To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect's blog
Twenty-eight years ago, a cricket match entered sporting folklore. That year, 1981, was an Ashes year and Australia, like this year, was expected to prevail. England lost the first test, drew the second, and found their talismanic all-rounder Ian Botham crippled by the burden of captaincy. Only after Botham failed with the bat in the second test did England make the bold and, as it turned out, inspired move to recall as captain a man whose batting was less than Bothamesque, but whose leadership was already legendary.
Mike Brearley had passed the role to Botham after a string of successes including taking England to the 1979 Cricket World Cup final. What he achieved upon his return was the more remarkable for being unexpected. The third test, at Headingley, began badly. Australia declared on 401, with England managing only 174 in reply and being made to follow on. The rest is legend. Botham scored a fearless 149 not out, aided by Graham Dilley's 56; before Bob Willis and Botham tore through Australia, bowling them out for 111, and victory.
Key to this astonishing comeback was Brearley's reinvigoration of Botham, using a combination of carrot and stick. Before the match Brearley said that Botham would score a century and take 12 wickets; then, when Botham was bowling hesitantly, Brearley withdrew him from the attack and dubbed him the "sidestep queen" to goad him into action. Then, when Botham went in to bat, Brearley told him to "go for it, enjoy yourself." England went on to win the series; and Brearley quietly resigned the captaincy and retired. He'd represented England in 39 tests, with 18 victories as captain, and only four defeats. Having had previous stints as a lecturer in philosophy, he set about training as a psychoanalyst, a profession he has followed for the last 24 years.
Today—at the start of a new Ashes series, arguably the most intense of all cricketing encounters—both long-form psychotherapy and long-form cricket seem in decline. In a quick-fix world there appears to be less tolerance for approaches—whether sporting or psychotherapeutic—that take time. In May, Chris Gayle, the West Indies' captain, said that he "wouldn't be so sad" if test cricket died out. Gayle, like many big stars, has made a fortune from the Indian Premier League, and clearly prefers the shorter Twenty20 game. The meagre 4,000 tickets sold for the opening day of the second test against the West Indies on 14th May seemed to indicate that English crowds, too, shared some of his feelings.
Psychoanalysis faces a different, but related dilemma. With the government pouring money into short-term psychological treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), psychoanalytic therapies, of which psychoanalysis is the most intense and long term, are feeling threatened (see also Alexander Linklater on psychiatry, p76). This is why Brearley, who since qualifying as a psychoanalyst in 1985 has shunned the spotlight—notwithstanding his cricket writings for the Observer—has opened the door of his basement consulting room in north London on a warm spring day and agreed to open up for questioning.
As president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the training ground for such luminaries as Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby, Brearley is now Britain's senior psychoanalyst. In person, he is thoughtful and serious, but also humorous and self-deprecating; and happy to discuss his two professional evolutions. He first encountered psychoanalysis at Cambridge, where he read classics and moral sciences and captained the cricket team. "I got interested theoretically. The professor of philosophy was John Wisdom, who wrote a book called Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis… He and one or two other people at Cambridge opened my eyes. That, and reading English literature, enlarged my sense of human emotions and what goes on under the surface, the complexity of human emotion."
Brearley's PhD, which he never finished—"I didn't have to; I got a teaching job without it"—explored the meaning behind different types of behaviours. But his interest has never been just theoretical: at Cambridge, he also volunteered for the Samaritans. Speaking to people in distress, he "was interested to listen to them and they didn't ring off readily. It was the first contact I had with people who were in emotional distress."
His interest in personal behaviour and motivation was also arguably his greatest strength as a cricketer. As Rodney Hogg, the Australian fast bowler, put it: "He has a degree in people." Botham, in the foreword to Phoenix from the Ashes, Brearley's book about the 1981 series, had this to say: "There is something about Brears. He knows how I feel and what I'm thinking… I took stuff from him that I'd clip other guys round the ear for." Ed Smith told me how he asked Brearley for advice during his 2002-06 stint as Middlesex captain, a post Brearley also held. Smith says Brearley's approach was to "tell stories rather than give prescriptive advice. He is very good at explaining the complexity of situations. A lot of people in sport pretend things are very easy, and much management speak is built around this idea.
Mike was so much more subtle. He always understood contingency and risk." Non cricketers, too, have found his ideas helpful. Film director Sam Mendes turned to Brearley's book The Art of Captaincy (1985) for inspiration while directing American Beauty. Mendes described him as "a philosopher-sportsman whose tactical skill has not been equalled since." Brearley, though, admits that it was not always this way. As a young man he was prone to arrogance, especially when, at 22, he was selected as a "young hopeful" to tour South Africa. But he wasn't picked for the test matches and "left to get on with things in the nets. I was bored. But worse I was resistant to learning—though I would have heartily denied it at the time." One day, practising in Durban, "a sallow man in a brown trilby hat" offered him tips on his batting, which Brearley ignored. The man turned out to be Walter Hammond, one of the game's greatest batsmen, who Brearley later learned was dying of cancer. This, he says, was "my lowest point, or my most arrogant point; my attitude was like a young violinist refusing a tip from Maxim Vengerov."
By 1981 this arrogance—and the envy and fear that Brearley says it can often mask—had presumably lessened, not least because Brearley, who had wanted to be a psychoanalyst since university, had by then been a psychoanalytic patient for three years—wrestling with "aggression, envy, jealousy, suspicion, and insecurity." It's hard to say to what extent these character traits remain today, although his understanding of his darker side must help him understand similar qualities in his players—just as in his patients. He began his own analysis, he says, not just because it was a requirement for his new career (all analysts must first undergo analysis themselves) but for personal development. "Psychoanalysis is an opportunity… to get to know yourself as thoroughly as you can. I always liked [psychoanalyst Wilfred] Bion's phrase that his job as a psychoanalyst is to introduce the patient to that person with whom he'll have most dealings in his life, namely himself… as if one has never met oneself at all."
Psychoanalysis was born 113 years ago when Freud applied the term "psychical analysis" to his treatment of disturbed patients. It takes time, and an intense period of personal therapy (five times a week throughout training) to become a psychoanalyst, in contrast to CBT which does not require practitioners to undergo therapy before working with patients. CBT, now the NHS treatment of choice, was developed in the 1960s by American psychoanalyst, Aaron T Beck.
Depressed patients, Beck found, had spontaneous streams of negative thoughts about themselves, the world and the future. If patients could identify and evaluate these thoughts, he claimed it was quickly possible to think more realistically and feel better emotionally. Correctly prescribed, CBT can be effective, as Brearley acknowledges. "I met a man recently who told me that he'd great difficulty with speaking, and he went for CBT and was helped to understand something about his life, and he was given exercises and, over a few months his difficulty improved, and it hasn't come back. Who is to contradict such a witness? What a good thing that this man's life was changed by 12 sessions."
Yet the two approaches, Brearley says, are quite different. Psychoanalysts, he says, are trying to "free the person over a large range of his mind, his emotional being, his activities, his behaviours, his feelings, his creativity, to expand his mind. Which is why the term 'shrink' is so objectionable." Yet such treatment is expensive, and while some long-term psychoanalytic therapies are available on the NHS, they are prescribed only rarely, and are vulnerable to cost-cutting. Still, he thinks it has had a deep influence on NHS clinical thinking, and throughout society. "Psychoanalysis has always been a fringe activity in Britain. It never had that cachet that it had in the US from the 1940s to the 1970s. But as a source of research it's always been extremely important, in terms of understanding the mind.… It's also had a great influence on group therapy, on education, in certain fringe ways on the arts."
Psychoanalysts try to access the unconscious by emphasising "transference," or the way hidden feelings resurface in a therapeutic relationship. Brearley says that unlike CBT psychoanalysis "puts emphasis on negative transference," or the negative feelings that the patient might experience towards the therapist (echoing similar emotions in other relationships). Without such a focus, he implies, there would have been no room, in cases such as his own, for addressing underlying difficulties such as envy and aggression. To be effective in this way the psychoanalyst must also be anonymous. Brearley, though, has always been something of a celebrity analyst, and admits that some patients "have found my being known as an ex-cricketer quite difficult." But, he adds, "it can be worked with, taken up as material… grist to the mill."
Yet his profession is pitted against the spirit of the age—against what Brearley sees as the pervasive pressure of the "short-termism" which also applies to cricket. His is a therapy which puts "emphasis on the intuitive, the unconscious, on what you can learn slowly and that takes a great deal of time to get to. It puts emphasis on the fact that you can't control everything." Brearley also questions theories of happiness from the likes of Richard Layard (a prominent advocate of CBT), saying: "There's nothing wrong with happiness, but what constitutes happiness? How do you distinguish between the different sorts of happiness? The happiness you can get from a drug, or from a relationship, or from a great novel?" He adds that although "happiness can be enhanced by analysis," the process is more likely to "enhance emotional liveliness and vigour" and that "obstacles to happiness can be lessened, if not overcome."
Yes, but does psychoanalysis work? It is a much debated question. But in October 2008 the first large-scale research into the effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy to appear in a major medical journal concluded that these kind of therapies were more effective than short-term or behavioural approaches for certain disorders. As its author Falk Leichsenring, of the University of Giessen in Germany, put it: "There is evidence that, for patients with chronic mental disorders or personality disorders, short-term psychotherapy is not sufficient." Brearley says that while the NHS has "a right to know if someone is getting better or being helped" his profession must "be careful not to let our thinking become interfered with by that kind of instrumental thinking." He is treading carefully: aware of the need to defend his profession from those who accuse it of being expensive and unverified, while pointing out that psychoanalysis, although not amenable to testing through controlled experiments, is backed-up by a number of "long-term studies and other methods suitable to a social science."
It is here, in particular, that Brearley sees a telling parallel with cricket. Too many rules make batsmen less spontaneous, just as an analyst "has to be open to whatever comes; you must not have too many preconceptions about what's to come or you'll get into a mess. Wilfred Bion said you have to act without memory or desire. That means putting aside from one's conscious mind most of the time the technical rules, just as in batting you have to be open to the ball that actually comes down to you… to say that you could lay down a set of rules about what makes a good batsman would either be vapid or it would be too narrow." In short, rules and guidelines of the kind increasingly found in treatments like CBT need to be used sparingly in psychoanalysis, with its focus on the messier business of unearthing feelings buried in the unconscious.
As president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Brearley has been trying to win over funding bodies to his gradual, unstructured approach. But it is hard: "How do you show that what you do is of value without distorting the description of what you do? To give a parallel example, I heard just before Easter that the judges of England were complaining against the department of justice for bringing in new regulations for sentencing. They said it removed their skill and discretion as judges if they had to state in advance exactly what criteria added up to what sentence. I think there's something of that for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytical therapists."
So what does he see as the future of psychoanalysis? His outlook is cautious. "Maybe the best that's going to be offered [in the public sector] is the odd specialist place where intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy can take place for a certain number of people, and where the research can go on, which will also filter down into other forms of therapy." He still feels psychoanalysis has a role in "helping the helpers," providing forums where health-service workers can reflect upon their frontline experiences. "And we have to try to encourage the NHS to recognise the value of psychoanalytic therapy, even in limited form, for such things as depression, anxiety, borderline and narcissistic disorders." Isn't this a rather defeatist conclusion? "Perhaps," he concedes. "But in many areas of the NHS it is needed."
Convincing the NHS to provide more psychoanalysis at a time of retrenchment may provide Brearley with his toughest test of captaincy. But being out at the front is his place. Such a role, he believes, means being "willing, and comfortable enough, to tell people what to do; to think, at least some of the time, that you are right, though it's very dangerous if you only think you're right, or always think you're always right." Crucial to this success in cricket, he thinks, was getting others "to think like captains… When I first played for Middlesex if you hadn't been playing for the county for about 15 years or for England for about ten years people weren't interested in your opinion." Brearley says teams play better when everyone is thinking "what should we all be doing?"
In trying to lead his profession he takes further solace from another lesson learned from both his professions: endurance. "After you've been fielding for two days, and you haven't scored any runs, dropped a couple of catches, and people are shouting at you and it's very hot, it can feel very gruelling." With psychoanalysis, too, sometimes you "have to stick at it." The treatment aims to bring forward "all the aspects of personality of the patient." And some of these personae may be hard for the analyst to deal with: "If someone is persistently hostile, negative, depressed and withdrawn, one can be the recipient of a good deal of denigration and scorn"; although here, again, captaining tempestuous sportsmen like Botham must have helped. A tolerance of boredom is also important, as Brearley wrote in one of his Observer columns: "Cricket matches, like works of art and psychoanalytic sessions, are usually uneven. Even in the closest and best contests there are passages of entrenchment, of defensive play, of phases where one side or both are keeping things ticking over." Sometimes, just as on long days in the outfield, the psychoanalyst has to have "the ability to stay with not knowing."
***
Brearley is only too happy to offer thoughts on the England captaincy and the future of test cricket. Often, he says, the best captains aren't the best players; and indeed his batting average was just 22.88 over 66 test innings, with no centuries. "The Bothams, the Flintoffs and the Pietersens have not on the whole had happy times as captain. I was in favour of Botham… though I felt they should have waited a bit longer… But that was probably a mistake. The best player, the most extrovert individual is, of course, not necessarily the best captain." Such captains, he says, include Nasser Hussain, Mike Atherton and Andrew Strauss, who "seems pretty good so far." And his prediction for the Ashes series? "Two-two."
Strauss, like Brearley, is passionate about test cricket, which needs prominent champions if it is to survive. Just as psychoanalysis informs other forms of psychotherapy, Brearley thinks test cricket has much to teach the shorter game. "Twenty20 is very exciting, and good things can happen in it, but it's important to keep test cricket too. The skills derived from test cricket can underpin the Twenty20 skills. And a greater range of cricketing ability and personality is revealed through five-day cricket than it is through Twenty20. There are parallels to each of these points in the comparison between psychoanalysis and things like CBT."
It's a persuasive comparison, but not one that will guarantee test cricket's survival. "Maybe it will turn out that test cricket has no long-term future," he admits. "Certainly the ICC will have to be careful not to make it too routine. Pitches will have to be much better for the game than the recent ones in the West Indies and Chester-le-Street. But we have to persuade people that many valuable things take time. You can't speed up the St Matthew Passion." Brearley points to the critical drubbing that Joseph Conrad received for his novel Chance (1913), and Conrad's own riposte, published as part of the introduction to the second edition, in which he wrote: "No doubt by selecting a certain method and taking great pains the whole story might have been written out on a cigarette paper. For that matter the whole history of mankind could be written thus if only approached with sufficient detachment. The history of men on this earth since the beginning of ages may be resumed in one phrase of infinite poignancy: They were born, they suffered, they died… But in the infinitely minute stories about men and women it is my lot on earth to narrate I am not capable of such detachment." Psychoanalysis, Brearley says, "tells stories in similar depth, with repetitions from different points of view... These things take time, as does test cricket."
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect's blog
Twenty-eight years ago, a cricket match entered sporting folklore. That year, 1981, was an Ashes year and Australia, like this year, was expected to prevail. England lost the first test, drew the second, and found their talismanic all-rounder Ian Botham crippled by the burden of captaincy. Only after Botham failed with the bat in the second test did England make the bold and, as it turned out, inspired move to recall as captain a man whose batting was less than Bothamesque, but whose leadership was already legendary.
Mike Brearley had passed the role to Botham after a string of successes including taking England to the 1979 Cricket World Cup final. What he achieved upon his return was the more remarkable for being unexpected. The third test, at Headingley, began badly. Australia declared on 401, with England managing only 174 in reply and being made to follow on. The rest is legend. Botham scored a fearless 149 not out, aided by Graham Dilley's 56; before Bob Willis and Botham tore through Australia, bowling them out for 111, and victory.
Key to this astonishing comeback was Brearley's reinvigoration of Botham, using a combination of carrot and stick. Before the match Brearley said that Botham would score a century and take 12 wickets; then, when Botham was bowling hesitantly, Brearley withdrew him from the attack and dubbed him the "sidestep queen" to goad him into action. Then, when Botham went in to bat, Brearley told him to "go for it, enjoy yourself." England went on to win the series; and Brearley quietly resigned the captaincy and retired. He'd represented England in 39 tests, with 18 victories as captain, and only four defeats. Having had previous stints as a lecturer in philosophy, he set about training as a psychoanalyst, a profession he has followed for the last 24 years.
Today—at the start of a new Ashes series, arguably the most intense of all cricketing encounters—both long-form psychotherapy and long-form cricket seem in decline. In a quick-fix world there appears to be less tolerance for approaches—whether sporting or psychotherapeutic—that take time. In May, Chris Gayle, the West Indies' captain, said that he "wouldn't be so sad" if test cricket died out. Gayle, like many big stars, has made a fortune from the Indian Premier League, and clearly prefers the shorter Twenty20 game. The meagre 4,000 tickets sold for the opening day of the second test against the West Indies on 14th May seemed to indicate that English crowds, too, shared some of his feelings.
Psychoanalysis faces a different, but related dilemma. With the government pouring money into short-term psychological treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), psychoanalytic therapies, of which psychoanalysis is the most intense and long term, are feeling threatened (see also Alexander Linklater on psychiatry, p76). This is why Brearley, who since qualifying as a psychoanalyst in 1985 has shunned the spotlight—notwithstanding his cricket writings for the Observer—has opened the door of his basement consulting room in north London on a warm spring day and agreed to open up for questioning.
As president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the training ground for such luminaries as Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby, Brearley is now Britain's senior psychoanalyst. In person, he is thoughtful and serious, but also humorous and self-deprecating; and happy to discuss his two professional evolutions. He first encountered psychoanalysis at Cambridge, where he read classics and moral sciences and captained the cricket team. "I got interested theoretically. The professor of philosophy was John Wisdom, who wrote a book called Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis… He and one or two other people at Cambridge opened my eyes. That, and reading English literature, enlarged my sense of human emotions and what goes on under the surface, the complexity of human emotion."
Brearley's PhD, which he never finished—"I didn't have to; I got a teaching job without it"—explored the meaning behind different types of behaviours. But his interest has never been just theoretical: at Cambridge, he also volunteered for the Samaritans. Speaking to people in distress, he "was interested to listen to them and they didn't ring off readily. It was the first contact I had with people who were in emotional distress."
His interest in personal behaviour and motivation was also arguably his greatest strength as a cricketer. As Rodney Hogg, the Australian fast bowler, put it: "He has a degree in people." Botham, in the foreword to Phoenix from the Ashes, Brearley's book about the 1981 series, had this to say: "There is something about Brears. He knows how I feel and what I'm thinking… I took stuff from him that I'd clip other guys round the ear for." Ed Smith told me how he asked Brearley for advice during his 2002-06 stint as Middlesex captain, a post Brearley also held. Smith says Brearley's approach was to "tell stories rather than give prescriptive advice. He is very good at explaining the complexity of situations. A lot of people in sport pretend things are very easy, and much management speak is built around this idea.
Mike was so much more subtle. He always understood contingency and risk." Non cricketers, too, have found his ideas helpful. Film director Sam Mendes turned to Brearley's book The Art of Captaincy (1985) for inspiration while directing American Beauty. Mendes described him as "a philosopher-sportsman whose tactical skill has not been equalled since." Brearley, though, admits that it was not always this way. As a young man he was prone to arrogance, especially when, at 22, he was selected as a "young hopeful" to tour South Africa. But he wasn't picked for the test matches and "left to get on with things in the nets. I was bored. But worse I was resistant to learning—though I would have heartily denied it at the time." One day, practising in Durban, "a sallow man in a brown trilby hat" offered him tips on his batting, which Brearley ignored. The man turned out to be Walter Hammond, one of the game's greatest batsmen, who Brearley later learned was dying of cancer. This, he says, was "my lowest point, or my most arrogant point; my attitude was like a young violinist refusing a tip from Maxim Vengerov."
By 1981 this arrogance—and the envy and fear that Brearley says it can often mask—had presumably lessened, not least because Brearley, who had wanted to be a psychoanalyst since university, had by then been a psychoanalytic patient for three years—wrestling with "aggression, envy, jealousy, suspicion, and insecurity." It's hard to say to what extent these character traits remain today, although his understanding of his darker side must help him understand similar qualities in his players—just as in his patients. He began his own analysis, he says, not just because it was a requirement for his new career (all analysts must first undergo analysis themselves) but for personal development. "Psychoanalysis is an opportunity… to get to know yourself as thoroughly as you can. I always liked [psychoanalyst Wilfred] Bion's phrase that his job as a psychoanalyst is to introduce the patient to that person with whom he'll have most dealings in his life, namely himself… as if one has never met oneself at all."
Psychoanalysis was born 113 years ago when Freud applied the term "psychical analysis" to his treatment of disturbed patients. It takes time, and an intense period of personal therapy (five times a week throughout training) to become a psychoanalyst, in contrast to CBT which does not require practitioners to undergo therapy before working with patients. CBT, now the NHS treatment of choice, was developed in the 1960s by American psychoanalyst, Aaron T Beck.
Depressed patients, Beck found, had spontaneous streams of negative thoughts about themselves, the world and the future. If patients could identify and evaluate these thoughts, he claimed it was quickly possible to think more realistically and feel better emotionally. Correctly prescribed, CBT can be effective, as Brearley acknowledges. "I met a man recently who told me that he'd great difficulty with speaking, and he went for CBT and was helped to understand something about his life, and he was given exercises and, over a few months his difficulty improved, and it hasn't come back. Who is to contradict such a witness? What a good thing that this man's life was changed by 12 sessions."
Yet the two approaches, Brearley says, are quite different. Psychoanalysts, he says, are trying to "free the person over a large range of his mind, his emotional being, his activities, his behaviours, his feelings, his creativity, to expand his mind. Which is why the term 'shrink' is so objectionable." Yet such treatment is expensive, and while some long-term psychoanalytic therapies are available on the NHS, they are prescribed only rarely, and are vulnerable to cost-cutting. Still, he thinks it has had a deep influence on NHS clinical thinking, and throughout society. "Psychoanalysis has always been a fringe activity in Britain. It never had that cachet that it had in the US from the 1940s to the 1970s. But as a source of research it's always been extremely important, in terms of understanding the mind.… It's also had a great influence on group therapy, on education, in certain fringe ways on the arts."
Psychoanalysts try to access the unconscious by emphasising "transference," or the way hidden feelings resurface in a therapeutic relationship. Brearley says that unlike CBT psychoanalysis "puts emphasis on negative transference," or the negative feelings that the patient might experience towards the therapist (echoing similar emotions in other relationships). Without such a focus, he implies, there would have been no room, in cases such as his own, for addressing underlying difficulties such as envy and aggression. To be effective in this way the psychoanalyst must also be anonymous. Brearley, though, has always been something of a celebrity analyst, and admits that some patients "have found my being known as an ex-cricketer quite difficult." But, he adds, "it can be worked with, taken up as material… grist to the mill."
Yet his profession is pitted against the spirit of the age—against what Brearley sees as the pervasive pressure of the "short-termism" which also applies to cricket. His is a therapy which puts "emphasis on the intuitive, the unconscious, on what you can learn slowly and that takes a great deal of time to get to. It puts emphasis on the fact that you can't control everything." Brearley also questions theories of happiness from the likes of Richard Layard (a prominent advocate of CBT), saying: "There's nothing wrong with happiness, but what constitutes happiness? How do you distinguish between the different sorts of happiness? The happiness you can get from a drug, or from a relationship, or from a great novel?" He adds that although "happiness can be enhanced by analysis," the process is more likely to "enhance emotional liveliness and vigour" and that "obstacles to happiness can be lessened, if not overcome."
Yes, but does psychoanalysis work? It is a much debated question. But in October 2008 the first large-scale research into the effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy to appear in a major medical journal concluded that these kind of therapies were more effective than short-term or behavioural approaches for certain disorders. As its author Falk Leichsenring, of the University of Giessen in Germany, put it: "There is evidence that, for patients with chronic mental disorders or personality disorders, short-term psychotherapy is not sufficient." Brearley says that while the NHS has "a right to know if someone is getting better or being helped" his profession must "be careful not to let our thinking become interfered with by that kind of instrumental thinking." He is treading carefully: aware of the need to defend his profession from those who accuse it of being expensive and unverified, while pointing out that psychoanalysis, although not amenable to testing through controlled experiments, is backed-up by a number of "long-term studies and other methods suitable to a social science."
It is here, in particular, that Brearley sees a telling parallel with cricket. Too many rules make batsmen less spontaneous, just as an analyst "has to be open to whatever comes; you must not have too many preconceptions about what's to come or you'll get into a mess. Wilfred Bion said you have to act without memory or desire. That means putting aside from one's conscious mind most of the time the technical rules, just as in batting you have to be open to the ball that actually comes down to you… to say that you could lay down a set of rules about what makes a good batsman would either be vapid or it would be too narrow." In short, rules and guidelines of the kind increasingly found in treatments like CBT need to be used sparingly in psychoanalysis, with its focus on the messier business of unearthing feelings buried in the unconscious.
As president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Brearley has been trying to win over funding bodies to his gradual, unstructured approach. But it is hard: "How do you show that what you do is of value without distorting the description of what you do? To give a parallel example, I heard just before Easter that the judges of England were complaining against the department of justice for bringing in new regulations for sentencing. They said it removed their skill and discretion as judges if they had to state in advance exactly what criteria added up to what sentence. I think there's something of that for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytical therapists."
So what does he see as the future of psychoanalysis? His outlook is cautious. "Maybe the best that's going to be offered [in the public sector] is the odd specialist place where intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy can take place for a certain number of people, and where the research can go on, which will also filter down into other forms of therapy." He still feels psychoanalysis has a role in "helping the helpers," providing forums where health-service workers can reflect upon their frontline experiences. "And we have to try to encourage the NHS to recognise the value of psychoanalytic therapy, even in limited form, for such things as depression, anxiety, borderline and narcissistic disorders." Isn't this a rather defeatist conclusion? "Perhaps," he concedes. "But in many areas of the NHS it is needed."
Convincing the NHS to provide more psychoanalysis at a time of retrenchment may provide Brearley with his toughest test of captaincy. But being out at the front is his place. Such a role, he believes, means being "willing, and comfortable enough, to tell people what to do; to think, at least some of the time, that you are right, though it's very dangerous if you only think you're right, or always think you're always right." Crucial to this success in cricket, he thinks, was getting others "to think like captains… When I first played for Middlesex if you hadn't been playing for the county for about 15 years or for England for about ten years people weren't interested in your opinion." Brearley says teams play better when everyone is thinking "what should we all be doing?"
In trying to lead his profession he takes further solace from another lesson learned from both his professions: endurance. "After you've been fielding for two days, and you haven't scored any runs, dropped a couple of catches, and people are shouting at you and it's very hot, it can feel very gruelling." With psychoanalysis, too, sometimes you "have to stick at it." The treatment aims to bring forward "all the aspects of personality of the patient." And some of these personae may be hard for the analyst to deal with: "If someone is persistently hostile, negative, depressed and withdrawn, one can be the recipient of a good deal of denigration and scorn"; although here, again, captaining tempestuous sportsmen like Botham must have helped. A tolerance of boredom is also important, as Brearley wrote in one of his Observer columns: "Cricket matches, like works of art and psychoanalytic sessions, are usually uneven. Even in the closest and best contests there are passages of entrenchment, of defensive play, of phases where one side or both are keeping things ticking over." Sometimes, just as on long days in the outfield, the psychoanalyst has to have "the ability to stay with not knowing."
***
Brearley is only too happy to offer thoughts on the England captaincy and the future of test cricket. Often, he says, the best captains aren't the best players; and indeed his batting average was just 22.88 over 66 test innings, with no centuries. "The Bothams, the Flintoffs and the Pietersens have not on the whole had happy times as captain. I was in favour of Botham… though I felt they should have waited a bit longer… But that was probably a mistake. The best player, the most extrovert individual is, of course, not necessarily the best captain." Such captains, he says, include Nasser Hussain, Mike Atherton and Andrew Strauss, who "seems pretty good so far." And his prediction for the Ashes series? "Two-two."
Strauss, like Brearley, is passionate about test cricket, which needs prominent champions if it is to survive. Just as psychoanalysis informs other forms of psychotherapy, Brearley thinks test cricket has much to teach the shorter game. "Twenty20 is very exciting, and good things can happen in it, but it's important to keep test cricket too. The skills derived from test cricket can underpin the Twenty20 skills. And a greater range of cricketing ability and personality is revealed through five-day cricket than it is through Twenty20. There are parallels to each of these points in the comparison between psychoanalysis and things like CBT."
It's a persuasive comparison, but not one that will guarantee test cricket's survival. "Maybe it will turn out that test cricket has no long-term future," he admits. "Certainly the ICC will have to be careful not to make it too routine. Pitches will have to be much better for the game than the recent ones in the West Indies and Chester-le-Street. But we have to persuade people that many valuable things take time. You can't speed up the St Matthew Passion." Brearley points to the critical drubbing that Joseph Conrad received for his novel Chance (1913), and Conrad's own riposte, published as part of the introduction to the second edition, in which he wrote: "No doubt by selecting a certain method and taking great pains the whole story might have been written out on a cigarette paper. For that matter the whole history of mankind could be written thus if only approached with sufficient detachment. The history of men on this earth since the beginning of ages may be resumed in one phrase of infinite poignancy: They were born, they suffered, they died… But in the infinitely minute stories about men and women it is my lot on earth to narrate I am not capable of such detachment." Psychoanalysis, Brearley says, "tells stories in similar depth, with repetitions from different points of view... These things take time, as does test cricket."
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