The film follows Kenzo Okuzaki, a man in his 60s who had served – and been taken as a prisoner of war – in the Japanese Imperial Army’s New Guinea campaign during World War II. During ten years of solitary confinement, served for a murder he committed in the 1950s, Okuzaki developed an anarchist and anti-monarchist politics, and after his release became fixated on righting what he saw as the wrongs of the empire.

His methods were unorthodox to say the least. On one occasion he fired pinballs at the Emperor, on another distributed pornographic cartoons; both carried 18-month long prison sentences. By the time the documentary was filmed in the 1980s, Okuzaki was well-known to authorities for his anti-imperial efforts, his florid public speaking, and his equally bombastic vehicle, emblazoned with anti-monarchy slogans. So Okuzaki is a compelling character from the off – but the events of the documentary become harder and harder to believe.

Ostensibly, Okuzaki’s aim is to find out what happened to two men during the New Guinea campaign, both of whom had met with unexplained deaths just after the end of the war. To do this he tracks down former soliders potentially implicated in these deaths and, in short, starts physically and verbally abusing them. Turning up unannounced to the homes of these now-elderly men, Okuzaki shouts, interrogates, physically restrains, punches and kicks, all in the name of getting the truth. I won’t ruin the film for anyone who might watch it, but in the end he uncovers some deeply disturbing things about cannibalism during the war.

It’s extraordinary to watch on its own terms, as you can imagine. But what stayed with me wasn’t so much the extremity of Okuzaki’s methods, or even the fragments of truth he manages to extract. It was something much more basic: his insistence that what happened must be said.

The questions this raises are difficult to answer. What does it mean to formulate something in language? Does it make the unbearable bearable? What changes, tangibly, when one speaks? Okuzaki seems to operate on the assumption that speech is inherently transformative, that if the truth can be spoken aloud something will shift – personally, morally, politically, or ontologically. But the film doesn’t quite bear this out. What we see instead is something much more ambiguous, that doesn’t and can’t really resolve itself.

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As someone in psychoanalytic training and treatment, I also, quite obviously, put a lot of stock in language. Psychoanalysis, of course, is sometimes referred to as ‘the talking cure’ and is founded on the basic tenet that words have a great deal of power: “nothing”, Freud writes, “takes place in a psycho-analytic treatment but an interchange of words between the patient and the analyst.” He continues:

Words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power. By words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair, by words the teacher conveys his knowledge to his pupils, by words the orator carries his audience with him and determines their judgements and decisions. Words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men.2

The interjection of the analyst – an intervention necessarily made in language – is also key to analytic technique, offering either a disjuncture in the patient’s chain of associations or a way of bringing something to the fore that had previously remained out of reach. But this – nor the speech of the analysand – is not a matter of simply translating experience cleanly into words.

Rather, speech is complicated by the unconscious. What is said is never coterminous with what is meant, hence the presence of slips, detours, and repetitions. So speaking does not produce clarity so much as a gap between what is said and what can be heard (by you or by others). It is this gap that keeps something in motion, returning us to the same material again and again.

There is certainly something to be found in this repetition – perhaps something that can only be found here. Many of us will have had the experience of circling around the same thing week after week, boring ourselves – and maybe, in our transferential fantasy, our therapist – to death. Then, suddenly, you hear your words in a completely different way.

What changes is not that something has been spoken again, but how it is heard, a renewed relation to our words that has less to do with mastery over language and more to do with its capacity to unsettle us, to return as something slightly alien.

But this has its limitations too. Though we might hope that a reorientation to our experiences leads to lasting change, that isn’t always the case. You might also have had the experience of hearing your words in an altered context and immediately forgetting this has happened – of having a revelatory ‘lightbulb moment’ in a session that then slips away again, subsumed into your daily re-enactments and repetitions. As Marcus Coelen and Jameison Webster put it, the unconscious “is not translatable away; it is an infernal machine where everything returns and nothing is simply in the past.” This certainly complicates the idea that simply ‘speaking the truth’ is enough alone to transform our world.

So, back to Okuzaki and his mission to speak the unspeakable. His confrontational approach to naming everything forces the unmetabolised into speech – a rupture that, much like the psychoanalytic speech act, has the potential to change the way that suffering circulates bodily and socially. Speech might open the possibility of true mourning, for example, or even redistribute guilt and responsibility away from individuals and across the culture.

But nothing does seem to change, and suffering stays in place. Okuzaki positions his relentless pursuit of former Imperial Army officers as a form of closure, but really he’s engaged in obsessive repetition compulsion, re-enacting the intense trauma of war in each of his interrogations. The past is not worked through so much as staged again and again – understandably so, considering the profound violence he’s is confronting.

What the film suggests, then, is not so much that speech is ineffective, but that its effects can be limited. Words do something — provoke, unsettle, expose, redistribute affect — but do not, in themselves, guarantee transformation. What Okuzaki needs is not just for the truth to be spoken, but for it to take hold somewhere, to register beyond the level of individual confession.

And here the limits of his project become clear. The problem is not only that the truth has been suppressed, but that it is housed within structures that have no real incentive to transform in response to it. The violence he uncovers is not incidental but systemic, produced by military command and imperial ideology – but his method addresses it at the level of individual culpability. Those he confronts do speak, in the end, and perhaps something shifts for them in this, perhaps what has been repressed returns in some way. But the structures that organised mass death, starvation, and violence remain intact. They are uninterrogated and unaddressed except on the level of the symbolic.

In this sense, the film stages a kind of impasse. If psychoanalysis shows us that speaking doesn’t automatically resolve suffering at the level of the individual, Okuzaki’s project suggests something similar at the level of the social. Truth-telling, on its own, doesn’t guarantee transformation. For something to shift, speech has to be taken up, circulated, and acted upon within a broader field — psychically or socially.

So what the film brings up is not confined to postwar Japan, but names a more general problem: a disjuncture between speech and transformation. Writing about the film reminded me of speaking out about violence and genocide in the present moment: an urgency – a moral imperative – to name what is happening in Gaza, for example, that sits alongside the knowledge that recognition alone won’t interrupt it, that our words may not only go unheard but could also be distorted and used against us. It’s a deeply disturbing experience; enough to drive you mad. We speak and speak and the world stays the same.

Again, this doesn’t mean that speech is meaningless. In so many capacities — global, local, interrelational, personal — we have a duty to speak, for ourselves and for others. But speech does not act on the world in a direct or guaranteed way. It opens something up rather than resolving it.

So perhaps the question is not whether speech is enough, but what words can attach themselves to. What forms of collective uptake, what radical shift in institutions, what material conditions might allow speech to have real consequences. Without that, speech risks becoming another form of repetition: a way of returning, again and again, to the site of trauma without addressing the conditions that produced it in the first place.

Janet Malcolm may well agree: dwelling on the question, my mind immediately turned to a passage in Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. Discussing transference, she argues that the concept “at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other.”

We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. “Only connect,” E.M. Forster proposed. “Only we can’t,” the psychoanalyst knows.

Wry as this may be, it doesn’t feel too hopeful. We reach across a vast lacuna and are met with… who, or what? Ourselves? Our projections? A ghost? Even worse – our mother?

The question also reminded me of a recent discussion with my comrades in Red Therapy about how psychoanalysis can make one feel, how finally lying on the couch can make things worse, not better. During this conversation someone described psychoanalysis as a ‘feel-bad modality’, and it’s stuck in my head ever since. We might have a fantasy of a therapeutic relationship of universal positive regard, self-actualisation, and total emotional security, which helps us clearly understand what it is we want, exactly. But where the unconscious is concerned all bets are off: nothing is settled, nothing is guaranteed, and we’ll probably never be satisfied. If you want to leave every session feeling warm and fuzzy, psychoanalysis is probably not for you.

Psychoanalysis shouldn’t always be romantic, mostly isn’t, and to look at it only through this lens would obviously be a category error. But the lack of security my comrade identified in her ‘feel-bad’ moniker may, in fact, be exactly where psychoanalysis has a sense of romance.

In Tales of Love, Julia Kristeva describes romantic love as “a disconcerting dynamic… and at the same time the supreme guarantee of renewal.” What better way to understand the process of being analysed, too? Frustration is important, I think, and in both romantic love and psychoanalysis we are drawn toward someone (or something) that always exceeds us, promising satisfaction but never delivering it fully.

Again, this might not sound romantic, at least in the traditional sense. But is this not at the root of some of the wildest, most passionate feelings one can experience? The most ardent devotion both stirred and sustained by your inability to get quite enough of the other person, that more, more, more feeling you get when you see your lover’s face. You’re never really able to look hard or long enough; something always escapes your grasp. Here, the idea of lack feels less unromantic than it does generative, keeping you bound to something that remains partially impossible and always leaving you wanting (needing?) more.

Kristeva’s descriptions are perhaps more in line with my understanding of psychoanalysis and its relation to love than Malcolm’s, then. If love, as she writes, is “a crucible of contradictions and misunderstandings – [and] at the same time infinity of meaning,” we might consider analysis in the same way, a time and space where meaning can condense but still elude us, where the very instability of the process becomes the precise conditions for transformation.

This is at the heart of what really works about psychoanalysis, the thing that gives you a deepened, prolonged, or renewed sense of your own aliveness. After all, what is analysis “if not an infinite quest for rebirth through the experience of love… set up at the heart of the analysand’s life as a condition for his perpetual renewal, his non-death?” (Kristeva again).

In other words, psychoanalysis is not about closure or finality, about ‘reaching’ some destination or answer, but about returning again and again to desire, each time anew, each time revealing something surprising – and always partial.

Love, in kind, is truly sustained not by our phantasmic proclamations that we belong totally to the other, but by what remains impossible or intangible: the thing that drives you to keep reaching, always reaching, knowing a remnant of the other will remain elusive but staying with it anyway. What could be more romantic than that?

On the theme of romance, some things I’ve enjoyed over the last few months:

• Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole. Some desperately romantic images in this bleak drama slash camp musical: the man upstairs reaching his leg through a hole in the ceiling; his hammering to widen it; his pissing in the sink so as not to make the bathroom of the woman downstairs leak; the second to last shot, of his arm reaching down for her. Gorgeous!

• Jonathan Demme’s Who Am I This Time?, a cinematic omen reminding me that love is, in fact, real.

• Clare Denis’ Friday Night, which I saw as part of Hope Rangaswami’s brilliant Strange Encounters series and was a favourite first-time watch of 2025 – a beautiful, tactile film which really elegantly plays with fantasy and meaning in love and sex.

• This Sugarcubes song.

• Julia Kristeva’s Tales of Love, which as I note above is full of gorgeous poetic and philosophical reflections on love, sex, psychoanalysis, ambivalence, ancient history, and more.

• This random piece of graffiti I saw in Russell Square:

As my psychoanalytic training progresses and I juggle it with work and life, I have slightly less time for this Substack. Joining as a paid subscriber would really help me fund my training – thank you to everyone who already pays, and to those who read it at all!

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We are all very concerned with what the Other means. We are all very concerned with what we mean — how someone else might interpret or understand what it is that we’ve said. This desire to know ourselves and one another is foundational, the thing that drives us to therapy, politics, romance, sex, art, body modification, to our careers. We all have something to say and we all have our own ways of trying to say it. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes our failures are catastrophic.

This is perhaps why many of us are so drawn to particular codes to make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and others, and others intelligible to us. Here I’m thinking largely about attachments to labels which neatly explain our relational or emotional experiences, or which totalise our encounter with somebody else.

The casually sweeping statements you see on social media about attachment styles, for example, can seep very quickly into one’s own understanding of the world: without due attention it can be tantalisingly easy to write someone off simply as “an avoidant” to avoid, yourself, thinking about how your own conscious and unconscious wishes, desires, and demands could also have structured the relationship or the other person’s response to you.

As Lee Edelman puts it in Sex, Or the Unbearable2, “to encounter another is to have to confront our otherness to ourselves”; placing a label on someone puts their behaviour (and by extension our own) firmly into the realm of the conscious, communication into a space that is controllable and knowable, that we have sovereignty over. Thus we never have to confront how strange we are to others and least of all to ourselves.

It’s this last part I find particularly interesting: what we think we mean when we speak and what we actually mean, and how that illogical muddle is transmitted to or understood by others. Having spent some time thinking about my creative practice recently, it strikes me that making art can fall into this category too.

We often think of writing, for example, as a channel through which we can express the inexpressible. I recently read Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease and was struck by her experience of creating in this context: for her, writing is not merely a conduit for the unconscious but is the unconscious itself: “when we write the noise is distilled and alchemised, and the self can find a way out.”

This sounds, at least to me, quite an appealing prospect. Liberating. Yet fearing the response our work might get from others, or fearing what it could reveal, may lead to an entirely different kind of artistic practice. Instead, we might use language in an attempt to master our desires and drives, or be using it, consciously or not, to control and conceal real meaning rather than express it. We may be wilfully ignoring that the unconscious makes knowledge about our own work partial and unstable anyway.

And this could extend to the interpersonal too. To use one example, it might feel as if we’re anxious about perfectly wording a text message for fear that our 'actual’ meaning will be misunderstood by the recipient ("I don’t want them to read into it”). But what if the exact opposite is true? What if there is a deeper anxiety, rooted in the fear that your ‘actual meaning’ has been concealed from you, that you have transmitted an unconscious desire or demand you’ve failed to understand yourself — that what you have ‘wrongly’ transmitted is not misleading but true? That you may, in fact, have said exactly what you meant without knowing you meant it?

This could be an impossible knot to untangle: if we follow the basic psychoanalytic tenet that we can’t always know our real motivations or meanings, then we also can’t really know exactly how we are being (mis)understood, nor how to easily reveal those meanings to ourselves.

Yet striving towards more and more preciseness doesn’t seem like the answer here. True intersubjectivity is agonising and unruly; so, too, can be the process of making art. I wonder if it might be worth dwelling less on the anxiety of misunderstanding or misrecognition, trying to approach such things with more fearlessness and seeing them instead as generative or an opportunity for different kinds of understanding.

The real challenge here may not be to pre-emptively resolve misunderstanding but to stay with it, trying to notice what comes up in the slips between intention and transmission and to take this not as a threat but as a site of possibility. The prospect brings me back to my dream: expression always hovering between creation and demolition, a reminder that ambivalence is at the heart of speaking, relating, and making.

This could even be seen as an active orientation towards both interrelation and creativity, a space where we can allow ourselves to be surprised and maybe even excited about what we could learn about ourselves through miscommunication or misapprehension. Of course in doing so we lose some control. But that too may place us somewhere we can come to better understand our aliveness and our interdependence, our inexhaustible need for each other and our inexhaustible strangeness to ourselves.

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It may seem somewhat semantic, but I much prefer the sense that psychotherapy is containing, rather than safe; that it can contain distress or madness without always soothing them, and can instead hold something really quite unsettling. That it can create or allow for a space that disturbs and disrupts one’s psychic and social life in meaningful, tangible ways. Too much reliance on ‘safety’ seems, to me, defensive; a fantasy of stasis trying to protect us from the profoundly anxiety-inducing yet unavoidable fact that true psychic movement, and true relation to another person, requires not only tolerating danger, disorganisation, and pain but really feeling it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently for various reasons. First is my own psychoanalysis, which in material and emotional senses is utterly disruptive yet has set things in motion for me in astonishing ways, as well as my first tentative steps towards developing a therapeutic practice. I’ve also been reflecting on various encounters in my life that have been equally anguishing and generative, confronting me with a visceral sense of what it can mean to withstand emotional disarray.

More broadly, I’ve spent many hours over the last few years thinking about psychoanalysis as an institution and its (sometimes completely repulsive) response to atrocities like the genocide in Gaza and the rolling back of trans rights in the UK and elsewhere, and have also been inspired by a piece written by my friend and comrade Sophie on her own Substack about the idea of ‘nervous system regulation’, the current apex of good mental health and wellbeing if social media is anything to go by.

It’s also struck me recently that our dysfunctional attachments to certain social and political institutions — the state, the clinic, or the nuclear family — can themselves be structured around safety. You stay safe, sane, or included, but only through extreme disavowal, and only with strict compliance with the rules. Unresolved (or unresolvable) pain, deviance, contradiction, hate, or ambivalence have to be regulated, or one is cast out or must choose to break free themselves.

In each of these spheres, in very different ways and with very different things at stake, there is a sense of inherent ‘disregulation’. Un-safety, challenge, rupture. Things that feel difficult or impossible to bear, or that we might want to avoid in the name of feeling safer or more ‘regulated’. Yet while this avoidance may appear to give us a happier, easier life, I believe it to be a catastrophic move for us both as individuals and as political subjects.

To remain with one’s own suffering and disregulation, for example, could be a path to also accepting real fragility, desire, cruelty, longing, and shame, and to truly embodying a profound sense of aliveness that can only be accessed through bearing both pleasure and pain. To remain attentive to this in relation to others can make relationships deeper and more expansive, but more importantly can be seen as an ethical question: being alive to our own defensive manouvers — avoidant, anxious, repressive, sadistic or otherwise — might help us relate to others in ways that cause less harm, or to accept ourselves not only as victims but as actors who can cause harm and thus have the capacity to attempt to repair it too.

More collectively, the question of whether to turn towards or away from rupture can also be ethical. To focus on psychoanalysis for a moment, many institutions and practitioners have, in the last year, decidedly turned away from disregulating the field, refusing to even name what is going on in Palestine let alone stand against it, instead calling vaguely and limply for the capacity to be uncertain or ambivalent. This is a clear and unforgivable moral failure: psychoanalysis stays safe, but at what cost, and to who?

As individuals, witnessing and truly facing what goes on in the world, and accepting the necessary distress that comes with this, should compel us not just to turn inwards to attend to our own pain but to work with and for one another to give that world a new and different shape. Refusing our desire to avoid disturbance leaves us with one only feasible option: to act.

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This is not, obviously, a call to feel unsafe in ways that are genuinely dangerous to one’s ability to cope, nor to put oneself into situations that are emotionally or physically unbearable. Nor is it a veneration of suffering in and of itself — sometimes misery, or at least staying too long in it, teaches us basically nothing.

But I was very moved by Sophie’s questions. “What survives in us, what can we tolerate surviving in us — and then, what do we survive for? If we are going to suffer, what must we, do we want to, suffer for?”

How we respond to suffering — our own or others’ — is never static. But I do feel strongly that we should always be striving to attend to our capacity for, and experiences of, pain, anxiety, and uncertainty; that suffering and pleasure are always in dialogue with one another; that being alive to such things can make us more likely to act; and that when we survive, when we suffer, we must do so not just for ourselves but for one another.

Recently my dreams have started sprawling in strange unexpected directions, so frenzied and detailed that a friend remarked that they needed a script editor in order to be interpreted. Despite this, I dream about the same five or six people on repeat, positioned slightly differently in various configurations that are nonetheless written through with strikingly similar themes. One of these themes is screens.

It started with a dream where texts from my best friend to a woman he was seeing were projected onto the departures board at an airport. Everyone else in the terminal could also see them, though I knew at least that she couldn’t. Scale felt important – that the messages were arriving on one screen, small and private in her hand, and were then blown up to mass proportion, for mass consumption.

In another I found myself at a stall selling bric-a-brac, the centrepiece of which was what I recognised as a camera. By any reasonable measure it looked nothing like one: a stout, grey, plastic block with an arm like a slot machine and no perceptible lens, propped up by two milk jugs. It was filming though, I could see – dreamy footage, Super 8. To film you pulled down the arm, arcade style, hoping that what came out would please you.

And it did please me: I could see myself on a nearby television screen, looking so beautiful I barely recognised myself. I asked the stallholder if I could buy it, needing so much to possess this image of myself. But it was too expensive — and besides, she informed me, I’d already asked that “She”, a non-present non-figure, didn’t find out about my purchases.

Screens of all kinds pop up elsewhere, in passing: missed (mixed?) messages from a lover; blue dots on a map informing me of someone’s location as they barrel away from me; the wrong film projected onto a badly angled, unwatchable cinema screen or the right film onto walls in rooms too brightly lit to see; atrocities and accidents witnessed through windows I can’t move past or through.

Screens have a strong resonance for me, most directly via my personal life which in all domains is littered with people who work in film or make them. I also have my own intellectual, aesthetic, ideological and emotional attachments to cinema as a form – and, in more quotidian ways, spend the vast majority of my day looking at a screen of some kind. One of the most reliable ways I lose grip of my dreams, in fact, is looking at my phone the moment I wake up, though the very reason I often reach for it so quickly in the morning is also to satisfy a desire of some kind.

I’ve also recently (re-)watched several Michael Haneke films with their own preoccupation with screens: Code Unknown, Benny’s Video, and Caché. Each, in their own way and to different extents, is interested in what happens when subjectivity and intersubjectivity are mediated through a screen: a window, the lens of a camera, on a tape.

Caché largely revolves around a set of mysterious videotapes received by bourgeois couple Anne and Georges in the mail. Some depict their home, others the house Georges grew up in. It’s not clear who sent them, though they trigger memories from Georges’ childhood that he desperately wishes to remain hidden.

Rewatching it last week, I was struck by how, as in my dreams, screens act both as a form of knowledge, expression or communication – a bubbling-up of repressed material from the unconscious – and as a barrier to this. Whether the illegible cinema screens of my dreams or the mysterious footage of the bourgeois family home in Caché, screens are an invitation to engage with fragmented and displaced traumatic content – an invitation that nonetheless cannot or will not be taken up.

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In the case of my dreams, this is because the unconscious is fundamentally illegible – I can only interpret its signals and slips consciously, with language, which as I’ve written before is insufficient. If you read them not as dreams-as-activity but dreams-as-text, there are still restrictions to my taking-up of screened content – the camera which would reveal me to be beautiful but that is too expensive to buy, the message received on one app I could somehow only respond to on another and that would therefore never actually be replied to.

In Caché, this lack of engagement is more to do with Georges’ interpellation as a colonising subject, compelled to repeat the sins of his father through a repression and disavowal inherently structured by a supremacist psychic order. There is no way Georges could ever accept the real meaning of the tapes, because to do so would be to acknowledge his ongoing complicity in institutional violence, a truth so violent in itself, for his own subjectivity, that it is unbearable, indigestible. His psyche refuses to free itself from the historical-material conditions of its formation, which the screen reveals but cannot alter.

Though less of a political reading, I’m reminded also of The Piano Teacher, how Erika’s incessant engagement with screens of different sorts keeps her desire alive but unsatisfied at the same time, whether she’s peeping through the window of a car at a drive-in at a couple having sex or watching porn in a coin-operated booth. The repressed material is there, seemingly within one’s reach. But its stark presentation – and the risk that one’s desires, memories, and transgressions have really been made legible to the other – make it impossible not to disavow in one way or another.

In all three cases, screens are fraught. They present material but distort it, invite you in but keep you distant at the same time; they are sites of desire, love, loss, violence, yearning, perversion, anguish, and despair. In my dreams, as in film, we look to screens – seductive, slippery, withholding, repetitive – both to understand something and delay understanding just a bit longer.

This started preoccupying me a few months ago, when I was roped in to prune a friend’s likes on a few different dating apps. I was surprised how big a role knowing seemed to play in people’s desires, how strongly they emphasised a need to meet someone who “knows what they want” whether in a relationship or in their life more broadly.

Some apps actively encourage this kind of categorisation. On Feeld, you’re asked to list all the things you like under the heading ‘Desires’, and this is often extended to bios too. You’ll come across someone with a long list of the things they like to do or have done to them, sometimes written in florid erotic fiction-style prose, sometimes in what to me feels like a pretty dispassionate and disembodied shopping list of sorts.

More and more ubiquitous seemed to be the inclusion in a person’s profile of the results of a ‘BDSM test’, which quantifies exactly what percentage they are dominant, submissive, sadistic, and so on, as if it wouldn’t be totally nonsensical to communicate to someone that you’re “47% voyeuristic”. Messages often opened with “what do you like?”; “I don’t know” or “it depends” apparently aren’t acceptable answers.

The basis of one’s erotic life is not, of course, the way one chooses to describe oneself on an app or what percentage exhibitionist a website says you are. But the ways in which we talk about desire, and the categories with which we identify, do inscribe themselves in all kinds of different ways, and I worry that a focus on absolutely knowing for oneself rather than on working out together might be restricting us in ways we can’t quite comprehend. I always liked the line from Lacan that we have to stay ignorant because it helps us conceive of, rather than foreclose, things (“when we know something, we are already not conceiving anything any longer”) and from Deleuze on the act of writing, that it represents something “always in the midst of being formed”. Both resonate with me when thinking about desire.

This also feels not-unrelated to the increasing reliance on ChatGPT not just to write emails or plan projects but to analyse text messages in an attempt to intuit the meaning of something a lover has said. You can, if you like, upload dozens of text messages between you and someone you desire and get ChatGPT to tell you what it means (although what it actually does is tell you what it thinks you want it to mean).

But the act of uploading and close reading your texts like this ignores two key things, among others: intersubjectivity, which can only be experienced relationally and can’t ever be translated into words, particularly via WhatsApp; and the unavoidable fact that people often don’t know what they’re saying when they say things. It creates a vision of an object that is controllable, knowable, and thus non-existent, unable to ever be related to fully.

I understand the instinct: it can be deeply anxiety-inducing to not be able to intuit someone’s meaning in a moment of rupture, crisis, or ecstasy. But, via text or in person, an unsettling encounter with the strangeness of another can’t ever be ameliorated by an unproblematised attempt at knowing because the shared fantasies, mutual projections, and intangible reveries that emerge between two people can neither be fully controlled by either party nor ever grasped in their entirety.

Obviously there are things people like and don’t like, know and don’t know, and I wouldn’t want to diminish that: there’s nothing wrong with knowing the kinds of relational engagement you’re interested in at a particular moment or what you want with a particular person. There are certainly things in all areas of relational life that feel definitive; qualities someone is drawn to, consciously or unconsciously; actions or words or forms of relation that they definitely like or don’t like with one person or another.

It’s just that I often long for a bit more space and time to not know things and for that to be okay. To keep moving into uncertain spaces and hope that it isn’t paralysing or destructive but fertile and yielding and generative too. That our desires can float between and around, away from and towards one another, always on the brink of being conceived, always in the midst of being formed.

My initial interpretation of the dream was something close to straightforwardly sexual, a repressed or sublimated desire for physical or emotional connection that exceeded the therapeutic relationship – or that it wasn’t really about my analyst at all, that it was a condensation of disparate anxieties about sex, men, speech, truth, and so on. Now, three years after that (real) analyst actually did try to escalate our relationship – through gifts, inappropriate self-disclosures, and eventually plain advances – I see it more as a warning sign that something was being put inside of me that I didn’t want. You never go to therapy an empty vessel, but there’s always space for things to be poured in.

The dream, and the idea of contamination by the therapist, returned to me recently after reading three stories of madness written by patients. The first is Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness, co-written by Mary Barnes and her therapist Joseph Berke. The book explores the time she spent at the radical therapeutic community Kingsley Hall with Berke, R.D. Laing, David Cooper and others, as well as her eventual emergence as a painter, writer and mental health activist.

The experience of staying at Kingsley Hall, and of being able to go mad on her own terms, was clearly of extreme importance to Barnes, and the work she did with Laing and with Berke in particular life-saving. And, within the text, there are clear disagreements between the two that complicate accounts of Barnes’ madness and its treatment and that give a sense of her own mind.

But there’s also a feeling that her sense of her own psychic break has been intensely shaped by Laing – madness as odyssey of the soul, moving from disintegration to wholeness via a fractured, incomprehensible, yet essentially spiritual and revealing experience of the self and the world.

Most troubling for me, though, was a passage in which Barnes talks of her brother, who also had a diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia’. She describes what most would plainly call an attempted rape but digests it differently, the language distinctly psychoanalytic. In fact, she puts the blame on herself, saying she had been “unaware [she] was seducing and castrating” her brother, essentially freeing him from responsibility for sexual violence. Considering Berke’s stance is itself psychoanalytic, this feels like a troubling introjection into Barnes’ understanding of herself, her madness, and the madness of others, and more importantly a disavowal or dismissal of very real violence she experienced.

An even more extreme account of a therapeutic relationship is Sarah Ferguson’s book A Guard Within1. It’s a slim book, only 173 pages, but turn to basically any of them and you’ll find an almost terrifyingly intense sentiment directed towards her analyst, who had died during her treatment and left her grief-stricken. You’d be forgiven for thinking the book was written about a lover, such is the ardour of her words: "never had I been so relieved and happy to be with you in your room again… the room nothing and nobody, however passionately I may love, can detach and take away from me”.

Again, her account of herself is inextricable from her analyst’s; his understanding is totally central, she’s lost without it. When he dies it doesn’t just represent a (very real and traumatic) break in transferential love, but a total psychic collapse; the absence of his voice completely destabilises her sense of self and reality.

A counterpoint is Barbara O’Brien’s Operators and Things, from 1958. The book is a first-person account of what some might call a psychotic break, in which O’Brien begins to feel controlled by “Operators” – disembodied figures who control her thoughts, choices, and movements. She becomes a “Thing”, a passive vessel through which Operators act.

Despite being quite literally psychically penetrated by external forces in the shape of Operators, O’Brien is able to resist similar contamination by a therapist – in fact, she makes fun of an analyst’s (admittedly terrible-sounding) attempts to cure her:

We discussed my sex life. It was not sufficiently full. I asked the analyst how full a sufficiently full sex life would have to be, and the analyst waved a hand airily. “You should have had a hundred and twenty-five affairs by this time.” The number seemed staggering and I tried to calculate one hundred and twenty-five on a yearly basis but the dry beach was unable to cope with arithmetic.

“Even so,” the analyst told me, “you might still find yourself now with emotional problems. American men are very poor lovers.” It occurred to me vaguely that with a hundred and twenty-five of them in my past, poor lovers or otherwise, I might well have emotional problems.

Theoretically, I actually find O’Brien’s psychological framework of recovery pretty unconvincing. Yet in her own way she retains a different kind of psychic sovereignty than Barnes or Ferguson seem to in their accounts of their madness, purely by dint of refusing to internalise the voice of an all-knowing other.

What happens between a therapist and their patient is obviously intimate, and like any intimate relation that means you have had a real and meaningful effect on the other. For the patient, the therapist becomes an object you internalise as well as (if not far more than) the living breathing person who hopes, dreams, has sex, argues, cries and sleeps outside of your sessions.

In this way, much like being in love, they are always somewhat in/with you - which came out in a slip I made the other day to friends when, describing enjoyment of the therapy I’m in at the moment, I said “I love with him” rather than just “I love him”. But you’re not the same person; they shouldn’t colonise you. The analyst I dreamed about, in his violent crossing of boundaries, put something more insidious inside me – not only in my sleep but also more consciously as a preoccupation in my current analysis, an obstruction in my ability to speak about what happened.

To me, reflecting on these accounts and on my own experience of psychic penetration, what is important is that the (un)intended intrusions of the analyst can be resisted, or their intrepretations gently refused. That you know, even if painful, separation can happen – whether through the end of the analysis, through death, or like Barbara O’Brien through simply making fun, holding what happens between you lightly as well as closely. That, like being in love, you are often with each other, sometimes in each other, but never totally of each other.

You can find second-hand copies of the books I reference by searching the following:

• Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness, by Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke

• A Guard Within by Sarah Ferguson

The final book, Operators and Things by Barbara O’Brien, can be read here.

Thank you to Charlotte for recommending ‘A Guard Inside’ and Ant for ‘Operators and Things’.

In different ways, their work positions imagination as a tool for collectively naming and attempting to claim new realities: engaging in the act of imagination is often a solitary act, but its radical potential blooms when we think together, as the prefigurative work of prison and psychiatric abolitionists has shown us. I also started thinking about how we might use dreaming in this context.

In one sense, our dreams are not political. Regardless of their content, they’re unlikely to inspire actual political activity – they’re ephemeral, sometimes appear nonsensical, and are laden with so much incredibly personal meaning it seems hard to imagine they could have much shared value. This is partly why some people find hearing about others’ dreams so boring – what to me might feel like a very powerful expression of anxiety about how someone sees me to you just sounds like a needlessly elaborate story about a camera with no lens.

Yet some have seen a more collective potential in dreaming, suggesting that, when taken together, dreams might say something profound about the relationship between our internal and external experiences.

The idea of social dreaming has its roots in a 1966 book by German journalist Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, which contains hundreds of dreams gathered from people living in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. The dreams, many of which are extremely disturbing, contain both latent and manifest content about the political landscape. Explicitly or implicitly expressed, the symbols, slogans and ideology of the Nazi regime had clearly forced their way violently into people’s psyches.

Some dreams prefigured violence that was to come, while others ceased to contain much at all. One man told Beradt he could no longer dream about “anything but rectangles, triangles, and octagons”, someone else “it was forbidden to dream, but I did anyway”. The dreamers, Beradt said, could not exercise their will when they were awake or asleep: even their dreams were being “dictated to them by dictatorship”. It goes without saying that we don’t need a collection of dreams to elucidate the violence of the Nazis, but they do add a distinct emotional texture to our understanding of that world and the fear and horror of living in it.

My own contact with social dreaming first came during lockdown, when I was invited to take part in a group on Zoom. The format was simple and open: someone started by sharing a dream, then invited others to free associate. The point, as with Beradt’s project though with much lower stakes, was to collect a set of unconsciously-driven psychic experiences that might tell us something about the affective qualities of our society and what it’s like to live in.

In order to do this, it was crucial we didn’t interpret the dreams, as one might in analysis or with a friend. Personal readings were subordinate to a wider, social sense-making: what a repeated image might reflect about our shared material conditions. Anxiety around housing was universal in the group because we were all low-paid and renting, and we stumbled across this theme a lot, sometimes finding it had expressed itself through oblique but clearly meaningful symbols. As it was lockdown, there were lots of dreams that touched on freedom; three separate people dreamed they had found themselves in the bodies of animals, foxes wandering around London coming into liberal contact with dirt and grime and rubbish, yet surviving.

Dreaming is not the same as imagining because, as Beradt put it, it is beyond our will. It’s not directive: you can’t get into bed and simply decide that this evening you’re going to have a dream prefiguring new ways of thinking about madness. Imagining is a practice which largely uses the conscious mind; dreaming is not. This clearly limits its potential use in a political setting.

But, as with actively taking time to imagine together, I believe there could be something valuable in social dreaming, cultivating as it does an acute attentiveness to the mutual anxieties, fears, joys, and pleasures of our unconscious minds that are also inextricable from our tangible being-in-the-world. This isn’t a Jungian notion of a collective unconscious, to be clear, but a social unconscious, helping us articulate the emotional resonance of the psychic content circulating between and among us.

I discovered while writing this piece that social dreaming is now sometimes used in organisations to “help firms identify unconscious barriers to success”, which suggests engaging in the practice isn’t enough on its own, and that sustained effort has to be paid to creating a shared political or social vision at the outset. (It also made me laugh, thinking about sharing my completely insane dreams with serious-looking colleagues in a meeting room in order to maximise shareholder value.)

Indeed, the idea of using social dreaming in this way feels antithetical to the way I experienced it in my group, where it was creative, an active practice of playfulness and connection. Because we were all Marxists we were, I suppose, relating to the material (and each other) in a certain way. But it wasn’t for anything in particular, other than to articulate a shared experience of the world and better and more vividly picture the connections we have to one another unconsciously as well as consciously.

Dreams are wild, uncontrollable, sensual, and embodied things; that’s why they can be so thrilling. At their best, dreams open us up to deep feeling and sensation, prompting questions (and not always providing answers) about who we are and how we’re living. I wonder if, shared with one another in an open and intentional way, and taken with a socially rather than personally interpretative lens, dreams might be able to do the same thing for groups interested in the vicissitudes and violence of the social world and the impact it all has on our psyches.

Like imagination, social dreaming invites us to ask what our experiences mean collectively, drawing out those symbols and themes that powerfully speak to what it is to live under capitalism. Just as we imagine different worlds not only for ourselves but for others, maybe we can dream in solidarity too.

• There’s a reason David Lynch is so often referenced when talking about the cinematic language of dreams, and his work is relevant here, too: not political in a didactic sense, but using dreamlike motifs both familiar and strange to create a deeply affecting account of the individual and social impact of sexual violence, the possession and repression of the nuclear family, and so on. Buñuel does this too, though often with a much clearer political aim; still, his work also expresses this using the images of the unconscious and of dreams, which feel surreal, elusive, and totally intimate at the same time.

• You can read all of Charlotte Beradt’s book, The Third Reich of Dreams, online here. I really recommend it, both for the dreams themselves and for her analysis.

• If you’re interested in actually doing some social dreaming, there’s a set of basic guiding principles here, though if used in a political setting I’d probably encourage you to go a little off piste – when me and my comrades in Red Therapy did a social dreaming exercise we didn’t adhere to the suggested layout of the room or lean too heavily on the ‘host’ role. The point isn’t to have conducted a perfect social dreaming matrix but to gain useful material which speaks to your shared political and (inter)personal imaginations.

• I listened to this Cocteau Twins song on repeat while editing this piece, which is very dreamlike and might get you in the mood for opening up the depths of your unconscious mind to your friends, lovers, comrades, and hopefully never your colleagues.

At the end of last year I had a long, sprawling conversation with a very close friend of mine, who makes films, about what it means to put yourself ‘in’ to your work. What’s at stake when you put yourself at its centre; who is it for; is it for anyone; does it matter if the end result is 'good' or 'bad' if it did something for and to you, the artist, if it made something happen. We both agreed these questions were valuable, but not about the best way of actually going about an artistic communication of the self.

As someone who used to write about themselves for a living and subsequently abandoned that career to listen to other people talk, I come at the issue completely allergic to any public sharing of what I consider to be ‘too personal’, seeing it as much more valuable to disperse that kind of material latently rather than manifestly. Every time I'd tried to more bluntly use my personal life, interpersonally or creatively, to get closer to what felt like some truth about myself, I only got further away – and I don't think it was a coincidence that I only seriously got into cinema after I stopped writing about my own life, as a different and perhaps more diffuse way of processing experience.

These questions re-emerged for me when I watched Stories We Tell, a 2012 documentary by Sarah Polley about her mother, Diane. The film features members of Polley’s family and former lovers and friends of her mother sharing their own, sometimes very different, accounts of what had gone on in Diane's life, her secrets and desires. In acknowledging the many overlapping stories that make a person’s life, the film does get at the fundamental idea that there isn’t really much to hold onto when it comes to the existence of one essential truth. But in its attempt to articulate everything, it also reminded me of the position I took when talking to my friend – that over-elaboration can actually be more like a concealment, emotionally speaking.

To share something personal of my own, the process strikes me as not-dissimilar to the many hours I spend in analysis drastically over-interpreting and over-narrativising, turning each faltering attempt at communication with a lover or badly navigated conflict with a friend over and over again like a Rubik’s Cube to find every conceivable angle. As open as that process might appear on the surface, as seemingly undefensive, it mostly reveals nothing; it's a deferral, the process of articulation itself distorting the thing you're apparently trying to describe. (I’m reminded of Erika’s letter in The Piano Teacher, her list of requests and demands – in comprehensively presenting everything she supposes she wants so much, she takes herself further from desire, joy, and the body than ever before.)

This can be deceptively easy to do in psychoanalysis. While its focus on the unconscious does ostensibly require an analysand to be attentive to those irrational parts of themselves they might not have access to or ever hope to understand, analysis is also conducted, to state the obvious, via language, which is necessarily formalised and intelligible and can therefore only ever be insufficient. Pair that with the classic transferential anxiety that one’s analyst will find one uninteresting, incoherent, or dishonest, and the temptation to try to articulate your entire self in a session can be completely overwhelming and ultimately totally frustrating. It can feel like leaving a party with the sense that somehow you haven’t given a full account of yourself, even whilst knowing such a thing is probably impossible – and definitely not actually desirable.

Polley doesn’t ignore this contradiction, remaining open about the fact that her mother’s story is wildly different in each telling and that her own editing process would be part of the same undertaking, an emotionally-inflected selection of narratives that could never be objective. Still, so much is articulated, everyone’s account at least partially presented, that it can keep you away from a sense of something truly real.

At the end of the film, Polley’s half-brother asks her what she actually wants to do with the documentary; what it actually is. This line of questioning is as unanswerably productive in our personal lives as in our creative work. What do we consciously think we’re doing when we try to give an account of ourselves, what are we actually doing, and what do we achieve? Very rarely in my life have the answers to those three questions aligned. Even rarer has laying everything on the table been the way to get there.