Category: Psychoanalysis

THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT: Is therapy forever?

I had planned on writing a post on collaboration, something that has been on my mind quite a lot lately. Then, Sunday morning I woke to a New York Times article that got my blood boiling – In Therapy Forever? Enough Already (click link to view): http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/in-therapy-forever-enough-already.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper There are many reasons why it stirred me […]

PLAY IT AGAIN SAM: On the compulsion to repeat.

There is a Buddhist belief that people come into our life so that we may learn something and/or work through something that we need to resolve before we can move on.  Thus everyone in our lives is a potential teacher, involving us in a relationship with the very thing that we have to work out. […]

THE BONDS THAT HOLD US: ON BLOOD AND LOVE.

This blog is collaboration. While I am writing it, it is based on something that was shared with me regarding a meaningful personal experience in psychotherapy. It was spawned from a posting on authenticity (https://www.drceccoli.com/2011/07/on-being-authentic/) in which I described the potential curative power of relationships that rely on the sharing of felt experience. This got […]

THE NUTCRACKER – On Being A Soldier Through Life.

During the recent holiday season, on my daily commute to the office, I walked by a poster of New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker, smiling at the familiar image of rosey-cheeked wooden soldiers and the memories that it elicited of my childhood. Until one morning as I walked by, it elicited something else, the image of […]

THE LANGUAGE OF AFFECT: feelings and emotions.

I have been thinking about emotions and feelings lately, and about how differently people respond to them. There are those people who treat their emotions and feelings as valuable sources of information, considering them like their third eye or ear, a personal route to felt, implicit knowledge. Such people approach their feelings with a sense […]

LOST (AND FOUND) IN TRANSLATION.

I have always been interested in language, and how the ability to speak many of them, to think and dream in them, impacts who and how we are. When, and how we learn a second or third or fourth language influences not only how we communicate with others, it also shapes the particular content and […]

CAN I GET A WITNESS? Relationality and consciousness.

I used to think that we needed language in order to experience consciousness. I could even make an intelligent argument for it. The conscious mind, I thought, coded experience with words, which assigned meaning to it. Since thoughts are language based, so consciousness must be. Now that seems all wrong. Simplistic really. I have changed […]

ON MEMORY AND THE RE-LIVING OF IT.

  Memory is one of those concepts that has been studied for centuries and has spawned multiple theories about what it is and how it operates. In psychology we think about memory functionally: in terms of how it operates and what it does. Hence, there are various types of memory whose name describe its function. […]

IS ANYBODY OUT THERE?

This might seem a strange question coming from a dweller of NYC, where millions of people are constantly out there – on the street, in the trains, stores, cafes, restaurants. Yet, it is a question that many of my patients ask, in relation to their loneliness. And so, this blog is about the experience of […]