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.