Now, two decades into my career, I practise, lecture, supervise and write about all of these things, but increasingly I reject everything that I learned. Instead, I practise the art of ‘being for another’, an idea that arose in conversation with my colleague Sophie de Vieuxpont. I’m a mentor, a friend in an asymmetrical friendship, and a sounding... See more

when an army of trauma counsellors descended upon the nation after the tsunami of 2004, the University of Colombo pleaded with them to cease seeing suffering as traumatisation as it was undermining people’s resilience. Sri Lanka happens to top the charts for wellbeing in the ‘The Mental State of the World in 2023’ report despite such denial of the... See more

Freudianism might have waned as a mass idiom for the psyche, but its pop-psychological replacement works in precisely this way. For a lot of people, the cure for all potentially destabilising social contradictions is to identify an offending party, and tell them to go to therapy. ‘Therapy,’ in this world, is not a series of techniques for thinking... See more