It has now been 23 years since Eddie’s death. For the most part, Rosen has succeeded in escaping incapacitation. “I’ve tried not to be burdened by it,” he says. “I talk in the book about ‘carrying the elephant’.” Rosen hands me a postcard replica of an engraving of a man struggling to carry an elephant up a hill. “I bought that in Paris,” he goes on, “and it’s a great reminder. You know, I’m not carrying an elephant. At the time I thought I was. Eddie’s dead and I’m carrying all this grief and it’s bigger than me – it’s as big as an elephant. But not any more. Even with this Covid thing, or with any of that other stuff, I’m still not carrying an elephant. So this picture, it inspires me.” He points to a cardboard box on which is scrawled the word HELMET, and I wonder what else of Eddie might be crammed into this den, out of sight.

There are many events in retrospect that we see have turned out well. To give you a couple of examples: Michael Rosen has got through lots of crises in his life including the death of his parents, his son, jobs and a close shave with death with Covid. He also had a long-term illness for over a decade without realising it and Jewish relatives who he discovered died in Nazi concentration camps. Their memories he unearthed from the fragments available to him to make sure they were not forgotten. Since Covid, the vision in Rosen’s left eye has been impaired. His left ear is what he describes as “a dead loss”. Every now and then he will experience a sudden shooting pain that chases itself around his body – one moment it’s in the knee, then the shoulder, then the hip. (“Boing!” he says, “and it’s moved on.”) It has taken Rosen until recently to feel accepting of this new physical state. The body changes, he says, and the brain must catch up. Still, he seems sanguine about it all, particularly the eye. “I could wear a patch and it would be much better,” he says. “But do I want to walk around wearing a patch?” He shakes his head, thinking of the schoolchildren he sometimes reads his poems to. “I don’t fancy it.” It’s more than two years since he left hospital after a near-lethal battle with Covid

"If you scoured the news for all of the greatest dangers in any given year in history it would sound rather dire."

For whatever reason, this disappointment didn’t arise while reading the opening essay on the idea of a cure in psychoanalysis - it seems like a liberating thing to suggest that psychoanalysis might be a kind of practice that cures people of the need to be cured. Or in the discussion of truth and the unconscious. There seems to be a structural similarity here, but also an emotional distance that I find hard to explain. When you turn on the Internet, or you watch TV it does feel like there is an overwhelming sense of pessimism at the moment. A sense of turbulence and confusion and unease. Do you think we’re a species that ties itself to the minutes and moments of our lives, that we cannot see the long arc as you call it? It’s bewildering,” Rosen says, when I ask about his parents’ response. “It’s in the book, really, because I’m looking at how they coped with that trauma.” Rosen grew up in a flat in Pinner, northwest London; both of his parents were teachers. He describes his mother as “in many ways extraordinary”. Of her refusal to discuss Alan, he says, “It’s incredibly gutsy, but at the same time quite worrying that she thought she couldn’t, or shouldn’t, mention it.” Rosen never quizzed his mother on the issue; she died at 56. “She wasn’t a hard woman. She was the soft one, hardly ever got angry with us, whereas the old man sometimes lost his rag. But there must have been some inner grit to make that decision. We would now think that it’s not a great idea – the general consensus seems to be, ‘OK, you don’t have to let it all hang out, but you can say it, you can talk about it.” Contrary to popular belief our world is getting better, not worse and this seems to be a hard pill to swallow for a lot of us. In his juggernaut release of 2011, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker made the case that violence, in general, has steadily declined over time, presenting six major causes for this.

Wisdom imparted by the author is applicable not just in sales and marketing ( business) but in any real life scenario where we just stop ourselves from going any further, the moment we know the answer rather than knowing the method of finding the answer. I have read Mouli’s first book, Catalyst, which was about what to do to be successful. After reading the Catalyst, I was able to understand the success model better. I could relate to the thought that, the time you put in your career is not automatically converted into the experience and algorithm that will drive your real individual growth and career success. To convert your time into the experience, you require a catalyst, and that catalyst is TMRR: Target, Measure, Review, and Reflect.There is also only little discussion of ecological limits or climate change – though he argues that these pose great challenges to the sustainability of current economic models, and that free market mechanisms only offer uncertain pathways to sustainability.

It was quite a fascinating read with a wealth of experiences on what it takes to get better in one’s life and career. I have truly enjoyed it, and couldn’t agree more about the thoughts in this book. Data in a sense aggregates all of these events and non-events. When you’re counting up the number of crimes, the number of wars, people killed in war, the number of people who live below the line of extreme poverty as well as the happy non-events the view of the world that you get is not only different but as it happens, quite a bit more positive. A cure, then, is something we might aim for, if not always achieve. If you have a broken leg, or a fever, you know what is to be aimed for; if you have a broken heart or a sense of shame, it is not quite so clear. To understand psychoanalysis you have to see where the analogies for it do and don’t work. And how it makes you think and talk differently about getting better. Patients come to psychoanalysis with an idea of cure because, historically, they have been to medical doctors, and before that they have been to religious healers. A culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption. When Bion writes of ‘something better’ than cure, he is playing on the idea of cure as getting better, with all its moral implications. The fundamental question being: what is it for any individual to get better (better at what)? Where do we get our ideas about this from, and what can we do with or about them? So much depends upon the available pictures we have about what it is for us to be better than we are, to improve. This is easier to assess in, say, sport or business or medicine than in morality or art or, indeed, psychoanalysis (what is it for the psychoanalyst – or any so-called therapist – to improve, or get better?). Psychoanalysis, that is to say – and this may be both salutary and topical – allows us to have second thoughts about success and self-improvement. In his book Second Thoughts, Bion writes, apropos of psychoanalytic treatment, ‘It is necessary to be aware of “improvement” which may be denial of mystical qualities in the individual.’ Self-improvement can be self-sabotage. Too knowing; too knowing of the future. A distraction, a refuge from one’s personal vision. If you’re using the word more or less or improve or decline you’re already making a quantitative claim. If you do it without data, you’re talking through your hat. You’re just making stuff up. So the idea that we can do without data is just a recipe for your irrationality. What gets measured, get improved. So, identify ways to measure “how to get better” and not just results.Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it,” reads the subtitle of celebrated children’s writer Michael Rosen’s new book. It’s a reference to We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, one of his best-loved works. Part memoir, part self-help manual, Rosen’s latest publication considers what it is to get better, “what it means, and how we do it.” Success = Effort X Getting better. One has better success over others in the same duration if he has a better “Getting better” model. At times the concept of cure may be so vague as to evade the very purpose and objective for which it is sought. This is akin to many journeys undertaken by us in life. There are some journeys where the destination is apparent, while there are others where the terminus is indeterminate. There is also a third kind of journey where we need not know about the destination. Where we land up finally represents a variable that is immaterial. Psychoanalysts such as Wilfred Bion and Marion Milner, claimed that too definite and ascertainable destinations were themselves, 'saboteurs' of psychoanalytic treatment. It is true that in some ways there is a risk of greater loneliness, for example, the fact that fewer people are married, that people are more likely to get divorced. On the one hand, that means some people are living alone and therefore will have more loneliness. On the other hand that is a product of the massive increase in personal freedom that society has been giving us.