Category: Trauma

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 THE IMPORT OF HISTORY: 9/11-Ten years after.

History has always fascinated me. In school, it was one of my favorite subjects because it provided a context for how the world evolved, how it got to be what I know it as. Perhaps my interest in history was one of the things that led me to the study of psychology and  later to […]

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. […]

ON MONSTERS, DEMENTORS AND OTHER MAGICAL BEINGS.

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, […]

Don’t Want to Feel-Don’t Want To Know : On Boredom and Confusion.

  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 […]