Anna Mortimer

Therapist, Journalist and Co-founder of the Mind Field - Sessions offered in English, Italian and Russian

I’m a former journalist, once Moscow correspondent for The Times (London). I grew up with a war correspondent father, who was killed in El Salvador in 1989. I was 19 at the time and thought he was tough, glamorous, hard-bitten and generally pretty cool. I only realized later that he was chronically anxious, alcohol dependent and probably quite traumatized by the horrors he’d experienced on the job. He was, as an obituary writer put it, “penitentially lonely” with a string of catastrophic relationships trailing in his wake. In my own analysis, I experienced and processed the damage passed on to me from my father’s disturbance. In thinking and reading around psychoanalysis and seeing training patients, I understood how these lives on the very edge of human experience can seriously impact on mental health. There are no prizes for toughing it out alone, for not getting help. This is what I have learnt.