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Rachel

  Dear C, Thank you for asking about the translator of Marie-Hélène Brousse’s book, The Feminine – A Mode of Jouissance (New York, Libretto, 2022), at the London Workshop of the Freudian Field last week (16 May 2026). Yes, Janet Rachel was the name I chose for that publication. I had translated the book with the help of many people, and Rachel turned up towards the end of that process and persuaded me to give her some credit. She has always been interested in the question of femininity and feminism, in fact Rachel and I first got together in the early 1990s just after the breakup from my first love. This was just before I met Lacan and psychoanalysis. Rachel turned up when I cancelled my surname. I was well and truly fed up and wanted to ditch my patronym and set off on my own. After going through the most immediate solution (e.g. reverting to my mother’s maiden name, rejected on the grounds that he was also another father), Rachel whispered in my ear, reminding me that she had be...
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English Psychiatry and the War

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  Dear D.R.  Like a ghost, you materialised at my side in the heat of the party at the NLS Congress, June 2026. The air conditioning unit above the door was adding to the decibels of the DJ without subtracting any heat from the dancefloor. I could hardly hear you, and it was horribly hot. Where had you come from? What did you want? You bent forward to put your mouth close to my ear and asked me what I was working on these days. Without a second thought I started to say something about my project to take horses to the Bethlem Royal Hospital. Your English barely better than my French was not the most auspicious beginning. The delicate threads of the story were defeated by the heat and the noise. And then you dematerialised as mysteriously as you had appeared, leaving me with the feeling that I had failed to transmit the essence, and the story fell flat on the floor.   So let me try again…  Once upon a time, in a land not too far away, when I began my first analy...
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Seni's Question: "What Is Happening to Me?"

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  Seni Lewis shouted into the void at Croydon’s Mayday Hospital, late August 2010: “What is happening to me?” With a little knowledge of the structure of the unconscious and the way our minds work, someone could have stepped into the breach and helped him to answer his own question.  When I was working at a Royal Free adult psychiatric ward, I met a woman, let’s call her Sara, who told me that she had heard voices for almost all her life, but thought everyone else did too, so she was never afraid of them. Another might add that as soon as you tell a doctor that you hear voices, you will find yourself bundled off to the madhouse. I think this may have been why Sara was on the ward – she had told her GP that she heard voices.  It seems clear that what Seni was experiencing was a good deal more frightening than what Sara was talking about, and we don’t know if he was hearing voices. But there are two aspects to what Sara said that might be useful. “I thought everyone could ...
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Sitting on the Fence?

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  Shortly before COVID an artwork was commissioned by the Museum of the Mind, and eight posts were erected along a boundary fence of the hospital to which were attached reflective placards with words asking a series of provocative questions. But the real point of the story is this: overnight, on 24 June 2020, someone sprayed a message across seven of the placards. Seven letters and a gap which read: RIP SENI. The Guardian has a twenty-minute video documentary about this which raises a lot of questions and leads me to ask another.  Seni Lewis (born 22 March 1987) died at the age of 23 on Tuesday 31 August 2010 on Gresham Ward at the Bethlem. I had read reports about this incident a couple of years ago, when I began thinking about taking horses there. I returned to the documents last night to try to find the facts that I thought I had remembered.  Seni’s death was eventually pronounced on Friday 3 September 2010. He had been admitted onto Gresham Ward at 5pm on the Tuesday...
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The Feminine: A Mode of Jouissance, by Marie-Hélène Brousse (New York, Libretto, 2021)

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  Translated from the French by Janet Rachel Dear G,  Thanks so much for asking “Who is Janet Rachel?” when you saw her name as the translator of this book.  Rachel turned up towards the end of the translation process and went on to steal the scene. She has been interested in the questions of femininity, feminine sexuality, and feminism since we first got together – that was in the early 1990s. I had cancelled my surname and was looking for a name of my own to start again with when she whispered in my ear. She had been sitting quietly between my first and last names for quite a long time at that point, and now she was asking to come out.  Rachel is the name of an Old Testament matriarch who was remarkable for never having had a child of her own; when I registered that fact, it was simple to say yes to Rachel and get the new name written in all the right places.  We went on to create performances and presentations, write poetry, and put on plays. Then we ...
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Working Together

Three of us were out for a ride across the common and through the woods on a beautiful sunny afternoon in early spring. After cantering along the wide central path, we slowed down and turned onto the narrow path that runs along the edge of the wood, which is bordered on the left by a long line of back gardens. The sunlight was filtering through the moving branches and playing tricks with our eyes. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a fox poke its nose through a hole at the bottom of a fence to my left, and I jumped: "Oh!" This, in turn, caused Artemis (the horse I was riding) to jump, and he hopped to the right, tense and with his head held high. We recovered quickly, and I shared a laugh with Gwen, who was riding behind me, as she and I worked out that what I had seen was a shaft of light catching the edges of the revolving blades of a fan fitted at the bottom of the fence. A couple of minutes later, Havana, the warm-blood mare in the lead position, stopped dead in...
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Do horses ask questions?

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A new brown mare is on the yard. She was pacing around her box and I thought, literally, "unsettled." Was it a signal that I read – or was it a "condition"?  She was put into a central pen while her stable was being cleaned, and tied by a halter rope attached to a string on the fence line. She was pacing back and forth on the end of the rope, which I found difficult to ignore.  I went and stood near her head. She was holding it high and looking around her. It was clear that the simple fact of my presence was not what she wanted, and she barely stopped what she was doing while I stood there. I began to walk around the outside of the small pen she was in, touching the posts and rails, checking the perimeter. This was something I used to do as a matter of course when I began my training as an equine facilitated psychotherapist (see earlier post, Klaus part 1 ). I suppose she noticed but I don't know what effect it had on her. Nevertheless, it gave me time to think....
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