On the Hoof

  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 the 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 the story to fall flat on the floor.   I'll try again…  Once upon a time, in a land not too far away, when I began my first analysis and joined CFAR to begin my training, I gave up my job as a r...

  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 find an answer to 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 for sure if he was hearing voices. But there are two aspects to what Sara said that might be useful. “I though...

  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." Then, overnight, on 24 June 2020, a nameless artist with no grant and only a spray can of red paint left 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...

  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 ...