This blog is about Dementors, those magical creatures in the Harry Potter books, that suck all happiness away with a deadly kiss, leaving one empty of life and with nothing to look forward to. A fate, some would say, worse than death. If you are not familiar with the Potter books, no worries, read on, […]
Category: Psychoanalysis
ON BEING AUTHENTIC.
When it comes to authenticity, be careful what you wish for. I say this, because being authentic is a lot more trouble than not being so. But it is also more rewarding, nurturing, freeing, and full of possibilities for emotional growth. Ultimately, authenticity is the key to life and our experience of it. As of […]
SPEAKING IN TONGUES.
It has occurred to me that all of us speak in many tongues. There is our everyday language, how we speak to others in the course of our day. There is our professional language, for me, the language of psychoanalysis that I share with colleagues and patients. There is the language of emotions, dense with […]
HOME.
The dictionary defines home as the place where one lives. This definition refers to the concrete place that one lives in, but it applies, just as well, to our internal home, and to the feeling all of us have of being home. I am referring to the experience of home, which can occur when we […]
MALE OR FEMALE? VIVE LA DIFFERENCE!
After I finished reading the Sunday New York Times article on the feminization of psychotherapy (click the following – Need Therapy? A Good Man is Hard To Find), I was once again reminded of how wedded we have become, particularly in America, to the idea of equality. Don’t get me wrong, we have had to work […]
ON LIES AND LYING ON THE COUCH.
I have been thinking about lying, and particularly, about lying on the couch, and the possibilities of why, anyone undergoing psychoanalysis or psychotherapy might be moved to not tell the truth. Therapy is, after all, a way of understanding oneself and ones’ personal history or personal truths. So at first blush, it makes no sense […]
LET’S GET PHYSICAL.
Really? Yes. Or as physical as one can get in a blog, and as a psychoanalyst. Lets talk about bodies. Our bodies. How they speak and what they say. This is an area that has been largely ignored, or relegated to second place in psychoanalysis. Mostly, because as psychotherapists we have grown more comfortable with […]
ON SPEAKING AND FINDING OUR VOICE.
Much of the psychotherapeutic hour is based on dialogue. On putting our experience into words, as an attempt to communicate to another what has happened, what we feel, what we remember. The interchange that ensues in each clinical hour is particular to the experience of each patient and their analysts’ experience of them. Each […]
I DO I DO! On relationships and commitment.
What does it mean to make a commitment to another, to be in an intimate relationship with another? Beyond the vows that we make, the intentions that we have in our heart, the passion and attachment that we may feel, what is commitment really about? Our culture tells us that relationship and commitment are something […]
TAKE A PAUSE.
We are inclined to move, to think on our feet, to react, to keep pace with the world around us. We are invited to multi-task, a word that did not join the English dictionary and vocabulary until recently (at least not as related to human activity) to accommodate our cultural need to do. And to […]