On the Hoof

I was keen to return to see how W was doing after our conversation on Saturday. John phoned ahead, and the yard manager warmly welcomed our proposal. It was unusually quiet – staff were away for some training. Some of the horses were taking afternoon naps. Others, including W, were munching their way through their hay. We left him to finish his lunch and went to say hello to a whole row of horses who lived in an alley at the rear of the stables.  When we returned to W, he immediately came to his door and greeted me. His mouth was not so angular today, but his eyes were 'tented' whenever something caught his attention. The main gate clanged, and a small dog started barking. W turned towards the sound, raising his head, eyes tented, and looked to see what might be approaching. A friendly man walked into the yard in a purposeful way and I smiled at him. Standing next to W so that I could mirror him, I followed his gaze towards this newcomer and pointed, saying out loud "Who...

  This beautiful horse arrived at the yard a few weeks ago and seemed pretty tense. He began weaving almost straight away, hence the guard that is now fixed to his door. Then he tried to roll a couple of times in full tack, as if trying to get something out of his body and make himself feel better. He has calmed down quite a bit since then, and I know that the staff are really great with the horses here, and that I don't know the half of what goes on. But this week, I took the chance to visit the yard one afternoon and found myself drawn to stand next to him, outside his stall. I looked at his mouth as his head kept up a constant series of small movements within the v-shaped space available. I greeted him with the Horse Speak three part greeting, but at the time, it was hard to know if he registered it. In retrospect, I believe he did. I then took up a position and began mirroring him, paying a lot of attention to his facial expressions. I was curious about the shape of his mouth, ...

In 1999 my colleagues and I were tasked with packing up and closing down Barbara Ward and moving to Gresham Ward at the Bethlem Royal Hospital a few miles up the road. We were part of the march of progress, stepping towards Care in the Community for the 21st century. A middle-class housing complex was planned for the newly vacated, beautiful site that once was Warlingham Park Hospital.  To enter the new ward at the Bethlem there was a locked door and a security camera that captured our image and sent it the few yards up the corridor to the nurses' station, which looked directly onto this entrance. The ward doors at Warlingham were almost always unlocked.    It is only now, browsing the archives kept by the Museum of the Mind at the Bethlem, that I discover that the open door policy at Warlingham was the initiative of T.P. Rees, who had taken over as medical superintendent in 1935. On his arrival "he ordered that the gates of the Hospital were to be left unlocked, and...

20 September, 2008,   The Rally of the Impossible Professions, Against the False Promises of Security  [1] was staged by the London Society of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis.  Jacques-Alain Miller came from Paris to preside over the meeting and delivered some closing remarks which were published along with other contributions from the day in the first issue of the international Lacanian journal of psychoanalysis, Hurly-Burly [2]. I got a call last month from Pascale Fari, curator of Lacan Web TV [3], asking if I still had the DVD recording of the event and, to my surprise, it took me less than an hour to put my hands on it. I said to myself : " When the Other calls, the unconscious answers." I had looked for it before without luck. Like hearing a poem learned long ago, or watching a play you once had a part in,  the words in the recording struck chords that I could feel resonating in my body.  The last words of the talk had a different effect. I...

  One key idea of Horse Speak is “Inner Zero.” It is hidden. You have to believe in it to make it exist. It's unconscious, elusive, yet active. It's not aggressive but it can silently make itself heard, make its presence felt. It is housed in your body, yet has a relation to others. It can be read by 'you' (and here the problem peeps through, for who is the 'you' who reads?) and by others, including horses.  To give it more texture, Sharon Wilsie sometimes links “Inner Zero” to the eastern arts of tai chi, yoga, or qi gong. It is understood as a kind of “energy.” It is alive, it can move, it can expand, and decrease. The key idea in psychoanalysis is the unconscious. You have to believe in it to make it exist. It has a link to the body, but it is more the body of orifices than the one governed by the brain. Once you have the unconscious, other key ideas come forward: drive, ego, subject, Other, symptom, suffering, jouissance, etc. Ideas of energy also exist and ...