Authors Electric

 First a greeting for the Solstice:   I’ve been a writer of sorts for as long as memory serves me, but my salaried working life was as a psychologist. Having both things going on was (mostly) good, I think. I was steered towards psychology when to the anguish of some of my schoolteachers, I didn’t want to teach myself or be a nurse. Then a new course in the subject was about to start at Brunel Polytechnic. I’d never heard of it. A promotional leaflet was sent round to schools and when my Headmistress saw it, she thought of me. I don’t know why, but it felt right straight away and my interview with Professor Jahoda confirmed the feeling. Professor Jahoda: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/jahoda-marie  Among very many lucky things in my life was being taught by Marie Jahoda. When I’d flunked my O level maths and couldn’t take up my place at Brunel, she wrote and encouraged me to try again, as Faculty wouldn’t waive the requirement, although she’d asked. I did, and pas...

Psychologist and author Alan Kennedy was researching wartime conditions in Vichy France for his fourth novel   Lucy   when he remembered that there was something he wanted to know about the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Did Winston Churchill have advance warning of the raid? Could he have saved the city at the cost of alerting the enemy that their Enigma code had been broken? Coventry, November 1940 All of us, I’m sure, will have had the experience being led astray from our main path of research along some elusive but compelling byway which, startlingly often, turns out to be relevant in some way we could not possibly have anticipated. Alan Kennedy was born in the West Midlands, about thirty miles from Coventry. He was a baby in his cot at the time of the bombing: his father left for work every day - often at night- but what did he do? Why wasn't he in uniform? His mother was terrified for the rest of her life by the sound of the air raid siren. Why? Anyone a...

           I’m a Psychologist by trade. Someone once said that Psychologists are all peculiar (that old taunt) because they just can’t fathom other people and they think studying Psychology will help them. Hmph. I’m inclined to think I chose it as a career from simple nosiness – or a fascination with why people do as they do, to put it more kindly.           We’re all at that, of course – we have to be, and some of us are demonstrably better at working it out than others. I wouldn’t claim that my training or work experience gave me some sort of extra insight or powers of prediction into other peoples’ lives, although it did provide some useful frameworks for clinical interventions. In everyday life, though, the same old questions continue to haunt: ‘Why would somebody do that?’ ‘How could somebody think that?’ ‘I can’t understand why anyone would…’ etc. etc.     ...

The Russian, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, has been oft-described as one of the first “psychological novelists”; followed up, some would say, by the 1890 publication of HUNGER by the starving, post-tubercular Norwegian, Knut Hamsun. Tough books, coming from the toughest of experiences/life stories…nothing precious about Dostoyevsky or Hamsun. They both seemed to set down the facts/details of a decade of suffering and survival in a first book: Dostoyevsky in HOUSE OF THE DEAD, Hamsun in HUNGER. But, this done, they would tend to let the imagination and spirit soar in the following books…the facts and details of their histories still embedded there though, felt, sensed, like psychological rock strata, unyielding. D. H. Lawrence, the English miner’s son, took on the “psychological” penetration of that rock strata next, delving deep, fusing the exploration with elements of impassioned drama and story which brought such a potent mix of public acclaim/disapprobation. While, in Cze...