More Rosebud - Professor Brett Kahr: Freudian Psychotherapist

0:00I'm Giles Brandreth and this is more Rosebud. Cue the music.

0:23welcome to more rosebud always a bit different because harriet jane our producer steps away from the console where she operates and makes sure that the balance is perfect and she's in front of the microphone herself people really love listening to your voice one of the things that i love about a podcast is that it's an intimate conversation in your ear it's quite personal yeah so you want the voice to be a nice one you do and you've got a lovely voice well i don't know that i have often mention that it's very soothing which is which i'm thrilled by i listen to the podcasts at home in the bathroom yeah when i'm getting ready to go to bed and headphones or just no on my phone i just playing just playing on my phone i don't have headphones yeah we need to get you a pair oh that's your oh for michelle child it's your birthday tomorrow and i meant to bring you a present and i haven't thank you oh well there you are oh i'm gonna get you some head get you some headphones i would love that actually should you get some for michelle as well though i mean are they expensive well it depends what you get but um Michelle doesn't listen to podcasts, does she?

1:29She hasn't heard any rosebuds yet. I tell her, you can say, Alexa, Giles Brandworth's rosebud, and it should pop up. Well, she's never done that. But she doesn't, anyway. So she obviously knows that we're doing it because sometimes we do it at home and then she will join us if we do it in the morning for lunch afterwards. Well, I mean, I could get you both a pair of headphones. Is it a bit of a passive-aggressive present from me to Michelle? No, because it's her birthday this same week as well. Okay. We're both Pisceans. Good idea. So that's a nice idea. Thank you for remembering my birthday at all.

2:04Oh, I can't believe I have... No, it doesn't matter. I hope. No, it does. No, it's nice. I haven't even got you a card. Right, next. You haven't got me a card? No, I mean, I just forgot. That's okay. Even though I'd written it on my to-do list two days ago. I do remember the year my father forgot my mother's birthday. And always the wedding anniversary. Anyway, I remember he woke me up at about five in the morning. I was only 10 or 11, or younger, I must have been. And we went out to the crack of dawn in the car to Covent Garden to get flowers. Yeah, good idea. And he had an amazing... Good idea.

2:37In those days, there was a flower market in Covent Garden. Yeah. And we got lots of flowers. And we got back before breakfast. And she never knew. And so he was able not only to make breakfast, but to bring them in. Oh, what a guy. And bring in this wonderful bouquet of flowers. What a guy. Yeah. Yeah. You can see where you get it from, Giles. Well, tomorrow morning, make sure you're up bright and early because I'll be at your door with a huge bouquet before breakfast. Well, meanwhile, it's more rosebud. I think we've got rather an intriguing episode today with somebody who is an expert on memory and psychology.

3:14He's a friend of mine, an old friend of mine. He's a Freudian psychotherapist. I've been to Freud's house with him. He actually is one of the trustees. This is Freud's house in London when he came just before the Second World War to live in London. You can visit it. And Mayorsfield Road in Hampstead, I think it's where it is. And I was allowed to sit on the couch, lie on the couch. It's a few years ago. I don't think they allow that any longer. Brett Carr is his name. But we've spoken to memory experts before, haven't we? Yeah, we had Professor John Simons from... But who is more of a neuroscientist?

3:50So Brett Carr is coming from a psychotherapy side. So he's not somebody that looks at the brain, but he's an expert on talking to people about their experiences and how that affects the rest of their lives. The traumatic experiences of childhood, for example, and how that can affect your memory. He's also going to talk to us about Sigmund Freud, the father of psychotherapy. And I'm hoping that in this episode, you learn things and possibly think more deeply about your own memories and why you remember certain things more than others so this is a different kind of episode with brett car our freudian enjoy cue the music

4:43Brett I'm so happy to be seeing you again I do feel you're one of my closest and best friends even though we only meet now and again we've known each other I think for probably about 30 years and we've done broadcasts together before and we've written for the newspapers almost together before but isn't it interesting is this a normal type of friendship when you feel close to someone you don't see very often well that is a very good question giles it's first first and foremost it's a great honor to be here and i regret we have we haven't had more opportunities to to socialize but i suppose we've both been rather busy with our working lives now what is your working life who are you for people listening brett car i know i've asked you to be here but what what are you professionally?

5:31Well, I trained first as a psychologist and then as a psychotherapist, and I've been working in the mental health profession for over 40 years now. The bulk of my time is spent in a very quiet, very confidential consulting room here in London, working with patients, both individuals and couples and families who are often really, really struggling really suffering especially in this era of human history post pandemic that was utterly devastating as you know for for pretty much everybody so psychotherapists have have never been more in demand because people are really struggling still you also it's interesting we're living in a different time because we're going to talk about memory and memories and you of the view that when it comes to memory this is a strange new world that we are entering in in our time unwrap that a bit for me please we have never lived in a more highly technologized era of human history and many people in the psychology world in the neuroscience world are really starting to question what impact all of this technology has on basic human attention.

6:53You may know one recent study has revealed that among adult Britons, the average attention span in many is approximately eight seconds long. And what I hear about in my consulting room is people who come home and they say, you know, I'm so pissed off. I had such a terrible evening with my husband last night, with my wife last night, with my son, my daughter, whoever the family member is, because I started talking to them, telling them what a dreadful day I had at work. And all they did was, you know, look at their mobile phone and send text messages saying, oh, don't worry, dad, I am listening to you.

7:32I just have to send this text. So I do think it has the potential to have an enormous impact on how well human beings can or cannot listen to one another. Gosh. And we're living longer lives and there's much more dementia around. So people's memories are beginning to falter. We had a guest here from the memory lab in Cambridge. You may have heard that episode. And he was explaining to us about how the hippocampus is the place where memories can be stored and then they go into the deeper memory and as people grow older now we find that the hippocampus is suffering and it can lead to dementia and that's a phenomenon that did not exist in earlier eras when i was a young psychology student if you had said to me what is dementia i think everybody including my teachers would have said i don't know the only time i ever heard the word dementia when I was a very, you know, obsessional, geeky, historically orientated student, is that back in the mid-19th century, the word dementia, that Latin term, was used to describe what we now call schizophrenia.

8:44The official name for schizophrenia, the most severe form of psychosis, back in the 19th century was called dementia precox, early onset dementia and these people who were hospitalized, institutionalized, and then called lunatics or insane people. Nowadays, thankfully, we wouldn't use such shaming terminology, but that was the only place that the word dementia was used, that these were people whose minds just seemed to explode. Very few people really knew about Alzheimer's disease and all of that. So it's really now only as we are all aging and surviving longer that we're starting to see these changes, these developmental changes in human memory.

9:31But I'm glad you wanted to talk about our mutual friend, Herr Professor Sigmund Freud, because Freud brings a very, very, very different understanding of why memory might work and why memory might not work, which has nothing to do with aging, nothing to do with dementia, Alzheimer's disease. It has everything to do with sanity, clarity of mind, and early traumatic experiences. You could have the best brain on the planet with no evidence of atrophy, no evidence on an MRI scan of any early stage dementia, but you might still have real problems with memory which have nothing to do with your neurological situation.

10:18They have to do with your very private feelings towards the intimate people in your lives. Gosh. Well, tell us, first of all, about you and Dr. Sigmund Freud. You are a Freudian analyst. Is that how we would describe you? I am a huge, huge fan of Sigmund Freud. And that was quite a rarity when I was growing up because Freud was born in Austria, in the Austrian Empire in 1856, and he died here in London having escaped from the Nazis in 1939. A lot of my teachers back then thought, well, you know, Freud, all he does is write about sex, and there's no proof that children are interested in sex and all of that.

11:03They endeavored to really shame him, but I persevered with my love affair towards Sigmund Freud, and I'm very, very glad that I did. And I now practice as a Freudian therapist every day. What is the essence then of Freudianism? What is Freud all about? The essence of Freud is really listening to people exceptionally carefully, quietly, silently, and helping people to put into words the biggest fears, the biggest anxieties, the biggest secrets, and the biggest memories of early traumatic experiences, which often cannot readily be remembered or cannot readily be verbalized because people are often overwhelmed by these experiences, whether it might be being raped as a child, being shamed, or humiliated as a child.

12:02I don't know any human being who has not survived something that we would describe as an infantile trauma or a childhood trauma. And everybody experiences a different kind of displeasure. You know, you might be a five-year-old and it might be that your mommy died of cancer. That would be a horrific bereavement. It might be that your parents live longer than you do, but they might have beat you. That's a trauma of a different kind. It might be that, you know, you grow up to become, you know, five foot six inches tall, but your sister turns out to be five foot seven inches tall. And you're extremely jealous because you feel bodily shamed by comparison.

12:46And you could have the most seemingly perfect face and perfect body. You know, look at Marilyn Monroe. She suffered from a lifetime of depression. as she came from a very, very traumatic, broken family. So Sigmund Freud, to go back to our friend, he really helped us to say, you could have the nicest body in the world, you could be the richest person in the world, but you could still be utterly miserable if you were felt to be not understood or not well treated or not properly held in mind as a little baby and as a little child. So he really was the person who introduced the psychology of childhood onto the map.

13:31But Freud told us that by really starting to talk it through, to put these shameful ideas into words, to be with somebody who listens to you really well, that has a hugely cathartic impact and helps you to both mourn the losses of early childhood, that perfect wish that we have to have had the best parents and the best childhood on the planet, but it will help us to deal with those experiences, to work them through. Before I share with you, or remind you, because I know you've listened to our podcast, of some of the first recollections of some of our guests, do we know what Freud's own first memory was?

14:15Did he write about that, talk about that? that's a very good question to ask freud was a great great reminiscer he he was very bold really as as a physician from the late 19th century to share his own personal experiences that would have been an utter rarity at that point in time he didn't begin as a an analyst did he began as an eye doctor is that right no no no he trained in medicine back in the 1870s and then he specialized in the field of neurology he discovered that many of his neurological patients seemed to be quite well from the brain point of view but when he started talking to them and they confessed to him actually my nanny sexually assaulted me when i was three years old you know my daddy did likewise when I was 10, he was the first person to really start to think, might this be having an impact on how people develop?

15:17And, you know, you can have lots of migraines because you might have a tumor in your brain, but zillions of people on this planet will have migraines and yet their MRIs will come back utterly perfect. One can have a migraine because one is carrying horrific memories. And when I talk to my patients and say, okay, I'm really sorry to hear that you're having such a dreadful migraine, when did it come on? And they will tell me stories like, well, it came on 10 minutes after my husband forgot that today was my 50th birthday. It came on, you know, 20 minutes after my boss told me I was fired. This kind of stuff.

15:58So Freud was really the first proper psychosomatician who endeavored to look at the impact of very painful life events, not only on the body, but also on the mind. And he invented the first non-medical approach to treating bodily pain and psychological pain by saying to his patients, come into my private office, lie down on this comfortable couch. He invented that idea, didn't he? He invented the use of the Freudian couch, which we all use nowadays, and he said, just relax and tell me what your worst thoughts are at the moment. Get it off your chest. Let's have a conversation about it. He invented what we now call the talking cure.

16:43And for himself, his first memory? Yes, in his book of 1900, Die Traumdeutung, known in English as The Interpretation of Dreams, possibly his most famous book. He shared many of his early experiences. One of his early, early memories was going with the Czech-speaking Catholic nanny to the Catholic Church. That was probably his very, very first memory when he was a tiny, tiny, tiny little boy. But he also remembered seeing his mummy naked, which is not, you know, totally surprising. I don't know many children who had been breastfed by somebody called a mother, who might not have had access to the mother's naked breast.

17:27But he really was very bold in hypothesizing that even though he was probably not the first human being to have access to his mother's naked breast, he said, it could well be the case that when we become teenagers or adults and start going out dating potential boyfriends, potential girlfriends, potential spouses, we base our attraction on the first human beings whom we did see naked, namely mummy and possibly daddy. Even if your parents wear, you know, 10 layers of pajamas every night, you're still going to be relating so intimately to your mother's body and to your father's body when you are the child of a heterosexual couple or whatever the couple might be nowadays and that said Freud becomes the template for who it is we are then attracted to later in life let me I'll get I'll share just some or two one or two of the one or two of the first memories of people and I won't necessarily give you their names because that's not relevant but see if you if any of this is I'm we might play you the odd clip but let's give you a few here well this is a lovely one here being in bed on a summer night and hearing her brothers playing cricket outside well that sounds rather lovely doesn't it now that's the memory i would like to have had i think if i was being interviewed i'd conjure up something like that but i'll give you another one first day at nursery school crying because this person didn't want his mother to have left him he was hammering on some frosted glass in a window that's how he pictured himself first somebody else first day at prep school so he's a bit older another boy asked him how old he was and he said he was four the other boy told him he was too young to be there as you had to be five so feeling too young we might actually play you this one this is an actress we'll play you this one without telling you who it is because that's not really relevant but see if we learn anything from it my first memory is actually handing my auntie muriel a piece of turd which i had very recently formed and expelled and realizing that i had to give her something because i didn't know she was coming i gave it to her how old are you when this happens?

19:54I think I must have been about maybe a year. And just give us the setup. Why you are at home? Why you're delving into your own nappy? Who is Muriel? My auntie Muriel and uncle Jack, my father's brother and sister-in-law, had come to stay. And I'm, you know, I'm a friendly little girl. And I thought, well, I've got to give them something. And I was looking around in my playpen and I, oh yes, that thing, that round sort of sausage-y thing, and I gave it to my Aunty Muriel, and she literally screamed her head off. She was so shocked and made miserable by it, she never, ever forgave me. Well, that's interesting.

20:44Is that a common occurrence? It is indeed a common occurrence, yes. Yes, yes. First of all, I think it's very generous of this person to have shared such an intimate early memory. It's truly fascinating. I don't know this person personally or her history, so I can't comment with any certainty on what it might mean. But a memory of that nature is by no means uncommon. First of all, if one were to come and see a mental health practitioner to discuss one's memory, we would encourage our patients, our clients, to share the memory, to elaborate upon it, because sometimes people remember with great accuracy.

21:29Sometimes people remember with some alterations to the accuracy. No two people reminisce in quite the same way. But when you are one year of age, as this woman claimed to have been two years of age, you're not going to be sharing memories with your aunt about, you know, what William Shakespeare wrote in Act 3, Scene 2 of Macbeth. You're going to be preoccupied by parts of your body. And this woman is talking about, you know, her fecal present. The meaning of that, we simply don't know. It might be that it was a real gift to her family member. It might be that it was a way of attacking her family member, saying, I don't like you.

22:17Here is a piece of what she described as turd. But these first memories have stayed with people for a reason, haven't they? Yes. I'll just give you a couple more to give you a flavor of this. We had somebody, I remember, who definitely remembered her first memory was falling downstairs. stairs we had quite a few of a sort of where physical things had happened to them squeezing through the garden gate and then going down a road alone looking up from a pram seeing foliage in the sky somebody really remembering disliking the texture of her grandparents carpet well come on in a moment i hope to created memories because i think i have had a few of those in my time but let me play another anonymous clip and this is somebody's first memory giles my very first memory is very very early on of a hose pipe with water coming out of it onto grass with clovers and i remember this very well it was in hook in hampshire where my father was in the army at Sandhurst and there was a little hill and I was watching this water coming out of the hose pipe.

23:34Well I mean we can't have a Freudian analyst in the room and not ask a little bit about this being his first memory the hose pipe and he wouldn't mind us sharing this with you because sex certainly has been a big part of his life and it was indeed a big part of our conversation in a happy way. It wasn't Freud, but was it, I'm trying to remember who it was who used to say, toujours les génitales, toujours les génitales. It was a Freudian. Maybe it was the person who was the head of the French Freud Society who once said that. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. It's a fascinating memory. I think, were Sigmund Freud alive and able to talk to this person about a memory like that, Freud would definitely think that, you know, you could be interested in a hosepipe because to a little child, a hosepipe might be totally fascinating.

24:26You know, children of two years old are not spending their time on social media, sending text messages, doing emails. They're just starting to look at the outside world. So they'd be fascinated by a bird flying by. They'd be fascinated by a hosepipe. They'd be fascinated by a leaf falling off a tree. But Freud would be curious, I think, as to why that would be the first memory that comes to mind. And given that we were just talking about feces, this would make me wonder, you know, what is the impact of little boys of urination? Because when little boys start urinating, we do not have control over our genitalia.

25:10when urine needs to come out it simply comes out and wets our nappies or is you know fills up the bathtub or whatever it might be but then when we you know become five years old or seven years old we learn how to remove our own underpants and then can begin to sit on the toilet or stand in front of the toilet and begin to take some control over the genitalia and then as everyone knows as boys become even older and become adolescents, then the genitals become a hosepipe of a different kind. You can begin to become sexually aroused and begin to ejaculate. So the notion of a hosepipe could be just a preoccupation with that physical object, but it could also be a symbolic object of the relationship to the male genitalia in terms of urination and eventually ejaculation.

26:06years ago you introduced me to the concept of the phallic swagger when we were talking about somebody who was very attractive knew that he was very attractive and had been surrounded when he was small by women he had four older sisters he had nannies he had loving mothers uh loving mother and so he was surrounded by adoring women and through his life you said of this fellow well he developed phallic swagger. That actor, I think, would acknowledge a certain amount of phallic swagger. And there was another one who has, definitely has phallic swagger to this day, whose first memory was being in a pram and seeing faces gazing down at him, looking over the pram and going, ah, oh, ah.

26:53Now, Harriet and I both wondered afterwards, well, is this what he hoped that would happen to him. Was this a dream? Tell us about Valix Swagger, and then tell us about whether we conjure up for ourselves first memories that we hope, that we'd like to have been our first memories. Yes, yes. Freud's view was that memories are not only points of recall of early experiences. You mentioned that one of the guests that you had on the program talked about having fallen down a staircase as a little child. Well, I couldn't think of anything more utterly terrifying than that, that you could be orthopedically strong, but, you know, your mother or your father might have totally freaked out, and then you as the child who fell could have been freaked out by the fact that they were screaming and crying and calling an ambulance.

27:46But we could see it as representative of whether somebody felt sufficiently well looked after as a child or whether they felt neglected you might have been you know that person for all i know might have been the most loved child in town and still accidentally slipped down a staircase or it could be that you know when an accident of that kind happens it is because the child isn't being watched sufficiently carefully and then could fall i'm not going to let you escape phallic swagger and the genitals but i want to become something that about the person falling down the stairs this particular person could they have been remembering that because at the time we had our conversation they were going through actually a difficult it's in the public domain difficult political situation where their career was at a traumatic stage things were going wrong in their life and actually within their marriage as well it was a very difficult time for them public knowledge they came they did this interview could it have been because that was in their head that their first memory when I asked the question on that day was this trauma and on a different day it could have been a different memory.

28:58Absolutely that's that's very very psychologically astute of you Giles. Yes no two people will often recall the same first memory in inverted commas the same way and I'm glad you mentioned the the the situation known as marriage because I work with a lot of couples in couple therapy. It's wonderful. The situation known as marriage is not a phrase I've heard before, but it's interesting. No two couples remember the last week of their lives in quite the same way. I can't tell you how many couples I've seen over the decades who come in for a first consultation and say, oh, I'm really upset. You know, we're coming to see you, Professor Carr, because, you know, our marriage sucks.

29:44And I say, well, what is happening? Well, oh, we haven't had sex for 16 years. And that's not uncommon in a long-standing marriage. But on so many occasions, the other spouse sitting in the room at the same time will say, that is such a false memory. We had sex six months ago that night after we went out to see that film and got very drunk. You know, so no two couples will even remember their adult sex lives in the same way. You know, we all as human beings have huge capacities to repress what can be really, really painful and distort what can be really, really painful. Freud introduced back in 1899, a long time ago, the notion of what he called screen memories, that one could report what seems to be an accurate early memory, but it might well be a distortion, almost as though somebody is putting a screen over it a bit like showing a film of the actual experience.

30:48Just in terms of your question about the meaning of phallic swagger, that is, I think, a phrase that I just used in an informal fashion. It's not a technical term, but we do encounter many men, particularly very handsome men or very bodily potent men who might be very attractive to women or men, and they might think, well, you know, I am, you know, the sexiest guy in town, and that can create a sense of real confidence, but also confidence at a level which becomes rather narcissistic, rather grandiose, and then people who feel that they are the most handsome man in town will then often interrupt other people during conversations and say, I'm not interested in your viewpoint, I'm the handsomest man in town, so you listen to me.

31:43You know, certain politicians nowadays are accused of having that sense of phallic swagger. And that can be a result psychologically of the fact that that person might be very attractive to other people. But it could be that what really lies at the baseline of it is that one feels not phallically swaggerous, but actually properly castrated, really impotent in many ways, but tries to hide that by saying, actually, I have the biggest penis in town, I'm the handsomest man in town, I'm the strongest man in town, vote for me, that kind of approach. Toujours le genital means always the genitals. And the caricature view of Freud is that there is a sex obsession.

32:31Is that fair? If there's something in it, how has it come about? And why are the genitals so important? Sigmund Freud was grossly humiliated during his lifetime. A, for being Jewish at a time when much of the culture in Austria and in other German-speaking countries was very, very grossly anti-Semitic. Obviously, the Holocaust eventually erupted and Freud's life was saved at the very last minute by a number of influential global politicians and by a very, very wealthy French princess, the great niece of Napoleon Bonaparte, Princess Marie Bonaparte, who had undergone psychoanalysis with Freud, was so grateful to him.

33:20and she gave an enormous amount of money to the Nazis to try to help Freud escape. She bribed the Nazis in order to let Freud out of the country. She bribed them, and we know from other data that politicians like Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States also put forward their views. Because he was world famous in the 1930s. He was world famous, absolutely. but in spite of having been world famous he was also grossly criticized because at that time no one talked about sexuality at all you know nowadays if you were to see a grand piano a baby grand piano in someone's house there would be three or four legs to the piano those wooden legs which hold it up and and they would be naked legs but back in Victorian times you would have been considered a very, very poor housewife or house husband if you didn't put carpets over the legs of your piano.

34:21You know, back in the late 19th century, one of the most common sexual fetishes in men was what we would call ankle fetishism. They became really aroused by seeing women's ankles. I know lots of people, whether they're female or male, who have beautiful ankles, But I don't know anybody now in the 21st century who achieves orgasm after having seen somebody's ankle, because we've all grown up in an era when the ankles are exposed and quite normalized. But back in Freud's era, every single woman had to have not only her breasts and her hips and her bottom and her legs covered with very long dresses, but the ankles as well.

35:07So that's the era that Freud was writing about, and he was hearing from all of his patients about how they'd had horrifically traumatic sexual experiences, but people really, really attacked Freud for daring to write about sexual matters. In fact, the most famous book that had been written before Freud began publishing extensively about sexual perversions in the late 19th century by the famous writer Richard von Kraft-Ebbing. Most of that was called, it was called Psychopathia Sexualis, sexual psychopathology, sexual pathology. But he wrote most of it in Latin, because back in those days, if you wrote about sex in German or English, a sort of, you know, more accessible, more understandable language, it was considered utterly disgusting.

36:02So Freud was very brave to talk about sex. And although a lot of people still criticize him to this day, we would not have the modernity and the diversity and the acceptance of sexual diversity, in my experience, had it not been for Freud daring to help us to talk about sex in a very direct way.

36:29Dreams. Dreams. And then I want to talk about, when we've talked about dreams, I want to talk about actually forgetting your memories. We had an email from a listener, Danielle Beasley, which I think you'll find interesting. It's about dreams. She says, some years back I had a vivid dream in which I was walking through the house we'd lived in from when I was two to five years old. I previously had very few memories of this house, but in the dream it was vivid. And when I described it to my mother the following day, she confirmed what I'd seen in the dream was true. Clearly some things are locked away in our brains and only some get recalled.

37:05So she remembered her first memory in a dream, then confirmed, she never thought it before with her mum, that it was true. Is that unusual? No, that's by no means unusual. And dreams are based very much on recent experiences, but also on ancient memories. So dreams can awake memories, can they? Yes. Dreams can awake memories, yes. That's right, yes. But dreams also become an arena in which early memories can be distorted in a much more filmic way. So, for example, let's say somebody comes in to the consulting room, lies down on the couch and says, last night I had a dream that I went to the planet Mars.

37:54okay I would ask them to engage in what we call the process of free association and I would say please tell me that's a fascinating dream please tell me what comes to your mind when you think about a rocket ship and you think about the planet Mars so I know some people who would say well the first thing that comes to my mind is that when I was a little child you know my father left the house because he and my parents split up when I was five years old, and I felt like he'd moved to a different planet because I never saw him again. So for that person, I would put forward the hypothesis, maybe flying to the planet Mars was your secret unconscious wish to see, could you reconnect with your father who seemed to have moved to a different planet in your mind?

38:42And And sometimes a comment of that nature will actually prompt patients to cry. What about forgetting? Actually wiping out memories. I suspect that I'm relatively happy as a human being because I do live on the day, looking forward to the future, and I've got a capacity for wiping out the bad things in the past. If I dwelt on them, I probably could remember them, but on the whole, I don't. is it good to forget is it difficult to forget is it easy to forget should one forget we we may need a further conversation about the art of forgetting because it's a it's a huge huge topic and what what i would say as a first response is that sometimes the capacity to forget which is which is inherent in every human being can be utterly devastating i believe i mentioned earlier in our conversation how frequently I hear in work with couples people who come for couple psychotherapy how devastating it can be when partner a forgets the birthday of partner b and partner b will understandably be devastated or partner b will forget that today is our you know our 16th wedding anniversary or our 36th wedding anniversary that is shockingly common but is that forgetting accidental if i forget my wife's anniversary our anniversary is that because i've genuinely forgotten or am i forgetting for a reason there could be 7 000 explanations for why you might forget your wife's birthday or your wedding anniversary in my experience of working with the vast majority of people when they do forget an important family event it's not because they have dementia it is often what we would call in psychoanalysis an unconscious expression of of aggression towards the partner so most people who do forget their spouse's birthday or the wedding anniversary it's because there is a part of them that's really really angry you know as a result of the 17 rows that occurred the week before and there is a part of you that then doesn't want to celebrate the wife or the husband or the boyfriend or the girlfriend because there's so much resentment and that can manifest itself unconsciously through the forgetting of that.

41:15Is there value though in some cases in forgetting? I remember years ago I interviewed Sir John Mills, a famous actor who had a very happy marriage with his second wife Mary Hayley Bell but he told me that when they were young and newly married because he'd been married before they had an agreement being actors and in the theater that if ever they had an affair they wouldn't tell each other they just carry on as if it hadn't happened and then he said quickly you forget don't talk about it you forget about it and then you can say you know yeah well I don't know you know we've been very happy haven't we and I had a similar conversation not about that sort of thing but with Edna Healy was married to Dennis Healy and she said to me I found in life that a trouble shared is actually a trouble doubled.

42:01And it's quite good just to keep it inside your head. So two questions really in one. Can there be a value in actively wiping the slate clean, forgetting something that may have been a hurt or a trauma, because it's better not to revisit it? And are you always feeling that you are doing good when people come and sit on your couch for their allotted 50 minutes and you are asking them to delve into painful aspects of their life, might it not be more helpful to them to say, forget about it, let's move on? Mental health practitioners cannot force human beings to reveal their secrets or to participate in honest discussions, either in the consulting room with ourselves or back at home with their partners and friends and family members and so forth.

42:54But I think nowadays most people would say that if you do not reveal your secrets, your partner is going to pick it up anyway. I've worked with so many couples and so have my colleagues who come in and say, you know, my husband has never revealed that he slept with, you know, 20 sex workers last week. He's never revealed that he's had a mistress in another country for so many years, but I can just sense from the way he looks at my body, doesn't touch my body, that he must be having a sexual affair with somebody else. And then when the confrontation does take place, yes, it's very painful, it's very ugly, it causes hurt to both partners, but if there is a wish to restore the marriage, the secrets do need to be revealed, or often can be repaired when the secrets are revealed.

43:48What about blanking out bad things? Because clearly I've had a few bad things, you will have had a few bad things, but I manage not to brood about them. I think, broadly speaking, unless I was sitting with you and we were exploring them, I've managed to forget them. Now I feel that's quite good. It can be good. Much will depend on what your already established mental structure has been. so if you grow up as a mentally healthy much loved child with with reliable lookers after reliable mummies and daddies and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and all of that and then you know at the age of 33 somebody you know punches you on the street and steals your wallet or your handbag that can be scary but you would likely survive that experience better because you already had a prehistory of bodily safety and mental safety.

44:55Whereas if you had grown up in a family where your parents were beating you up all day long and not looking after you and leaving you in the house at night alone while they were going out to the pub getting drunk, and then at the age of 33 you were robbed in the street, that could cause a psychotic breakdown in somebody with that kind of history. So if you're already mentally healthy and you have an awful experience, yes, you are allowed to work it through. Yes, you are allowed to survive it. Yes, you are allowed to contextualize it. And that traumatic episode is something that can be forgotten or at least pushed to the side within your memory.

45:38But if you already have that background of real unsafety and then a traumatic experience of that type occurs, you'll have one of two reactions. One will be to remember it every single day of your life and then that will increase your depression and your anxiety and your terror hugely. The other would be to just deny it completely and then put all of your thoughts into how can I get drunk, how can I become a drug addict and just erase my mind. You must be a very healthy person because you've been in therapy for many years, you understand all this. Do you think you are a mentally healthy person?

46:16I would like to think that I might, yes. As part of our training, we are required to undergo our own, what is called a training analysis. And whereas most people nowadays will come and see a therapist on a weekly basis, those of us who train as classical Freudians, we are required and honored to attend literally five times a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So when I was doing my training, I went to see my training analyst every single day of the week for years and years and years. And it was just such an amazing privilege, such a great experience to lie down on somebody else's couch and to be listened to.

47:00I think it really did. But I would find that, I would think of that as being terribly self-indulgent. My goodness. Wow. I think it might be framed as self-indulgent, because yes, I did talk about myself quite a lot, but I think it has enhanced my capacity to really understand and empathize with every single other human being whom I have come to meet in my life, whether professionally or personally. it really taught me how to listen how to be listened to and how to facilitate and respond in conversations in a compassionate and serious way well I love listening to you and I love your compassionate and serious conversation I'm going to end as we always do by asking maybe through you by asking Dr Freud what lessons at the end of his life he had learnt what lessons have you learnt as a lifetime being a Freudian.

48:02What will you share with us, the lessons of a lifetime? Oh, goodness, what a profound question.

48:17I think what the biggest lesson that I've learned from Freud is that the more emotionally secure you can be as a little child, the more loved regularly, looked after regularly, the sturdier you'll be. And the more you can be well analyzed later in life by a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst, the more that sturdiness can be increased and the more your core mental health will be there. And the more healthy you are, the more you're going to have the capacity to survive. We need to be as mentally healthy as possible. And what I'm so glad to report is that when I entered the psychology world back in the late 1970s, everybody said when I decided what I would study at university, they said, psychology, what the hell is that?

49:11Why would you want to waste your time learning that? Why didn't you study mathematics or history or English literature? You know, those more common old-fashioned subjects, all of which are fascinating, and I love them all. But I was very, very attracted to this subject. And back then, if you admitted publicly in this country in the 1970s or 1980s or even in the 1990s that you were in therapy, people were very, very hesitant, thinking you must be a weirdo, you must be mentally ill. Whereas nowadays, at least in London, you know, I know lots of groups where people are worried if you're not in therapy.

49:53so mental health and mental illness have been de-shamed hugely over the last few decades at least in this country what you've just told me though is that the childhood the earliest memories in those childhood years are key yes that if you've got a good loving childhood that gives you that security that will stand you in such good stead for the rest of your life but there will be people listening and indeed we've had stories told to us about people who had very challenging childhoods yeah what can they do now it's too it's too late to re to rebuild your childhood having a really solid childhood is terrific but even if you struggle with the worst trauma it doesn't mean that you're untreatable i i started my career focusing specifically on the most ill members of the population, people who were diagnosed as psychotic and people who are called forensic patients, people who commit really grotesque crimes, whether it's murder, rape, pedophilia, arson, and so forth.

51:04So I worked with the most traumatized, most mentally unhealthy people. But I'm really pleased to report that if we can get those people into ongoing therapy, they can improve tremendously. They really, really can. And those early traumatic childhoods can actually be reset. So even if you've had the worst childhood in the world, there is still hope for improvement. Going back for the last question to sex, did Freud actually say sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Did he? we strongly suspect that that is not the case. It's an apocryphal story. It is an apocryphal story. Because I think in the Freud Museum, there's a photograph of him smoking a cigar.

51:56And it's a joke because the idea of, you know, the phallic and the oral satisfaction, putting something, you know, that's how it all began. But you think it probably is apocryphal. Regrettably, Freud was a compulsive smoker. Back then, you could be even a genius like Freud, but nobody knew that smoking cigarettes or cigars would cause a greater likelihood of cancer. And as you may know, Giles, he did develop in 1923, 16 years before his death, a very severe maxillofacial cancer. And he spent his last years really, really suffering. And I think, you know, there's extreme likelihood that having smoked approximately 60 cigars per day would have contributed to this.

52:49If people want a book to get into Freud, everyone knows the name. But if the essential Freud, you gave me a book of yours years ago, Coffee with Freud, which is you imagining conversations, you and Sigmund Freud sitting down together. I don't know if that is still in print. It is. Or what would you recommend if somebody has been intrigued by this whole thing? and wants to discover more, where would they go? Yes, well, I think my first recommendation would be to endeavour to read the complete works of Freud in the original German, if you've got a bit of spare time. But should that not be the case...

53:24How many volumes of that is there? Should that not be the case, that's very kind of you to have brought in a copy of my book, Coffee with Freud. I created what I called an imaginary non-fiction conversation with Freud because I take him out to a cafe in Vienna, the Café Landmann, and I say, you know, I brought him back to life and say, hey, Professor Freud, great to meet you in person finally. Tell me about your life and your career. So it's all based on what I hope is historical accuracy from my archival research over the many years, but I try to give Freud the opportunity to speak in a conversational way.

54:05So I think a lot of young students have found that book pleased to say it's still in print.

54:57That was more Rosebud with music by Phil Leppard, production by Harriet Jane, and in the chair, me, Charles Brandreth. Thank you for listening.