香港六合彩精准资料

This year鈥檚 香港六合彩精准资料 Private Practice conference was built around the value of arts and creativity, and the talk I gave was intended to give a flavour of what literature might do to assist the work of psychotherapeutic practice or, as I have myself experienced it, in the ordinary life of becoming a human being.

I鈥檒l begin with the two problems mentioned in my title. The first is put into words by Dr Helen Stokes Lampard, Chair of The National Academy for Social Prescribing: 鈥楪Ps see patients, many of whom are widowed, who have multiple health problems like diabetes, hypertension and depression, but often their main problem isn鈥檛 medical, [it鈥檚 that] they鈥檙e lonely. The guidelines say we should be talking to them about their weight, exercise and prescribing more medication. But really what these patients need is someone to listen to them and to find purpose in life.鈥�^1听Loneliness, social isolation and lack of purpose are life problems for many of us and the solution proposed by Dr Lampard sounds simple: 鈥樷��what these patients really need is someone to listen to them and to find purpose in life鈥�.¹

The second problem is given voice by psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion: 鈥業f a person cannot 鈥渢hink鈥� with his thoughts, that is to say that he has thoughts but lacks the apparatus of 鈥渢hinking鈥� which enables him to use his thoughts, to think them as it were, then the personality is incapable of learning from experience. This failure is serious. Failure to eat, drink or breathe properly has disastrous consequences for life itself. Failure to use emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality.鈥�²

There is a relationship between the two problems sketched above: they represent points on a continuum of human being, of human suffering. There is an everyday, widespread, social loneliness, which may include lack of human purpose for many. And, for some of us, there is a deeper problem, that 鈥榝ailure to learn from emotional experience鈥�, which becomes what Bion calls 鈥榓 disaster in the development of the personality鈥�.^2听They are connected, it seems to me, by Bion鈥檚 idea that we humans need to learn to 鈥榰se鈥� our thoughts. We need, in other words, to develop the ability to consciously know what our lives mean.

I had the experience, but missed the meaning

Like many people who have had difficult childhoods, I am a person who might have struggled with learning to use emotional experience. And yet, though I bear the residual scars of my early life, I did not suffer a 鈥榙isaster in the failure of personality鈥�. There are many complex reasons for that: I have been able to build strong human relationships. I have had meaning of various sorts in my life. And I have had years of counselling, all of which have helped me. In addition, reading literature has given me a model of 鈥榣earning from experience鈥� and thus I have avoided some of the likely problems that might otherwise have dogged me.

I didn鈥檛 think of it as 鈥榯roubled鈥� or 鈥榗haotic鈥� at the time: it was just our life. I 鈥榟ad the experience鈥�, as the poet TS Eliot says, 鈥榖ut missed the meaning鈥�.³

By the age of 15, I was truanting from school, taking drugs, finding dangerous people to hang out with. Though I didn鈥檛 know it, the potential 鈥榙isaster鈥� in the development of personality was happening, and there was little to help me 鈥榣earn from emotional experience鈥�.² I didn鈥檛 find that kind of 鈥榯hinking鈥� in the pub world I inhabited with my mum, nor with the police who brought me back after I had run away, nor from teachers who gave me detentions for not doing my homework. Yet, even as I scorned those living the straight life of homework and parents with boundaries, I also knew, at some level, that the life we lived was damaging me: hence the many times I ran away.

School, with its various disciplines, did not appeal, but the library round the corner from our pub was open to all, gave me the freedom to choose whatever I wanted to read and offered me a home away from home where very different voices spoke to me; the voices of thoughtful adults, who were thinking about life and learning, as Bion might say, from emotional experience. As a teenager, I read 鈥� among many others 鈥� VS Naipaul, Iris Murdoch, Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, John Wain, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett. From them, I learned that life was hard, adults were weirder and more broken than I had realised and, above all, that reading was a way of learning about reality. Nothing spoke to me more insistently than Samuel Beckett鈥檚 play, Happy Days.⁴

Winnie, up to her neck in a pile of sand, meditates on her life and her stuckness and imagines a future perfect that never arrives 鈥� 鈥樷��this will have been a happy day鈥�⁴ 鈥� and the sadness, the stuckness, the not-becomingness spoke to me. Running away, I carried my stolen copy of the play with me. That kind of connection was something I began to look for in my reading, and I found it in some unexpected places.

Later, after I鈥檇 left school, had a baby, been married and divorced and was, at the age of 21, at community college trying to do 鈥楢鈥� levels, I met what felt important information in Gerard Manley Hopkins鈥� poems, in Shakespeare鈥檚 King Lear. These didn鈥檛 offer biographical recognition, they weren鈥檛 like me, but they spoke to something in me, to something (in Bion鈥檚 language) that needed to be thought about. Eventually, I got to university and read English Literature, did a PhD and became a university teacher of literature, all the time looking for, or trying to build, 鈥榯he apparatus of thinking鈥�,² a kind of consciousness that allowed me to think about my own life through the lives and languages of books, and especially through poetry.

I am!

I was to meet the same kind of consciousness in one of my evening classes at the university, when I had asked students 鈥� the usual mixed bunch of an adult education evening class 鈥� to bring in a poem they loved to share with others. A woman, who looked to me like the headmistress of a posh girls鈥� school, brought and read this poem, written in a lunatic asylum, by the 18th-century English poet, John Clare:⁵

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes鈥�
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love鈥檚 frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live鈥攍ike vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life鈥檚 esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange鈥攏ay, rather, stranger than听the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below鈥攁bove the vaulted sky.

This woman, in her twinset and tweed skirt, read the poem out to us, then told the class, 鈥業 was an alcoholic, in Australia. I lost everything 鈥� my family, the children, the farm 鈥� I was kicking around the streets of Melbourne for years鈥� And I had this poem 鈥� on a piece of paper, in my pocket 鈥� and sometimes I would take it out and read it and think鈥� Yes 鈥� I am鈥︹��

I saw that this woman had used that poem in the same way I had used Winnie鈥檚 thoughts in Happy Days. But virtually no one was teaching literature in this way.* I began to have a feeling that I wanted to do something about that.

Then, driving to work one day, passing through the highly impoverished north end of Mersyside, I had what might be called a kind of revelation. I was going into the university to teach Wordsworth. It was May. There were daffodils lining the path of a house near the lights at which I had stopped. I watched an older woman walk up the path to one of these ex-council houses, small, poorly built, with tiny gardens fronting the street. The door was opened by a young woman with a baby on her arm and as the baby saw what I assumed was his granny, he leaped for joy in his mother鈥檚 arms, and a line from Wordsworth flashed into my mind: 鈥樷��while the sun shines warm,/And the Babe leaps up on his Mother鈥檚 arm鈥︹��⁶

As the line flashed into my mind, I also thought: that baby, growing up here, will never read Wordsworth. He will never get from literature what I鈥檝e got 鈥� this equipment for understanding myself. He won鈥檛 have the experience I鈥檝e just had, of a line of poetry coming into his mind. Now, you might say, this is not such a great problem, and I agree, there are many worse. But it felt a massive blow at that moment as the lights changed and I drove off, thinking, 鈥業鈥檝e got to do something about this.鈥�

Get into reading

What I did was start a project called 鈥楪et into Reading鈥�, in a little local library just opposite those traffic lights. I sought out people who were not into reading, like Eric, who was literate, but said, 鈥業鈥檝e only ever read the stuff on the back of sauce bottles.鈥� Like Dom, a disabled single parent, who remarked, wonderingly, about our shared endeavour, 鈥榊ou need it, but you don鈥檛 know you need it.鈥� Like Stella, who told me after being a silent presence in the group for a year, 鈥業 read to my little boy now, just like you read to us鈥︹�� Because some of the group were not literate, I read aloud. That meant we had to read whole works, and so, unlike a book group, the reading experience was live and shared, taking place in the room, with everyone experiencing it in the same real time. There were eventually about 10 people in the group, recruited because they wanted to get into reading. But what I didn鈥檛 know was that almost every one of them lived with a physical or mental health condition. Over that first year, they began to tell me that reading together helped them, in some way, to 鈥榝eel better鈥�.^7,8

The Reader

From that first group, The Reader⁷ has grown and, pre-pandemic, our 1,000 volunteers were running about 800 groups each week, meeting, usually in community libraries, mental health inpatient and outpatient settings, care homes, prisons, probation hostels, addiction treatment centres. A trained Reader Leader organises the group, bringing with them a story or poem or perhaps a novel. The Reader Leader reads aloud, people listen and may take turns at the reading if they wish, and they talk about what is being read. That鈥檚 鈥楽hared Reading鈥�. Here鈥檚 GP, Dr Helen Willows: 鈥楾he Reader鈥檚 approach has the power to transform the lives of the people that we see day after day at our surgery 鈥� those that are stuck, perhaps with low mood or who are socially isolated 鈥� these are the people for whom another tablet is not going to make a difference.

Dr Willows is a practitioner in Shropshire, and has been developing Shared Reading groups in her area because she says 鈥樷��they make a difference鈥�. But what difference? Yes, to Dr Stokes Lampard鈥檚 point, there are the important social connections. There is having a regular and always interesting thing to do each week. But under all that, I think we are back to Bion鈥檚 idea of an apparatus for thinking.

Here is Rose, living in a care home: 鈥楳ost of the time we are lonely, but when you share in this group, it鈥檚 as if you are composing another world around you. You come out of here and you feel fulfilled, filled up. See 鈥� you鈥檝e had a life where you haven鈥檛 always been happy, and you can鈥檛 really put it into words, it just stays there [points to head]. But talking about these poems, I think it helps. They鈥檝e got a lot to say, these poems, about life as if that鈥檚 the way life鈥檚 got to be. It can鈥檛 be good for everybody. We hope it is, but it never is, is it?鈥�

As Dr Willows says, no tablet can help Rose have this experience of finding meaning in thinking about her own life. The shared experience of reading offers Rose meaning, which she movingly recognises as useful in processing and organising thoughts of a tough life: 鈥楾hese poems mean something don鈥檛 they? They mean something because you can鈥檛 wait to hear them, read them and think about how it鈥檚 been a bit like the life we鈥檝e had.鈥�

Now that our world is learning to live with COVID-19, The Reader has many online Shared Reading groups, and some are starting up again in real life, too. If you are interested in joining a group, or undertaking Read to Lead training in order to build Shared Reading into your own practice, please do contact The Reader at听 .

* My husband, Philip Davis, and my teacher and later friend, Brian Nellist, were both teaching literature as personal illumination, as were a number of their students at Liverpool in the 1980 and 1990s. But it鈥檚 fair to say, their boat was very much voyaging against the tide of theory that dominated English studies from the 1970s onwards.