About

Oliver James (born 1953) is a British attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist, chartered psychologist, book author, television producer-presenter, broadcaster and journalist. He trained as a child clinical psychologist and worked as one in a mental hospital for 6 years. He has published 13 books, 3 of which sold over 150,000 copies. Between 1982-2006, OJ made 9 television series and 7 individual documentaries. Between 1990 and 2016 he wrote columns in 6 different national newspapers and did hundreds of features for them, and for magazines.

In 2008, in the midst of the Credit Crunch on BBC Newsnight he demanded that Teresa May (then a shadow minister) apologize for the Thatcherite policies which he believed caused the Crunch.

Most of his work in all media reflects two evidence-based theories:

The quality and kind of nurture in our early years, combined with our role in the script written for us by our families, profoundly influences what sort of adult we become. Whilst physical, biological processes (like problems during pregnancy) undoubtedly affect what we are like, genes have been proven to play little part in explaining why we are different from our siblings or similar to our parents. These ideas are explored most directly in the books They F You Up (2003), Not In Your Genes (2016), How Not to F Them Up (2010) and Love Bombing (2012).

The kind of society we live in – its political economics and culture – also profoundly affect what we are like. Partly they do so through their impact on parenting. Juvenile Violence in a Winner-Loser Culture (1995) showed that a substantial rise in violence in the late 80s was partly caused by an increase in the proportion of boys being raised in low income families after 1979: a neoliberal political economy caused more parents to be poor, making them more likely to parent in ways that create the potential for violence. In 1997, came Britain on the Couch which explained why we were more prone to depression compared with 1950, despite being much more affluent. Ten years later came Affluenza, which shows that people who place too high a value on money, appearances, status and fame are more prone to mental illness. In 2008, the scientific companion to that popular book (150,000 sold), The Selfish Capitalist, offered persuasive evidence of two original and important claims: that the populations of English-speaking nations have twice as much mental illness as those in mainland Western Europe; and that what explains this is primarily the version of neoliberalism which James dubbed Selfish Capitalism.

Whether in print or through broadcasting, James has often found himself at odds with scientific and political orthodoxy. He was ahead of his time in pointing out that the Human Genome Project had shown that genes play little part in explaining our individuality, something that is gradually becoming accepted as the new orthodoxy. Against considerable opposition, he exposed the exaggerated claims for the efficacy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy made by New Labour and its advisers. Fierce hostility also greeted his listing of the evidence that group daycare was potentially harmful to some toddlers and all infants. His encouragement of Love Bombing by parents of difficult children ran counter to psychological orthodoxy, though it was repeatedly shown to work in his ITV This Morning parenting strand. Perhaps most influentially of all, his presentation of the SPECAL method in Contented Dementia (2009) was actively and energetically opposed by the Alzheimer’s Society; despite their opposition, the book sold 150,000 copies and is by far the most widely used technique, even today (as the enthusiastic and very numerous reviews on Amazon show).