Over recent years I wrote a book about a part of ourselves that we cannot see, that is intangible: the mind. It took me a while to realise this is what I was writing about. I never know what precisely I am writing about until some time in (usually after much structural shuffling and a fair bit of the kind of loose-thinking that happens at 3 a.m. or while cleaning grout). I’d been telling inquiring people I was writing about my postnatal experience of intense anxiety, or the story of my unusually psychoanalytic upbringing, or my family’s historical pulling away and toward each other, or my struggle to move away from my mother into adulthood. I was writing about all those things. But they were merely the subjects gravitating around my central question: was my emotional experience determined by the organ of my brain, my biology, my genes (the material me), or was it because of my life experience, stored up invisibly as memories in my dynamic but invisible mind (the immaterial me). And gravitating around that was the even more central question, the nucleus of it all: What was this immaterial me? How could it be helped when it suffered?

What is a mind? I began to ask. In an even more translucent venture, if that’s possible, what is the Freudian mind—the one I had been so vested in, having grown up raised by psychoanalytically-thinking parents—the one that Freud hypothesised was unconscious, hidden even from ourselves. The one that had promised me recovery. Did it exist? Should I have spent so many years talking to an analyst in a bid to come upon some knowledge of my self? Had I been on a (prone) wild goose chase there on my analyst’s chaise-longue, talking dreams and associations?