Smoking damages your health, as well as that of those around you.

However, this habit of showing us graphic pictures of black lungs and huge tumours on cigarette packets is pretty useless.

I know the intentions are good, but they don’t work on the mind the way they were intended, and the reason for this is best explained by Freud in his essay ‘Negation’, a read I strongly recommend.

Negation, as explained in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, denotes a mental process in which the subject formulates the content of an unconscious wish in a negative form.

The content of the wish finds expression in consciousness, yet the subject continues to disown it.

So basically the only thing these ugly pictures, to which I refer, might be doing, is upset the stomach of who may have just eaten.