On the Hoof

  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...

  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 ...

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...

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....

  Horses have accompanied humans throughout history; they are part of our life and our memory. This image is from Chauvet Cave and is thought to be a drawing done 30,000 years ago. When two piebald horses stepped out of a horsebox last month at the Bethlem Royal Hospital it might have been the first time in seventy-five years that hooves had trodden that turf.  Last week, John and I revisited the archive at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind to try to discover the date as precisely as we could. The archivist had kindly retrieved file HCQ-06 from the strongroom so that we could peruse the minutes of the Farm and Garden Committee from 1951 to 1975 (Bethlem).  As soon as we opened the manila folder the words from the very first page, dated December 1950, leapt out to meet our eyes. Item (f) “arrangements [to] be made for the old brown mare to be humanely slaughtered at the farm in the presence of the farm foreman.” A flush of emotion swept over us both at the stark dignity ...

I walked around a corner into the main square of the stable yard and headed down one side and saw Nechta standing at the bar to her box facing me. She was looking at me, and as I approached she lowered her head, putting one front leg forward, then the other. She put her muzzle on one knee, and then on the other. I bent down to look and noticed some cuts just above the fetlock. I gently stroked down her left foreleg, holding my hand on her knee for a moment. I noticed her lips touch the top of my head and then my shoulder before moving to the nape of my neck. I looked up and saw that she had raised her head high and was looking across the yard. I stood next to her close to her shoulder and looked where she was looking across the corrals to the middle of the row of boxes at the top of the square, where a couple of ponies were standing at their stable doors. She showed white around her eye, as if in fear, then turned and withdrew into the shadow at the back of her box.  The excha...

  The 21st century is already witnessing a notable change in the way we use horses as our society changes and patriarchy gives way to new forms of families, social bonds and institutions. We are living in a time of radical transition, and we have the opportunity to participate in the invention of what is to come. I have a dream which is part of a new way of being with horses which I believe to be valuable, sustainable and ethical.  A first step to realising the dream is taking shape: to take two horses to the Bethlem Royal psychiatric hospital, where occupational therapists and some of their patients will be waiting to greet us. In a simple, sheltered space that is close to a walled garden and bordered by hedges and trees, we will bring something real – the possibility of equines to reignite the trust, consent and cohesion that is foundational to a social bond. Facilitated equine encounters uses the structure of the psychoanalytic discourse which allows us to hold humans and h...

  Where nothing happens, twice – this phrase was coined by Vivian Mercier in the Irish Times , 18 February 1956, when he reviewed Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot . The characters Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo and Lucky have been reenacting these two moments of nothing in countless repetitions since Beckett finished writing them in January 1949. The truly astonishing power of the play led San Francisco Actors' Workshop director Herbert Blau to take it to the San Quentin prison in November 1957. The idea that the play (in which nothing happens twice) could be transformative had now crossed the Atlantic. Rick Cluchey, an inmate at the prison, was serving a life sentence when he heard it being performed over the loudspeaker system. The experience had such an effect on him that he went on to form a drama group with other inmates to stage the play. He eventually won a chance for parole and met Beckett. He continued this friendship and pursued a life anew in the arts. The story ...

One idea could be to introduce a small herd (four to begin with) of Exmoor ponies under the aegis of “conservation grazing.” The perimeter of the grounds is already securely fenced, and by introducing a cattle grid at the entrance ponies would be prevented from from roaming––New Forest-like––onto the surrounding roads. The central set of humans are effectively contained in their particular buildings much of the time, and the gardens linked to wards are already protected by high fences. In this space the people mostly belong to the buildings, which allows you to imagine the ponies safely enjoying access to most of the grounds, especially the meadows that form a beautiful boundary to three sides of the institution.  The presence of the ponies could be used to emphasise the relationship of the humans to their environment as well as to each other. The ponies could provide a reference point around which relationships could be re-articulated. Their presence could become a focal...

  Saturday 1 June, 2024, I walked around the meadows that surround the Bethlem Royal Hospital with a colleague who works there now. We caught a bus from Crystal Palace which wound through the back streets of Beckenham and Bromley before finally dropping us off at the northeast corner of the site, a bit of a stretch from the main gate. After about five minutes’ walking, we found what seemed to be an entrance, where a gap between a small set of maisonettes revealed a gate and pathway through trees that beckoned to us. But the gate was locked fast, the grounds were impenetrable, and the fence was unscalable. We resumed our route along the road to find the entrance to the grounds, then my friend led the way around the bottom meadow, past beautiful trees, a large house now boarded up and padlocked, and up to a desolate site that once housed an IAPT operation. We stuck to the fence line, which provided a secure boundary all the way around, and passed no one. As we approached the southwes...

There are eight Exmoor ponies, all geldings, living on a lovely piece of public land called the the Law in North Berwick, Scotland. It's on the coast, a short train ride from Edinburgh, and they've been there since October 2013 thanks to the initiative and vision of an exceptional man employed by the local council at the time whose name is Duncan Priddle.  The main feature of the land is a volcanic plug which gives the place it's name: the Law. It is all that remains from an ancient eruption and it sticks up 187m in an otherwise gently undulating landscape. The ponies regularly climb to the top of the Law and Sylvia Beaumont, who lives nearby, is often there to take their photos to post on the FaceBook page dedicated to this small herd. Earlier this year she captured a moment where the ponies were drawn to a man playing his bagpipes with the Law in the background. The video she took of the moment was enchanting . We went to visit Sylvia and the ponies this summer, and for t...