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NOT too long ago I was sitting in my office looking for something when I came across this collection of my papers. These are articles on a variety of topics that I have written over the past fifty years. Some have appeared in journals or in the media, but the majority have never been published anywhere, and were often put together for talks or lectures that I had to give. Looking through them, I thought to myself, what is the good of keeping all these old papers, stretching back over the years; it’s time for me to throw them out and get rid of them once and for all. However, it’s hard just to throw away what has been, after all, a major part of one’s life. Then a solution presented itself. I thought, I’ll send them down to Cork University Press – who published my book Music and Madness – and ask them to look at them. Once they tell me they are not fit to publish, I’ll let them get rid of them. To my great surprise and dismay, they wrote to say that they would like to publish them; not to try to edit and bring them up to date, but simply to deal with them as a historical record and publish them in chronological order, insofar as this is possible. So that is how I come to be writing this introduction. When I wrote Music and Madness, part of my motivation, as well as attempting a critique of the current state of psychiatry, was to rid myself of all the garbage of my past. Now these papers have placed one further impediment in my path, but my ultimate purpose hasn’t changed and I am still resolved, once these papers are published, to finally let go of the past, to come into the present and to celebrate just ‘being’ and, for the few years remaining to me, take each day as a blessing. Whatever about that, now looking back, it was in 1956 that I commenced my first job in psychiatry in the Warneford Hospital in xvii Introduction Oxford. This was a small, fairly typical, conservative, British mental hospital, with an orthodox view of psychiatry as a medical speciality, believing that mental illness is just like any other illness and that it would eventually be shown to have an organic basis. I didn’t feel that I gained much useful understanding from this psychiatric exposure. There were two aspects of my experience there, however, that did have a profound effect on me. The Warneford had been a private psychiatric hospital, which had a tradition of serving Oxford University. By the time I went to work there it had been incorporated into the new National Health Service and was a public hospital, but the tradition of relating to the university still continued , and virtually all the patients were either students or academic staff of the university. Meeting these people was a revelation to me. To describe this awakening, I cannot do better than quote what I wrote in my book Music and Madness about this: Because of the attitude and derived thinking in the education system in Ireland . . . when I was growing up, I had always assumed that if any question arose, someone in authority would give you the answer. Until I came to Oxford it had never dawned on me that one could think independently about the nature of reality or come up with solutions oneself. But here in this hospital I was dealing with people who, although they were labelled as patients, had been selected as the most brilliant academics or students from schools all over Britain and elsewhere. Their attitude seemed to be starkly different. If a question arose, they asked themselves ‘what do I think about it?’ This struck me like a bolt from the blue and I began to think: ‘if they can think for themselves, independently, why can’t I do the same?’ From that moment on, I began to think for myself, never again being willing just to accept, unquestioningly, the views of others. There was an elderly psychoanalyst who was only there on sufferance because he was a friend of the medical superintendent of the hospital. He, too, gave me quite a different view of emotional disturbance as an understandable and adaptive response to traumatic and painful experiences. To quote once again what I said about this in my book, he was completely at variance with...

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