for example, is largely that of a figurehead, with little power to make decisions and organisational changes.

The main problem in overcoming some of these differences in order to find a strong voice in keeping with our Royal Charter, whilst staying reasonably ‘safe’ and acting within our constitutional role, and at the same time dealing with new and challenges such as changes in employment law, is that the BPS office seems under-staffed. Its infrastructure has simply not grown in line with its membership size and the responsibility that comes with the roles BPS members hold in our professional lives. The organisational structures of the BPS are sadly outdated. This can be resolved quite easily: despite the relatively low membership fees, the BPS has the financial resources to evolve and grow, and indeed the current Structural Review may be a step in this direction.

However, the people in positions of power need the inclination to change. Are they truly visible enough to fully engage with the membership and elected officers? Or are individuals in key decision-making roles distant from the current pressures faced by clinicians, and too invested in maintaining the status quo? We must have greater transparency and more professionalism within the BPS.

Clinical psychology is at a pivotal moment in its development, and many of us recognise the need to change in line with the environment in which we work, if we are to shape that environment for the better. Most importantly if we are to properly care for the people who access or could access clinical psychology input, then we need to be clear in our identity, roles, and responsibilities.

We need a professional body to support us in that. It may be that this has to happen outside the BPS, but perhaps not. If clinical psychology is to remain embedded in the BPS then we need strong infrastructures, contemporary thinking, transparency, professionalism, and a caring approach to each other as colleagues. Sadly, I have experienced less of this than I would expect within the BPS.

We now see a number of different groups developing alternatives outside BPS structures, some are further along than others. We need this action in order to press for change and show that there are other ways of representing our profession.

However, my concern is that if the ‘crisis’ we are currently experiencing within the BPS leads to people wanting a fast solution, we will simply replicate the same problems which exist now in the BPS. We need a range of people involved in the discussions about our future, we need safe spaces created in which people can explore some of the problems inherent to clinical psychology (such as the limited diversity amongst those in positions of power), and we need to take things slowly in order to build them collaboratively.

Wherever we get to next, we need to focus on the foundations. Those foundations could be renewed in the BPS or placed in a different space, but if we don’t focus on the foundations, the building will crumble.

With love. Ste Weatherhead CPsychol Senior Academic and Clinical Tutor, University of Liverpool the psychologist july 2017 letters

A curveball angle Kohler in the 1920s explored connotations of the words maluma and takete (later researchers replaced these with bouba and kiki). Most readers will readily associate maluma and bouba sounds with a rounded shape – takete and kiki with a cornered shape. A 2011 David Robson article in New Scientist took us back to Humpty Dumpty who declared ‘my name means the shape I am’. These word/shape associations were not just evident in English but also in other languages, so they are not merely an amusing byway in the halls of mental science. An American team in the 1960s claimed that the nature of what people see in their environment influenced their susceptibility to a range of visual illusions; their ‘carpentered world hypothesis’ was supported by Gregory in the UK.

Psychology should next explore whether the nature of people’s visual world (be it cornered or rounded) and auditory world (be it evocative of curves or of corners) influences how they feel and behave. Important implications may well include: the degree of rectilinearity of the inhabited world; the perceived solidity and ultimately resilience of a currency depending on its name; and the possibility of an effect of a musical culture that is rhythmically two-timed (as opposed to a culture which is predominantly threetimed) and how its members feel and interact. Let us take this third suggestion first.

Music in three time ‘projects itself’ onto curves of motion and vision (as in the kite flying of Ray Bethell) while music in four or two time hearkens unto marching and jumping. This four- and twotimed ‘jerkiness’ is increasingly normative in Western popular music; one would hypothesise a move towards a less contemplative demeanour in feelings, and in behaviour (than if a culture had heard a normative shift towards three time).

As to currency, the great majority of names are ‘takete-like’ with at least one firm consonant. The Bhutanese ngulturum has four firm consonants and ‘sounds as though’ it would resist inflation. There is one currency whose name is extremely ‘maluma-like’ and that is the euro, for which one would hypothesise a lack of defensive robustness first in users’ perceptions, then feelings and eventually behaviour.

A current exhibition on the Japanese house mentions that most urban Japanese ‘live stacked up on top of each other in hutch-like apartments’. Hong Kong is a remarkable place to witness such a design – the living units are unavoidably rectilinear, but at the foot of such urban estates shopping malls are emerging which use curves wherever possible. Perhaps the ‘taketic’ apartments promote feelings (and behaviour) of bounded discipline, while the ‘malumic’ swirls of the malls intentionally promote a ‘letting-go’, suitable for shopping? Mallory Wober London NW3