Beauty has been democratised. No longer the preserve of movie stars and models but available to all. But while the invitation to beauty is welcomed, it has become not so much an option as an imperative.

We know that ever woman wants to be thin. Our images of womanhood are almost synonymous with thinness.

If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.

Skinny is only one body type.

We accept there's an emotional aspect to life. But we're not very developed in our ways of understanding it.

Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

The analyst's psyche operates as a kind of... something to hold on to while somebody's going through therapy, if they're deconstructing their own psyche, if that's cracking up in some way, or dissolving.