Books

A field guide for young men who are tired of being told they are not enough. Written by two clinical counsellors, it diagnoses the lostness that the manosphere exploits and the optimization industry sells against, and offers something different: a praxis of becoming, drawn from twenty-five hundred years of thinking about how a human being lives well. The book refuses arrival, refuses comparison, refuses certainty about the future — and hands the reader back the older question Pindar asked: become such as you are, having learned what that is.

On Inhibition argues that what the psy-disciplines treat as separate conditions — adhd, anxiety, OCD, and related presentations — are surface expressions of a common dynamic: insufficient inhibitory capacity, rather than excitatory excess or discrete deficit. Written as a sequence of numbered propositions in the manner of Bruno Latour, the essay draws on phenomenology, information theory, and clinical practice to ask what therapy would look like had Freud followed Brentano rather than the positivist physiology of his teachers. It is at once a critique of how the clinical disciplines have organised themselves and a positive account of what a person is, from which therapeutic possibilities follow.