I was sitting having coffee with a friend who I know is ” good with I.T.” He understands these things. I was struggling to set up another Twitter account. I’d followed all the rules. Pressed all the right buttons. Uttered all the appropriate digital incantations. To no avail. “Here. You have a look. You do this stuff.” He looked at the runes. Waved his digital wand and told me what steps to take. It made no difference. I couldn’t understand a word. He sighed and pronounced judgement ” Your problem is that you have an analogue mind in a digital world.” He’s absolutely right. My brain doesn’t seem to do digital.

I’ve just visited the Tesla museum in Belgrade. We were given a tour with various clever demonstrations. My wife and friends assumed I’d be bored. I wasn’t. I wasn’t engaged enough to be bored. I simply had no framework into which I could put what I was hearing. ( I say this with no sense of ludditism. I should be better informed.) I’m not. Put me in front of a Dali painting and I’ll find a way in. Jackson Pollock’s work is the same. I know how to think about what I’m seeing.

Psychoanalysis is the same. I can work with dreams. I can make sense of my patient’s material however it is communicated. Even if  I feel completely lost in a session, I can think about that state of mind and wonder about it. 

As a teenager I remember my father coming back from a school open day and reporting my headmaster’s indictment of me. He says your head is full of nothing. This was not true. My head was not full of maths, physics and chemistry. It was full of Romeo and Juliet. Of dreams and hopes that could not be contained in a dry formula.

Fifty years on and very little has changed. If    I’m sitting with a patient I’m not good at concise formulations. I can’t build a plan of action based on an initial assessment. I meet my patient as they are on that day in that moment. I’ll wave my hands and say things like ” You know it occurs to me that…” Or ” I think you want me to understand that…”  I worked in a CBT team for a few months. It was not a success. I focussed on all the wrong things. I was supposed to divide my patient into neat proportions and ratios. Anxiety = 60% Depression = 40% Therefore create a plan of action for the depression. I left after a year.

My point is to make a plea for those of us who are digitally challenged. We aren’t being difficult when we can’t make this app. work. We know that a good digital filing system with appropriate passwords is a thing of beauty. It’s just that finding the meaning in Dali seems so much more useful. Or being able to create a well framed interpretation of a patient’s words. Here only analogue will do…