John Launer: Thinking the unthinkable on Lucy Letby

The psychiatrist John Bowlby once wrote a paper called On Knowing What You Are Not Supposed to Know and Feeling What You Are Not Supposed to Feel.1 In it he explored states of mind where we know at some level that something has happened but also deny it. He took as examples children who’d been told that a parent’s death was accidental rather than suicide, but who in adulthood were able to admit that “I knew it all along.”Like many people, I’ve been gripped and troubled over the past few weeks by the case of Lucy Letby, the neonatal nurse convicted of seven murders and six attempted ones. The ideas in Bowlby’s 1979 paper—sent to me by a colleague who’d been a student of his—have helped me as I try to make a little more sense of what happened. I hope that they may help others who have found many…
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