Dr. Libby Nugent: Clinical Psychologist

20/12/2025

18/12/2025

Sharing something reflective rather than analytical today. It draws on a story from Jewish tradition and reflects on endurance and withholding, without offering analysis or argument.

There is a story in Jewish tradition of a city called Luz.It is not defended by walls. It is not announced on maps. It survives because it is not fully given over to the world.In the midrash, Luz is a place where death does not enter. Not because the people are spared suffering, and not because time...

17/12/2025

14/12/2025

Oliver Sacks saw his therapist for nearly 50 years. During that time, he became one of the world’s most prominent neurologists and a kind of founding father of medical humanities—a discipline that coalesced in the 70s, linking healing with storytelling. But the freedom that his therapist promised through analysis was elusive. Sacks was closeted until the last few years of his life, and again and again, displaced his psychic conflicts onto the lives of his patients. He gave them “some of my own powers, and some of my phantasies too,” he wrote in his journal. “I write out symbolic versions of myself.”

In this week’s issue, Rachel Aviv uncovers decades worth of Sacks’s records and journals—many of which had never been read—to understand how the celebrated neurologist’s personal struggles shaped how he viewed his patients: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/kVB8dJ

11/12/2025

11/12/2025

11/12/2025

In clinical work, we talk a great deal about boundaries: the rituals and structures that make thinking possible. Yet in many contemporary services, these boundaries are stretched so thin that clinicians find themselves holding far more than their role was designed to contain.

What looks like personal overextension is often a response to something deeper: the quiet collapse of institutional containment. As I’ve been sitting with this, another story has been circling in my mind, one that captures the emotional logic of boundary creep with unsettling clarity.

Click the link below to explore these themes through the traditional tale of the Fisherman's Wife.

I keep returning to the old tale of the fisherman and the flounder. It turns up in supervision and in my own thinking at moments when effort feels endless and strangely unquestioned. In the story, a poor fisherman casts his net into grey, restless water and pulls up not an ordinary fish but a talkin...

07/12/2025

07/12/2025

07/12/2025

Thought provoking read “how Zack Polanski's attitude to carers is in keeping with the body and dependency denialism of identitarian individualism”

In her excellent 2021 book Care and Capitalism, the sociologist Kathleen Lynch describes the way in which the devaluing of care work is tied to negative attitudes towards dependency and the body.

07/12/2025

04/12/2025

INTO THE OFFICE WOODS: A fairy tale guide to the Christmas Do

Office parties may look like glitter and karaoke, but they carry a deeper
psychological weight. In private practice they rarely happen, yet they still
arrive in supervision and reflective conversations: half dreaded, half
cherished. During my NHS years I felt the paradox keenly: reluctant to attend,
but often glad once there.

This essay explores what these gatherings reveal about workplace life, through the unlikely lens of Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Parties become temporary forests: spaces of play, risk, archetype and consequence. What they offer, and what they threaten, depends on how we frame and hold the threshold.

Working in private practice, office parties are mostly a non-event. Yet they still wander into my consulting room: in reflective practice, in supervision, in the stories colleagues tell with both fondness and dread. During my years in the NHS and social care, I always felt conflicted about them. I r...