(Aeon) – My father had become professionally involved with the Tavistock, which in the 1980s was a hotbed of Kleinian analysts. In 1986, he signed me up with O’Shaughnessy, and I began what proved to be three years of private sessions – four days each week, around 40 weeks a year – in O’Shaughnessy’s Hampstead home.

Nothing, however, was going on with me that required almost daily psychoanalysis for months and years. To be sure, I was shy and sometimes reluctant to join in with new activities. But by no means was I depressed. Besides a nervousness at the prospect of starting secondary school, I was a contented child. And, significantly, my parents had disagreed as to whether intervention was even needed. ‘Mother,’ O’Shaughnessy writes, ‘was humbly dubious about this, insisting that Leon was just an ordinary boy, not academic, no trouble at all.’ (Read More)