Book launch: Timeless Lessons, by Dr Mannie Sher
Book launch: Timeless Lessons, by Dr Mannie Sher
Celebration of the memoir Timeless Lessons: A Psychotherapist’s Journey and Insights for His Family
photo: John Spinks
In Timeless Lessons, acclaimed psychotherapist and leading Tavistock Institute consultant and researcher Mannie Sher offers a deeply personal, intellectually rich memoir, presented as a series of letters to his children and grandchildren.
The launch event, which took place on Sunday 25 January 2026, was warmly hosted by Dr Eliat Aram, CEO of the Tavistock Institute.
Mannie’s family celebrated together with colleagues and friends, with many powerful contributions, including from his wife Leonie Sher, lifelong friends Aubrey Moher and Colin Schindler, brother-in-law Allan Shafer, colleagues Anton Obholzer and David Lawlor, Mannie and Leonie’s sons Yoram, Danny and Shanan, granddaughter Adeena Sher and heartfelt words from two of his youngest grandchildren Lily and Shiloh Sher.
In the words of Chair of Council of the Tavistock Institute, Lucian Hudson, this was an occasion to witness writing and speaking skills being transmitted from generation to generation.
Lucian said, “Mannie Sher’s contribution has been prodigious and prolific: here we see his exploring another vital dimension, one that demonstrates the relevance and value of the Tavistock Institute approach to everyday life.”
Why did Mannie write his memoir?
“In the Introduction, I describe how the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 crystallised something for me”, Mannie said. “It seemed, in a way, to bring an era to a close: our assumptions about liberal democracy, about the rule of law, about the steady march of progress - all of these suddenly felt fragile, reversible.”
“It was tempting to see the problem as belonging only to “them”: to the tyrants, the bullies, the destructors. But I found myself asking uncomfortable questions about our own complicity, our wilful blindness, our complacency, our preference for comforting illusions.”
“I did not, however, set out to write a grand treatise on geopolitics. At my age, one learns the importance of humility. Instead, I turned to something more intimate and, for me, more honest: a memoir in the form of letters to my children, my grandchildren, and their descendants.”
A memoir is a genre of autobiographical writing in which an author selects, shapes, and interprets aspects of their lived experience in order to make meaning of a life. Unlike the comprehensive narrative arc of an autobiography, memoir is partial, thematic, and reflective. It is concerned less with the chronology of events and more with the psychological and symbolic significance they come to hold for the writer.
In that sense, memoir is not the record of a life as it happened, but an account of how a life has been remembered, organized, and understood, often retrospectively and with the benefit of time, distance, and revision.
The function of memoir is manifold. At its simplest, it bears witness: to family histories, social worlds, ruptures, traumas, migrations, political upheavals, and the intimate landscapes of feeling that accompany them. Memoir can also serve to repair continuity in a life that has been fractured by loss or conflict.
The act of writing can create coherence where none was apparent at the time, binding disparate episodes into a narrative that confers meaning.
For some, memoir becomes an act of testimony, addressing silences or secrets that could not be voiced earlier. For others, it functions as legacy, transmitting values, stories, and identities across generations. It may also provide a vantage point from which the writer reconsiders choices, relationships, loyalties, or the unconscious patterns that shaped them.
There are striking parallels between memoir and the psychoanalytic enterprise. Both assume that the past is not simply behind us, but alive in the present; that memory is reconstructive; and that meaning is created through reflective work rather than given by the facts themselves.
Just as analysis invites the patient to speak freely, revisit formative experiences, reframe conflicts, and tolerate ambivalence, memoir invites the writer to encounter their own internal objects, identifications, and resistances. Both processes involve selection (what is included and what is omitted), interpretation (how events are made sense of), and transference (how the past inflects the present). In both, truth is not merely factual but emotional, concerned with how something was experienced, fantasised, and defended against.
The memoirist, like the analysand, may discover that the narrative they set out to tell is not the one that ultimately emerges. Writing can loosen defences, allowing previously disavowed feelings or meanings to surface. The resulting text often carries the texture of psychic work: oscillations between remembering and forgetting, guilt and reparation, idealisation and disappointment, mourning and renewal.
In this way, memoir can become both literature and a form of self-analysis, an attempt to give narrative form to the complex interiority of a life lived.
Read the book
Spanning over 80 years and five continents, the book reflects on family, trauma, politics, and the human condition through the lens of a life devoted to psychoanalysis, social systems, and intergenerational understanding.
Structured as 57 intimate, vignette-style letters, Timeless Lessons blends autobiography, clinical insight, psychological theory, and poetic reflection. Sher recounts formative experiences—from a troubled childhood in apartheid-era South Africa to his professional work in London—while addressing timeless themes such as morality, faith, identity, memory, and social responsibility. These letters stand alone as thought-provoking meditations, yet together form a cohesive narrative of personal growth, philosophical depth, and emotional clarity.
