Books

On Inhibition: Notes from Undisciplined Practice begins from a counterfactual: what would clinical psychology look like had Freud followed his teacher Franz Brentano — the first phenomenologist — rather than the natural-scientific model of Helmholtz and Brücke? The question is not idle. The psy-disciplines as we have inherited them organise themselves around solely what is present: i.e., behaviours that can be observed, symptoms that can be enumerated, and brain regions that can be imaged. The psy-disciplines have produced, after a century plus of effort, a baroque nosology and almost no coherent account of what a person is.

In this work, I offer such an account. My central claim is that what the diagnostic catalogues treat as separate conditions — adhd, anxiety, OCD, the depressive presentations, and much else — are surface expressions of a common dynamic: insufficient inhibitory capacity, rather than excitatory excess or discrete deficit. All activity, the argument runs, requires resources to begin and resources to slow or stop. The clinical disciplines have, for a century, attended almost exclusively to the former. The inhibitory hypothesis attends to the latter. I argue that most of what gets called pathology is the predictable behaviour of an organism whose inhibitory tone is depleted.

Written as a sequence of numbered propositions in the manner of Bruno Latour's amazing and weird Irreductions, the volume unfolds across four movements.

Movement 1 is a critique of what I call the ascesis of clinical reason: the purifying drive in psychiatric epistemology that achieves precision by excluding lived experience. The DSM is read as a Ptolemaic system whose proliferating subtypes and comorbidities are the epicycles of a f(l)ailing framework.

Movement 2 dissolves the bounded individual. Drawing on Gregory Bateson, Claude Shannon, and the unfinished cybernetic conversation of the Macy conferences, this section develops schismogenesis as the description of what happens to recursive systems whose inhibitory tone is inadequate to their interactions. It then introduces the dividual: one equals several, in Latour's phrase, and the holobiont, the human-microbial community that is the actual unit of clinical attention. The movement closes with the Freud–Brentano counterfactual: what therapy might have been had its founding figure followed the phenomenologist rather than the physiologist.

Movement 3 opens the thermodynamic and phenomenological registers. Erwin Schrödinger and Ilya Prigogine give the framework its physical spine. From there, the movement turns to Heidegger, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Karl Friston to develop the argument that what gets called anxiety is the work of an organism living in the present of its predicted futures. I introduce schismogenic hurtling — the runaway loop in which each anticipated future generates more futures faster than they can be sorted. Healthy futurity is introduced as the inhibitory accomplishment by which the field of possibility becomes navigable rather than overwhelming. The psy-disciplines, on this account, are constitutionally blind to the field that most determines present suffering.

Movement 4 is the praxical movement. Pindar's exhortation — become such as you are, having learned what that is — orients the work; Nietzsche's amor fati takes the exhortation to its limit; Foucault's askēsis names the operation by which a person arranges the conditions of their own becoming; and Heidegger's Eigentlichkeit gives the same claim in phenomenological vocabulary. The movement closes by naming what the whole has been toward: a praxical wisdom... the self-knowledge that emerges from cumulative practice and that makes presence to another genuinely possible.

The argument is punctuated by italicised interludes drawn from clinical practice and personal experience. The most dramatic is a client's dream, vividly remembered from the age of seven and offered with the dreamer's joyous permission. In the dream, the child looks up at the sky and sees a slow, indifferent stream of all the things in the universe — every object, every colour, every matter that is or could be, none privileged over any other. The child wants to make contact and cannot. Dread. Terror. Terror and dread. The dream becomes the volume's clearest image of State 1 at cosmological scale: the field of everything-at-once, the condition of maximal informational entropy, the phenomenology of a receiver without joints by which the world might become navigable. It is the image the framework has been giving names to from its first page.

On Inhibition is at once a critique of the way the clinical disciplines have organised themselves and an invitation to a different practice: one that treats persons as recursive becomings rather than as bounded objects to be sorted into categories. It is written for clinicians, theorists, and those who have grown impatient with the catalogues.

Lost and There: A wayfinding guide for young men is a book Peter La Grand (my friend and colleague) and I are writing for young men, roughly 18 to 35, who recognize themselves through the language of lostness. It is not a self-help book, and it does not pretend to be. It refuses the genre's central promise — that if you follow the rules, optimize the inputs, and become someone other than who you are, you will arrive. There is no arriving. The treadmill is the product.

We are two clinical counsellors, both fathers, twelve years apart in age. We write in one voice — we — that operates from-beside rather than from-above. We are not at the end of the trail waving you in. We are somewhere on the trail too, and what we have to offer is what we have learned, in our own lives and in our counselling offices, about how to be lost well.

The book is built around eleven chapters in four movements:

• The ground (your body, your lostness, what you came into the world already carrying).
• Yourself (your courage, your claim, your structures).
• Your time (your future, your cut — what you choose to leave behind, which is also your mortality, quietly named).
• Your world (your people, your own — which is to say, the long work of telling what is genuinely yours apart from what the They has handed you and called yours).

The book closes by naming what you have been practicing all along: phronesis, the practical wisdom Aristotle made central to the Nicomachean Ethics twenty-four centuries ago and that the modern world has largely forgotten.

The book opens with a line from Pindar: Become such as you are, having learned what that is. The whole project operates downstream of that one sentence. We do not promise foundness, optimization, or a thirty-day plan. We promise that the practice itself — the work of becoming what you are, by learning what that is — is a way of being in your life that does not require you to be at war with your own existence.

That is the offer. The rest of the book unpacks it.