Classics and Clinical Psychology

Once a classicist, always a classicist. 

I have been working as a clinical psychologist for many years, but my love of classics has never left me. It's like belonging to a cult, but a nice one. I studied Classics at Wadham College, Oxford from 1993-1997, but I have been immersed in the ancient world since I started Latin at 11, and Greek at 13. As I have studied and worked with human behaviour, cognitions, emotions and relationships, I have realised how much the ancient world and its wisdom have to offer us. 

My love of the classical world and clinical psychology came together in my book 'The Odyssey Mindset: 7 Timeless Lessons for Life'. The Odyssey Mindset distils the wisdom of one of the world's most famous and beloved poems into practical lessons to help you live better. The Odyssey is a deeply psychological poem - it speaks to us about love, loss, grief, desire, status, joy, family and all the things that make human beings, well, human. It will meet you wherever you are in life, and that's why it has endured for nearly three thousand years. Now I have sought to bring together that wisdom into a practical and actionable guide for modern readers. You can find it here if you'd like to read it. 

I absolutely loved writing it, even though it had to be done in under 4 months so that it could come just before Christopher Nolan's film. Even though it meant no holidays, and many hours spent beavering away in London's Senate House Library (my work place of choice, along with The Bodleian in Oxford), I couldn't have been happier to revel in my niche - a 'psycho-classicist'. And that's what I aim to do, using my dual expertise as a classicist and psychologist to bring modern psychology together with the literature, history and philosophy of the ancient world in a way that makes it current, relevant and practical for the 21st century reader. 

Classics will survive and thrive by reframing and recasting stories and wisdom from the past into ways that engage the modern reader. If more people come to Homer because of The Odyssey Mindset, then I am glad to have made that contribution.