Book talks about the “what to get better” and “how to get better” components which will help us to build a better and effective “Get Better Model” Of course, my argument is that I think people have to be aware of the threats and the dangers, the injustices and sufferings. No one would argue that those should be minimised. But if the improvements, success and developments are not reported I believe that is as bad as complacency, namely fatalism. Having finished the book, I am still unsure what exactly to think of it. The premise is interesting and gives a different view on the question of development, predominantly in Africa. The general theme is that development in Africa has not failed, quite the contrary. When not taking GDP per capita into account as a tool of measurement, Africa has seen spectacular improvement. The main indicators that Kenny looks at are levels of education (i.e. literacy), healthcare (i.e. life expectancy and child mortality) and social and democratic rights.

Getting Better is written in an unusual stream-of-consciousness style which can be a bit rambling and goes off on all sorts of tangents and parenthetical detours. Rosen reveals in the final chapter that this style in itself is part of his method for Getting Better. Contrarian arguments can be fascinating. This author was briefly mentioned in the New York Times' 2010 year-end “10th Annual Year in Ideas”, which also linked to his article in Foreign Policy from a few months ago: Best. Decade. Ever.: The first 10 years of the 21st century were humanity’s finest — even for the world's bottom billion. I think that John Gray’s dismissal of data is sophistry. It’s a formula for surrendering to our own cognitive biases and to allow ourselves to be jerked around by entrepreneurs of attention like our politicians and the terrorists.

People continue to pursue various kinds of irrationality or superstition. But you may be right that people recoil against the idea of overanalysing in their lives or over-rationalising. It is almost certain that we won’t or can’t get what we want, partly because, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we are largely unconscious, unaware, of what we want, and what we want is, as Freud wrote, in excess of what any object can provide (the exorbitance of desire is his theme). But if much analysis and more psychotherapy – not to mention its theory – is ‘ludicrously omnipotent and optimistic’, it is because the analysts are, consciously or unconsciously, complicit with their patient’s omnipotence and optimism; omniscience and optimism, like omniscience and pessimism, tending, rather, to go together. We may only know that we want to change, but not how we want to change. And yet, it should be noted, Bion broaches, despite his patent misgivings, the idea of ‘something better’ than a cure; thereby inviting us to imagine what might be better than a cure, what might be a better aim for someone going into psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis may be able to provide something better than a cure. It has certainly enabled Bion to think and write of there being something better than a cure.

Comedian Cariad Lloyd said of this book that it’s “like having a cup of tea and a chat with Michael himself”, and I’d have to agree. There’s no ego here, no ulterior motive, and he’s not trying to prove anything. It’s just him talking about his own experience and how he might be able to help others, and its just warming, humorous, silly, natural, and above all, honest. Really honest. And we all need that. In Getting Better, Rosen describes the moment he discovered a photograph of a baby boy sitting on his mother’s knee. When he asked his father who the boy was, Rosen or his older brother, Brian, his father said neither – that it was a third son, Alan, who had died as an infant, before Rosen was born. Rosen was 10 at the time. Nobody in his family had spoken of Alan previously, there were no photographs of him in the house. And though Rosen’s father, Harold, mentioned Alan from time to time over the course of his life, Rosen never spoke about him with his mother, Connie.It’s perhaps a little too techno-optimist, pays too little attention to questions of power and exclusion, and there are some lapses of empathy.

Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine. Try reading the book this weekend and try to reflect on what your get better method is and how you can leverage and inculcate it in your day to day life to accomplish a long-term success. Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it,” reads the subtitle of celebrated children’s writer Michael Rosen’s new book. It’s a reference to We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, one of his best-loved works. Part memoir, part self-help manual, Rosen’s latest publication considers what it is to get better, “what it means, and how we do it.” I’ll give myself a mark, shall I?” he says. “Right, fair enough. No, I think this is quite a good thing to do actually. Like they did at the Beeb. Every now and then you have to do a little…” If you’re using the word more or less or improve or decline you’re already making a quantitative claim. If you do it without data, you’re talking through your hat. You’re just making stuff up. So the idea that we can do without data is just a recipe for your irrationality.For whatever reason, this disappointment didn’t arise while reading the opening essay on the idea of a cure in psychoanalysis - it seems like a liberating thing to suggest that psychoanalysis might be a kind of practice that cures people of the need to be cured. Or in the discussion of truth and the unconscious. There seems to be a structural similarity here, but also an emotional distance that I find hard to explain.

It has now been 23 years since Eddie’s death. For the most part, Rosen has succeeded in escaping incapacitation. “I’ve tried not to be burdened by it,” he says. “I talk in the book about ‘carrying the elephant’.” Rosen hands me a postcard replica of an engraving of a man struggling to carry an elephant up a hill. “I bought that in Paris,” he goes on, “and it’s a great reminder. You know, I’m not carrying an elephant. At the time I thought I was. Eddie’s dead and I’m carrying all this grief and it’s bigger than me – it’s as big as an elephant. But not any more. Even with this Covid thing, or with any of that other stuff, I’m still not carrying an elephant. So this picture, it inspires me.” In the early 1990s, there was tremendous fear that if Germany was reunified then perhaps we would see the Fourth Reich, there were fears in the 1980s that Japan would take over the world. In this digital world, there is quite a lot of buzz around Machine learning/ML (application of AI that provides the system the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed) – however, the better rhetorical question to ponder upon is – aren’t we humans supposed to be good at it in the first place? This certainly needs a good introspection and no debate. As the numbers and targets take more precedence in today’s cut-throat competitive organizations … people tend to rush towards results and often miss the learnings which they could have done during the journey. Each one of us has a profound capacity not only to get the results but also learn from it and get better every day (or rather “every hour” as Chandramouli often says 😊). As the saying goes, it’s not the destination, but the journey as well that matters. This book exactly focuses on the topic of taking time to “get better” by contemplating with right questions (“what” and “how”) to arrive at building a better learning model (GBM – Get-Better-Model). We can become fatalistic about the human condition figuring nothing anyone tries to do will be any good, but then we become more receptive to radicalism. Potentially to a charismatic strong man who claims that he alone can solve our problems. I don’t doubt that he’s correct. In a similar vein, Steven Pinker presented an argument on the myth of violence at TEDtalks in 2007 (see the 19-minute video). I’ve read quite a bit on how our brains aren’t quite as rational as we prefer to think they are, and several of those cognitive biases lead us to focus more on negative things and remember them better; the “infotainment” shows we turn to for “news” operate on the if it bleeds, it leads tactic, which further reinforces our beliefs that things are nasty.In Getting Better, he shares his story and the lessons he has learned along the way. Exploring the roles that trauma and grief have played in his own life, Michael investigates the road to recovery, asking how we can find it within ourselves to live well again after – or even during – the darkest times of our lives. Moving and insightful, Getting Better is an essential companion for anyone who has loved and lost, or struggled and survived.