Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it

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Rely on “The Pilot’s view”, to “do the right thing vs. doing the thing right” and measure your core capabilities and devise an action plan accordingly. Not quite the crusade because I am distrustful of leading an argument by passion or by my moral fervour. But I decided partly at the urging of leaders and critics to not let the book be completely bloodless and to muster some moral and emotional energy for the values that I argue in the book namely humanism.

If you do pay attention to detail and the little things are important to you, you make them important to people.”– Coach Bill Snyder Getting better by yourself: This is about deliberately getting better from what you do on a daily basis by yourself, without external help. Michael Rosen has got through lots of crises in his life including the death of his parents, his son, jobs and a close shave with death with Covid. He also had a long-term illness for over a decade without realising it and Jewish relatives who he discovered died in Nazi concentration camps. Their memories he unearthed from the fragments available to him to make sure they were not forgotten. It is an increasing theme within journalism, and many journalists are quite upfront about it. They believe that any positive development is not serious journalism but is corporate public relations or government propaganda. Getting better by yourself: Deliberately getting better from what you do on a daily basis by yourself, without external help.They talk about the talking cure. Well, there is a sort of doing cure, too.’ The photo of Rosen’s son Eddie, who died unexpectedly in 1999, at the age of just 18. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer

Mouli shares that Success is not about how good you are; it is about how powerful and effective a model you have to improve how good you are. Mouli calls this model the Get Better Model (GBM). In Getting Better, Rosen implies that coping is an everyday practice – we are coping even when we are unaware we are coping, and perhaps especially in those moments. Partway through our conversation I ask Rosen, “How have you coped?” hoping he might share some strategies, though he misunderstands the question.The author has not given any generalized information like stay positive, change your subconscious thinking, but dwelled on various methods to solve problems in a manner which could help not only for that given challenge but for similar challenges for which one may be future ready for. At its most minimal, the patient wants something they have been unable to get elsewhere – call it relief of suffering, enhanced freedom – and the analyst has a treatment that he values and wants to practise. To write of the concept of cure may involve the analyst in making controversial claims about the efficacy of his work; it may, at its worst, encourage the making of false or dubious promises; it may promote spurious success stories. And it may expose failure. But above and beyond this it raises the difficult questions that are at the heart of psychoanalysis, though not always at the heart of medicine: what has what the analyst wants for the patient got to do with the patient? And what is the significance, the history, of what the patient expects from the doctor? This patently replicates one of the essential perplexities of development: what has what the parents want for (and from) the child got to do with the child and her development? And at this point, as each psychoanalytic writer states the aims of psychoanalysis, everybody comes along with their specification: for Anna Freud and Winnicott, for example, the aim of analysis is to facilitate the patient’s development; for Klein it is for the patient to reach what she calls the depressive position; for Lacan it is to enable the patient not to betray their desire, and so on. This – as this brief menu of options and possibilities makes clear – is where the trouble starts, and where the real interest of psychoanalysis begins.