It is precisely this exhausting culture war which staked its apotheosis — mostly after the murder of George Floyd, though also over the decade prior — on so many endless rhetorical battles over “wokeness” and everything it ostensibly represented. For moderates and liberals, this mostly meant conformity and a new regime of manners, a sacrifice many media and university elites happily made, since it guaranteed full capture of the groundswell of social justice sentiment throughout the 2010s. For genuine social justice crusaders, this meant the morphing of a once-positive term (“stay woke”) into a self-righteous moralistic movement which few could admit had become something of a parody of itself. For many conservatives, this meant the absurdity of “woke” calls for everything from prison abolition to Thanksgiving abolition; the general censoriousness of online progressivism and Twitter mobs; and a general plague of “cultural Marxist” shibboleths, encompassing everything from a conspiratorial trans takeover to the tyranny of DEI, conflating lame liberal platitudes with the entire history of Western Socialism. This, of course, led immediately into the even more parodic and censorious “anti-woke” backlash, fueling Elon Musk’s buying of Twitter and Donald Trump’s tech-billionaire-assisted accession to a second term in the Oval Office.

In reality, of course, trans people have spent the last decade as a maligned hyper-minority in Western society (a position made all the worse by the insufferableness of so many self-selected “allies”); DEI is a consulting industry worth billions of dollars, which largely exists so employers can wield even more power over their employees; and whatever “peak woke” was, it was never even close to offering up the kinds of state-socialist nightmares keeping Ron DeSantis up at night. In fact, many Leftist intellectuals and commentators were from the beginning completely at odds with the usual rhetorical trappings of “wokeness”: the vitriolic racial pessimism, the refusal to debate or discuss, the tendency to dismiss real-world working-class economic concerns by insisting instead on the need for a kind of perpetual re-education campaign. With the 2016 and 2020 defeats of Bernie Sanders, they saw the first chance in modern American history to renew the New Deal and take real steps toward Nordic-style democratic socialism derailed again and again by activists and mainstream Democrats, neither of whom ever stopped maligning Bernie for focusing on class over identitarian grievance.

Yet AOC’s statement was perfect for our moment, as if all that furor was just a vague, silly dream anyway. Which in some ways, of course, it was. As a maximally adaptive cultural signifier, “wokeness” masked, through the blustering and repositioning of its rhetorical opponents and advocates, processes that have been going on in America for centuries. America has always been a country whose Puritan elite founded their power on the enforcement of prudish WASP politesse, as well as one undergoing a perennial religious revival since at least the 1740s. The “woke era” was, if anything, the digital and televisual spectacle version of these eternal American facts. Which is why the new book by Catherine Liu — professor of media studies at UC Irvine, and one of America’s few interesting Marxist intellectuals — is such a breath of fresh air. Whatever you think of its conclusions, the only really compelling analytical approach to the culture war of the last few decades is the old-school Marxist one; and whether or not you agree with her prescriptions, Liu’s book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, is the clearest and most compact look yet into the culture war’s obscurantist machinery.

To do so, Liu seizes on one of our society’s central myths: the myth which the elite classes of America have learned so well to deploy, to protect their power; the myth which underlies all our empty, narcissistic therapy-speak; the myth which binds millions of social media users into disturbing parasocial relationships with a manipulative culture of celebrity confessional — the myth of the “trauma script”. Interestingly, Liu begins her analysis of contemporary trauma culture with a different AOC scene. This example comes from the Representative’s Instagram Live confessional, following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, during which Ocasio-Cortez was forced to hide in an office, fearing for her life. That February, she took to social media to share an hours-long, intimate confession about the ways in which her endangerment that day evoked memories of a former sexual assault. Liu is sympathetic, describing how she herself — at that point still marooned in the midst of isolation during the Covid pandemic — was genuinely moved by the narrative of trauma, recovery, and struggle AOC so personally laid out.

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In retrospect, though, Liu is far less sympathetic. Here, after all, was an elected politician, taking to a media platform, performing a particular ritual script, and appealing for personal sympathy, much as celebrities and brand ambassadors alike are expected to do, in order to maintain an invested audience. Whatever truth there was in AOC’s confession could not possibly be separated from the ways such trauma scripts have been perfected to boost already-famous people’s apparent authenticity, nor from the simple fact that she was undermining her own responsibilities as an elected official, encouraging the people who elected her to see her not as a uniquely powerful person responsible to them — but as a wounded, healed, and ultimately virtuous everywoman.

Liu sees AOC’s stunt as the zenith of a project begun by — of all people — Oprah Winfrey. In fact, Oprah is something like the arch-villain of Traumatized, an entrepreneurial savant of media communication whose famous televised confession of her own childhood sexual abuse, on her daytime talk show in 1986, is for Liu the ultimate example of the trauma script, one which “forged an image of the ideal liberal subject for the end of history in the televisual era… a story that countersigns every aspect of the logic of our media age”. What AOC was up to on that livestream, and what so many of us are up to these days, when we talk on and on about our “trauma”, was perpetuating an easily-digestible narrative, first honed by Winfrey, in a late-20th century liberal environment that valued sentimental stories of empowerment above all else.

On political grounds alone, Liu is appalled by this “tightly choreographed, standardized script of survival and recovery”. But on her way to the final Oprah chapter — which is so thorough and eviscerating that one begins to wonder if Oprah really isn’t one of the most destructive figures in modern life — Liu winds her way through the expected kinds of historicizing that make books like Traumatized worthwhile. So, for instance, we learn that the origins of modern trauma actually stem from 19th-century railway companies’ attempts to promote the talking cure, to avoid being made liable for “railway spine”, the era’s term for the invisible signs of shock suffered by the (mostly bourgeois) victims of train accidents. We learn how “mental health” itself was only coined after the Second World War, as a measurement of the fitness of soldiers, by a military keen to research new treatments that would get them back to the front lines more quickly.

We also learn about the bitter fight over the 1980 publication of the controversial DSM-III, which forever abolished the inclusion of psychoanalytic ideas from mainstream American psychiatry, and first elevated PTSD to a real diagnosis. Under the direction of Robert Spitzer, the DSM-III eradicated Freudian terms like “neurosis” and “psychosis”, and enacted what Liu sees as “a massive redefinition of mental illness”, one that functionally “erased childhood history from diagnostic consideration as a possible origin or ‘etiology’ of disease”. The laudable desire to make psychiatry a more exact science turned the profession away from psychoanalytic ideas of inner conflict, and instead pursued diagnoses of mental illness as physical, medically-treatable diseases of the body. Liu remains suspicious of the ways in which the proliferating lists of symptoms in subsequent DSMs have opened up further chemical interventions, largely as a way of making treatment easier for insurance companies.

For Liu, the origins of this new psychology are bourgeois, through and through. In a chapter on the history of modern middle-class obsession with safety and risk during childhood, Liu draws a stark straight line from Victorian campaigns against “cruelty to children” all the way to the Satanic Panic of the Eighties. There, the era’s new theories of trauma and memory loss were deployed to outright falsify media spectacles and horrifying stories of mass child abuse at places like the McMartin Preschool. Liu reminds us that elite moral panics around childhood abuse were largely liberal, middle-class affairs, long before the advent of newer Right-wing conspiracy theories about pedophile rings in pizza parlors. The anxiety of the comfortable, wealthy professional classes is a major theme running throughout Traumatized — a key origin of what we would now call “wokeness”. Since the creation of the bourgeoisie in the 18th century, this anxiety has always manifested as “a savior complex that loves nothing more than moral panics and the spectacle of philanthropic activism”.

Yet the “personal-is-political” mantras of Second Wave Feminism are suspect, too, and Judith Herman’s 1992 book Trauma and Recovery comes under fire as the foremost example of the ways in which that feminism — in league with anti-Vietnam veteran advocates like Robert Jay Lifton — began to shape our current image of the holy victim of abuse (or war), which Liu calls “an ersatz New Age religion with Protestant characteristics”. Such at least was the ideal put forward in 1988 by Ellen Bass, in her monumentally influential self-help book The Courage to Heal — and this same vision forms the basis for the trauma script Oprah would turn into the vernacular of daytime talk shows, celebrity confessionals, and, eventually, social media.

Liu is ultimately unsparing in her condemnation of the chokehold trauma culture has on our society. Not only does it make actual mental therapy difficult, giving the client a ready-made script to perpetually avoid personal responsibility for their own suffering, trauma culture also feeds the pointless culture war. Ever the good Marxist, Liu’s real complaint is that trauma culture — like the nebulous “wokeness” which it undergirds — ultimately functions as a way of disguising elite power. “Trauma culture’s regressive class politics exposes us to the reaction of conservatives who are willing to channel working-class resentment into a politics of rage against liberal hypocrisies,” Liu writes in her conclusion. “Professional-class liberalism, especially in its pseudo-radical form, continues to foreclose the building of political organizations in which the struggle against capital and for the interests of wage workers takes precedence over fetishized forms of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen.’”

What follows from this, unsurprisingly, is a straightforward prescription for more class politics. Liu earnestly believes in the Marxist dialectic, and insists that the pieties of the professional-managerial classes are the first real obstacle to enacting socialism. The reader is free to agree or disagree with her final prescriptions, but her analysis of the particular class character of our trauma culture seems to me inarguable. It is, by and large, a liberal, bourgeois phenomenon: sentimental, anxious, and neurotic. It obscures the material and economic causes of mass suffering, offering up only personalized narratives of trauma and triumph — narratives it can then use to filter out those marginalized people not “enlightened” enough to perform it correctly. This of course drives those people (regardless of race, gender, or religion) right into the arms of Right-wing politicians able to exploit popular anger at elite hypocrisy and censoriousness. Thus the two symbolic styles — elite prudery and proletarian rage — continue to feed into each other, just as the culture war feeds into itself, just as the endless cycles of “woke” and “anti-woke” only serve to perpetuate a meaningless spectacle.

What is most interesting, though, is something else which Liu suggests only briefly: that our current model of therapy — centered as it often is around the repetition of the trauma script and the rehearsal of a narcissistic ego — is a dead-end, leaving us the easy prey of expanding bureaucratic diagnosis and pharmacological control (though how a socialist state would avoid reinforcing such a medicalized bureaucracy, Liu never considers). One practical answer might be a partial to the psychoanalytical model — that Oedipal father whom modern psychiatry had to slay, to legitimize itself as a science. At points, Liu suggests that our obsession with particular ideals of “mental health” are doing real harm to us, since we’ve largely abandoned the idea of mental illness as an internal conflict requiring actual psychic resolution. Liu puts the issue neatly:

“In a real-life therapeutic setting, the path to recovery begins with giving up the ‘me’ that is demanding to be seen; in collaboration with a therapist who is able to resist regression into the mother/infant dyad, an ‘I’ can emerge as a subject responsible and guilty, but also capable of grasping troubling truths about an objective reality that cannot be bent to the fantasy of ‘me.’”

A society overflowing with “me” fantasies, stuck on the trauma script, has little defense against people who exploit that script for professional or economic gain — whether that’s celebrities like Oprah, politicians like AOC, or the professional managerial class itself. What Liu does so well in Traumatized is to lay out the ways media, celebrity, and contemporary psychiatry have collaborated to reinforce a vision of our own psyches that ultimately makes us ill. I myself don’t believe there’s anything like a political solution for what is essentially a tangle of persuasive and enticing symbols, which no one person has the wherewithal to untangle. But the psychoanalysts, in their naming of metaphors like the “unconscious” or “repression” or “the ego” (metaphors which we all still use on a daily basis), at least gave us ways of thinking and talking about those symbols that remain ripe for rediscovery. It’s time to see “mental health” and “trauma” for the metaphors they are, as well. Only by understanding where they come from — understanding them as recent inventions born of specific historical moments — can we begin to choose a better model for our lives.

A few months earlier, while on maternity leave with her third child, Rev. Hollaway had read How To Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan’s discourse-shifting 2018 book about the potential mental health benefits of psychedelic drug use. “My response to it was: there’s a question for the church on every page,” she says. “The fact that increased mystical-type experiences will result in better therapeutic outcomes ought to make us pay attention.” Keen to learn more, she signed up for training as a psychedelic facilitator at the California Institute of Integral Studies. “I was completely psychedelically naive, and I didn’t want to start this year-long program when I’d never experienced it,” she says. Hence, magic mushrooms in the tub.

Rev. Hollaway is not alone in believing that psilocybin and LSD may ask serious questions of the Christian church. In the last decade, progressive members of the clergy in many different denominations across the United States have begun to explore how they might support those in their congregations who wish to integrate their psychedelic experiences into their faith.

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Back in 2016, a minister at Emmanuel Episcopal Church just outside of Seattle named Hunt Priest was one of 30 religious leaders from a variety of backgrounds who took part in a groundbreaking study into psilocybin and sacred experiences at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University. While the research project can’t help but sound like a joke (a Catholic priest, a rabbi and a Zen Buddhist roshi walk into a drug lab…), the impact that Priest’s first experience with psilocybin had on his life was very real.

“I went in thinking I would just see some weird colors and stuff,” Priest remembers when we speak over a video call from his home in Georgia. “But pretty immediately I started having a reaction that felt deeply Pentecostal.”

Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing Christian denomination in the world, adding around 13 million new worshipers each year. The tradition places a strong emphasis on miracles and embodied experiences, emphasizing the direct relationship between the worshiper and God through the Holy Spirit — best exemplified by speaking in tongues. This was not at all how Priest had previously understood his faith. “That’s certainly not the Episcopalian, Anglican, way of thinking about Christianity,” he adds. “It was probably my first deep, embodied experience of the Holy Spirit.”

Other participants in the study reported similar effects: 96% of the religious leaders rated their psilocybin trip among the top five most significant spiritual experiences of their lives; 79% said they felt the experience had enriched their daily prayer, made them better at their jobs and increased their sense of the sacred in their everyday lives.

Priest, who had been feeling burned out and directionless prior to the experience, returned to his life with renewed vigor. He moved to a new church in Georgia, and in 2021 founded Ligare, a non-profit organization that takes its name from the Latin verb meaning “to bind”, the etymological root of “religion”. The group’s stated mission is to bridge gaps between Christian organizations, mental health advocates and the psychedelic community — and to “empower and educate religious leaders and communities about the profound opportunities and significant challenges within the resurgence of psychedelics”.

You may be surprised to learn that the idea of priests preaching the Gospel of hallucinogens has not always gone down well with church elders. Last August, a former Ligare intern named Joe Welker resigned from the group and reported Priest to his church diocese, who launched an investigation. It eventually found that Priest had engaged in “conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy” by using his position to supposedly endorse the use of banned substances. Despite the opening up of medical research, psychedelics remain federally illegal across the United States. Only a trio of states — Oregon, Colorado and New Mexico — have moved to relax their local laws.

In Georgia, a bishop in the Episcopal Church gave Priest the choice to either resign from Ligare — or resign his ordination. He chose to continue his work with Ligare. “I don’t mean to sound haughty or anything, but it’s my ministry,” he tells me. “I still consider myself an Episcopalian. Obviously, I consider myself a Christian. I’m here for the church when it’s ready to learn about this. I hope their position will change, but I went with my calling. I’m not angry. I was disappointed and hurt, but it’ll turn around.”

Priest’s frustration is palpable. After all, the substance he consumed is produced naturally in a mushroom, and is it not written in Genesis 1:29 that God gave the plants “upon the face of all the earth” to humanity? Furthermore, in his Epistle to the Romans 12:2, Saint Paul instructs Christians to “be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God”.

Renewing his mind is exactly what Priest felt he had done. To be told that his church has no place for what he believes was a direct encounter with the Holy Spirit is hard to comprehend. “It goes back to Genesis 1: ‘God saw that it was good,’” he argues. “There’s a reason we have receptors in our brains for psilocybin: an ancient evolutionary connection. That’s not to say that there isn’t a risk and you don’t have to be careful — but used with the right intention, in the right way, it’s beautiful.”

As far as Priest is concerned, the only people who should really be worried about psychedelics are atheists. “I’ve talked to so many people who say things like: ‘Holy shit, Mary Magdalene came to me… Who’s that?’” he says. “So many people have experiences of God, or Jesus, and it opens this awareness of spirituality or mysticism that we don’t often get in our waking lives or in our religious tradition. There’s definitely a vibrant Christian conversation going on right now, it just needs to be bigger. And it will be.”

* * *

When psychedelic drugs first began to permeate the American consciousness in the early Sixties, any spiritual or religious associations tended to be with Eastern religions, New Age philosophies or slightly indeterminate fusions of the two, such as the Hare Krishna movement. However, it didn’t take long before certain Christians were beginning to wonder whether they too might have something to learn from a hallucinogenic sacrament.

On Good Friday in 1962, at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, a graduate student in theology from Harvard Divinity School named Walter Pahnke ran a double-blind experiment with 20 divinity students in which half were given a placebo and the other half were dosed with psilocybin. The experiment, which was supervised by Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (today better known as Ram Dass), had a profound impact on many of its participants. The religious scholar Huston Smith later described the Good Friday experiment as “the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced”.

While for some this gave weight to the theory that psychedelics are entheogens, capable of reliably producing direct religious experiences, for others it suggested that Christianity may itself be a product of hallucination. In 1970, the archaeologist John Marco Allegro published The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, making the dramatic claim that the gospels are coded stories written by a fertility cult, and that Jesus is in fact merely a metaphor for a psychoactive mushroom. The book and its theories are pet favorites of the podcaster Joe Rogan, and partly inspired Philip K. Dick’s 1982 novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, in which an Episcopal bishop travels to the Holy Lands to investigate whether mushroom use could help explain the resurrection.

In more recent times, historians and theologians have suggested various ways that biblical stories might be reinterpreted if it is accepted that Abrahamic prophets used psychedelics in their rituals. In the 2000s, the Israeli academic Benny Shanon advanced the theory that when Moses heard the voice of God from a burning bush on Mount Horeb he was under the influence of ayahuasca. Meanwhile, in his 2020 book The Immortality Key, Brian Muraresku explored the possibility that what early Christians called “wine” was in fact a type of psychedelic brew. Could it be that when Jesus turned the water into wine he did so not by miraculous means, but simply by lacing it with psilocybin?

* * *

Whether or not early Christians took part in psychedelic rituals is a matter of speculation, but the influence Priest’s first hallucinogenic experience had on him is easily verifiable. When he walked out of Johns Hopkins a decade ago he was met by Reverend Timothy Tutt, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, who immediately recognized that something had changed in his companion. “I spent the next 24 hours with him, and what I saw was my friend of several years glowing and sparkling,” recalls Rev. Tutt when we speak via a call from his home in Washington, D.C.. “I don’t know any other way to say it.”

Sometime later, Rev. Tutt decided to pursue a psychedelic experience of his own in a group setting along with several other Christian clergy and congregation members. He, too, had a profound experience. He established a direct connection with the divine and says that this helped him to address a deep-seated trauma.

“I’ll just be quite honest: through one of my psychedelic experiences, I was able to come to terms with an event of childhood sexual abuse that happened in a church setting,” he says. “It is not uncommon for the American church or other churches to have those experiences. I had done a great deal of work around it with my therapist, but really, psychedelics helped me come to terms with it in a way that nothing else had.”

The potential for psychedelics to address and begin to heal trauma — which Pollan explored at length in his 2018 book — is a subject that many of the clergy people I spoke to for this story returned to. Reverend Molly Baskette is a longtime pastor in the United Church of Christ who has decided to retire from parish ministry to set up a legal ketamine clinic in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“I’ve been a working pastor for almost 30 years at this point, and there are a lot of hard things about serving a very diverse population,” Rev. Baskette tells me. “We have ex-evangelicals — queer people who have fled more fundamentalist queer-phobic traditions. We have homeless mentally ill people, and housed mentally ill people. We have people with substance abuse disorders who think we don’t know their secret. We have a lot of people with PTSD. In some ways, a pastor becomes an untrained — or badly trained — therapist. When I read How To Change Your Mind, I was like: ‘Thank Christ!’ Literally, not as an expletive. Here is a possible solution for people who are suffering and sick — and isn’t the church about relieving suffering?”

Rev. Baskette may be retiring from her parish, but she has no plans to leave her church. She remains part of a working group within the UCC that aims to normalize the concept of using psychedelics for healing and spiritual growth and intends to pass a resolution publicly affirming the church’s support for legislation. Another member of the group is Reverend Molli Mitchell, who recently became the first ordained minister to become a legally authorized psilocybin practitioner in Oregon.

Rev. Mitchell began her career as a social worker before her life was upended by a stage-three breast cancer diagnosis. After going through treatment and reassessing her life she entered a seminary, but not before heading out on a camping trip to the desert and trying mushrooms. She describes this as a “phenomenally powerful, life-changing experience.”

Today, she serves as a hospice chaplain, a local church pastor and a facilitator at the Portland-based psilocybin center 7 Gates Sanctuary. She sees all of these roles as different aspects of her ministry — and believes the church is well-placed to bring psychedelic healing into the mainstream. “The church can play a significant role in the same way that it played a significant role in increasing access to healthcare,” she says. “Churches founded hospitals, and founded hospices. They founded them because Jesus was a healer. We have hurdles to overcome in terms of stigma, and historic Christian ethics that said ‘all drugs are bad’. But this is not outside of the scope of what we care about and why.”

It makes sense that churches would want to ease the suffering of their congregations. Still, it’s also easy to imagine why those at the top of the church’s traditional power structures might not be so keen on throwing their weight behind psychedelics.

Allyssa Jomei, who works with Ligare as an Interfaith Spiritual Director, acknowledges that the spiritual experiences people have while taking psychedelics may not be recognizably Christian at all. “What folks are dealing with as they have these experiences and are curious about it is just a total dismantling of faith systems,” she says.

This is part of what makes psychedelics so challenging for traditional religions to truly embrace. While some people who take these substances may well have experiences that align with the theology they already understand, others may find themselves confronting something totally alien. “That’s a hard thing, and it really strikes us at the core of who we are,” says Jomei. “That’s why it’s useful to have someone with an interfaith background, because when people are grappling with something bigger than what they thought they were, it’s really helpful to have some different perspective and different language as they’re deconstructing and reconstructing.”

Back in Pasadena, Rev. Hollaway sounds a note of caution for Christians who believe rushing out to champion psychedelics might be a panacea to revive flagging interest in church services or offer a speed-dial to the divine. Although it might sound like an ingenious ploy to boost church attendance among the young — Come for the psilocybin, stay for the psalms — Rev. Hollaway suggests that the church would do well not to lose itself in a headlong rush to occupy ground it does not fully understand.

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“I would say the church can play a role in tempering enthusiasm,” she says. “Any religious tradition that has been around a good while has developed the resources to take a longer view. In psychedelics, when we talk about preparation and integration, we’re usually talking about three meetings before and three meetings after an experience. What about talking about lifelong spiritual formation, and what that actually means? A religious life and a religious experience are two different things.”

A looming question remains over how traditional churches might realistically integrate the regular or semi-regular use of psychedelics into their traditions. Certainly, it seems unlikely that any self-respecting priest will be swapping their communion wafers for acid tabs any time soon. Some of those I speak to advocate for annual retreats, where clergy and other committed congregation members could trip together and “reset” their spiritual connection. Others see psychedelics as primarily a therapeutic tool, a medicine to be used to treat trauma or ease anxiety for those fearful about dying.

Even among those who have had found themselves reconfigured by a mind-altering religious experience, there remains a significant amount of skepticism about exactly what role the church itself might have to play in all this. When I ask Rev. Hollaway what she believes the church embracing psychedelics would look like, she expresses that most fundamental of Christian instincts: doubt.

“I can picture it a lot of ways, and the truth is I don’t know,” she says. “I want to have enough humility to say that I don’t know how it’s going to play out. I don’t even know that it should.”

As a psychologist you hear many stories like this. But you don’t need to be a professional to know that hardship during childhood can shape us for life. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as family breakdown, violence or neglect, are now hard-wired into our understanding of developmental psychology.

We are rightly aware of the damage that adversity can cause, but we are far less attuned to the risks posed by the opposite: the absence of challenge. The childhood and adolescent distress that we currently frame as a mental health crisis can be understood as much through the lens of ACEs as its corollary: what I propose we call Overprotective Childhood Experiences (OCEs).

OCEs are ACEs’ caring cousins. They are what happens when parents remove the tricky bits that help us learn and grow. Instead of fighting over toys during playgroups, children can be assigned them on a parent-led rota basis. Similarly, there’s no need for solitary imaginative play that arises out of momentary boredom when you have the frictionless fun of an iPad for now or AI-powered virtual reality in the future. If ACEs create hardship in the home, OCEs form a parent-imposed “easy mode” that makes the world beyond the home seem harder than it is.

While psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt have popularized the phenomenon of overparenting and warned about the risks, these concerns remain a somewhat heterodox position. Haidt’s insights are evidenced, well argued and common sense to anyone who works with kids; the mystery is why so many families still act against his wisdom. I believe that part of this is because we’re better at recognizing acute risks over slower, chronic ones. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s best-selling book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, might be theoretically dubious, but it feels intuitive to people and so it’s become part of pop-psychological lore. Trauma and ACEs capture our immediate fears, but we don’t have a concept or word for other types of risks.

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As a result, mainstream parenting culture (which is what I encounter in my therapy practice) remains fixated on the risks of adversity. Most parents are unaware of the severe risks posed by OCEs, even though I see mainly OCE-shaped problems in my practice: checked-out, pallid, withdrawn kids who are overwhelmed by school, by groups of other children, and by the challenge of the world beyond their screens. Unlike a lot of ACEs, which are often events outside our control, OCEs are fully avoidable and fixable through basic parenting decisions. To return to Theo’s struggles from the beginning of this piece, we need to be able to discuss both the ACEs (fraught separation, death of a relative) as well as OCEs (removal from school, decreased challenge through digital instead of real relating, questionable neurodevelopmental diagnoses) that shape his world.

The advent of technology, most recently AI, has supercharged the problem of OCEs. Faced with the decision between the friction of interpersonal play or the ease of Roblox, an iPad-reared child will opt for the latter. An AI-reared child has no need to expend creative effort into actually drawing a dragon when they can get one made in moments. And character.ai is there to meet any of your friendship needs with relentless positivity and fun. These OCEs do not just impact emotional resilience. They hit at the very core of our being and cognition, eroding our capacity to persist with the effortful thinking and interpersonal processing that characterize growing up and becoming a fully functioning individual.

When Meta’s chatbots were found to be behaving flirtatiously with children, the response was understandably one of outrage. But alongside fears of AI’s sexualization of children, there is another danger: AI’s ability to simulate frictionless relationships. The chatbots were in fact designed to hack the human need for attachment. They offer all the warmth and validation we get from the best relationships without any conflict; the thrill of an adolescent crush without the uncertainty or rejection. Tech gives you what you want, not what you need.

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Parents are increasingly unable to bear to see their children’s minor upsets too. They protect their children from challenge and social friction, assisted in their endeavors by technology that makes their children’s lives smooth and easy. The loneliness and dysfunction that ensues from these OCEs is often subsequently interpreted as a mental health issue within the child, rather than an effect of problematic parenting and culture.

If tech’s solution for tech-enabled loneliness is AI chatbots, we can’t blame the turn to easy mode entirely on Mark Zuckerberg. Therapy hacked the human desire for conflict-free relationships long before the rise of those chatbots. The original pitch of therapy was to “do the work”: to transcend personal or outside-world difficulties through the challenging space of the therapeutic relationship, in which the therapist encourages the client to critically question their choices and motivations. Gradually, however, many therapeutic spaces have become safe spaces where all stories are heard and valued equally, without challenge. This is partly an artifact of therapy’s financial model. For the most part, people feel more satisfied when listened to than given a hard time. But it’s also an inevitable result of therapy culture’s hyperfocus on trauma and ACEs: you don’t want to retraumatize your client by querying their lived experience.

With that in mind, do you think it’s bad that chatbots just reflect your words mindlessly back at you, alongside generic encouragement? That’s exactly what a lot of person-centered counseling does too. This has happened at the cost of personal growth: the therapist now, just like many of today’s parents, tries to create a space without adversity for the client, affirming and validating the client’s version of events.

That affirming tendency was partly responsible for the rise of the “affirmative care” that we saw first in gender dysphoria and now in neurodivergence. To query or challenge a client’s account of their difficulties if they consider them to be around gender or neurodiversity, no matter how biased or improbable their accounts may be, has been labeled abusive and has even been prohibited under some psychotherapeutic bodies.

Therapy culture laid the ground for the chatbot shift to affirmation and flattery. When GPT-4 started telling us how brilliant we were for asking banal questions about train timetables, we should have been more worried. And now technology’s ability to smooth human experience is making inroads into the therapeutic space, where a growing percentage of AI use is now as a quasi-therapeutic companion. If your AI chatbot is too firm or too chatty in its therapeutic role, just tweak your prompt to adjust its settings — validate me more, help me stay with my emotions — and it will be just right for where you are right now in your life.

But friction-free therapy is only half the problem. AI also creates OCEs by undermining children’s ability to understand and consolidate knowledge. A 14-year-old girl told me about a peer at school who struggled academically — until she discovered she could have ChatGPT open at all times. When asked about how she’d cope in her GCSEs next year, she shrugged and said she’d probably slide her phone into her calculator case. She wasn’t bothered about passing anyway — if answers are handed to you as soon as the question crosses your mind, where is the value of memorizing facts?

Gen Alpha are right to see the internet as a vast resource for knowledge. It seems inevitable that we are moving into an era of extended cognition — the philosophical theory that the mind extends beyond the human brain in a network of information, whether social or technological. But our capacity to navigate that informational field — to know what it is that we’re looking for, and why we’re looking for it, and which bits of information are useful, and which are not — depends on our ability to reason based on information in our actual brains. Anyone can Google the First World War and get a good summary, or get Claude to adumbrate the Russian Revolution, but in order to truly understand the links between Germany’s faltering war effort and their audacious intervention to send Lenin to Russia to stoke the revolution, we need to have internalized a coherent picture of the world.

“Facts are not opposed to understanding; they enable understanding,” wrote the educationalist Daisy Christodoulou in Seven Myths about Education. Without chunks of general knowledge committed to our own long-term memory, we don’t have enough of a mental map to make good judgments, or even to make sense of new bits of information about the world.

So, as well as being emotionally harmful, the OCE-rich environment rots our cognitive abilities. It saps us of the knowledge we need to autonomously operate our AI assistants and our ability to tolerate the low-level frustration of memorizing boring bits of information that will allow us to know how to think. The problem of “frustration intolerance”, identified by the psychologist Albert Ellis, cuts across all our cognition. Without the ability to tolerate minor discomfort, we cannot progress in an imperfect world.

The urge for easy mode is understandable. Humans evolved in a high-risk environment full of potential ACEs that we rarely encounter anymore in the West; being hungry and hunted on the savannah is closer to a war zone than our safe, suburban lives. Grabbing opportunities to rest would have been crucial to our survival. But we now live in an environment where rest and assistance are far too available. Just like we can tear our muscles if we work them too hard, they also break down if we don’t exercise them at all. Humans do best in an optimal zone of stress — the sweet spot where we’re challenged enough to grow but not so overwhelmed that we break down.

Evolution has supplied us with impulses to push, improve and excel as well as impulses to hide and relax. They are two opposing but complementary forces in our lives, and their balance adjusts in different situations. Pushing entails discomfort, and we naturally wish to remove such discomfort. We don’t yet know the full consequences of such removal in the early developmental window, but we are perhaps starting to see signs of it in Gen Z’s troubled relationship both with working life — with their tendencies to “quiet quit” or check out altogether — and less satisfying, less frequent formation of human relationships.

It may seem counterintuitive in an age where we talk a lot more about trauma than checking out, but OCEs carry as serious a risk as ACEs when you take them too far. The risks of ACEs might be more obvious, but the risks of checking out, of withdrawing ourselves and our children from challenges, are just as real. We’re starting to see how they play out in our children’s well-being and our shared morale. We should worry about where they lead us.

* Names and minor details have been altered to preserve confidentiality

But then Freud, by his own admission, was much less interested in healing the sick than in pioneering the “science” he called psychoanalysis. So he would have been dismayed to learn that, by the turn of the millennium, most psychiatrists would view his theories in roughly the same way chemists viewed alchemy: as a faintly embarrassing remnant of their field’s unscientific prehistory. “Freud’s ideas”, declared a major history of psychiatry in 1998, “are vanishing like the last snows of winter”. Ironically, Freud’s single surviving legacy in Western medicine looked set to be the use of talk therapies largely cleansed of psychoanalytic content.

This was a brutal demotion in status for a man whose impact was compared, in his lifetime, to that of Darwin. And even if that comparison was Freud’s own, it says a great deal that he wasn’t laughed out of Vienna for making it. Just as Darwin had uncovered the evolution of species by studying the flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands, Freud believed he had uncovered the evolution of the mind by studying the unhappy patients on his couch. Many eminent contemporaries took him at his own estimation: Einstein wrote him fan mail, and Bertrand Russell campaigned for him to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And Freud’s ideas came to hold such sway that through the Seventies the DSM-II, the American “bible” of psychiatric diagnosis, comprised a medley of psychoanalytic terms like “hysterical neurosis” and “schitzoid personality”.

Within a generation, university students were becoming more likely to encounter Freud’s ideas on a course in literary theory than one in psychology or psychiatry. One reason was the new discovery of primary sources which, in the Eighties and Nineties, turned assassinating Freud’s character into something of a public bloodsport among intellectuals. The wise and humble doctor eulogised by Auden now stood accused (irrefutably) of clinical ineptitude and scientific recklessness verging on fraud, (plausibly) of conducting an affair with his wife’s sister, and (absurdly) of attempted murder and child abuse.

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But far more damaging for Freud’s ideas was the rise, in the latter half of the 20th century, of an alternative view of mental illness based on three things: genes, brains and drugs. The decoding of the complete human genome promised to unveil the origins of psychological suffering in our parents’ DNA rather than in their care-giving styles. New brain imaging technology would enable us to observe psychiatric disorders in the contours of grey matter rather than rooting around for them in the murk of the unconscious. And new medications to treat mania, psychosis and depression were already replacing the hours of aimless chat prescribed by psychoanalysis. Freud began to look more like the founder of a religion than a scientist, and his followers like disciples zealously but fruitlessly interpreting his sacred texts. “Biomedical” psychiatry had seemingly triumphed; the real scientists would take over from here.

So it may come as a surprise that, decades after the study of the neuroses was replaced by that of the neurotransmitters, a prominent clinical psychologist has published a new book that includes a game attempt to make a scientific case for Freud. In Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Making of the Modern Mind, Frank Tallis dares to take a harder line than most other Freudian holdouts. When their discipline came under siege from biomedical psychiatry, most psychoanalysts — turtlenecked figures who could quote Proust and Lacan but had never seen the inside of a lab — retreated to Hampstead, pulled up the drawbridge and turned inward. Adam Phillips, perhaps the most famous of them, now argued that Freud’s ideas cannot be false but, like poetry, only “more or less interesting, more or less inspiring”. Sounding like High Church mystics in the age of modern science, the psychoanalysts in effect helped downgrade their own field from a mighty branch of medicine to a (more inspiring, interesting — and expensive) rival to astrology.

By eschewing such relativism, Tallis may be out of step with contemporary psychiatry — contrast his subtitle with that of the 2006 work Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind — but unlike Phillips et al., he at least takes Freud seriously on his own terms. After all, Freud fulminated against those like Jung who doubted the literal truth of ideas like penis envy and the oral and anal stages of sexual development. “We don’t reject Copernicus, Kepler or Galileo because they produced horoscopes,” Tallis points out. This is true, but some might object that there is rather more evidence that the earth travels around the sun than there is for the idea that the central trauma of a little boy’s life is his terror of being castrated by his father as punishment for wanting to sleep with his mother.

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Boldly (or, perhaps, rashly) Tallis attempts a review of the science. Freud’s ideas, he assures us, have had unspecified “seismic after-effects” in the field of biology. There have been conferences of something called the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society (among whose attendees, we are gravely informed, was Oliver Sacks). In support of Freud’s claim that dreams represent symbolic wish fulfilment, Tallis quotes a neuroscientist who writes that “‘wishing’ might be subserved by the mesocortical-mesolimbic dopamine circuitry of the brain”. There is certainly a pungent, science-y whiff to all this. But readers will decide for themselves whether it adds up to what Tallis calls “Freud’s scientific rehabilitation”.

But perhaps instead a case can be made for the enduring relevance to psychiatry of Freud’s worldview without resorting to scientific credulity or postmodern mystification. Indeed, millions of readers are already familiar with it by way of bestselling books based on a growing body of research on the effects of trauma. When Bessel van der Kolk argues that the human body “keeps the score” of the mind’s suffering, or that “traumatised people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on”, he can sound uncannily like Freud (whose work he liberally quotes). Likewise the Canadian physician and intellectual Gabor Mate when he writes that our early experiences can leave us trapped in a “physio-emotional time warp”. Van der Kolk and Mate place strong emphasis on “attachment theory”, first developed by the psychoanalyst John Bowlby, which explores how the effects of our early entanglements reverberate through our lives.

What’s more, the claim that Freud’s notions are unsupported by science no longer cuts as deep as it once did — because, as it turns out, so are some of the fundamental assumptions of the “biomedical” psychiatry that supposedly usurped them. The decoding of the human genome, completed in 2003, did not show that mental illness is predestined but, rather, that hereditary vulnerability interacts with our environment in enormously complex ways. Optimism around psychopharmacology has waned, as new psychiatric drugs have failed to appear and doubts about the efficacy and safety of the old ones has grown. And hopes brain imaging would transform psychiatry have petered out, as new technologies like fMRI have so far shown no utility in the diagnosis or treatment of mental illness. In 2022, a new history of psychiatry gloomily concluded that “biology is a bet whose payoff has been far more limited than its architects promised”.

None of this means that the Gothic edifice of Freud’s theories, with its vaults and gargoyles, is about to be rebuilt. But a sober assessment of what modern psychiatry can and cannot tell us suggests that, in broad outline if not in many of its details, his approach continues to hold much value. Our past loves and terrors can haunt us in the present. We are often opaque to ourselves, riven by conflicts we only half understand, our passions barely kept in check by external constraints. If we can be helped to overcome the thousand ways we protect ourselves from self-knowledge, we may see that our distress is not some random affliction but a meaningful response to the conditions of our development. Our suffering has a story, and it makes sense.

Freud once likened the way we repress unwanted thoughts to the ejection of a disruptive audience member from an academic lecture so that the event can continue smoothly. Now 30 years after Freud himself was manhandled from the podium of psychiatry and shut out of the lecture hall, the authorities who replaced him are faltering — and he can still be heard, banging on the door outside. Even if, as Auden wrote, “often he was wrong and, at times, absurd”, his voice cannot altogether be silenced. Perhaps the most canny assessment of him came from his wronged patient Horace Frink, who when Freud was dying was asked if he had any words for his former idol. “Tell him he was a great man,” said Frink, “even if he did invent psychoanalysis”.

The Shefayim Hotel, 15 minutes north of Tel Aviv, is currently serving as a temporary home for residents of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, which, on October 7, saw 62 of its 950 residents killed and 18 of them taken hostage. Flapping gently in the breeze from the ceiling of the reception area are images of the hostages. There is a banner with their names; yellow stickers are placed next to them if they have been returned. A few weeks ago, two were killed in a horrific tale of friendly fire. Yotam Haim, 28, and Alon Shamriz, 26, had managed to escape their captors in Gaza when they were fatally shot by Israeli forces, along with another young Israeli man.

On the hotel’s front desk, there is a list of funerals and memorials yet to take place. Everyone knows there may soon be more. Five members of the kibbutz remain somewhere underground in Gaza. At least one of them is a young woman — one of the 17 Hamas has refused to part with, perhaps because of the horror stories they would tell.

Today, the residents of the Shefayim Hotel have a roof over their heads, food and medicine. Each family has been offered therapy. You could compare them with the people in Gaza now suffering the repercussions of Hamas’s actions. But that doesn’t make life any easier for them.

“It hurts all the time, it hurts everywhere. I hate waking up in the morning. If I could stay curled up in my bed I would,” says Dafna Rousso, 43, a mother-of-three from Kfar Aza whose husband Uri was killed by Hamas militants on October 7. She looks haunted, but like many Israelis, she is now used to patiently telling her story to the Western media, knowing that if the victims don’t speak, no one will believe what happened.

Shortly after the first rocket attacks were heard, Uri, a member of the kibbutz militia, received a message saying terrorists were in the vicinity. He rushed out of his home so quickly that he didn’t even have time to say goodbye to his wife and daughters. His cartridge showed that he managed to shoot at the terrorists six times. He was probably one of the first members of the kibbutz killed. And he wasn’t the only casualty in Dafna’s family: her nephew was also killed and, as someone born on the kibbutz, she knows everyone who died that day.

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Dafna, her daughters and her sister are now renting a flat nearby the Shefayim, but come back to the hotel for therapy sessions, and to be with those who understand what they are going through. There are vague plans for a temporary kibbutz, somewhere closer to the Negev — made up of caravans or temporary housing — where they can begin again, while waiting for Kfar Aza to be rebuilt. But no one knows whether the kibbutz, which was once so popular it had a three-year waiting list, will ever be revived. Dafna doesn’t think it will. How could those who saw their loved ones slaughtered ever feel safe enough to go back there? “To add to the tragedy, we’ve lost our community too,” she says.

Her story echoes across Israel, where nearly a quarter of Jews are reportedly suffering from PTSD. In the south in particular, families are still grappling with the fallout from October 7. Children have finally gone back to school, with too many classes missing pupils who were killed that day. Those who survived are now less likely to be playing Mums and Dads or having picnics with their teddy bears. “Now they are whispering in a corner saying, ‘Sshhhh we need to be quiet, there are terrorists outside,’” says Dr Flora Mor, who has been working with evacuated families for the humanitarian agency JDC. “During the Lebanon war we saw displaced people and fear but it was nothing like what we are seeing now in terms of scale, tremendous pain and trauma. The children aren’t as good at vocalising how they feel so there is a lot of separation anxiety, bedwetting and nightmares. They are very closed off or aggressive. They don’t know how to be themselves. It is like they have forgotten how to play; they are so stressed.”

One of the initiatives she has been trying to implement is one she devised, with Tel Aviv University and the Israeli Ministry of Education, in the wake of the Lebanon war: the Hibuki doll. A sad-looking dog, the toy has long arms and legs that can be Velcroed together, so that children can wear it like a backpack, and feel like they are constantly being held. (The name Hibuki comes from the Israeli word for hug.) More than that, the Hibuki doll is a tool that enables parents and educators to work out what young children are thinking. If they are told they have to look out for the doll, children will often tell their parents that Hibuki has had nightmares or is scared — when they aren’t ready to discuss their own feelings.

Parents can also benefit from talking about another’s emotions when they don’t feel able to articulate their own. Some attend therapy groups during which they discuss how to talk to their children about Hibuki: “The parent is encouraged to ask, ‘What did Hibuki have a nightmare about and how do you think we can make it better?’” says Flora. “When you are dealing with multi-generational trauma, it can help both the parent and the child.”

For the adults themselves, just a few miles down the road from the Shefayim Hotel is Rishpon, a home from home for another group of survivors. Behind a pair of heavy gates lies a camp in what feels like an enchanted forest. Teepees have been set up to offer massage and sound therapy; there’s a candle workshop and a campfire, free food and herbal teas. This was once a retreat for troubled youths, but it has been expanded to become a centre for the survivors of the Nova festival.

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Around 3,500 young people were dancing in the desert close to the border when Hamas terrorists invaded and started shooting at them. Of them, 364 were killed; many more were wounded, raped, taken hostage. Rishpon offers them a safe haven, where they support one another and speak to psychologists who are trained in helping them. “I see telling my story as a way of therapy,” says survivor Nehoray Levy, 24. “I lost 10 friends at Nova and it brings them back — I memorialise them for others.”

The trauma can hit him suddenly. “I think I am OK and then suddenly I am not. Last Friday it just attacked me out of nowhere, all these memories. I was crying and shivering for 15 minutes — my mum just hugged me.” There are the memories of seeing his friends killed, of bullets raining down on him; there is the survivor’s guilt, the fear that he could have done more to save them. And, like many Israelis, he’s saddened that he is telling his story in a world that doesn’t seem to care. “I know it is important for me to talk because I am a survivor and there are people who say they don’t believe what happened, or feel they can justify it,” he says. “It is insane to think we would lie about this, but we have another battle that we are fighting on social media just to get people to believe us.”

Many of the Nova survivors need more intensive therapy because of what they witnessed. The “Iron Hug”, a shelter named after the Iron Dome defence system — and set up by the addiction centre Ritorno in the countryside close to Jerusalem — is dealing with Nova survivors who aren’t coping at all. Some of them have lost their jobs and flats because they were unable to function normally, go to work, even get out of bed. Others have been thrown out of home because they were excessively using alcohol or drugs or sex to alleviate their pain.

“When you drink something, or smoke something, or have sex with someone, for a moment you feel good — and you forget about your memories and your flashbacks — but it doesn’t last long and then the cycle begins again,” says Talia Brandes, who is helping to run the shelter. “At first, we didn’t realise that some of them were living on the streets or were homeless. But then one of the girls wrote to me in the middle of the night saying that she could not take it anymore — she said ‘I am sleeping in different beds every night’. That is when we realised, we needed a shelter for them.”

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Trauma, of course, is something with which Jews are familiar — older survivors of October 7 speak of its echoes with the Holocaust. And therapy is something Jews are good at. But can you mend a country that seems so broken? The images of those 136 hostages yet to be returned are everywhere; pictures of them flash up at cashpoints. And Israelis are forced to reckon with the fact that, elsewhere in the world, posters of the kidnapped are pulled down, or seen as false propaganda.

“It feels like our entire society is being tortured — all of those hostages are like our children,” says former politician Ayelet Shaked, who is now the Chairwoman of the Friends of Schneider Hospital — the biggest children’s hospital in Israel. She has worked with some of the nation’s most traumatised individuals: the child hostages who have been returned. “Physically they are malnourished, have nits and scabies but those things they can recover from. Mentally, it is a different thing; some of them were physically abused. Some of them were sexually abused. They were not allowed to speak, not allowed to cry.”

And yet, she is hopeful. “They will not break us,” she says. Israel, recently so divided over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned judicial reforms that many wondered if it could ever recover, is more united than ever. “[Hamas] miscalculated as they saw we were polarised before, but now we know what we have to do: we will fight until the end — until all those monsters that did this are either dead or in jail.”

As for the Israel’s traumatised survivors, “will be looking after them for some time”, says Shaked. “But we will get there.”

This marks a strange moment in our cultural relationship with mental health. After decades of stigma, we are finally sharing our vulnerabilities. Yet we may be talking ourselves into a new problem. Trauma has become something of a cultural fixation — one of the most overused concepts in our daily lives.

But what exactly is trauma? And why has it come to dominate the therapeutic and cultural discourse? In an attempt to get to the bottom of this new psychology, I’ve been speaking to the world’s leading trauma experts. And I have discovered something unexpected: a powerful contradiction at the heart of psychology that explains why trauma has become one of the most divisive political issues in America.

The problem is that no one can agree on a definition of trauma, let alone how it should be treated. Progressives and conservatives don’t see eye to eye: either you are a Lefty snowflake with self-diagnosed trauma, or else you are getting on with life’s difficulties without complaining about it.

Psychologists are split down similar lines. When clinicians talk about trauma, they tend to distinguish between two distinct but related kinds of human experience. The first is the type researched by Dr George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, who has been investigating grief and PTSD for more than two decades. He explains that in the DSM, the key diagnostic manual used by psychiatrists in the US, trauma has a very specific definition: “It’s a violent or life-threatening event that is outside the range of normal experience.” This might include a car crash, sexual assault or a period spent in combat. However, Bonanno says, “even the term [‘traumatic experience’] is a misnomer, because even those events don’t always cause trauma reactions… I use the phrase in my research ‘potentially traumatic events’, as no event is inherently traumatic”.

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In his book, The End of Trauma, Bonanno points out that most people who endure extreme events — or trauma — tend not to suffer from PTSD. But those who do tend to experience a range of symptoms, such as flashbacks and panic attacks, which usually decline over time. So rather than being slaves to our trauma, Bonanno argues that humans are defined more by our inherent resilience than by our fragility.

Others disagree. Many clinicians would argue there is another kind of trauma that isn’t yet included in the DSM, but which is increasingly seen as a fundamental cause of mental illness. It it caused by experiences that aren’t explicitly violent but which affect us deeply, such as an emotionally abusive relationship in adulthood, or severe emotional neglect in childhood.

The psychotherapist Alex Howard, author of It’s Not Your Fault, distinguishes between overt trauma, as described by Bonanno, and covert trauma, this less tangible, nevertheless traumatic experience. Most of the clinicians I’ve interviewed agree that while we’re relatively good at treating overt trauma when it manifests as PTSD, covert trauma and the resulting “complex PTSD” is harder to deal with as it’s transdiagnostic, encompassing various disorders, and so affects almost every aspect of someone’s life. But this covert trauma, for an increasing number of clinicians, explains why we are the way we are. And through this interpretation, we are moving our conception of mental health away from “what’s wrong with you” and toward “what happened to you?”

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It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of this shift in our politics and culture. The degree to which our actions today are shaped by previous traumatic experiences has fundamental implications for criminal justice, social welfare, and healthcare policy. It also marks a dividing line between conservatives, who tend to value self-reliance in the face of adversity, and progressives, who believe we are defined by systems and forces beyond our control. The new narrative around trauma gives weight to the latter, to the ire of conservatives.

However, this new way of thinking about the mind is compelling for the public. Look at the extraordinary success of psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score, which spent more than 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Van der Kolk has argued powerfully for greater recognition of the effects of childhood trauma on adult mental health, and has lobbied for “Developmental Trauma Disorder” — a new construct that would take into account “covert trauma” — to be included in the DSM manual.

The most radical aspect of van der Kolk’s thesis is that past trauma is preserved within the body. While your mind might have dissociated from a traumatic experience, your body “keeps the score” and holds onto it. This means that, until we can fully process our original trauma, it continues to haunt us physically. The implication is that trauma is mysterious and hidden, but also vitally important to find. It dictates our lives and holds the key to our salvation. These are the perfect ingredients to drive a cultural obsession, with the end of suffering always just beyond our reach.

This concept of trauma is hugely popular in what some call the Trauma Industrial Complex: the inevitable industry that has sprung up to offer retreats, therapies, coaching programmes and courses to help people find and move through their trauma. When run by licensed therapists, some of these programmes can be helpful — but they also feed our “trauma-chasing” culture, keeping us chained to it.

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Among clinicians, though, van der Kolk’s theories remain contentious. Bonanno is unequivocal in his critique. “There isn’t someplace we can hide memories away,” he tells me, “and there is no anatomical or neuroscience mechanism to explain how you have a trauma hidden in your body.” When I put this to van der Kolk, he listed a series of examples showing that humans could, in fact, repress traumatic memories. For instance, people in road accidents can experience anterograde amnesia, and there’s extensive literature on Holocaust survivors having no memory of their experiences, or of remembering them at a later date.

At first, I was confused that two world experts could disagree about something as fundamental as whether we can forget bad memories. But as it turned out, I’d inadvertently stumbled upon one of the deepest tensions in psychology. This abiding rift over memory stems in part from a controversy in the field that took place three decades ago.

In 1990, a university student called Holly Ramona started therapy for her depression and bulimia. Her therapist, Marche Isabella, told Holly and her mother that bulimia was usually caused by incest, and that 70% of her bulimia patients had been sexually abused as children. Through the course of therapy, Isabella worked with Holly until she seemed to uncover memories of being sexually abused by her father. Her father vehemently denied this, but would go on to lose his job, his marriage, and his family. He became the first person to successfully sue a therapist over implanted memories.

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There were hundreds of similar cases involving “recovered memories” of childhood sexual abuse in the Eighties and Nineties, with therapists pushing their patients towards memories they didn’t have. It is a complicated moment in the history of psychology, because childhood sexual abuse is devastating and disturbingly common, and cases of false memories need to be carefully parsed out from real recollections. Some studies have also shown that traumatised people are more likely to have false memories, and Elizabeth Loftus, arguably the most influential researcher in this area, has shown convincingly how suggestible we can be to forming new memories. And even though there was no scientific support for the approach, a cohort of therapists were convinced that memories of abuse could only be unlocked through treatment. But many patients would later recant their “recovered memories”, and a host of lawsuits followed. For more medicalised psychologists, this episode was proof that psychoanalysis was vague, unscientific hokum.

This had lasting consequences for the field of psychology, leaving practitioners stuck between two reductionist positions: that either traumatic memories are entirely real, or that they are entirely manufactured. Neither position seems convincing when we consider the complexity of the mind and the prevalence of childhood abuse. But it partly explains why Bonanno and van der Kolk are at such odds.

It feels like clinicians such as van der Kolk are making the same mistakes as their Eighties predecessors as they encourage millions of people to “find their trauma”.  While there are benefits to destigmatising trauma, there are dangers too. Rachel Yehuda, Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, cautions that “if you attribute everything that happens in the world that you don’t like or that you didn’t expect [to trauma]… that can take a concept that could have been very useful and change it quite drastically”.

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Just look at the rise of “trigger warnings”. A 2020 study on trauma survivors found that these warnings may in fact worsen anxiety by increasing the “narrative centrality” of trauma among survivors. “Narrative centrality” refers to the degree to which someone identifies with their trauma, and how central it is in how they understand their own life. By increasing narrative centrality, you risk keeping people stuck in their trauma.

This points to the double-edged sword of increased cultural awareness of trauma. On one edge, it opens up more honest and vulnerable conversations about emotional suffering and mental health. On the other, it increases the narrative centrality of trauma throughout society.

As a result, therapists and psychologists are filling the role left by the clergy in providing guidance for how to live. As the Memory Wars show, psychoanalysis has the right DNA to fill that void. It is mystical, insofar as it deals with the unseen realms beyond our awareness. It is confessional. It is revelatory, revealing to us why we do what we do. In the absence of a metaphysical framework that can help us understand why we suffer, trauma is becoming a creed that can explain all.

And if the rise of therapy-speak is frustrating, it is also understandable. We need some way to make sense of suffering and redemption. It’s a problem, though, when we focus too much on our fragility and forget our resilience, a critique often levelled at progressives by conservatives. Likewise, if we ignore our vulnerability entirely, we create repressive societies — as liberals are fond of pointing out.

With its focus on emotional safety and the deterministic qualities of trauma, psychology often coincides neatly with social justice ideologies. Yet what works in the therapy room doesn’t necessarily work in the real world. Take the example of emotional validation: the idea of a therapist acknowledging and connecting with the emotional reality of a client. When this becomes a value in society, we can quickly fall into a moral relativism that gives undue value to people’s emotional reality.

But a healthy society should be sophisticated enough to know that humans are both fragile and resilient at different times and in different contexts. A healthy perspective requires us taking our “emotional reality” with a pinch of salt. Knowing when to focus on trauma and when to let it go requires a kind of wisdom that we won’t find on social media feeds and university safe spaces — but in the grit and contradiction of the human experience.

There is something dystopian about people competing for the attention of a famous podcast host to solve their most intimate problems. Hundreds of couples apply for a handful of opportunities to share their stories with Perel, along with her legion of listeners. Her 2006 bestselling guide to marital relations, Mating in Captivity, established her as TED-talking international authority on relationships. By the time Where Should We Begin? launched in 2017, Perel was listed in Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul 100 list of “spiritual luminaries”. Her podcast has been downloaded 50 million times since its launch.

It’s not hard to see why. As radical new ways of ordering relationships have proliferated, we no longer hold a set of principles for living in common. Liberalism’s marketplace of ideas has given rise to a marketplace of moralities: as free unbounded agents, we get to decide what is right for us. But when our bespoke moral stories clash with those adopted by other people in our lives, things get tricky: how do you resolve a conflict when you cannot agree on the rules that mediate it? Who do you turn to, to help you decide?

Enter Perel. She is fair, philosophical in encouraging a big-picture view of how to live well, and gently tough at making sure that the dynamic never falls into that of victim and aggressor. Nothing is sensationalised, and no one is demonised. She is something of a radical in the Anglosphere, where our one-strike-and-you’re-out attitude to cheating has remained intransigent even as non-traditional, non-monogamous relationships have become increasingly common. With divorce rates estimated at 42% in the UK and 45% in the US, and 27% of US adults estranged from a close family member, Perel’s more charitable approach to conflict might have merit.

She is also part of a trend. Therapists are increasingly becoming a kind of free-market priesthood, jockeying for the territory that actual priests once oversaw. With the decline of religion, we have lost any sense of a unifying story about how to live, without which we’re more likely to be miserable — as the mental health gains from being religious can attest. The claim of therapy is that it helps you shape the overarching narrative with which you make sense of the world, and how to live well in it. At best, going to one’s therapist is a substitute for confession, a time for honest reckoning; too often, though, clients see it as an indulgence, a means to divest one’s conscience of interpersonal responsibility. Once, we could have taken solace in doing the right thing by others; now, the feeling of solace comes first.

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By Nina Lyon

Perel is too tough, and too professional, to let her clients avoid hard truths. But other therapy-as-content offers people that easy way out, dwelling purely on the solace. If Instagram laid the groundwork for the therapy influencer phenomenon, all pastel-coloured quotes and exhortations to set boundaries, TikTok took it to the next level. Therapists on the video-sharing site seem to see everything as a sign of trauma: transient negative emotions, feeling under-motivated, feeling over-motivated, feeling uncertain. Things that cause trauma include having to do homework, dead celebrities, and understocked supermarkets. If anyone suggests that these things might not actually cause trauma, TikTokers argue that they are “invalidating” that trauma — which, they insist, causes further trauma. The therapists who say things like this make their followers feel understood, offering sweet relief from the harsher offline world — and building their influence as they do.

An obvious concern of the influencer model of therapy is that anyone can set themselves up as a mental health expert, without any training or expertise. But most successful influencers on TikTok and Instagram are verifiably qualified therapists or psychologists. They’re careful with disclaimers too, reminding their audience that their content isn’t therapy.

But if it isn’t therapy, what is it? And who does it serve?

In The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche describes the emergence of a priesthood class that gains its influence by stirring up resentment. Until the priests come along, you may not even have understood that you were suffering. It is only when they point out injustices that the extent of your distress becomes apparent. They present you with a new, inverted moral code in which suffering is honourable and weakness is good, while the previous virtues of strength are abandoned.

The therapy influencers peddling trauma are straight out of the priesthood playbook. If the Nietzschean priesthood is all about radicalising the underclass against its oppressors, TikTok therapists have identified a vast new audience for this. Whipping up new flavours of trauma with every new social justice movement, they target a demographic who genuinely lack full autonomy, who have resented this since forever, and who spend a lot of time online: teens.

The #teentherapists’s USP is that they get it — your parents don’t listen, they don’t validate your experiences, they’re actively undermining you. The demands of school are too much right now. Setting consequences for your behaviour is abusive parenting, and it doesn’t work anyway. They’ll even shout at your mum for you. They argue that “reparenting” is required to fix all this trauma, setting themselves as the adults you really can trust.

Much of what these #teentherapists identify as abusive behaviour looks alarmingly like differences in opinion in how to navigate the world, or jarring communication styles. The information they’re sharing is bitesize, in videos that aren’t usually longer than a couple of minutes. It’s also general: whereas Perel offers insight into a specific relationship dynamic or individual psyche, TiKTok therapists are presenting universal “life lessons”. The brevity of the messaging and its attempt at catch-all appeal does little to help its audience discern abuse from ordinary conflict. There’s also something uncomfortable about adults cultivating mass parasocial relationships with kids, especially when the implication is that these distant adults are better authorities than those who are present in a teenager’s life lives.

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The TikTok therapists have an appealing moral sales pitch — they can reach out to a massive audience who would otherwise have been ignored. The app is more accessible than therapy. But in order to get their voices heard, therapists have to actively seek followers. If a TikTok influencer takes a strong line, viewers feel heard and vindicated, they get to blame someone else, and they want more of the same kind of validation. TikTok therapists get validation, too, from follower counts, and the book deal that might accompany them. They might even get to be the new Esther Perel.

But Perel isn’t speaking to you; she’s speaking to the couples in her session. Where most therapy-as-content cares little for the public good — it tells stories about our inner lives that can only atomise us further — Perel focuses on building, rather than destroying, social relations. Her branch of therapy is closer to genuine spirituality than the TikToker’s: the sociologist Émile Durkheim saw religion as a force for ordering interpersonal relationships, creating meaning and bringing people together to communicate and affirm shared values. It’s a version of spirituality that only works when it works in common, and you can’t achieve that in a me-centric universe.

Then again, the marketplace of meaning isn’t a uniquely postmodern phenomenon. The decline of the traditions of the Roman republic brought in weird new religions, which were mixed and matched to suit people’s temperament and station, just as elements of spirituality are today. Individualist spiritualism is nothing new, either: William James wrote about the cheesy affirmations of wellness-adjacent New Thought at the turn of the 20th century.

What is new is the impact of technology. The internet gives would-be priests access to souls worldwide, and allows them to repackage their advice into compelling, publicly-available content. The reality TV show Couples Therapy has had 50 million viewers, for instance. While Perel’s episodes conceal the identity of their subjects, Couples Therapy has not only real names but faces. A misanthrope might wonder whether that accounts in part for its wild success — there’s nothing like watching a real relationship melt down in real time. We watch Love Island for the drama of hot 20-somethings cycling through new relationships. How different is it to watch a 30-something couple conclude on TV that this is probably the end, skilfully assisted by a therapist?

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Perhaps it’s about how the therapy-as-content is presented. If it exists only as emotional pornography to feed our outrage, resentment, or lust for drama, there’s nothing very therapeutic going on. When it gives us the opportunity to think expansively about what sacrifice, loyalty or trade-offs mean in our interactions with one another, then it carries both personal and social benefits.

The way those stories are packaged and sold inevitably shapes the way we use them in the wild. Create shorts for kids that introduce a layer of conflict to ordinary hardships, and they’ll probably end up more lost and distressed. Edit a day of footage showing couples bickering by the poolside into a half-hour show of shallow emotions, and you’re arguably complicit in manipulating them for malign ends. Carefully stitch together real-life therapy sessions to represent a couple’s deepest challenges, with their informed consent, as Couples Therapy does, and you’ll have a largely thoughtful audience who, though titillated, are also inclined to care about the interpersonal conflict presented, and its broader social implications.

Likewise, Where Shall We Begin? avoids the hyperinflated trauma, lurid revelations and psychobabble that get the attention on TikTok or television, instead teasing out nuance and deep understanding from its subjects. Like a good priest, Perel offers her flock pastoral care, even when she is saying things it’s hard to hear. Perel’s clients are parables for her congregation. Every session, focused on one interpersonal relationship, poses big-question questions: about what it means to be a man, or married, or loyal. Each encourages us, therefore, to think a little harder about the principles for which we no longer have a blueprint.

REBT is characterised by a kind of rugged psychic individualism. In this view, if you hope to be psychologically fixed by relying on others, if you seek healing from interpersonal woo-woo like transference, you’ve already made a key philosophical error. You’ve outsourced your agency. And that’s before getting into the most eccentric elements of psychoanalytic theory — penis envy, the Oedipus complex, Melanie Klein’s baffling idea of the bad breast as persecutory object. To read Freud is to grit one’s teeth at the relentless dogmatism of his prose, the certainty with which assumptions that look absurd in the context of observable reality somehow grew legs and ran for decades. If you are looking for relief from mental distress, is it wise to procure it from people who believe in resentment-drenched theories that could only ever make sense to the pathologically horny and disturbed?

More generously understood, psychoanalysis is based on the idea that mental distress tends to arise from unconscious inner conflicts, and that past experiences — especially those of early childhood — exert a long-term effect on our thoughts, feelings and actions. The analyst assists the patient in exploring the depths of their mind, unearthing hidden meanings. Change happens by means of the therapeutic relationship, with the patient unconsciously acting out past conflicts. The process can take years.

Albert Ellis, the originator of REBT, was a psychoanalysis refusenik, as was Aaron Beck, the father of CBT as we know it today. Their early careers were largely an accident of history: both happened to train in clinical practice in the post-war era, when psychoanalysis was dominant. Both soon observed inconsistencies between the theoretical claims of how analysis worked and their own observations of patients. Beck noticed that negative views of the self, the world and the future characterised depressive episodes in patients, rather than the repressed feelings that Freud held to be their cause. The psychoanalytic process was only supposed to work if you saw the patients daily, maintaining the relational magic, but Ellis noted that his patients who only came in once a week did just as well, and that they did even better when he ditched the psychoanalytic theory and talked to them about philosophy instead.

What emerged from this was cognitive behavioural therapy. Rather than getting stuck into the past, it operated in the here and now, looking for the habits of thought and behaviour that maintain our distress, and finding ways of thinking and behaving that might work better. The therapist’s role was not as ersatz parent or interpreter, but as Socratic teacher, helping guide the patient’s reasoning to more pragmatic ends. This seems to have worked well: in the English-speaking world, the dominance of CBT makes Freud look more like a kooky curiosity in the history of ideas than the father of psychology.

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The ideological descendants of Freud have strong feelings about this. They’re not all psychoanalysts: there’s a genealogy of therapeutic styles that see human distress as the product of relational problems, from maternal attachment to structural oppression. They tend to see the solution as lying in the deepest layers of the self. Another thing they often have in common is really, really hating CBT.

The arguments vary. Psychodynamic psychologist Jonathan Shedler has suggested that its evidence base for CBT is skewed by selective reporting. Its heavy reliance on manuals, which therapist Nancy McWilliams criticises as rigid and simplistic, leads it to be mistakenly thought of as scientific. By focusing on the individual locus of control, CBT is a tool of neoliberalism, ignoring the systemic inequalities that shape people, telling us to grit our teeth and smile rather than try to change the world. For Jungian psychotherapist Paul Atkinson, CBT mostly serves industry, rather than the people it’s supposed to treat; it’s designed to make you a better cog in the machine. Since 2008, it has been provided for free by the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, conceived by New Labour’s “happiness czar” Richard Layard, to improve economic productivity by way of public wellbeing. As a public investment, CBT was a good one: it is short-term, taking as few as six sessions to complete in straightforward cases, and therefore cheap. It is also highly structured, gathering its own data via regular symptom inventories, meaning it could be accountable to the public purse. Choosing CBT was following the science.

This infuriated CBT’s detractors, provoking a backlash against IAPT and CBT in general. Doubts have been raised over whether IAPT data supports the impressive results it claims; studies of CBT’s efficacy elsewhere have found it to fall over time, with one finding it no more effective than its nemesis. Given that it’s being offered for free to anyone who wants it, if CBT worked, you’d expect things to be going pretty well by now. Instead, we are less happy than we have ever been, with the ONS finding the UK prevalence of moderate or severe depressive symptoms at 21%. If, as the accusers declare, CBT isn’t really therapy but a coercive lever to make people economically productive, it’s not working: record numbers are out of work due to mental ill-health.

Each era brings its own problems. In Beck and Ellis’s time, sexuality was repressed in favour of propriety, which fed depression. In the 21st century, our wellbeing has been eviscerated by technology; the impact of the internet and smartphones is well-documented. Relationships, as we used to understand them, have collapsed. The world of work has changed: there are fewer casual, pleasurable digressions between colleagues; work is increasingly seen as something that happens in isolation, rather than in concert with people you care about. If the online world turns out to have rewired our attention, this may undermine our ability to maintain the cognitive control that allows the mechanics of CBT to happen.

Economics plays its part, too. Even before inflation and housing shortages piled on extra pressures, it was hard for a family to keep a roof over its head without two adults working full-time, which impacts time spent with loved ones. You can blame this on the capitalist pursuit of profit, or the creep of technological slavery, but the outcome is the same either way. We’re swimming in material goods, and relationally impoverished. This is where the psychoanalysts might have a point. Even if cognitive-behavioural therapists can train our thoughts, downplaying the influence of the external world on our wellbeing is unwise. Psychological studies are in agreement: the quality and quantity of our relationships strongly predict our wellbeing.

But there’s something perverse about the very idea of therapy when we think about it, as the psychoanalysts do, in the terms of a relationship. We have always spent money on the services of soothsayers, acupuncturists or hairdressers, but those transactions weren’t intentionally about paying for human contact. We have also always exchanged money for sex, though it has usually been social taboo. Now we pay similar prices for the more basic intercourse of being listened to. We don’t trust people who sell sexual affection, because that affection lasts only while they’re paid, but we place uncritical confidence in those who sell us empathy.

CBT may not be the panacea it was hoped to be, but psychoanalysts accusing it of neoliberalism are being hypocritical. Selling committed, long-term relationships looks a lot like commodifying humanity. And if state-funded therapy threatens your livelihood, you’re more likely to get cross about it.

Beck described the therapeutic relationship as necessary but not sufficient for change, which comes, first and foremost, from the patient methodically practising new habits of action and mind. By contrast, the labyrinthine doctrines and relational focus of psychoanalysis make it easier to abandon agency: you can hand over your wellbeing to someone with a parental-style command of what is really going on in your head, who can give your world meaning and keep you feeling safe. It’s more comfortable, at least in the short term, to be told that our problems came from others, but it carries interpersonal risks. Being told we’re victims of fate tends to make us resentful. If you’re feeling low and you’re told that the reason is probably a failure on your mother’s part, your attitude to relationships probably won’t improve. The same is true if you’re feeling bruised from a tricky break-up and are told that you’ve been traumatised.

CBT is, in some sense, classically liberal, in that it sees the individual as having autonomy over one’s own mind. It’s harder to pin down a single position for its detractors. A relational view of the world — especially one where attachment to the mother dictates later wellbeing — is fundamentally conservative. Current discourse around attachment and trauma, rooted in socio-economic forces, is mostly Leftist in character. The philosophies underlying therapeutic approaches should, in theory, have a profound impact on patient outcomes. But this doesn’t happen.

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Psychological studies find that there’s remarkably little difference in outcome between wildly different therapeutic styles. This is known as the Dodo-bird effect, from the famous scene in Alice in Wonderland where all must have prizes. The stories we tell about our minds may have social consequences, depending on what or whom we find accountable when things go wrong, but they don’t make much difference to therapy itself. Individual studies of this or that approach will continue to make grand claims of their power. Other studies will erode them. But therapy’s value seems to stem from sitting in a room being listened to by someone we like. In which case, can’t we replicate this experience with friends or relatives in our lives?

What we can say with certainty is that in the decades since we normalised paying to be listened to, we haven’t become any happier. We know, too, that we do best when our lives are rich with relationships and meaning. Maybe it was always a stretch to think that these things could be bought, or provided by the state. Internecine squabbles between opposing forms of therapy might disguise a conclusion that looks bad for all of them. We don’t need shrinks or ever-growing datasets to work out if we’re okay: we’ll know things are looking up when we stop employing people to listen to us talk.

It wasn’t the mercurial, ADHD-fuelled writing style, which somehow still manages to tease a bright narrative line out of the chaos. It wasn’t the harrowing details of the two years the author spent in the notorious Nineties CEDU boarding school system for troubled teens. It’s that the book is trend-buckingly unapologetic. There is no privilege-acknowledging. There is no self-flagellating liberal guilt. There is one trigger warning, but in context it functions more like a titillating anticipatory pause than a chance to avoid upsetting content. After all, what reader of Paris: The Memoir is going to set the book aside just when she’s getting to the juiciest part of her traumatic origin story?

It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. It’s got to the point when writers insert privilege disclaimers reflexively, including in contexts where they don’t make sense and aren’t even necessarily true. (“My house burned down and somebody murdered my cat — but as a cis, straight, able-bodied white woman, I’ll never know what it means to really suffer.”) I understand why people do this, of course; if you don’t call out your own privilege, you run the risk of someone far more unhinged and vindictive doing it for you. I just didn’t realise how refreshing it would be for a writer to just… not.

In the few places in the book where the word does appear, it tends to have a very different meaning. In the CEDU facilities where Paris was confined for two years in her teens, it was a “privilege” to contact your family, to wear shoes, to sleep on a bed instead of a bare mattress in the hallway. Said privileges would be revoked for violations of the facility’s rules, which were both so numerous and so intentionally self-contradictory that it was impossible not to break them. In short, the abuse that occurred at these places, which multiple lawsuits have alleged functioned more like private prisons than schools, is nothing short of horrific — residents were forcibly medicated, ritualistically humiliated in group struggle sessions, beaten and sexually assaulted, stripped naked and left in solitary confinement for up to 20 hours at a time. And the teens destined for them were the last to know what was happening: standard intake protocol was for members of the CEDU security team to snatch them out of bed in the middle of the night.

Since 2020, when she first shared this story in the documentary This Is Paris, Hilton has been part of a survivors’ movement that calls for CEDU facilities to be shut down. The sections of her memoir detailing her treatment there read like equal parts exposé and survival thriller. But here, too, the book takes an unexpected turn. Paris Hilton isn’t sorry for her privilege, but she isn’t sorry for herself, either. In a world where so much cultural currency resides in narratives of victimisation and oppression, she chooses again to just… not.

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This is striking, juxtaposed with another recent memoir by a certain individual born into breathtaking wealth and status. Consider Paris’s tone when reflecting on how her time at Provo, Utah’s CEDU facility, left her not only traumatised, but completely lacking the education of a normal person her age:

This whole shit storm had stolen two years from me, and that’s like—what is that? Like 10 percent of my life at the time? No! More like 20 percent, isn’t it? Because, like, two years would be a fifth of your life if you’re twenty, and I was only eighteen, so—ugh. Forget it. I can’t do math. Math got robbed from me, along with geography, algebra, socialisation, healthy flirtation, how to conduct my body and value my soul.

Now compare it with Prince Harry, bewailing that he’d been cut off financially by his father at the tender age of 34:

Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf.

Both passages embody a peculiar type of celebrity: fame was guaranteed long before they did anything attention-worthy in their own right. Both were notoriously troubled teens who responded to the pressures of a privileged upbringing by rebelling, often as publicly and messily as possible, secure in the knowledge that they were too well-protected to be left with nothing. Both, too, experienced genuine trauma in their lives, the pain of which no amount of money could soften.

And yet, if someone had said 10 years ago that only one of these people would ultimately build a multimillion-dollar brand on the foundation of his or her victimhood — and make a spectacle of renouncing his or her famous family while continuing to capitalise on it at every turn — who’d have guessed it would be the Prince?

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Perhaps we might disagree on who has the greater claim to family grievance: the motherless royal who chose to renounce his role in the family, and wound up renounced by them in return; or the heiress whose complicated relationship with the parents who sent her away doesn’t stop her from citing the family name among her list of assets. (It is worth noting here that Harry, though he has made headlines by acknowledging his white male privilege, always somehow seems to avoid mentioning the part where being born royal and astronomically wealthy was surely a greater advantage. He also has the word “PRINCE” emblazoned on its cover in an exceptionally large font.) But the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

The difference in their attitudes, meanwhile, is vast. After returning to her parents’ home from the lockdown facility, a 19-year-old Paris stays up at night, unable to sleep in the room from which she was abducted at the age of 16, listing “ways to make money and leverage the assets no one could take from me: my face, my name, my legs, modelling contacts, and experience on the runway — none of which would mean anything if I wasn’t willing to work hard”. Harry, a married father in his thirties, also stays up at night — raging at the injustice of having to navigate the adult world, for which he is woefully unprepared in a way that neither the press nor his family seem to appreciate. He laments having been cruelly robbed, by his royal upbringing, of formative experiences such as carrying cash, riding the subway, or (yes, really) receiving boxes from Amazon: “After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilised, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature?”

The two approaches make for a study in what each author evidently perceives as his or her most winning public relations strategy. Harry’s brand is a sob story, wrapped in a privilege acknowledgment, stuffed into Oprah’s mailbox. He is undiscerning in the details he shares. Paris’s is a more carefully choreographed airing of dirty laundry, offering front-row seats for the press. Unlike Harry, Paris is under no illusions as to the symbiotic nature of the relationship between herself and the media. They exploit her, but she exploits them, too, often beating them at their own game. As harrowing as the boarding school stories are, the more radical — and revealing — part of this memoir is the frankness with which she describes a lifetime of living in front of the cameras, for better and for worse.

Her humanity, the real person behind the public figure, comes through in unexpected flashes, as when she describes putting her own body between a mini-dress-wearing Britney Spears and the hovering paparazzi as the pop star climbed into a car, shielding her in the vulnerable moment when a photographer might have captured an upskirt shot. But what also comes through is how savvy Hilton has always been about how much she controls the narrative when it comes to her family’s public face — how much she is its public face.

When her parents come to visit her at the Provo boarding school just a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday, she hisses a promise in her father’s ear: if he makes her stay at the facility until she’s reached legal adulthood, her first stop after they let her out will be the offices of the Wall Street Journal, where she’ll tell the press exactly what they’ve been doing to her — what her parents paid them to do. After years of refusing to believe their daughter when she said she was being abused at Provo, what does it say about the Hiltons that this was the one utterance they took seriously? (Paris was released shortly thereafter.) And what does it say about Paris that, despite her threat — and despite the obvious cachet of having been so sensationally mistreated — it took decades before she made this story public?

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I came of age at the same time as Paris Hilton — she is almost exactly one year older than me — and it’s tempting, having read this memoir, to indulge in a little self-flagellation of my own. I remember laughing along with everyone else when Sarah Silverman, at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, joked with gleeful malice about Hilton’s upcoming stint in jail. I remember rolling my eyes at The Simple Life, the reality TV show that featured Paris and Nicole Richie struggling their way through menial, low-paying jobs as janitors, farmhands, camp counsellors. Of course, there was no way of knowing at the time how much of The Simple Life was pure performance (apart from the strip searches and struggle sessions, Provo’s preferred method of character-building was to make the residents haul rocks), or that Paris’s widely-mocked breakdown over being sentenced to jail stemmed from genuine PTSD. But the mix of sneering contempt and total incuriosity with which she was treated: that was a choice.

It seems incredible that the media hasn’t jumped at the chance to recontextualise what they did to Paris Hilton in the same way that they’ve done with Britney Spears — which is to say, to shamelessly march out all their most exploitative coverage for a documentary re-airing, under the nearly transparent pretence of repenting for their sins. And yet, the response to Paris’s latest offering has been, at best, only marginally less sneering than usual.

Maybe it’s because there never was a meltdown, or a breakdown, or a tearful sit down with Oprah that made Paris seem like a person it was possible to feel sorry for. Or maybe it’s just the same old cynicism: who is to say that this isn’t just another example of Hilton’s uncanny capacity for controlling the narrative, even as she appears to be making herself vulnerable? If a person is both incredibly calculating and also incredibly honest about it, does that make her more trustworthy, or less? When she forgives her parents for sending her away, is it because she really forgives them? Or has she simply concluded — as Prince Harry must have when he decided to christen his daughter a Princess — that her family is a greater asset to her than renouncing all its privileges could ever be?

Julian is the protagonist of Paul Schrader’s 1980 masterpiece American Gigolo, made in the golden age of the erotic thriller. He’s played, and overshadowed, by Richard Gere, who made history as the first leading man to get full-frontally nude in an American studio film. This was another golden age, after all — of sexual freedom — between the invention of the Pill and the horrors of the AIDS crisis.

Why was Julian like this? Why was he so talented at languages, and suave, and erudite; and why was he so into making older ladies feel good? Why was he selling sex, anyway? And what about that murder he was framed for? Nobody cared. The plot was always secondary to the style, merely a support structure for a case study in early Eighties seduction. The point of Julian, if there was one, was his narcissism: he’s a shiny shell draped in Armani suits, who may well have absolutely nothing inside. Later, Schrader actually disavowed Julian a bit, calling him “really just a thin guy”, superficial without knowing it. In that way, maybe, he represents that brief, proto-Reagan paradise: a little stupid, a little evil, but kind of cool.

He was a man of his time, but now, Julian is back. Showtime has created an American Gigolo miniseries, out last week. A hodge-podge of sequel, prequel and remake, the show seems so singularly hellbent on destroying its source material that one wonders: why on Earth was it made? Schrader is apparently wondering, too: though credited as a “corporate consultant” on the final product (his salary was $50,000), he has called the show a “terrible idea” and vowed not to watch it.

A wise choice. Julian has been reimagined as a generic, pitiable, weeping loser, a superannuated sad sack in disgusting hoodies with greasy hair. He’s 45 years old. He’s played by Jon Bernthal. And he shares nothing but a profession with the original character. Julian’s sexiness, it seems, doesn’t work with the archetypal protagonist of prestige television: the sensitive man obsessed with his childhood.

Viewers of the original American Gigolo didn’t care why Julian did what he did. But the new show insists on providing us with a hackneyed backstory, in the form of shot-for-shot flashbacks. Sometimes, there’s the same footage twice in the same episode. Here’s the post-prison Julian grabbing a fence; here’s him doing so as a poor boy in a generic Dust Bowl setting, with his extremely simple mother. Oh, there he goes sleeping with her friend. Fetish understood. And then we find out why he sells sex: a mysterious French-speaking brunette named Olga shows up to the family shack in an extraordinarily short tweed skirt suit, asks to look in his mouth, hands his mother an envelope, and tells him she’ll be waiting in the car. Julian asks his mom: “What?” She sobs: “You’re gonna go to Hollywood and you’re gonna be a big star!” He again asks: “What, Mom?” She screams: “You need to get the fuck out of here right now!” He’s then sent to, it would appear, a high-class gigolo camp.

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To ensure that the audience can congratulate itself on watching virtuous prestige television attuned to the havoc wrought by toxic masculinity — not the reality shows that their less successful cousins watch — Julian must now have “feelings”, “trauma”, and “pain”. To ensure the creators have ten hours of material, in a business model premised on streaming audiences no longer leaving their homes, or even their beds, to consume “content”, he must also have an incessantly — and very slowly — rehashed “past”.

It is difficult not to see the new American Gigolo as the latest absurd iteration of the media’s anxious, obsessive search for trauma, victimhood, and injury in what, until now, have been recognised as happier chapters in the American story. As Mike Hale has aptly put it in the New York Times, it “remakes an era-defining film for the current age of victimisation”. The whole point of the original Julian was that he was young, confident, and the sexiest man imaginable, a man so alluring that the gorgeous wife of a prominent politician would risk literal death to be with him. But the new Julian is a bundle of pathetic clichés of the repentant male: “I’ve done dumb things.” “I’ve hurt people.” “If I sat on your feet, would you feed me?”

Low-effort psychology, apparently, is a key tenet of prestige television these days — as is box-ticking political lip service. American Gigolo has been reinvented to conform to our current sexual mores: all the sex in this tragic remake are more ferarum and a little rough. In the original, the only BDSM scene, which completely turns off Julian, is orchestrated by a disgusting creep who murders his wife. The whole film revolves around Julian’s sexual tenderness and care toward his love-hungry customers. But whatever! Now it’s hot for a traumatised male to “explore” kink and subsequently cry about how he’s caused “pain”.

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And perhaps it’s impossible to emulate the sexiness of the original American Gigolo at a time when sex is regarded as suspect, and “sex workers” themselves embody an inscrutable mixture of saintly victimhood and feminist triumph. Plus, the day-to-day of today’s young escort is a lot more mundane: see Pacho Velez’s performatively boring portrayal of sugar babies in his recent film Searchers, just staring at their iPhones as they scroll through options. That’s a lot less compelling than the original Julian Kay sliding into fancy lounges and waiting for a lady with big earrings to walk over with her cocktail.

The new American Gigolo is, then, as representative of its moment as the first one was. The late critic Mark Fisher wrote about the cultural exhaustion of the 2000s, of the inability to create new artistic forms. In the decades since the Reagan era, he argued, with crash after crash punctuated by booms of ever more inequality and precarity, society became increasingly fearful of the future and ambivalent about the present. Culture, therefore, could be nothing more than a tranquilising and unchallenging rehash of stale nostalgia. American Gigolo is a case in point: its creators, I suppose, vaguely remembered American Gigolo as cool, thought other middle-aged people would, and most importantly, couldn’t think of anything better to make.

The series is part of a larger and more depressing trend toward anodyne, cookie-cutter, sad-sensitive-male remakes. Most cynically, perhaps, is the tendency — part of streaming services’ “microtargeting” strategies based on harvesting demographic data — toward clumsy, politically correct updates of exciting black media. Amazon’s 2021 Coming 2 America, a sequel to Eddie Murphy’s beloved 1988 film, is so lazy it de-ages the actors using CGI to recreate scenes from the original; but for contemporary audiences, it inserts unwieldy references to women’s rights. The 2019 Netflix film Dolemite is My Name likewise stars the now 61-year-old Murphy. Here he portrays Rudy Ray Moore, stand-up and Blaxploitation director best known for Dolemite (1975). In both films, Murphy’s lines are far less shocking than in his Eighties triumphs.

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What made the originals funny would never be acceptable today: the humour of Coming to America largely rode on Eddie Murphy’s “African voice”; the humour of Dolemite rode on the Blaxploitation genre’s radical redeployment of Black stereotypes. Today, they have been revised to cleanse the edginess, anger, and discomfort of their originals, in the relentless march to neutralise everything that could possibly risk controversy. Like the woke-washed American Gigolo, the rehash of Dolemite includes absurdly stiff, laundered dialogue. A toothless liquor store haunt says: “Hotel Dunbar: that used to be the centre of Black arts and entertainment.” Snoop Dog, as a Rasta, turns down Murphy’s music: “Sometimes our dreams don’t work out, brother.” The original Dolemite is pretty much known for his catchphrase “Do-lo-mite!” (like “Dy-na-mite!”); now we must suffer Murphy saying things like: “I don’t have a lot of good memories of back home.”

Not even the Classics are safe. In fact, they offer the most absurd example of this bleak trend. Robert Icke, who has been described as the “great hope of British theatre”, has decided to turn the earliest extant work of Greek tragedy, set approximately 3,000 years before the invention of psychology, into another struggle session about trauma. In his adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, during a sold-out West End run, Icke had Orestes recount what he experienced after the end of the Trojan War to a therapist, in a move so inappropriate that even the Guardian called it “neurotic”. In the adaptation’s New York run this summer, Agamemnon was a selfish politician making cynical remarks to a television journalist about how difficult democracy is — despite the fact that the play was set in a pre-democratic era. The adaptation has been dubbed a “masterpiece”.

Most astonishingly, every reference to Greek gods was gone: in their place, Agamemnon, the infamously selfish and infinitely brave antihero of Greek epic, was talking about how his religion “helped” him cope and how he wished he could spend more time with his family. At his trial, Orestes protested that people who’ve been hurt in turn harm others. Yes: the leading British theatrical talent of our day has taken Aeschylus’s timeless and unsurpassed poetry about divine prophecy and replaced it with pabulum about how “hurt people hurt people”.

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Taken together, these terrible cultural offerings reveal the unrestricted seepage of cut-rate therapy and its wooden jargon into the very furthest reaches of history. The past has been terrorised and defused, and audiences no longer, apparently, are considered adult enough to consider events without a pre-packaged trauma narrative to delineate who’s good and who’s bad. The gigolo must be sad; Dolemite must be wounded; and even the House of Atreus must be analysed with all the subtlety of an Instagram self-care post explaining “PTSD”.

The impact is palpable: in a major way, the purpose of art is to show that a past existed, and that it was different from the present. These bowlderised and ham-fisted revisits brainwash viewers into a terribly misleading idea: art has always been one way, as has psychology, as has politics, as has religion, as has everything. “Source material” is less marshalled into new interpretations, more colonised into uniformity. It is a sad day when Julian Kay, Dolemite and Agamemnon somehow all have precisely the same thing to say: “I’m in a lot of pain, and I’m sorry!”

Rob Barrow is the CEO of MindMed: a leader in a new species of pharmaceutical firm. These companies, described as “corporadelic”, are aiming to change mental health — and maybe the world — through psychedelic drugs. 

Barrow was the opening speaker at the PSYCH Symposium, held recently in the National Gallery. The agenda: “to connect and collaborate”, and to “expedite access” to “psychedelic healthcare” across Europe. The wider mission is an old Sixties dream — brotherhood, connection to nature — repackaged for a new age of all-powerful corporations and philanthropists.

These are boom times for psychedelics. Celebrity endorsements, Netflix documentaries, and all-star conferences abound. In recent weeks we’ve seen The New York Times and the BBC broadcast stories of veterans dissolving PTSD in MDMA, and psilocybin’s apparent (and, it seems, swiftly-discredited) capacity to “free up the depressed brain”. 

Maybe the most extraordinary moment, though, was the Psychedelics House of Davos, featuring a World Economic Forum-sponsored panel: “shamanic investing” expert Silvia Benito, Deepak Chopra, and the Countess Amanda Feilding. Feilding’s Beckley Foundation has fronted her quest since the Sixties to rehabilitate psychedelics — LSD is her favourite — and, curiously, the ancient art of trepanning.

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It’s been a strange turnaround. Criminalised and forced underground since 1970, psychedelics and related drugs have been found, by a a growing number of clinical trials, useful in treating mainly psychic ills, including depression, PTSD, anxiety, and addiction. The “peak states” furnished by LSD, psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), MDMA, ketamine, and others — combined with pre- and post-session therapies — can help ease chronic distress. Johns Hopkins studies of psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety, depression, and smoking cessation, for instance, indicate rough efficacy rates of 85%, 75% and 80%, respectively — although their sample sizes were not large or diverse, and their results have not yet been replicated.

Establishing efficacy in trials according to a gold standard of evidence is difficult. Long-term follow-ups are scant and a host of concerning side-effects — re-traumatisation, debilitating changes in visual processing, strokes — are under-explored. COMPASS Pathways’ Phase 2b trial of psilocybin for depression prompted concern among commentators and retail investors, who noted that suicidal thinking and behaviour were higher among those administered psilocybin than the control: a serious adverse event (SAE) rate of 5%, with a resulting crash in the share values of psychedelic firms. Whether down to chance, a small sample sensitive to noise, or, as COMPASS argues, the inherent risks of dealing with highly depressed patients, one broad conclusion should remain the same: psychedelics are powerful, and we ought to tread lightly. 

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Joining these difficulties are a host of barriers faced by those who want to conduct research on psychedelics. “The Science” is always political, as Covid-19 showed in spades. Psychedelics are researched in an uphill, pragmatic battle against anti-drug prejudice. Britain remains sclerotic and authoritarian on drug policy, as revealed by our new culture war-driven push to persecute “middle class cocaine users” and black-mark their passports. These rules are reified in institutional obstacles to further research (some of them bizarre), which a UK campaign led by Crispin Blunt MP is attempting to reform. Similarly Byzantine practices afflict researchers in the United States. Research must therefore be conducted alongside a push to change attitudes, convince committees, and win a PR war. 

The response of psychedelics firms, backers, and some scientists has been to hype their products. Story-hungry media and a searching mental health sector have been willing enablers. We see studies from top institutions suggesting psychedelics can “decrease political authoritarianism”, help combat climate change, or “navigate a path to peace” in Palestine. A recent “population study” suggested psychedelics “lower the odds of crime”, with an “association” observed between peyote use and decreased “motor vehicle theft”. In particular, a famous (and flawed) chart by ex-Drug Tsar Professor David Nutt showed harms from LSD and magic mushrooms as near-zero, with the results replicated in downstream “drug information” and “harm reduction” resources. 

The corporadelic movement is playing “the establishment game from inside the establishment”, Countess Feilding said at the Symposium. “Use the light of science to destigmatise and rehabilitate psychedelics.” This rhetorical approach has been dubbed the “Trojan Horse”, with medico-scientific corroboration a vessel for the larger mission.

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The missionaries dwell in a broad church. Consider the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, and its founder Rick Doblin. Funded by and collaborating with corporadelic firms, MAPS is in Phase-3 studies into MDMA for PTSD, in particular for veterans: a group bound to elicit sympathy from the conservatively-minded. “We don’t actually do science,” Doblin said. “We do political science.”

He foresees that psychedelic therapy, and an envisioned network of “thousands of clinics” by 2035, will democratise “the sense of connection, not just the idea of it, but the felt experience of it”. 

“It is inevitable that in hyping things up too much, risks can arise”, Countess Feilding clarified via email. “On the other hand, it seems vitally important to establish if psychedelics have a major part to play in the survival of Homo sapiens and in improving our health, happiness, and outlook.”

But today’s psych-elites don’t seem particularly interested in democracy: they are drawn from Silicon Valley, Burning Man bros, billionaires, and California narcissists. A “market opportunity of £1.8 billion by 2026” remains for the taking, Symposium attendees were told. Billionaires like Peter Thiel, venture capital, hedge funds, Google, and the owner of GoDaddy have piled into psychedelic medicine; dozens of new firms with names like Eleusis, Awakn, Field Trip and MindCure have appeared, all decked with white-sheen websites and evangelical web copy. And the safer psychedelic retreats currently cost thousands of dollars, and may well stay that way.

“I believe loving money is one of the greatest gifts you can give humanity at this time,” said Azrya Bequer, one half of a husband-and-wife duo behind BEQOMING, an outfit earmarked “to serve the 0.1% of the wealthiest people in the world to start making better decisions for our planet and our future generations” — through facilitated ayahuasca ceremonies. 

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Why now? Psychiatry is in crisis, commentators observe: in total contrast to the advances of physical medicine, and despite tens of billions of dollars invested in treatments and research, outcomes remain broadly stagnant. It is a field in search of a silver bullet. 

But squaring the circle of the world “out there” has been psychedelia’s perennial problem. “It’s all in the mind, ya know,” George Harrison’s acid cartoon blurbed in 1968’s Yellow Submarine, to the trumpets of All You Need Is Love. The cost-of-living crisis, inequality, institutional decay — the more material drivers of our distress — received little mention at the Symposium. There was talk of trauma, the inner healer, the true self. Or, for pharma firms profiting from a brain-centric, diagnostic view of misery, there is “chemical imbalance” and “brain disorders”, leveraged by overstretched references to “neuroplasticity” and pretty pictures of brain scans. Even the Department of Defence is directing $26.9 million towards novel psychedelics for veteran PTSD, whose battle scars they reduce to a “neurophysiological dysfunction”. 

MindMed’s former CEO, JR Rahn — now CEO of a “People-Powered Pharma” outfit called LOVE Inc. — put it this way: “Forty percent of the country is suffering — that’s a big, big market.” 

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That market is greedy. Reportedly in keeping with the FDA’s regulatory requirements, plans are in place, in time, for MAPS to administer MDMA to children as young as seven. “The sooner you treat people for their trauma, the more benefits when you come to talk about insurance coverage and all,” Doblin said. “The more lifetime benefits there are, the more suffering you avoid.”

It’s tricky territory. A psychoactive as powerful as MDMA would seem precisely contraindicated for children, whose developing brains may render them susceptible to long-term changes and dysregulations. Doblin is firm and provocative. “The prohibitionist argument leaps from problems that can be caused by daily or frequent use of marijuana, or other drugs, to arguments for abstinence”, he said over email. “Daily use of marijuana in high school can be problematic but that doesn’t mean the message to adolescents should be to never use marijuana.

“For adolescent patients with PTSD, their brains are already warped by their PTSD, so not using MDMA to protect their brains doesn’t make sense”, he said.

The mission is not without its own traumas, however. Strikingly, at least four participants in MAPS’ MDMA trials experienced significant deteriorations in their wellbeing that were neither chased up nor reported in their much-vaunted paper, published to mass media attention in Nature. Across psychedelic culture, victims of sexual assault and rape claim they have been told to keep silent to avoid drawing stigma to the Mission.

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No psychedelic drug is yet approved by regulators, though MDMA stands at the penultimate Phase 3 stage. More banal realities can be stubborn. Despite complacent claims, including from Professor Nutt last month, that psilocybin is “the most effective antidepressant” — and “we don’t need [controlled trials]” — an Imperial College head-to-head of psilocybin versus an SSRI indicated no significant difference, even after a six month follow up. Press teams and media downstream — even The Daily Mail — spun these results in a more sympathetic tone: that “psilocybin performs as well as antidepressant”. Brought to trials desperate for help — and inflated by PR pumped by research departments about “brain resets” — the patient may experience striking collapses in mood as mushroom euphoria dissipates and depression returns, or if the promised mystical experience fails to manifest. 

These are just some of the under-explored problems with “therapy on acid”. Patients are also vulnerable to hyper-suggestibility, sexual abuse, exploitation, and risks of guru complexes among therapists, who can programme their clients with their own worldviews. These issues were rarely mentioned at the Symposium. Reportedly contacted by representatives in Rwanda, Doblin has elsewhere spoken of seeking to dissolve the animosities of Hutus and Tutsis with MDMA. An outfit known as Unlimited Sciences, a “psychedelic research nonprofit” launched to “inform public perception, education, policy and practices”, is raising funds for a study on the outcomes of mainly-female Saudi refugees at an ayahuasca ceremony: a population for whom such bioethical issues are likely aggravated.

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In the “Great Psychedelic Craze” of the Sixties, it was believed that LSD and cannabis could create a revolution. Draped in white robes and beads, Dr Timothy Leary told reporters that “the kids who take LSD aren’t going to fight your wars” or “join your corporations”. Looking around the Symposium was to see the death of a dream. Far from overturning power structures, psychedelic utopianism has been captured by the elite. 

We listened to Christian Angermayer, the billionaire “Prince of Psychedelia”, who says he “finally understood Bitcoin” after his first psilocybin trip, and has since tattooed the molecule on his arm. He compared his therapists to shamans, drawing a straight line between the apocryphal drug cults of early Christianity and “ancient Egypt”. Angermayer reassured investors of market deteriorations in guru-like tones: “The market is a cycle like life is a cycle … as a company, if you are fully-financed, you almost have to say: okay, ignore the stock market, it does not contribute to your mental health.”

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Just as mindfulness became McMindfulness, psychedelics has become McPsychedelics. The transition has not been universally applauded: two senior psychedelic figures described crying at the Symposium. “We thought we were getting Woodstock, but we’re getting Prozac Nation 2.0,” said Jamie Wheal, who was prophetic commentator on the psychedelic scene in 2019.

“How can we compete with this?”, asked Lauren Katalinich of the UK Psychedelics Society, gesturing woefully towards a Symposium room of grey fabric and black suits. Capital does as capital will. In its quest for new and fruitful markets to carve, it has gone from without to deeper within, and plumbed the fathoms of inner mind. Corporadelic firms post marketing photos of misattributed “shamans” on Twitter; “mystical experience”, a predictor for depression, sells. There is perhaps no psychedelic feature that couldn’t be captured and marketed: nominally-radical notions, like encountering hyper-realistic entities and God Himself on DMT, become news copy and advertisements to entice clients. 

At its height in the Sixties, the Great Psychedelic Craze believed it could levitate the Pentagon through sheer “vibration”. For the Second Great Craze, the world of “net zero trauma” is its infinity point — where the trip is heading is anybody’s guess. Utopia translates as “no place”.

An earlier draft of this article described COMPASS Pathways’ Phase 2b trial as exhibiting a ‘red flag of suicidal thinking’ among patients administered psilocybin. This has been contextualised. An earlier draft also suggested that Unlimited Sciences were raising funds for a study to administer ayahuasca to Saudi refugees. This is not the case. Funds are instead being raised to study the population outcomes, with no input on administration. 

I wonder what Lumet would make of studios greenlighting entire movies to “state the reasons”. Largely thanks to Emma Stone’s spiky charm, the 101 Dalmatians prequel Cruella made $233m on its release in May. If Hollywood can rehabilitate a puppy-skinner who is basically called Cruel Devil, then all bets are off. Following prequels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ratched) and The Sopranos (The Many Saints of Newark), get ready for the origin stories of Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and Gru from Despicable Me. The ubiquitous Timothée Chalamet is currently shooting the Roald Dahl prequel Wonka. Now that Netflix has acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company, the only obstacle to a Young BFG movie is that he would sound too much like a rapper.

Blame, in part, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which bucked William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” maxim by building a series of interconnected movies into Hollywood’s dream scenario: a safe bet. Constructing a universe around beloved IP is the business model of our times, besides which inventing characters and worlds from scratch looks like a terrible bother. But the MCU has six decades of comic-book mythology to work with and, because it had a plan from day one, relentless forward momentum. Most IP-juicing requires starting with well-known movies and working sideways or, increasingly, backwards.

For the Star Wars empire, whose first three prequels notoriously depleted global supplies of exposition, that means Solo and Rogue One, both set prior to the Star Wars movies that people fell in love with. For The Wizard of Oz, the blockbuster musical Wicked asks how those witches ended up so mean. Meanwhile in the world of superheroes, Joker reaped 11 Oscar nominations by presenting Gotham City’s murderous chaos agent as the product of bullying, insufficient mental health care, urban decay and toxic showbiz. Not so judgemental now, Batman.

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Some of these are successful entertainments but, nonetheless, ones that nobody asked for. I doubt that any child has ever watched the Wicked Witch of the West and thought, “Huh, what’s her story?” Most of these stories were originally written before the rise of pop psychology, when it was OK for a character to be wicked or bizarre without inviting an investigation into nature, nurture and the long-term consequences of trauma.

It’s not that there are no successful attempts to mine a character’s past for information that might decode their behaviour. Citizen Kane’s Rosebud or Vito Corleone’s salad days in The Godfather Part II are gold-plated arguments for the value of an artful backstory. But screenwriters are obsessed with providing damp-squib answers to questions that nobody was asking. I enjoy reading interviews with the people behind prequels as they try to justify the exercise without admitting that the only important question these movies are answering is “How can we squeeze more money out of this IP?” Ever wondered how Han Solo got his name? Me neither. Turns out he was alone a lot. Cool.

Television has its own version of rubber-ducky syndrome, now that flashbacks are de rigueur and grief has replaced alcoholism as a short cut to depth of character. Baptiste was already the most depressing cop show on TV — Camus of the Yard — before they killed off Baptiste’s daughter and his hallucinations of a stuffed toy elephant turned tragedy into accidental comedy. Another recent BBC procedural, Vigil, was grippingly assured in the present-day scenes but drifted off course in the flashbacks. It was as if writer Tom Edge didn’t trust us to believe that a woman would feel uncomfortable investigating a murder on a submarine (pretty stressful!) unless she had previously experienced her own watery calamity. Watching these shows back-to-back with Mare of Easttown, I began to wonder if a shocking bereavement was a requirement of the job. It feels a little crass to milk grief so frequently, and unnecessary, too.

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How much do we need to know about a TV detective to be invested in a whodunnit? Columbo had an indelibly eccentric personality (mostly improvised by Peter Falk) but no stated first name and no private life except for a wife we never saw (unless you happen to have watched the flop 1979 spin-off Mrs Columbo). Columbo was what he did, and that was enough.

What Lumet and Chayefsky were really getting at with their rubber-ducky quip was the pretence that explaining everything is akin to psychological veracity. We are all shaped by our experiences, good and bad, but rarely in a clear or simple way. Psychotherapists don’t identify one essential turning point in a client’s life (“Hmm, Dalmatians, you say?”) and then close the case. Sometimes, one can know every factor and still encounter a terrifying, unilluminable void at the heart of a personality. In real life, not everybody who does appalling things is misunderstood.

There is, of course, a humane liberal impulse to understand how circumstances can corrupt an individual; how the abused can become the abuser. It is the job of psychologists and the criminal justice system to get beyond the idea that certain people are irredeemably sinful, and the task of historians to fathom how seemingly ordinary people could become complicit in atrocities. Authors such as Gitta Sereny (who wrote about the Nazis Albert Speer and Franz Stangl and the 10-year-old child-killer Mary Bell) and Gordon Burn (who chronicled the serial killers Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West) dedicated their lives to interrogating the problem of human evil.

Disney and Warner Brothers, needless to say, are not engaged in that painful work but in the trivialising of trauma to give profit-seeking entertainment a veneer of psychological curiosity. It is both morally dubious and narratively absurd. In storytelling, villainy often has a theatrical boo-hiss quality that requires no elucidation.

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Why is Cruella a canicidal fashionista? Because otherwise Dodie Smith’s story would have been just a bunch of dogs running about. Why is the Joker a cackling killer? Because the joylessly uptight Batman needed an antithesis. In Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, a pompous psychologist appears on a talk show with the Joker to argue that he is not so much evil as horribly mistreated. The Joker promptly kills him, and everybody else in the room, with glee.

It’s true that Miller was a law-and-order conservative who enjoyed poking fun at bleeding-heart liberals but, like Christopher Nolan, he also knew that the Joker is compelling because he is beyond understanding. Ridley Scott squandered a great deal of time and money on making two prequels to his own Alien, even though the unknowable menace of the creature was what made the 1979 movie such a taut shocker. More often than not, additional information makes antagonists less intriguing.

As one of the showrunners of Lost, Damon Lindelof was as responsible as anybody for the backstory epidemic, creating a time-hopping narrative tangle that concluded with a crushing disappointment. He was then a co-conspirator on the Alien prequel Prometheus. On his next show, The Leftovers, he learned his lesson and leaned into his characters’ reactions to the mysterious disappearance of 2% of humanity rather than the reasons for the event. Trauma was the cake rather than the icing, and therefore taken seriously. In becoming so comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, Lindelof made one of the finest shows of the decade. The theme tune of the second series summed up the ethos of the whole show and the reason behind its success. It was a song by country singer Iris DeMent: Let the Mystery Be.

Donald Trump used this tactic to sell an unwitting public on everything from steaks to vodka to reality television; then it became his presidential campaign strategy. But now he’s gone, and there’s a new grifter in town. This one is named Trump, too. And she’s got a book to sell.

Until recently, Mary Trump was known mainly for being the black sheep of the Trump family and a thorn in the side of its presidential patriarch. She was “the good Trump”; a lesbian with a PhD who was openly critical of Donald even as the rest of the family backed his campaign. It was from her that the New York Times got the tax documents that formed the backbone of its 2019 bombshell reporting on Donald’s finances, which showed that the now-president had paid just $750 in federal income tax the year he was elected to office. She was the author of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, the tell-all book about her uncle that his lawyers famously (and unsuccessfully) tried to quash. She was the one who went on national TV and called the president a sociopath. If the Trump family was a well-guarded mob, Mary was the closest thing the political Left had to an informant from the inside.

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Mary’s unique position as the sole dissident member of the Trump clan was always her biggest selling point, and that remains true with the publication of The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal. The author claims to both loathe her family and shun the association, even telling strangers who ask about her last name that she’s not related — “I found it unthinkable that anyone should find out who I was.”

But she claims, too, to understand Donald in particular in the way only a family member could. She is the perfect, no, only person who can spearhead her titular Reckoning. (She never actually says “I alone can fix it,” but she doesn’t have to; the sentiment oozes from every page.) The book positions itself as a sort of literary therapy session: together we’ll unravel our national trauma, with Mary as our spiritual guide.

But this is where things get tricky — and decidedly, familiarly Trumpian. To sell us on the necessity of this book, Trump must first sell us (or at least, the 50% of Americans who didn’t vote for her uncle) on the notion that we are still capital-T-traumatised — until or unless we read it:

“I’m going to talk about the trail of impunity, silence, and complicity that winds its way through every generation of our history, from the economic, social, and moral justifications for slavery and Native American genocide, through the failures of Reconstruction, the horrific legal, quasi-legal, and extralegal quagmire in which Jim Crow expanded alongside the cultural expectations and disappearing of oral history that followed both world wars and the 1918 pandemic.”

This is a promise made in the book’s introduction. But this exhaustive and profound exploration of our country’s legacy of failure never materialises: it’s the literary equivalent of one of those rambling, incoherent campaign promises that Donald Trump made and then barely even tried, in the most half-assed way, to keep. In practice, Mary Trump’s deep dive into the multi-generational trail of impunity, silence, and complicity that touches every part of American life lasts a scant 27 pages and reads like it was cobbled together from the summary portion of various Wikipedia entries.

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To be clear, there is a book to be written about the face of populism throughout American history, and how it evolved over two and a half centuries to culminate in the weird, sad, dangerous, single-term presidency of one Donald Trump. There’s also a book to be written that draws a through line from the devastation of the Civil War through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and the clarion call of “Black lives matter!” that set our nation literally and figuratively aflame during the summer of 2020.

But this is not that book. Indeed, this is a collection of barely literate, half-baked, underdeveloped ideas that never would have been given the imprimatur of a publisher if not for the name on the cover.

The immense Trumpiness of this endeavour would seem to be at odds with the stated purpose of The Reckoning, but in truth this is basically Mary Trump’s entire brand. For someone who professes to be repulsed by her association with the 45th President, she seems to know she’d be nothing without it. Her business is called the Trump Life Coaching Group. Her name is the first thing that appears on the book cover, in just slightly smaller font than the title.

Even her access to those bombshell tax documents stemmed from a legal dispute over her grandfather’s will — in which Fred Trump, Sr. apparently intentionally cut Mary and her brother off from the family’s wealth. (The details of both that lawsuit and another filed by Mary against Donald in 2020 leave little doubt that the Trump family is full of enormous jerks, but might also prompt the discerning reader to take Mary’s “sociopath” claims with a grain of salt.) There are multiple possible ways to interpret this information — some more flattering to Mary, and some less so. Can she still be praised for her bravery in rejecting the Trump family if they, in fact, rejected her first?

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Donald Trump's ruinous legacy

By Michael Tracey

Either way, it’s always been the spectacle of a Trump family fallout — rather than the substance of Mary’s commentary — that has made her a figure of interest. We just want to watch something like HBO’s Succession playing out in real life. And there lies a useful comparison: some of the characters on Succession are better people than others, but only in the sense that some of them are not quite completely evil. There is no such thing as a “good” person in the Roy family; there is only the least bad.

The Reckoning ultimately fails to make the case for its own existence. Trump can insist (and she does, repeatedly) that America’s return to relative normality since the election of Joe Biden is nothing but a farce, an illusion, a way of distracting ourselves from the national trauma buried bone-deep inside us and the ever-present threat of fascism lurking just outside the door. But this is just the classic patter of the snake-oil salesman: a quest to persuade people that they’re secretly sick so she can sell them the cure.

And while this sort of shallow therapising about the brokenness of America is merely grating under ordinary circumstances, the idea that we should indulge in it now — as Kabul falls to the Taliban; as Afghan citizens risk their lives in the hope of escaping to the U.S. before it’s too late; as we see horrifying reminder after horrifying reminder of what life under oppressive authoritarianism actually looks like — is truly obscene. The events of this week throw the grasping solipsism of books like this, and indeed the entire woke self-help industrial complex, into particularly sharp relief.

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But the truth is, even if the thesis of The Reckoning were sound, it wouldn’t matter. If America was in pain — if we needed a moral authority to lead us back into the light — Mary Trump is the last person we’d want to guide us forward. Indeed, the best possible sign of our nation’s healing would be for us to collectively let go, and for the 45th president and all his family members to fade out of the public consciousness and into irrelevance.

Mary Trump’s first book, released on the eve of the 2020 election, sold like wildfire right out of the gate. But this one almost certainly will not, and that’s not because it’s not good (although it isn’t), or because it’s a shameless cash grab (although it is), but because she’s outlived her usefulness to the Left. The enthusiasm for Trump’s wayward niece was all about Trump himself — like dancing with your ex-boyfriend’s nebbish-y nemesis, not because you like the nemesis, but because you like how angry it’ll make your ex to see you canoodling.

But the ex is gone now, and we’re pretty much over him, even as Mary Trump keeps shouting from behind us that we’re traumatised and that she alone can lead us out of the dark. This book was meant for a moment that is already past — that started coming to its messy end as soon as the election results were in.

And while there may be little love lost between Mary Trump and her disgruntled uncle, here they form an unwitting alliance: each, in their own way, rejects the results and implications of the 2020 election. Both refuse to admit that the people have spoken, that the country has moved on, and that despite the challenges of the past four years, our democracy ultimately worked as intended. She demands a reckoning. He demands a recount. It is the Trumps, not America, that can’t let go.

I made a point of not watching this slaughterhouse video, even though for the past two years I’ve been doing a Leverhulme-funded study on how different audiences respond to jihadi execution videos. I’d already watched my fair share of jihadi snuff, and I doubted that watching another monstrous ISIS film would have enhanced my understanding of the group and its propaganda. (ISIS, let us not forget, has used children in videos to kill hostages and has filmed a group of men in a cage being lowered into a swimming pool.)

This is the bit in the article where I’m supposed to tell you about how watching copious amounts of jihadi atrocity porn has left me mentally scarred and traumatised, and how even the most innocuous thing can trigger a memory of watching a captive getting his head cut off, blown off or crushed by a tank. It’s the bit where you’re supposed to marvel at my bravery in taking on such a dark subject, martyring myself in the name of public social science: “I watched these godforsaken videos so you didn’t have to…”

Well, that’s not my “truth”, and we’ll get to that in due course. But in the meantime: what are we to make of the increasingly repeated claim that doing research on any one of the vast litany of horrors in human history is a mental health risk? Such statements must, of course, be taken seriously. But by foregrounding the experiences of the researcher at the expense of history’s actual victims, do they not risk veering into moral narcissism?

As part of my research, I’ve interviewed jihadism scholars, researchers and journalists who have exposed themselves to this material over an extended period. The overwhelming conclusion that emerges from these interviews is, as you would expect, that watching jihadi atrocity videos exerts a mental toll on those who do it.

Michael Krona, a media scholar researching ISIS and Salafi-jihadist propaganda at Malmö University in Sweden told me: “I think the videos with kids as executioners could be the worst thing that I have seen. That really got to me emotionally, especially as a parent myself.” Referring to the material he was watching and documenting back in 2015, when ISIS was pumping out more than 200 videos, radio programs, magazines and photo reports a week, he said: “It was impossible for me to switch off. I had to start counselling around that time when it became too much. It took a long time before I could learn to structure the exposure and to make it emotionally bearable.”

Other researchers have testified to similar feelings. “There are moments, I find, where my everyday life is invaded by these scenes,” jihadism scholar Charlie Winter has said of ISIS’s worst atrocity videos. Seamus Hughes, who researches extremism at George Washington University, has likewise said: “You look at violent imagery all day, and it gets to you. And you want to tell yourself it doesn’t, but it does.”

I can readily understand and empathise with their reactions; when I first started doing my own research on ISIS video-propaganda, I experienced several months of night terrors, which I duly treated with alcohol and antidepressants. (I don’t recommend this.)

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But the temptation to classify these unpleasant experiences as clinically traumatic seems to me not just overblown but also a category-error, mistaking spiritual harms for psychological maladies to be diagnosed and treated. This certainly seems to be the case with the historian and journalist James Robins, who, in a recent article, claimed that “the phenomenon of the historian traumatised by history remains unstudied and is not widely known”. A few sentences later, like clockwork, comes the bit about Robins’s own torments:

“After writing a book on the Armenian Genocide, a process that took me five years, I found it impossible to slip comfortably into sleep. All kinds of catastrophes visited me — still visit me — in that space before dreams: ugly visions, jarring scenes from my research.”

I have encountered similar expressions of anguish — mostly on Twitter, of course — from colleagues in my own field of criminology, especially those who visit prisons, detention centres and interview victims of abuse. Some have even published peer-reviewed articles about their experiences of trauma.

Of course, anyone who probes these accounts with a sceptical eye risks being denounced as an insensitive prick. But it is hard to avoid the air of moral narcissism that hangs over some of these trauma accounts. After all, the moral narcissist is, as Ed West recently observed, someone who manages to make everything, including the most atrocious deeds and crimes in faraway places, all about them.

The historian Karen Halttunen brilliantly captures the type in her article on “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain”. Discussing the English humanitarian reform movement of the eighteenth century, Halttunen described how it was inspired by a “cult of sensibility”, with its heroic exemplar being “the man of feeling” whose “tender-hearted susceptibility to the torments of others was the mark of his deeply virtuous nature”.

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The so-called “man of feeling” was also a man full of shit, buying and showing off the “tableau after tableau of pitiful suffering” for the purpose of, in Halttunen’s words, “enhancing (and demonstrating) their virtue”. And it didn’t take long for others to notice their hypocrisy, as Halttunen records:

“Oliver Goldsmith ridiculed sentimentalists for weeping over the sufferings of helpless animals even as they consumed at dinner the flesh of six different creatures in a single fricassee…. John Keats and William Hazlitt would soon charge that the poetry of sensibility actually explored not the feelings of the imagined sufferer but the feelings of the spectator watching that sufferer and was geared to demonstrating the spectator/reader’s own exquisite sensibility.”

However, the most serious charge levelled against the humanitarian sentimentalists was that they were secretly getting off on spectacles of suffering; that they were voyeurs. “The literary scenario of suffering, which made ethics a matter of viewing the pain of another, from the outset lent itself to an aggressive kind of voyeurism,” Halttunen noted. The reformers were aware of such criticisms, and therefore “filled their writings with close descriptions of their own immediate emotional response to the spectacle of suffering, to demonstrate that their sensibilities remained undamaged”.

This, I think, helps to explain the proliferation of trauma discourse among academics interested in human malevolence and cruelty: their public proclamations about how their research has left them traumatised serves to deflect or pre-empt any suspicion of voyeurism and resultant desensitisation. They are decent men and women of feeling, after all.

But there’s also another, perhaps even greater, incentive at work: namely, the seemingly inexorable temptation in our culture to proclaim a victim status. By portraying their research-work as potentially dangerous and traumatising, privileged academics who would otherwise have little or no warrant for claiming victimhood can do so, and thus enjoy the deference and accommodation that comes with such a status.

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As one well-known war correspondent told me, on the condition of anonymity:

“There is a bit of a trauma sweep-stakes that has come into existence, where one of the ways that you can get credit is by describing how much you’ve been hurt, which creates an incentive for people to over-perform the wounds that they’ve received…

When I’ve given talks on ISIS, at least at every other talk there’s someone who asks about how awful it’s been for me, and I will always be honest about that. I’ll say I would not recommend that anybody do this who’s sensitive to these types of things, but I’m okay. I’m worse for having seen these things, but it’s not something that’s going to destroy my life. I know what the reaction of those audiences will be when I say that. They are hoping that I say that this has really fucked me up. There are correspondents who, throughout their whole careers, have made a lot of hay out of saying how war has really screwed them up, even though they were never well to begin with. You don’t get a book contract by saying I went to these horrible places and was fine. Nobody’s going to read that.”

But at least war correspondents, however prone some may be to self-pity and self-dramatisation, ventured out to war zones and, in many cases, put their lives on the line in doing so. By contrast, the trauma merchants of the ivory tower have taken no such risks, physical or moral. And yet here they are engaging in online bonding rituals over the profundity of their moral sensitivities.

For if trauma is to mean anything, it has to mean real suffering that comes from direct and close confrontations with death, dying and mortal threat. However uncomfortable it is to conduct research into dark episodes of human history, it isn’t remotely comparable to witnessing real horrors or being on the receiving end of them. That isn’t to doubt the sincerity of those researchers who claim to be traumatised. But it does strike me that the symptoms of psychological distress they report, from sleeplessness to anxiety to palpitations, are really vestiges of moral shock and disturbance.

 “Every time I saw an execution by ISIS, and felt my soul diminished, that feeling of diminution also reminded me that I still had a soul left to wound,” wrote Graeme Wood in a brilliant essay on his own experiences of watching jihadi atrocity propaganda. As I understand it, the diminishment Wood is referring to is the nasty realisation that, just like those poor souls whose grisly demise we have chosen or happened to watch, we, too, will die — even if it is in less violent circumstances. The problem with medicalising these universal feelings of dread and vulnerability is that it implies that they can somehow be “treated”, instead of accepted as an unavoidable part of life.

#MeToo is about saying: this happened to me, I’m not lying, I’m not mistaken, I’m not exaggerating; it was abuse, and it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. Here is my truth.

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The writer whose books simply have to be shared

By Polly MacKenzie

Sharing our truth is powerful and important, but there are many stages still to go before we find peace (forget about resolution, justice or karma!). Luckily, there are many books that can help this process.

My #MeToo story is called ‘Emotional Violence and Social Power’ and while I don’t have the space, strength or tears to go over everything that’s happened since I wrote it, I want to share some of the books that I’ve read since. I have no idea when or if true recovery will ever come, but the books I’ve named here, none of which are self-help books and all of which are written by experts in their field, are valuable reads. All the books take a holistic view, looking at the psychology, physiology, sociology and the cultural ramifications of aggression, survival, and the search for justice and emancipation from the triggering, flashbacks, nightmares and other effects of trauma.

Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery is an international bestseller and the definitive book on PTSD. Be prepared to cry. It’s a wrenchingly honest, compassionate and honourable read, written with deep understanding. Alongside that I would recommend several complementary classics: Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score and Babette Rothschild’s The Body Remembers both examine how psychological pain is held in the body as well as the mind.

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I also strongly recommend Betrayal Trauma by Jennifer Freyd, which looks at the effects of detachment, abandonment, abuse of trust and violation in childhood. Freyd is a real buzz-name at the moment. The aptness of her acronym for the behaviour of wrong-doers when confronted, DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender – is evident in the reactions of high-profile abusive men as they are brought to account.

While I don’t think it’s our responsibility to psychoanalyse our aggressors or listen to their excuses, there are some fascinating books on abusers. They make for a grisly, shocking and – be warned – sometimes triggering read. Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door is a sensational introductory book and a good starting point.

For anyone who has survived an abusive relationship, there are some very striking and (again) classic works: Power and Control by Sandra Horley, Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft and From Charm To Harm by Gregory Zaffuto are all precise examinations of abusers who are often glib and charming on the surface and who rely on control, gaslighting, isolation and threats to first psychologically manipulate and then physically terrorise their victims.

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Finally, as awareness of coercive control and abuse develops, I want to recommend a remarkable memoir by Helen Walmsley-Johnson. Look What You Made Me Do is a survivor’s memoir written with depth, literary flair, candour and clarity by one of the most insightful journalists working today.

When I read these books, I cried with pain, recognition, admiration and gratitude for these writers’ wisdom and compassion.