Ask most adults if they believe in magic and they will usually make a face, laugh or look at you like you have lost your mind. Yet, magic is what this blog is about: magic, and how we lose access to it and forget how to use it. A definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: […]
As a psychoanalyst I believe in the power of words – spoken, written and thought. So at first, it may seem paradoxical that I should think of language as limited in helping us access and interpret our experience. It is, after all, our way of being conscious- we think in words, we articulate our thoughts […]
During the second World War, the English peadiatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott spoke regularly to thousands of young mothers on his radio show about solo parenting and mothering, as most of the United Kingdom’s men were otherwise engaged. Winnicott brought his experience as a peadiatrician into his analytic thinking, and is responsible for many […]
When President Barack Obama was elected, there was dancing in the streets of many cities – in my city of New York, people stayed up late into the night celebrating his victory. I remember the following morning, across the ocean, in the United Kingdom, getting my coffee at the nearby shop, where an English lad […]
The first time I read about mirror neurons I felt great excitement. Here, finally, was a scientific team of researchers ( 2007-Giacomo Rizzolatti, Corrado Sinigaglia, Frances Anderson) confirming that we are relational beings, that we read each other automatically, unconsciously and at the neurological level. Wow. Science catching up to psychoanalytic theory, Freud would be […]
I have been thinking about boredom and confusion, as two states which herald dissociation. Both occur often enough in my consulting room; and we all seem to experience them at one time or another. They seem to block certain thoughts and sensations, memories, and feelings under a fog of non-experience. We are then left […]
Several weeks ago, I wrote two blogs on dissociation: On Being (One)self and Dissociation and Trauma. Both pieces described the process of dissociation on a spectrum of severity. Today’s blog, part one and three quarters, is meant to address a crucial difference in how dissociation is enlisted by our psyche, either as protective or […]
That is how much time has passed. Nine years. To the day. Almost to the hour as I write this. You know what I am talking about. None of us can forget. Time has gone by, it has in fact, altered everything, and also left scars and open wounds. The smoke has cleared, the debris […]
Last week I wrote about the fact that our experience is discontinuous in nature. I also said that despite the fact that we experience ourselves as one, unitary being, we actually have many self-states or self configurations which help us along, are not always in our awareness, and are often dissociated. Then, a patient who read […]
Modern psychoanalysis thinks of the self as having multiple states or narratives. Patients walk into our offices and present us with their story, but as analysts we know there are many stories to one self, and many experiential states to that self. Furthermore, we know, that depending on the day, event, mood, and situation, we […]