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

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Get better by leveraging others: This is about deliberately leveraging all external resources available to you to get better. If you do pay attention to detail and the little things are important to you, you make them important to people.”– Coach Bill Snyder This is one thinker that wants the data to do the talking rather than his words. In his latest book Enlightenment Now, he continues this number fuelled charge for reason, going as far to say that the advanced benefits we’re experiencing are being “wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots”. We are far better off today than we have ever been. But we don’t seem to be paying attention.

They talk about the talking cure. Well, there is a sort of doing cure, too.’ The photo of Rosen’s son Eddie, who died unexpectedly in 1999, at the age of just 18. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer So there are versions of psychoanalysis in which the aims, however various or contradictory, can be articulated, as in medical treatment. And there is a more radical version of psychoanalysis – suggested by Freud’s writing, but not formulated as such by him – in which it would make too much of the wrong kind of sense to suggest that there could be an aim for psychoanalytic treatment, or too definitive an aim; the formulators of such aims would already have an omniscience that the theory itself disqualifies (you can’t really be an expert on the unconscious; you can only make suggestions about such a thing: you can only, that is to say, be a student of psychoanalysis). In this version of psychoanalysis, an aim for psychoanalytic treatment could only be a contradiction in terms, implying as it does that there is someone who is supposed to know the aim; or who could know the aim beforehand (the aims of a psychoanalysis could evolve through the treatment: I could, say, begin the treatment wanting my symptom to be removed, only to discover through the treatment how much I could enjoy my symptom if I put my heart into it).

Try reading the book this weekend and try to reflect on what your get better method is and how you can leverage and inculcate it in your day to day life to accomplish a long-term success. Because I’m not him!” Rosen says. “So you try not to be burdened?” I ask. “Or not to be a burden?” “Both, actually,” he says. “I guess I have sad thoughts every day. But I try not to be overcome by them.” In our lives, terrible things may happen. Michael Rosen has grieved the loss of a child, lived with debilitating chronic illness, and faced death itself when seriously unwell in hospital. In spite of this he has survived, and has even learned to find joy in life in the aftermath of tragedy.

If I could prescribe Getting Better to the entire nation, I would... It's a book that inspires hope, courage and belief in humanity. Basically, it reminds you how to live. I loved every single word' Dr Rachel Clarke It is almost certain that we won’t or can’t get what we want, partly because, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we are largely unconscious, unaware, of what we want, and what we want is, as Freud wrote, in excess of what any object can provide (the exorbitance of desire is his theme). But if much analysis and more psychotherapy – not to mention its theory – is ‘ludicrously omnipotent and optimistic’, it is because the analysts are, consciously or unconsciously, complicit with their patient’s omnipotence and optimism; omniscience and optimism, like omniscience and pessimism, tending, rather, to go together. We may only know that we want to change, but not how we want to change. And yet, it should be noted, Bion broaches, despite his patent misgivings, the idea of ‘something better’ than a cure; thereby inviting us to imagine what might be better than a cure, what might be a better aim for someone going into psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis may be able to provide something better than a cure. It has certainly enabled Bion to think and write of there being something better than a cure. Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine.

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Once the symptom is seen as a making of meaning by an organism enigmatic to itself, rather than as a malfunctioning of a potentially well-functioning system, the treatment becomes a less obviously normative project; the aims of the treatment, the concepts of cure, are there to be argued about rather than merely consented to. As we shall see, psychoanalysis – which Freud wanted to be a part of medical science – was to expose the oversimplification of the concept of cure in medicine: at least when it came to so-called mental illness. Cure being a consensus, among any given group of people, about what health is, and so about the aims and objectives of certain kinds of medical treatment; and where cure may not always be possible, it is useful as an organizing aim, a regulative target (‘How do I know if I am cured?’ becomes a question of not simply whether my suffering has been alleviated but ‘Who am I going to ask that can tell me?’ or ‘Which criteria for cure can I assent to?’). The concept of cure, in other words, is quite literally a question of criteria; of whose criteria we are meeting, and of our reasons for those particular criteria as satisfying. Where there are ideas about cure, there are shared criteria in play, however tacit or unconscious; criteria, fundamentally, about what is good, what is of value, what about ourselves and our lives should be nurtured and encouraged.

get better at getting better is a great follow-up to the Catalyst. It is about building the capability, to build a model to be successful. The book talks about the “what to get better” and “how to get better” components which will help us to build a better and effective “Get Better Model (GBM)” to be successful. To excel in today's VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, it is not about how good you are; it is about how powerful and effective a model you have, to improve how good you are. If you have a strong model – then you will be able to multiplicate the model and achieve success in different roles and domains throughout your career. This is my takeaway from the book GBAGB. If you’re using the word more or less or improve or decline you’re already making a quantitative claim. If you do it without data, you’re talking through your hat. You’re just making stuff up. So the idea that we can do without data is just a recipe for your irrationality. It’s perhaps a little too techno-optimist, pays too little attention to questions of power and exclusion, and there are some lapses of empathy.The Taleb critique is a different story altogether. It’s very hard to discern a coherent criticism beneath all of the belligerence and macho posturing. If one were to try to uncover a substance of the criticism, it would be that it’s possible for gradually improving trends to coexist with a non-zero probability of a catastrophic event. Contrarian arguments can be fascinating. This author was briefly mentioned in the New York Times' 2010 year-end “10th Annual Year in Ideas”, which also linked to his article in Foreign Policy from a few months ago: Best. Decade. Ever.: The first 10 years of the 21st century were humanity’s finest — even for the world's bottom billion. Like his earlier book Catalyst in this book also the language is simple & learnings are practical.. though this book could have been shorter as I found some points repetitive

I think that John Gray’s dismissal of data is sophistry. It’s a formula for surrendering to our own cognitive biases and to allow ourselves to be jerked around by entrepreneurs of attention like our politicians and the terrorists. There is no fix, but he details the slow process of finding a voice that allows him to talk about Eddie, aided by a child asking him a question about his son at a talk. He subsequently wrote about the experience in Sad Book (2004), illustrated by Quentin Blake. More than 20 years on, he finds that Eddie is “there, he’s in me, he’s around me … Is he ‘at rest’ in me and with me? Yes, I think it’s something like that.” At its most minimal, the patient wants something they have been unable to get elsewhere – call it relief of suffering, enhanced freedom – and the analyst has a treatment that he values and wants to practise. To write of the concept of cure may involve the analyst in making controversial claims about the efficacy of his work; it may, at its worst, encourage the making of false or dubious promises; it may promote spurious success stories. And it may expose failure. But above and beyond this it raises the difficult questions that are at the heart of psychoanalysis, though not always at the heart of medicine: what has what the analyst wants for the patient got to do with the patient? And what is the significance, the history, of what the patient expects from the doctor? This patently replicates one of the essential perplexities of development: what has what the parents want for (and from) the child got to do with the child and her development? And at this point, as each psychoanalytic writer states the aims of psychoanalysis, everybody comes along with their specification: for Anna Freud and Winnicott, for example, the aim of analysis is to facilitate the patient’s development; for Klein it is for the patient to reach what she calls the depressive position; for Lacan it is to enable the patient not to betray their desire, and so on. This – as this brief menu of options and possibilities makes clear – is where the trouble starts, and where the real interest of psychoanalysis begins.

Khan’s brief and lucid paper provides what is perhaps a questionable progress myth in the psychoanalytic use of the concept of cure. He cites instances from Freud in which both Freud and Khan are clearly working out, however casually, what, if anything, the concept of cure has to do with psychoanalysis. He begins with a 1909 letter from Freud to Jung. ‘To salve my conscience,’ Freud writes, ‘I often tell myself: above all, don’t try to cure, just learn and earn some money! These are the most useful conscious aims.’ Presumably he has to tell himself this so often because as a doctor he is tempted to try to cure his patients (this is what his conscience tells him). As a cover story for this understandable desire, he suggests learning and earning his living; it is intimated that if he profits, the patients may as well. As though some kind of mutuality was the name of the game. But we should take seriously at this point the fact that learning from the patient is proposed as both an alternative to trying to cure them and a way of curing them. Clearly, if you can learn from the patient, you have broken the spell of your own disabling omniscience. You use an enormous amount of stats, graphs, various data to demonstrate the world has gotten better. Let’s just say for the book’s sake, the world is moving in one linear direction minus a few bumps along the way, that progress follows an incremental but positive direction?