We are, all of us, finely tuned complex beings. Every day in my clinical practice I am reminded of this fact. Individuals and their lives, and life solutions are never simple. Instead, each person carries within them a dense cast of internal characters and experiences which lend their voices and truths to lived experience, often […]
Category: Psychoanalysis
OUR USE OF OBJECTS – And Their Importance In Our Lives.
Several weeks ago I wrote a post on our internal world and how it is populated (https://www.drceccoli.com/2012/08/our-internal-world-and-how-it-is-populated/). I was drawing attention to the powerhouse that runs our life. In that post I focused on the significant players in our lives and our relationships to them. Today, I would like to speak about the rest of […]
WAIT WAIT DON’T TELL ME – On NOT Helping and the dance of mutuality.
It may seem curious for a psychoanalyst to write a post about not helping but that is exactly what I am going to do here. Three weeks ago I wrote about how difficult it is to sit and wait from the patients’ point of view (click here to read: https://www.drceccoli.com/2012/09/what-do-i-do-action-thought-and-change/).This week I turn to the […]
WHAT DO I DO? Action, thought and change.
Over many years of listening and working with patients, I have come to differentiate various degrees of thoughtfulness which, when considered and allowed to steep, move people toward action and change. In treatment, there are those moments when something clicks for the patient, when some piece of behavior sincs with history or memory or something […]
OUR INTERNAL WORLD – And how it is populated.
Most of us are used to thinking about our life and how it progresses from the outside. We look at what we have accomplished and done, our family, our friends, our work, our daily routines and interactions. We tend to think about our lives as made up of the events that happen to us […]
ARE WE THERE YET? The time it takes to change.
Why does psychotherapy take time? Why is it difficult to predetermine how long a treatment will last? Are we there yet? My patients want to know. How long till we get there? How long do I have to come to therapy for? Good questions. It reminds me of the questions we used to ask as […]
TOMATOE/TOMATO/POTATOE/POTATO: On The Language We Speak.
I am interested in language in every possible sense of the word: the language we speak, as well as implicit communication-the language of emotions, the language of the body, the language of movement, the language of art. We communicate in many different ways, and as a psychoanalyst I try to pay attention to as many […]
ON WOUNDED HEALERS.
As someone who teaches, supervises and works with fellow colleagues, analytic candidates, psychology graduate students and members of other healing professions I have found that often, many of us entered a healing profession because of a personal wound. Or perhaps not because of it, but because such wounds alerted us early on to the need […]
ON WORK AND LOVE – and finding a balance.
In considering what makes life distinctly human and meaningful, Freud famously wrote: “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” And indeed they are. They are the very foundation on which we build a meaningful life. Think about it, our lives revolve, hour after hour on our relationships with others, and they are organized […]
WORDS AND INCANTATIONS – Talking Magic.
As someone who believes in the talking cure, based on words that try to capture inner experience, think it through, re-narrate it based on personal history, and share the entire process with another, in the context of a relationship, I have always thought that there is something magical about words and what we can do […]