“The fundamental idea behind psychotherapy is that we tend to grow mentally unwell because we haven’t been able to think with sufficient clarity about the difficulties in our past, typically in our distant childhoods. Damaging incidents have been locked away, and continue to have an outsized impact on us, but we have no way of going back over them in order to liberate ourselves from their distorting influences. A sense that we are bad or disgusting, acquired in our fifth year, may ruin our chances of fulfilment in our fiftieth…”