Episode 9: Fiction as a Therapeutic Device
In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, John Cussans speaks with Simon O’Sullivan, philosopher, artist, writer, and member of the performance group Plastique Fantastique, about his 2024 fiction The Ancient Device, published by Triarchy Press.
The conversation opens up the idea of fiction as something more than narrative. In Simon’s work, fiction becomes a device, a prop, a ritual structure, and a way of entering into relationship with what is hidden, unresolved, wounded, or waiting to be transformed.
The Ancient Device moves through English ceremonial landscapes, mummers’ plays, rave and traveller culture, village halls, village greens, masks, props, wounded characters, internal landscapes, and the deep mythic charge of places that stay with us across a lifetime. It is a fiction grounded in landscape, but also one that moves through memory, trauma, anxiety, addiction, performance, community and repair.
A central thread in the episode is the relationship between outer landscapes and inner psychic landscapes. Simon reflects on how places from adolescence, childhood, counterculture, performance and ritual can remain active within us, not just as memories, but as charged sites that continue to shape imagination, identity and possibility.
John and Simon also discuss the relationship between The Ancient Device and Plastique Fantastique, the performance group whose work brings together ceremony, mythology, science fiction, trance, theatricality and collective transformation. While Plastique Fantastique often leans towards the contemporary, futuristic and ceremonial, The Ancient Device is more rooted in folk culture, English landscape, mumming, masks, village spaces and older forms of ritual performance.
The episode also moves into rich and challenging territory around group work, therapeutic communities, addiction, trauma, vulnerability, and the possibility of performance as a space where something can be witnessed without judgement. In this sense, fiction and ritual become ways of laying things out, stepping into them, and finding a different relationship with what has previously felt stuck, painful or unspeakable.
This is a conversation about how stories work on us, how masks can reveal rather than conceal, how landscapes can hold memory, how performance can become a method of repair, how fiction can become a form of myth-work, and how the places we return to, inwardly or outwardly, may still be speaking.
It is a deeply thoughtful episode about art, ritual, therapeutic practice and the possibility that fiction, when approached as a living device, might help us find new ways to encounter ourselves, each other, and the landscapes that have shaped us.
Find out more:
Simon O’Sullivan: www.simonosullivan.net
Plastique Fantastique: www.plastiquefantastique.org
The Ancient Device: available from Triarchy Press