. Today on the podcast, I'm in conversation with Dr. Alan Ba. Alan is a writer, psychiatrist, and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and he's the chair of the Art and Psychiatry special interest group at the Royal College of Psychiatry. Today, we discuss a few interesting topics, what makes psychoanalysis different from other kinds of therapy, different unconscious drives.

People have, what a psychoanalytic session looks like, the many benefits of free association, how art can help mental health professionals understand the human experience. And we also discuss the acclaimed new Netflix series, adolescence, what it got right, and also some gentle critiques as well. Before we get to today's conversation, a quick thank you for all the feedback about last week's podcast.

How and Why I Stopped Drinking. I. It was great to see that it resonated with a lot of you drinkers and non-drinkers [00:01:00] alike. I did get some other feedback, which was more along the lines of, but Alex, doesn't alcohol help us socialize? Might it be necessary to socialize? And even some feedback that was along the lines of, if Gen Z are drinking less and Gen Z have more mental health problems, could it be that alcohol is a necessary part of the equation to help people socialize and therefore have less mental health problems?

And I think there are definitely interesting points, but overall, I don't think they track really to the extent that Gen Z has more mental health problems than previous generations. I think that's for all sorts of reasons, including things like access to technology, the ease with which one can have a more isolated existence now, whereas in the past, I think that was a lot harder.

A lot of other reasons as well. Alcohol clearly makes it easier to socialize, and [00:02:00] there's no doubt about that, but I would argue as I argued in the podcast, that it makes it easier upfront, but then it takes on the back end. So it makes it easier initially, but over time, the more you pair alcohol with socializing, the harder it's going to be to socialize without alcohol, to the extent that if you've done it your whole life and then you suddenly try, yeah, absolutely, it's going to be difficult.

But as I then explained in the episode last week, it's something of an illusion. The difficulty of socializing without alcohol, just something you need to push past. Over weeks and months, it gets much, much easier. We know of course of many communities that are able to socialize without drinking. If you look at Mormons, for instance, in the us, they don't drink alcohol and are very, very well socialized.

Even in the modern day, they're very tight-knit social groups with a lot of frequent in-person contact, and they're actually one of the subcultures in the modern west that don't seem to have the same level of [00:03:00] problems with dating and relationships that seems to be affecting the rest of society. So I think actually a really interesting case study in Mormonism.

But all of that being said, if you do all your research about alcohol and you know all the information and on balance, you still feel it helps you socialize and therefore you use alcohol as a tool to help you socialize. You're not gonna get any judgment from me about that. As I said in the episode, it's a pretty normal part of the human experience.

The point of the podcast was not really to dissuade people from drinking, but more to. Spark a conversation so that people can make the decision to drink or not drink with a little bit more consciousness and intention. Because one of the things that bothers me about alcohol is that for many people, it's just become kind of conditioned and automatic, and I think whenever we have these conditioned or automatic responses, that's usually a really good opportunity for growth.

Anyway, thank [00:04:00] you again for all the feedback. You can direct all feedback or any other topics you want discussed on the podcast to Thinking Minds podcast@gmail.com. As always, if you want to support the podcast to share with a friend, leave a review or a rating, a written review in particular really helps people to find us.

You can also check out some of the links in the description. Thank you very much for listening, and now here's today's conversation with Dr. Alan Baban. Alan, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Alex. I really enjoyed talking to people I've trained in psychoanalysis.

I think it's such an interesting worldview, and I think to people outside of mental health, they often conflate terms like psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists. They kind of all perhaps mean the same thing. They picture a couch usually in an office. But maybe we could start, if you could explain the difference between what, what is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, and importantly, how, how do they have different worldviews?

Yeah. [00:05:00] So a, a psychiatrist is a doctor that's done a medical training. So somebody who's gone to medical school, who's graduated with a medical degree, and after that has decided to subspecialize in psychiatry. So mainstream psychiatry is the place where, for example, you'll see somebody who prescribes you medication, but you're going to see somebody who exists within the orbit of a larger mental health team.

So, at least on the NHS, somebody who will have access to refer you to, for example, a psychologist, a social worker or, or the great swat of other things that are available. A psychoanalyst or psychotherapist, or psychoanalytic psychotherapist in this country does not have to have had a medical training.

Now that's differed internationally, but in the UK there's a rich culture, particularly in psychoanalytic training, where people from various fields are encouraged to do the training. So very famously in the British society, you have, for [00:06:00] example, Michael Brearley, who's a ex captain of cricket, who became a psychoanalyst.

You have social workers, you have all sorts of people who end up becoming psychoanalytically informed. So an analyst is somebody who doesn't prescribe medication. It is a unilaterally psychological treatment. I. Based on concepts originally formulated by Freud over a hundred years ago and then elaborated by many, many people since psychoanalysis is not something that you can really get on the NHS.

So psychoanalysis, as it's defined in this country, is four to five times a week therapy. So that means that you see your therapist at a frequency of four times a week or five times a week, typically for a long period of time, and by long I mean years duration. So a kind of ordinary psychoanalysis is going to last probably around four years or more.

On the [00:07:00] NHS though, we do provide psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychodynamic psychotherapy. So these are modified offshoots of psychoanalysis that occur at a reduced frequency. So psychodynamic psychotherapy happens once or twice a week. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy happens three times a week and happens at some specialist centers nationally as well.

And what do you think are some of the foundational principles of the psychoanalytic worldview? How do psychoanalysts see people and, and behavior and change? Yeah. Uh, I mean, I often get asked this question by trainee. So I, I did my training as a consultant in medical psychotherapy and general adult psychiatry.

And a big part of my training and research was looking at trainee psychiatrists and how they learn their psychotherapy competencies. So all psychiatrists have to do some psychotherapy, as you know, to, to finish their psychiatric training. And [00:08:00] typically when, when your training is a psychiatrist, you might become confused.

What's the difference between CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy and systemic therapy, family therapy, transactional analysis, gest therapy, psychoanalysis. I think the main thing that sets psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically informed approaches apart is the recognition of the unconscious mind. There's really no other therapy modality I know of that is completely rooted in the unconscious and really foregrounds the importance of the unconscious when it comes to the therapy.

So the unconscious being that huge part of our mind that we're by definition completely unaware of, we are not conscious of it. And which has been, you know, now reflected over the past few decades in, in modern neuroscience that most of what happens in our, in our brain or the electrical activity is [00:09:00] stuff that doesn't actually reach, are higher levels of consciousness.

And it's exactly the same for the mind as well. So the unconscious was one of, uh, the most important discoveries made by Sigmund Freud when he originally formulated his. Theory of psychoanalysis. Yeah, that's the main thing that sets it apart I think. I think the other things are probably the length of the treatment.

I mean, other therapies tend to run a bit shorter, so behavioral treatments typically last between 12 to 16 sessions. Of course, sometimes they last a lot longer than that as well. I've known some to run like a year or more, but psychodynamic or analytic treatments are typically at least going to run for around a year.

Is it fair to say that when Freud proposed this idea that so much of what's happening for us psychologically is out of awareness, that this was a pretty radical notion at the time, because now in modern life we take it pretty much for granted that we do [00:10:00] things, you know, sometimes automatically, sometimes out of habit.

But was this radical when Freud posited it originally? I. Alex, I, I think it's still a radical idea, to be honest. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but I, yeah. First of all, you're absolutely right that it was a completely revolutionary idea at the time. But I think in our current day and age, what I see is a, is a real focus on, uh, you know, if I take an example, wearing a Fitbit or wearing a watch and monitoring every little thing that's going on in your body.

So if I do a run on a treadmill, I can look at, you know, my stride length, I can, I can see all sorts of parameters about the last half hour run. And I think increasingly it seems, we're trying to do that with the mind as well. But this idea of the unconscious goes radically against that. It's basically saying there are parts of yourself that, by definition would be impossible to, to kind of know.

The goal [00:11:00] of psychoanalysis is to try to get to know them a bit better, as much as you can, and there's various methods to do that. So I, I still very much think it's a radical idea, and I think it's quite a provocative idea as well. And, and even, I, I don't know if you'd agree with this, but a bit of a disturbing one as well, because there's so much emphasis, I think in our, definitely in the, you know, there's big, big steps being taken in mental health and psychiatry over the past few decades about de-stigmatization, about education, about various illnesses and stuff and, you know, treatments.

But the ultimate idea is that you can't fully know yourself as a person. You can never fully know someone else, I think, are quite disturbing ideas, you know? Yeah, I agree with you. I think they're incredibly disturbing to people. People don't, people like to feel like they're in control of their lives.

Especially in the modern [00:12:00] era where we can be in control of so much, we can control the temperature of the rooms we're sitting in. We can fly across the ocean in hours. We have all of this technology available to us, which gives us the sense that controllers within reach and, and I think that makes our like lust for control even worse.

And so still, I think these ideas remain very provocative. I do, I do think it's probably less radical than it once was. I think there's at least a section of the population that are willing to submit. Yeah. You know, I'm becoming my mother, you know, I can see myself taking on her traits or, or I know that I can, you know, really want one thing with one part of my mind, and yet when I'm in a particular situation, another part, part of my psyche emerges.

But yeah, many people really love to still feel like they're retaining that sense of control. I'm wondering. What are some like [00:13:00] red flags that might present in someone to suggest that maybe they need to do something that could be psychoanalysis or something else to have a bit of a closer look at their unconscious?

Yeah, I'll respond to that, Alex, in, in a roundabout way, first of all, I just wanna pick up something you said that I was quite interested in, used the phrase lust for control. Really a nice phrase and, and I think it hits the nail on, on the head in that there's something quite seductive about this idea of control.

It's by nature a seductive idea, but you get pulled into a system where you can really keep a close eye on everything in yourself and everyone around you. And that's a, a, basically a huge defense against being in the moment and living life and being, you know, exposed to all sorts of emotions. The good ones, but also the ones we, we maybe don't want to feel shame, embarrassment, humiliation, kind of all of this stuff.

So, yeah, I just wanted to pick that up. [00:14:00] I would also want to respond to what you said by saying I think there's a difference between an intellectual understanding, you know, you said you talked about this kind of hypothetical patient who says, you, I did blah and blah because of my mother or something, or things like this.

So a kind of an intellectual understanding and what I see as a emotional understanding, and I think the two are very often confused because obviously everybody can read a psychoanalytic textbook and even do a form of self-analysis and come to certain conclusions. But does that actually result in deeper characterological change in the way they relate to other people?

Probably not, I would say so. I think it's the emotional understanding that actually develops in the context of a living relationship with the therapist. That is the most important thing and the thing that actually requires work. I sort of forgot your question. You were saying [00:15:00] like, what, what might draw somebody to do psychoanalysis?

My question was about red flags that might suggest someone should look at their unconscious, but first I just want to pick up on that point, the difference between intellectual and emotional understanding. I definitely agree that intellectual understanding can, in many cases, be really insufficient.

People can understand why they get into certain patterns, say, but fail to change them. Do. Do you feel that intellectual understanding is even a prerequisite? Is it important at all? Ha ha. Have you ever seen it be relevant in a, in a client's progress, or do you almost see it as a. An unnecessary byproduct that really it's just about getting to the emotional, re-experiencing as quickly as possible.

Yeah, I mean, I, I just see it as something that happens. Basically, we, we all rely on intellectualism as a defense, very commonly. [00:16:00] Doctors or people who do medical trainings or go who, you know, me and you have probably gone through a decade of, or more of being immersed in quite a categorical medical model, which is based on a very intellectual understanding of, of things.

It's, it's just something that happens. It's a way of dealing with anxiety, isn't it? I think where it, it might become sort of slightly problematic is where it goes unchecked in the therapy. So where, for example, you have a therapist who kind of colludes with the intellectual understanding rather than, you know, over time in whatever way is sensitive or necessary commenting on.

Why the patient might be resorting to an intellectual response all the time. One, what in their feelings are they trying to avoid? Mm, mm-hmm. What I've, what I've noticed is you can sometimes have a, a group of people, including doctors who are really advanced [00:17:00] academically in one area of their life, or maybe not doctors, other professions, lawyers, scientists, actors, people who've really developed some kind of facility in one area of their life, but there is an impairment in another area of their life.

Very often their relationships. And when it's addressed in the therapy, the, the understandable response is to move away from the area of impairment and move to the area of competency instead. So intelligent people will often. Be some of the more difficult clients to see because they will actively use their mind in variant, very clever ways to, to avoid this kind of emotional contact, right.

With the therapist. Yeah. I, I think the way I see it is like every facet of the human experience can be used helpfully and authentically or could be used as a [00:18:00] defense. And so I think that's true of the intellectual parts of our parts of ourselves. You can use your intellect actually to be authentic and, and to help you get closer emotional contact with someone, or you can use your intellect as a shield and very much a barrier to shield yourself from the world.

I think emotionality could be the same thing. You could use, you could express your emotions genuinely, but sometimes emotionality can be used to distract or to occupy a victim role, say. So I kind of think, you know, even even using our bodies and our felt bodily sensations, we can tune into our body to help us see where we're at and whether or not we're in pain or are we calm, or what kind of support do we need.

But sometimes our bodies as well can be a distraction from something else. Uh, Alex, I completely agree with you, with, with just one, one kind of modification, and I think it comes more from my orientation. So in, in my training, in orientation, I [00:19:00] really, um, read quite a bit and studied under people who are very influenced by an analyst called Wilfred Bion.

Mm-hmm. I, I don't know if you've, you must have heard of Bian. So somebody who famously was originally a tank command, a commander in World War I, um, who then ultimately trained as a psychoanalyst. Originally he was worked in Tavistock clinic once he first formulated a fear of groups before moving towards individual work.

One of the, the aspects of theory I really like from beyond is he, he, he really foregrounds emotion. He says, in order to achieve higher levels of thought, it has to be rooted in an emotional truth. So a, a kind of an intellectual understanding or communication that is almost divorced from emotion lacks sort of substance to it, if that makes sense.

So he saw emotions as somewhat primary? Yeah. [00:20:00] Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And so let's, let's get back to the red flags. People love red flags. Someone's walking around and they're thinking, do I need to look at my unconscious? You know, 'cause presumably many people have a reasonable, you know, relationship with their unconscious.

Maybe they're not acting out dysfunctional patterns and they're living in relative harmony. But what are the red flags? That might pop up, that might emerge, that suggests, Hey, maybe I need to do some introspective work. It's a really hard question to answer, and I think that's part of the reason I've been avoiding it for about five minutes as well.

Okay. And I, I think the reason is, is that the, well, first of all, the assessment to bring somebody into therapy, or particularly analytic therapy, is a long one. So you would meet the client at least twice, if not more than that over a period of time. So maybe a couple of weeks. So it's a longitudinal assessment.

It's not a one-off assessment. [00:21:00] And the end goal is to see if the client can commit to a treatment that by its nature is quite time intensive. It's a big time commitment. It's a big emotional commitment as well. And obviously if you do it privately, it it's, it's quite a sizable financial commitment as well.

So it's a lot to ask for someone. And you. I kind of want to get, to get to grips in an assessment to see if somebody has the appetite to know their mind in that sort of way. And that's not an easy question to answer. I mean, obviously as part of my, my training, I had to be in analysis as well. And I'm not sure if right at the beginning if I, you know, rewound back to my very first session if that's something I would particularly know or be able to answer.

So I, I think it is a, in terms of, you know, you mentioned this phrase, red flags, I would say to try [00:22:00] and establish whether the patient has a sense of curiosity about their minds and about their suffering as well, whatever that is, right? And whether they want to understand themselves better. And, and that would take a bit of time as well.

Uh, typically if you asked people the, if things people might say are. Uh, people who have a repeat pattern of difficult relationships. People who notice the same thing happening again and again in their life. People who, for example, despite attaining wealth or success in other areas of their life, might feel this emptiness inside and are wondering why those are the sorts of people that might be drawn to a more kind of analytic therapy.

But that doesn't mean that they would be able to make use of analytic therapy. That's, that's something that's, um, it depends on the individual and the treatment. And what, what does analytic therapy look [00:23:00] like? What should someone expect if they go for sessions of psychoanalysis? If you are going to a psychoanalytic treatment or a psychoanalysis, you're going to be meeting your therapist at least three times a week.

You're going to be meeting your therapist at set times. So there's quite, in a, in a way, a predictable frame. So say you'll have your session Wednesday at 5:00 PM Thursday at 5:00 PM Friday at 5:00 PM and the goal would be as far as possible to maintain those timings, if that makes sense. When you see your therapist, it's gonna be in the same room, so the room would be looking the same, and obviously you would be having the same therapist as well.

We'd all hope to expect all the, the breaks or the holidays the therapists take would be telegraphed quite a long time in advance. So say you would know about the summer break in August, maybe around now, if that makes sense. So it's. It is [00:24:00] like entering a, a working relationship where you are working with another person to understand yourself better when you enter the room, it, it depends on the person.

There will definitely be a chair for you to sit down in. However, if it's a more analytically oriented therapy, some analysts might have a couch in their room, typically, definitely if it's four or five times a week, and if the patient is comfortable, might encourage the patient to use the couch as well.

Now the couch, uh, is positioned in such a way that you cannot see your therapist or analyst anymore. They're sitting behind you. And the purpose of that is to really try to allow the patient to free associate as much as possible and to follow the trains in their own mind without being distracted by actually seeing the therapist in front of them all the time.

Now that can be scary for quite a lot of people, and it is quite a [00:25:00] big step to move from the chair to the couch because when people start to go deeper into their psyche and to go deeper into whatever's going on inside their mind, they might find scary things as well. And those scary things in, in some way might be projected onto the therapist or the therapy treatment.

So in some cases, the room might become quite scary, but the, the role of the therapist is to try and, you know, not shy away from the anxiety, but to try to help the patient understand what's going on in, in that moment. The reason I focused very much on concrete things at the start is it's my view that the frame of the therapy is very important.

So things like the room, like the setting, like the positioning of the chairs and all of this stuff. Have to be as reliable and predictable as possible to allow this kind of more free floating nature to emerge, if that makes [00:26:00] sense. And often actually, if you see a patient for a while and there's, you know, changes in the room and stuff, they will notice it.

And, you know, it's, it's all grist for the mill. You know, it might be disturbing, it might not be disturbing, but it, you know, people will notice small things. And on, on the idea that it's all grist for the mill. How do you think about a psychoanalyst orientation? Like classically it's felt that psychoanalyst should be as neutral as possible and therefore not exude any of the emotional warmth you might typically expect from a psychotherapist nowadays, because that helps, you know, as you said just now with the environment, it helps the, the client to discover their own minds with a bit more clarity.

As things progressed, there was an increasing sense that actually even that neutrality is itself something that can distort the client's experience. How do you feel a psychoanalyst should orient [00:27:00] themselves towards their client? Do you think there is place for more warmth, what Rogers might have called something like unconditional positive regard, or do you think that neutrality is important?

I mean, my, my view is different patients will draw different things out of you, and every relationship is going to be different. So there's not a one size fits all. I, I think this idea about this cold impassive blank front, uh, partially comes from a misunderstanding of psychoanalytic treatments. In fact, therapists and analysts are almost excruciatingly attuned when they're working to try to understand the emotional reality in the room.

Uh, the anxiety from the patient's perspective is often that they're sitting with someone who's fallen asleep or who's saying nothing, or whose mind is drifting off somewhere else. And that's something to talk about in the treatment. But the nature of the analytic and dynamic [00:28:00] training is to allow yourself to become receptive to as many frequencies of a patient's communication as you can to try and think about it and synthesize it together without, without imposing too much of your own personal stuff on it, if that makes sense.

So obviously we are all people. You know, if you entered my office, it's not going to be a completely Spartan room. There's going to be a few personal objects, a few things I like. I, I have to work there. I have to make it comfortable for myself, but I'm not, for example, going to have, I don't know, um. Family albums or, you know, my favorite vinyl records in the background, because I think that would be giving away too much of myself in, in that kind of setting and stuff.

So there are things that I think just for the nature of the treatment and the nature of giving the patient as, as much room as possible to explore their stuff without imposing your stuff to, to leave a sense of [00:29:00] blankness there, that I don't see as a, as a coldness necessarily, I see it as space. Now, that space might arouse anxiety, you know, but that anxiety is, is fair to be thought about and understood that in a way is the purpose of it.

There's different therapists who would have different orientations in how they put themselves across. I mean, some therapists might be a bit more talkative than others. For example, for me personally. I don't think it's wrong sometimes to ask the patient a question if I'm interested in something they say.

Some therapists don't operate in bad way. For me, if I'm dealing with somebody who's experienced what I feel is a really significant amount of trauma in particular, I think in both situations you have to treat the situation quite carefully. And you might be dealing with somebody who requires more, um, more of an external show of emotion [00:30:00] from the therapist, if that makes sense.

Or more kind of concrete containment in the room before kind of deeper levels can be accessed. And that's because of the, almost the fight flight response that can become so active in the room with that patient cohort. So, so to long answer to your question, is it, it really depends. Um, there's no one size that fits all, but I think the most important thing in whatever you do is just to be as receptive as possible.

And to always think about what belongs to the patient and what belongs to you, and to try and separate those in your mind. If a psychoanalyst has worked with a patient for some amount of time, you know, as we've discussed, it can be for multiple times a week for years, and they get to know them well, why would it be unhelpful for that psychoanalyst analyst to give the patient advice?

I don't think it would be unhelpful to give the patient advice. I think, I mean, clearly there's gonna be some [00:31:00] situations where, uh, a therapist or analytic therapist or analyst will have to do something, an act. I mean, if you sat in a room with one of your clients and just putting a really absurd situation, the window was open and the patient started walking out of the window, you're not gonna sit there and do nothing.

There might be some situations where just for preserving the, the, the, the sanctity of the space that things have to be done. That's different from giving sort of, you know, if somebody comes to you and says, oh, you know, I don't know whether to take a job in Manchester or a job in London and stuff now, I think a therapist would look at that as a problem of the mind.

And to think about it in the context of the patient's life story, somebody who's not working in a psychotherapeutic way might say, oh, you know what? London's closer to you. Why don't you just go to London and stuff and foreclose it. Because obviously patients will bring all [00:32:00] sorts of things to therapy, but they know it's their therapy session.

So even if they're pushing you to say, just, just make my decision for me, they are bringing GI book's. They're expecting a certain function from the therapist that they're struggling with as well. Even if it is in that moment to tolerate some ambiguity to create a thinking space around it, the mistake is to foreclose the space for thinking by almost, um.

Deciding for the patient and stuff. One example is if you have kids, for example, doing a jigsaw puzzle, right? And somebody's struggling, you have a, a, a little boy or girl struggling to put the jigsaw pieces together. If they're really struggling, you don't so much want to do it for them. You also don't want to leave them completely alone where their suffering may be with their sense of not knowing what they're doing.

You might rotate the jigsaw piece 90 degrees or something and put it back in front of them just to try and help them see how things can connect a bit. So you want to create a [00:33:00] facilitating environment, not an environment where somebody, uh, doesn't feel empowered to kind of use their own mind, if that makes sense.

Is there an ideal that psychoanalyst posit that people should move towards in terms of psychological health? So, for example, Carl Rogers in past incentive therapy. Talked about what it meant for personalities to mature and for people to grow. For example, he would say that as people mature and grow, they can think more flexibly and more abstractly.

So things are taken less literally. Do psychoanalyst have a similar philosophy of what psychological maturity might look like? Uh, yeah, I have two answers to that. My first answer is to think of something Freud said classically. So Freud's instruction to the patient was to go on the couch and to free associate to say whatever comes to your [00:34:00] mind with no sense of editing it, no restriction, no encumbrance from whatever you want to leave out.

And I don't know if you've ever tried doing that yourself, but it is almost impossible. Everybody, every single one of us, I. Has our own constellation of psychological defenses, things we don't feel comfortable talking about, things we want to leave out and this sort of thing. So we, by nature, what psychoanalysis or analytic therapies grapple with immediately is the resistance to the free association.

Now, from that side of things, Freud might say, well, once the patient is actually able to free associate on the couch, then they're ready to leave the therapy, if that makes sense. So that's a, that's a kind of one way of looking at it. The other way is to look at the kind of theoretical elaborations that have happened over the last a hundred years.

So, other than Freud, you might know the, the most [00:35:00] major contributor to Psycholytic theory definitely in the UK was Melanie Klein. Yeah. So Melanie Klein famously came up with her two positions in the mind, the paranoid schizo position. The depressive position as well. And they're almost like two operating systems in the brain.

That's the way I see them as, and they both run in my view at exactly the same time. But one might be more dominant than the other. The paranoid schizoid position is a way of being that is more primitive. It's rooted in defenses like splitting. So splitting people into good or bad black and white thinking, which by nature favors a more paranoid stance towards the world in group, out group.

Absolutely. Exactly. Uh, and by nature it's a way of being that precludes you from knowing yourself because typically all the stuff you don't like about yourself, you wanna locate it outside of yourself in the [00:36:00] outgroup and then attack them for, for those characteristics. And then you have the depressive position, which is marked by a kind of leap in maturity.

Where you're able to recognize and acknowledge both the good and bad in yourself and the good and bad in other people, in, in a realistic and a in an ordinary way. And that's more marked by feelings of concern for other people, concern over the way you've behaved towards others about being able to tolerate a sense of guilt, maybe over your actions, but not a persecutory guilt.

More just a, a guilt that might actually bring on something creative and reparative in yourself, not a guilt that's gonna send you to the kind of depths of hell and make you want to sho yourself in a room. So that's a more depressive position. It's not clinical depression. The two are often confused, but she gave it this term, the depressive.

So I think in terms of signs of psychological health or maturity. Most [00:37:00] clinicians would say you're dealing with someone who, uh, is predominantly existing in a kind of more depressive mode of thinking and relating with other people. But the reality is every single one of us has the capacity to become unbalanced in ourselves and to kind of revert to more paranoid ways of being.

And that can happen at any time, you know, in the supermarket aisle. Or if you've been, you know, re-offended by another car or something you, you know, or if your, your, your latte's been made wrong, you might, you know, oh my God, that's a, the latte one that nothing activates my paranoid Schizos states more than that.

Do you think we're in a paranoid schizo state culturally at the moment? It feels like that, you know, looking at politics, the, the extent to which things have become so tribalistic heightened prejudice from one side of the political spectrum to the other. Do you think we're in a paranoid schizoid situation?

Culturally, I find it really scary to think about Alex, you know, if that makes sense. I think [00:38:00] it's not hard to think of examples over the last decade. Definitely more than a decade in world politics and think we are in a kind of paranoid state. I think Covid Coronavirus was a huge trauma on everybody's psyche, actually.

And I think we're all still suffering from the consequences of that, you know, the levels of dissociation after the trauma, the flip into something manic to try and make the world completely anew after a kind of trauma. Um, I think the world is, is a, is a, is a problematic place at the moment. And increasingly in treatments, patients bring in the world more and more, you know, so definitely over the last couple of years the big things that have come in have obviously been.

Israel, Gaza, Palestine, Russia, Ukraine, Trump. More and more it, it feels, in our cultural context, there's a vocabulary of [00:39:00] divisiveness that seems to be becoming more predominant, but also linked to that. Uh, and this is my personal view, a a a definitely a note of shamelessness about it all as well. You know, this very triumphalistic streak that I think is manifested by, uh, you know, figures like Trump who can go and say, well, it's gonna be this way, and that's just going to be the way it is, kind of, and the world is going to be changed and, and to do it so brazenly as well.

It's concerning something I worry about looking at politics, particularly the politics of narcissism when you see a lot of narcissism. Power is this idea that for me to win, someone else has to lose. Like my triumph requires someone else's destruction. And I, I see this, or I mean, it's, it's obviously hugely concerning because it positions things as a zero sum game.

Like [00:40:00] even think about something not, not wanting to be an armchair psychotherapist, but you think about something like the world economy. It strikes me that the world economy for it to thrive, it's a collaborative game. You know, the more countries are able to trade amongst each other freely, the more benefit there is for everyone involved.

So if taking something like the tariffs as an example, it feels like the tariffs are this attempt to create a set of winners and losers, and based on the losers losses, we can claim ourselves as the victors somehow. And then ex explore some sort of triumph. And that's kind of what I see in narcissism more commonly as well as a beneath the desire to self aggrandize, there's this desire to destroy something else.

And it just strikes me that's, I'm not really asking you a question, but it seems like really destructive worldview. Yeah. And I, I, I think it's important to, to think about, because I think it's, it's not only just splitting the [00:41:00] world into winners and losers, but I would extend it also to say that it is a complete rejection of the acceptability, of losing, you know, what's, what's wrong with losing?

What's wrong with being rejected or being disappointed? I mean, these in some ways are facts of life. These are parts of ordinary life that everybody is going to have to go through. If you engage in any kind of relationship or creative process, you can't always get what you want. I think it's the violent rejection of this idea of losing the unacceptability of it.

The fact that you're either a hero or, or an absolute zero that's so kind of damaging. It, it takes people away from the idea or the sense that you can just exist in the world in a more ordinary way where, you know, sometimes you might be a bit up and sometimes you might be a bit down, but you know, there's enough there to, [00:42:00] to keep you going.

It is worrying because obviously, I mean we're, you know, we're, we're doing a podcast here and you know, I, sometimes I go down this kind of YouTube wormhole or I see what my younger kind of cousins look at on YouTube and stuff, and you get all sorts of shorts from people who kind of proper ways of viewing the world or this is how you must behave if you want to succeed, or this is how you must behave if you want to win.

And there seems to be this endless pipeline of propaganda about winning. If that seems to be fed into people's minds on a daily basis by algorithms. And I think in, in a way it is psychologically dangerous because it it on on, at least on some subliminal level, it creates this idea that there is something wrong with losing, well, there's something wrong with second place or third place.

Yes. And that to be exceptional, I think the internet can give people the illusion that to be exceptionalism is the norm. [00:43:00] Because you can go on a YouTube page and just see, you know, video after video of creator who each has thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of views. And I think that implicitly gives you the express, the, the impression that it's you and a bunch of ultra winners that form, uh, kind of one peer group.

But of course that's not a realistic view because you're not seeing all of the YouTube channels that are doing. Poorly or that are mediocre, you're just seeing, you know, the internet allows you to just exist in a world of, and create an ecosystem of ultra winners if you want to. And it's easy to see how that could amplify our insecurities.

And it might make people who feel like they're not that ambitious, that they do just want to live a more ordinary life, like you said, which is, you know how most people have lived for most of human history in an ordinary way, by definition makes them feel, you know, incredibly inadequate. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.[00:44:00] 

And, and of course those feelings of inadequacy are part of it, ordinary life and existence as well. But if you're existing in a frame of mind where winning is the only thing, they become absolutely unbearable. And so the drive becomes a red redoubled effort to win at all costs instead. And so as you say it, it becomes a zero sum game, but it becomes a negative spiral as well into the abyss.

You know, unless you win big, you know, but you know, if 240 million people play the lottery, someone's gonna win, but everybody else is gonna lose. And something. When it comes to narrow definitions of success, I really worry about the pattern of the insecure overachiever, which is a pattern I've been thinking about.

I wrote an essay about it last year. The Insecure overachiever is capable of applying a lot of work, attention, focus, effort at something. But their problem typically is that they've internalized the value system of something else or someone else. For example, you know, they [00:45:00] internalize their parents' values.

They don't want to become a doctor. Particularly say this happens all the time with doctors. They don't want to become a doctor. Their parents want them to become a doctor because it's so prestigious and socially acceptable, and so they're smart and they're hardworking, and they apply themselves to that.

Pursuit and then they, you know, find themselves perhaps at 40 or 45 and they feel totally unsatisfied. It really goes to show how work and effort and focus can be implied in so many different directions. You can apply focus, work, and effort to writing a novel, raising your family, writing essays. It's all becoming a doctor.

But if you don't apply that work focus energy to the thing that actually resonates with you, you're kind of dooming yourself to some disharmony in your life. Like earlier you said sometimes one of the reasons people come to psychoanalysis is 'cause they feel that emptiness, even though by all accounts they're [00:46:00] doing well.

And I think that's one of the things that goes wrong is that they don't, I don't think really modern culture encourages people to reflect on what their values are like. Like you said, you go on YouTube and you find a video like five Tips for Success. But, you know, success looks different for every individual dependent on their values.

So I wonder if there's room in our culture for more of a discussion of how should people actually be discovering their values. Yeah, I think that's, that's a really interesting thought because in terms of values, they're quite personal, aren't they as well? You know, they can be shared. You can have a group of values that are shared in a, in a cultural group of people, but they're really, really personal values about what's meaningful for you that are gonna take time to kind of dis dissect and unpass.

And you're not gonna necessarily find them on this low calorie diet of kind of ten second YouTube shorts on the internet. I think the important thing [00:47:00] that we're coming at is, and I'm quite passionate about this topic as well, I always, I find it a cheeky answer whenever we get like, um, I. Training psychiatrists or people shadowing us at work.

Um, so I work as psychiatrists at the moment in, in some A and e departments, and we get people shadowing sometimes and they ask me what's the most important part of kind of treatment and stuff. And my answer is, well, first I ask them what they think and they say like, oh, it's pills, or, you know, it's this or that.

I always say It's time. For me, the most important operative factor in treatment is time. And I think time is often in short supply. It's at a premium and people don't want to give fair time. We exist in a culture where the expectation is that things have to happen quickly, but in fact, with most of our available treatments, the psychological ones, or even a lot of the tablet treatments, you are looking at an investment of [00:48:00] quite a bit of time before you're gonna start to see some kind of positive effect as well.

I think time as an important part of treatment is very underplayed. Yeah. And psychoanalysis is obviously, uh, standing steadfast against the trends of modern society, insisting we're gonna take as much time as this process needs. Yeah. Too much time. Maybe. I'm curious, how did you become interested in the connection between art and, and mental health?

I've always been a big sort of reader. I've always loved film. Like all my life. I've, I've always loved art in a way. Growing up, I ended up, you know, growing to medical school, but I actually found myself in the middle of my degree doing a creative writing course for a couple of years. So I did a master's in creative writing and I, I, I became very interested personally in.

Language. Um, but not only the kind of content of language and sentences [00:49:00] itself, but more the form of language. So the, the sound, the prosody of kind of prose and stuff I became interested in. Um, and so I spent a couple of years kind of studying that and, and, uh, did various things came out of it before I returned back to medical school.

And I, I don't think that ever really left me. I mean, I was very much looking for a specialty that would integrate like my more sciencey side and my more artistic side. So I was drawn towards psychiatry, you know, that seemed like more of a natural fit. And then when I discovered, you know, within my psychiatric training, the long case for example, so that's a, a mandatory requirement in psychiatric training where you have to see a patient once a week typically as a psychodynamic treatment.

So a treatment where you prescribe no drugs. It's all about listening. It's all about, you know, discovering meaning and stuff and seeing the same person for a year. I absolutely loved it. I founded the most kind [00:50:00] of creative collaborative thing, and I became interested in doing more cases. And, and from that, I, I ended up, um, proceeding to do a kind of psychoanalytic psychotherapy training at the Tavistock.

And then, you know, as with lots of these things, just through attending conferences and stuff and contributing to events, I got to know a group of like-minded psychiatrists. So initially there was a group of trainees who started something called psych art that was, uh, art and psychiatry group made by trainees and for trainees, and I became a part of vain.

We put on some conferences and stuff. And, um, in one of those conferences, the, the then chair of the art and psychiatry special interest group in Royal College came and, um, yeah, we hung out a bit and then he invited me onto the committee. And then I just got involved in, that was around six years ago. And last year, around last sort of March, April, I took on the chair role for this art and psychiatry special [00:51:00] interest group.

If you're, if you're training or working in mental health, how can art help you understand your clients or patients or understand the kinds of conditions you're working with? I think it's less so just art in and of itself, but it's an engagement with art and the quality of that engagement. So to engage with art, whatever it might be, visual, written, you know, whatever.

You have to adopt an attitude of receptivity, so you have to be open to it. Obviously, as you'd know in discussions about art amongst groups of people, it's very rare for groups of more than six people to really agree on any one thing. So you're gonna get different points of view as well. So if you're part of a discussion group, you might be exposed to radically different points of view and have to bear that as well without attacking it.

So to tolerate different points of view to adopt this attitude of receptivity, but also to adopt a [00:52:00] place where you can be creative and collaborative. So as part of a discussion with other people or with VR art itself, you might change the way you feel about VR art. You might want to respond to it by making your own artwork as well.

So I mean, we. I don't know if you've heard of a kind of technique it's used in America. It's called Visual Thinking Strategies, VTS. So it, it, it's, so last year, uh, the A PA American Psychiatric Association Conference in New York, last year in May, the SIG went there and we did a presentation with colleagues in America about visual thinking strategies.

And what we did was we invited this artist, great artist, he's called Michael Tolin. He's a professor in School of Art and Design in purchase college in, in New York, I think. And he's created this amazing artworks as a response to his cancer diagnosis. And they're quite [00:53:00] elaborate abstract, visual pieces.

So we threw them up on a screen for the a PA audience and we encouraged their response to it. We didn't say who created the art. We didn't say that Michael was in the audience or in fact on the panel and that he was going to talk afterwards. We just had an open mic on stage and we encourage people to walk up and to say what they saw.

And obviously one person started in point A, another person brought point B, but we ended up with this quite complex understanding of the art in front of us that was creative and fluid, and that really got people's minds thinking. And then at the end, Michael came on and revealed who he was and he said what he thought like the art piece was all about.

But I guess it's, it's an example that was a room of basically psychiatrists, uh, international group of psychiatrists who at least for that hour got to collaborate and think together and to exist as part of a group and to think creatively as well. [00:54:00] Now I think when we're with patients, the idea is that we have to listen and be receptive.

It's very hard to listen sometimes. So I think that the arts can help us, put us in that place where we are more likely to be able to listen, tolerate ambiguity, tolerate anxiety, tolerate different points of view, and to come to a more creative place in ourselves. And not this place where, you know, you look at a piece of art and you say, well, you know, that's just about that.

As, as with a patient, you don't wanna say, well, it's because of your mother. You know, a, a sentence that might foreclose any sense of exploration or thinking. Yes. So that's one example. Really, it's learning to inhabit, like for me, psychotherapy is learning, at least part of psychotherapy is learning to ha inhabit someone's world.

And I guess with art you can do this because the artist temporarily creates a world, which should you choose, you can step into. But I guess we're [00:55:00] not taught a lot how to engage with art in that way and to allow yourself almost to be seduced by art. We're kind of just taught, kind of appraise it, especially if.

We're talking about a Marvel movie or something like that, but some, some art really benefits from that deeper level of engagement. And some Marvel movies are really good as well, Alex, as well. Okay, fair enough. Um, but yeah, controversial point of view, but I, I would say that it's, it's important to step into the art and to step into the patient's world, but also to keep one foot rooted in yourself as well.

So not to lose yourself completely, so to tune in to what the patient's saying, but also to have that extra layer of kind of objectivity listening where you can think about it and triangulate a bit. That's often the challenging thing. Something I've found is, you know, you talked about free association earlier.

I think free association is such a valuable skill to learn. And I think, [00:56:00] you know, almost every form of psychotherapy owes a debt to psychoanalysis because of the discovery of, and the utilization of free association. I don't think enough schools of psychotherapy name that like, Hey, free association is something we, we require for therapy sessions to work.

Therapy sessions of all kinds requires clients to come in and speak in a spontaneous, unfiltered manner about their experience to some degree or another. But I think free association has tremendous benefits, not just for discovering oneself, but in fact for more organic acts of creativity. And I think artists without realizing it, need free association to produce the works of art.

And in many ways, that's the difference between art and propaganda and that I think art is like. I'm going to get into myself and see what emerges and what emerges. Let the chips fall where they may, to some degree, which is what you kind of do in a therapy session. Whereas I think propaganda is much more in the realm of the [00:57:00] intellectualization we talked about at the beginning, where it's like, I have a point of view that I believe is correct, and I'm going to try and create a, an aesthetically pleasing work of art that communicates that point of view.

And if you're open and engaged, I find, I find, I find this real internal clang that you feel when someone's clearly trying to impose a point of view. Have you, no. Have you experienced something like this? Yeah. I, I think it's really important what you say, because in, in the second example, the quality of the artwork is slightly in it, or there's something a bit empty or flat about it.

Kind of formally impressive, but almost predetermined. I. Everything is in its right place, and it leaves little room for the kind of reader or viewer or listener to engage with it in a kind of creative way. And I think we've all come across kind of artworks that, uh, don't take the risk almost to enter into a kind of more formal relationship with the [00:58:00] audience and stuff, but try too hard to be good and, and often fall that on their face because they're, they're often created in with this idea that, uh, they just have to be adored.

In fact, for art, I think to be true and authentic, it has to take the risk of being disliked or even hated. Yeah, I great and great artists that maintain their greatness, they repeat and they iterate and they iterate. And sometimes it works really well and sometimes it doesn't. And there's a sense that that's okay because they're more into the process than the outcome.

I might mention you, you might be interested, there's a really, uh, well-known psychoanalytic paper by a guy called Elliot Jakes. Mm-hmm. He was a Canadian analyst who became part of a British society, and it's called The Death and the Midlife Crisis. Well, it's really, really good. So it's, um, might be open access actually.

But basically he talks about two types of [00:59:00] creativity. He talks about this group of creators who early in their youth are kind of brimming with passion and zeal, and it's almost like the, the ink is dripping off the quill or the fountain pen and the artwork just is a spontaneous emission that just gets created and stuff.

And then he then differentiates that from the more kind of sculpted creativity that you see as artists mature and kind of mellow out in their older age as well. And he differentiates the two. The second he says is more rooted in kind of depressive anxieties and typically happens to people as they approach the midlife.

The midlife in, I think the fifties when the paper was written, he put us 35 years old, which is quite scary to think about nowadays. But, um, but yeah, obviously you have a group of creators who, you know, someone like Bel, you know, who created so many poems when he was young, became renowned and then just decided to stop writing very early on in [01:00:00] his life.

Or you have other artists who create and create in their twenties, and then there's nothing else after that. Equally, you have a group of people who don't create up to the point of their, like late thirties. So Joseph Conrad was one of these, so first novel came out, I think when he was 37, 38, who then go on to have these, you know, quite fulsome careers and stuff.

So it, it's just to highlight that creativity is what it is and it's, uh, it's an expression of. What someone is going through at that point in their life and their journey and stuff, and how they wrestle with the anxieties. Yeah. Speaking of wrestling with anxieties and wading into somewhat more controversial territory, have you seen the Netflix series A adolescents, which has captured all of our attention, and what, what are your thoughts on that?

I did see it. I mean, I, it's obviously a really powerful program and you know, I would say it's formally daring, it grapples with [01:01:00] very, um, difficult themes to think about. You know, we're, I guess we're gonna spoil it. What happens in adolescence? We should put a spoiler. I think everyone's watched it. Yeah.

Okay. But, you know, talking about, um, children basically who are going on to do heinous acts and stuff, things that are very difficult to think about, but also the impact it has on. Not just the immediate family, but the wider community around it. It was incredibly powerful program. Um, I thought it was incredibly effective that I have one gripe with it that's more rooted in my kind of personal aesthetic sensibility.

And whenever I've voiced this, all of my friends say, you, you know, there's something wrong with me and stuff, but I'm not a big fan of one track shots. You know, these one track shots. I, I'm okay with them. I, if they're in a film, I can kind of do it for five minutes or 10 minutes and stuff. But to have it for a [01:02:00] whole hour for each episode, I found it a bit much.

Now, obviously they spent so much effort to do those one track shots, and I, I think I read somewhere that on one of the episodes they had to do like so many takes of it, which meant they had to rerun the same hour again and again and again. But, uh. For me, I found that a bit of a, um, gimmick in a way. I didn't understand why everything had to be kind of one track.

I don't know what you, what did you think of that with regards to the One Track? I liked it, and I'm generally a fan of one Track. I really liked 1917. For me, the effect that the, the one take shot has on me is it's introduce a sense of realism, slows the pacing down. I think a lot of modern movies, the pacing is way too fast, and so I find it very relaxing and I find it very realistic when it comes to adolescence.

I think it's, it helps induce a strong sense of real realism, even in the parts of the show, which [01:03:00] were slower, almost more boring, but incredibly lifelike because life is, you know, these punctuated high drama points. Interspersed with more boring periods. So it, for me, it added to the realism. In terms of the show itself, I think it got some things right and some things I was a bit more unsure of.

So I think what it got right is it really captured quite well how humiliation is a very powerful precursor to like violence and aggression. So the protagonist of the, the movie the Boy, you know, his aggressive acts to kill the girl are basically motivated by sexual humiliation. And I think he got that really right, captured that quite well in the, the session that he had with the forensic psychologist who was doing the assessment.

Even though I thought there were other aspects of that assessment were pretty unrealistic, like how provocative she was almost goading him to try and learn about him, which he wouldn't really expect in a real forensic assessment. [01:04:00] I did feel that it fell into the trap that I mentioned earlier, and that it, it felt like the show had a clear point of view.

It wanted to come across basically that the internet is a place where young men talk about ideas from evolutionary psychology in a harmful, dysfunctional way, and that promotes them to see women negatively. And this is posing a huge risk of violence. And I'm not saying that's not the case at all, although I would say the situation's probably a little bit more complicated than that.

And then personally, I'm a fan of evolutionary psychology and it, I think it could be used productively. So that's my bias. So I think it, it fell into that trap a little bit of, we have a clear point of view that we're gonna. Put out there, the internet is a bad place. If we leave young boys on the internet unsupervised, these terrible things are gonna happen.

And it doesn't really start a mature discussion about what we should do with male aggression in society, which is a really important problem. Like young male [01:05:00] aggression is a problem. It's always been a problem because young male aggression has the potential to do so much good if it's harnessed productively, and the potential to do so much that's destructive.

And I, one of my concerns about our culture, the modern West in general, is it seems like we're not ready to have that more sophisticated discussion of how do we integrate this aggression in a way that's helpful. Right now, the status quo seems to be something like male aggression is bad sound, the alarm.

We need to shut it down. Again, speaking from a more psychoanalytic point of view, perhaps you'd agree with me, perhaps disagree, but shutting it down I don't think is gonna be a good idea. We need to figure out how do we get in dialogue with that aggression and use it in a way that's good for everyone, for men and for women, obviously.

But I, I'm curious what you think about that. Yeah, I mean, I, I would really echo much of what you say and, and just to add that there's the sense that there's something called aggression [01:06:00] that is absolutely terrible and it has to be located somewhere. So if we think about in and out group, it has to be located outside.

It's not part of us, this aggression. And at the moment, the, the kind of the vessel that's most capacit to contain that is male aggression because it's true. There's been so many multifarious episodes of young men who've gone on to do horrible things. So the aggression seems to be totally located there, but in fact, aggression is.

Um, gender neutral. In a way it's age neutral. It is absolutely human aggression, just is including more destructive, violent forms of aggression and aggression that might be utilized to become more constructive. I mean, constructive aggression we might term differently. Other people might call it passion.

Other people might call it vu. You know, kind of what you need to drive yourself forward to kind of achieve things. [01:07:00] Um, a more kind of positive aggression. And I think that that is a concept. I, I don't think the culture is completely divorced from it. I mean, I, I don't know if you've come across a, there's a analyst who's really well known, called Josh Cohen as well, so he's, he's published a, a number of books on, I think Grant.

I think one was on Penguin. I. The most recent book he published this year was called Anger. And it really looks at this current cult cultural situation we have of everyone so angry and everybody has a grievance and stuff and, and thinks about that, but he talks about the importance of a kind of positive, um, aggression as well.

So that's quite a good book I'd recommend. Yes. And my, my last grievance about adolescence, which I wanted to mention is that, of course a fictional show can contain truth, but it doesn't mean we should respond to it like it's a documentary or a research paper. So when I, you know, when you hear that, oh, we're gonna show it to [01:08:00] everyone in school, it's gonna be directly influenced government policy.

I kind of do see that as a problem. Saving private Ryan contains a lot of truth about World War ii, but you wouldn't. Go to Saving Private Ryan to try and inform your policy about how to prevent a World War. You need something a little bit more substantial and a bit more objective. So there's this way that 'cause fictional dramas can evoke so much emotions and it can be so compelling and also contain some truth that perhaps they're better at motivating action.

Then the less sexy, less glamorous things like sociology papers, psychology papers, which is probably, I think what we should be paying attention to actual research in terms of how we influence government policy. And I think that that would probably be a bit of, of a better step forward. So, in fact, a new app idea we can create after this program is a Netflix for sociology and research papers.

So I'm, I'm only being, you know, not totally childish, [01:09:00] but you know, if you've ever done research before, you know how much effort it takes to actually do the research, carry it out, and then. The, the kind of horrible reality at the end of it, that likely maybe 50 to a hundred people are ever going to see that research and be immediate kind of few years and stuff compared, you know, to the mammoth reach of a program like adolescents, for example.

So, I, I think it, it is a, uh, uh, a reflection of what we kind of celebrate and emphasize as a culture. We do celebrate exposure. We celebrate and we celebrate fame, but we don't tend to celebrate as much sort of quiet, hard work, I think. But quiet hard work doesn't really call attention to itself too.

Mm-hmm. So maybe it needs its own Netflix, probably shout out to all the quiet hard workers out there. Alan, thank you so much for joining me today. We're out of time. It's been a pleasure to speak with you and would be glad to have you back at some point in the future. You too, Alex. Always good fun, lovely [01:10:00] chatting.