June 2026

Freud is already there. Not conjured, simply there as the tram rounds a bend. Black coat, gloves, beard, a dark hat carried rather than worn, looking like a consultant from another century who has arrived to inspect a badly run business and found, with weary…

Lacan leaps into the scene in a navy tracksuit. The tracksuit is cheap, slightly shiny at the knees, the sort of thing an Eastern European coach might have worn in 1975 while smoking furiously on the touchline. He has also found a whistle. It hangs…

He arises from the depths of Moorgate tube station into that hard London air, wearing his flimsy bomber jacket, an old skin that is still too thin. The Barbican rises around him, walkways crossing above water, towers standing with their blank faces turned away. Willoughby…

Just beyond the edge of the lake, the therapists gather in a gaggle. Not so much Greek chorus as supporting cast in an amateur production of West Side Story. Perhaps in Eastbourne. The Editor is busy checking the plural noun for a group of therapists.…

The Man finds himself in a room named ‘1992.’ “’Go to Poland,’ he said. ‘Adventure,’ he said. ‘History,’ he said. ‘You’ll love it,’ he said. The brochure looked good. The Boy, being the Boy, heard something else beneath the words: Leave, but only so that…

Quite what Bernard of Clairvaux is doing here is anyone’s guess. But Lacan seems to think it’s a good idea. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Bernard says, apropos of nothing really. “WTF,” the Boy says. “Who dat?” Lacan is lecturing again…

When she confused Lacan for Lancan – or maybe she was thinking of Lancôme – it was hard not to fall in love with her. “Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it,” Lacan says, as the Man struggles to…

A bicycle. A car not properly seen until the moment it has already cut him up on a zebra crossing. There are no zebras crossing. Impact arrives all at once and then oddly slowly. The bike rears up like Champion the Wonder Horse. The Man…

The Man thinks perhaps sex should come later in the book. Or not at all. They are all there now. Lacan. Freud. The Holy Father. The Publisher. The Editor. The Boy. M1. O. M2. The Writer too, sitting slightly apart wearing the hunted look of…

The lecture hall is three-quarters full. There are therapists, NGO women, someone from HR, two students who have come by mistake and a bearded Czech man in a linen jacket who thinks he is attending something called “Reimagining Masculinity in Central Europe.” He isn’t. At…