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It was with great excitement that I recently read Freud’s paper “On Psychotherapy.” The paper is taken from a 1904 lecture that Freud gave to a group of fellow doctors. This is Freud at the beginning of his career and at the inception of psychoanalysis (and subsequently psychotherapy). There are, of course, a lot of […]

Surely one of the most important of human needs is to be understood: To feel that another person really understands you, really gets you. And when you feel this sense of being understood, you feel less alone in life. It is an existential fact that to some extent we are all alone. It is a […]

If I were asked (and I’m glad I’ve not been; though I suppose I’m asking myself) if I could capture what psychotherapy is about in a word, I would say “repair.” It’s one of the best words in the English language. To repair. There are, according to an online dictionary, a number of meanings. I […]

While the exchange between the client and therapist occurs through verbal and nonverbal communications, it is fundamentally a relationship conducted through words. It is still “the talking cure” (Freud, 1910, p. 13), though I don’t think so much about “cure” as I do about “change” or “development.” [Interestingly, it was Freud’s patient who coined the […]

Often clients come to a session with something to talk about, some idea or topic to discuss. And, of course, that is fine, though not a requirement. Sometimes clients begin a session by saying “I don’t know where to begin” or “I don’t know what to talk about.” And that’s fine too. In fact, at […]

I want to let people know that I have added a new article, entitled “Fundamental of Couples Therapy,” to the library section of my website. I work a lot with couples (married and non-married; straight and gay) and I very much enjoy that work. Couples therapy is usually very dynamic; I find that I am […]

Psychotherapy is a unique relationship; it is really like no other. It is not a friendship. It is not like a relationship with family members. Given its uniqueness, the psychotherapeutic relationship may take a little getting used to. Although there are different schools of psychological thought that view the clinical relationship somewhat differently, most would […]

With so much emphasis in our culture on knowing, on being certain and correct, having the answers, it may be that the psychotherapist’s office remains one of the last places where it is perfectly all right to not know. After all, to discover, to learn more about oneself — an essential, perhaps the essential, goal […]

We tend to focus on the body’s need for exercise. Research makes clear that inactivity is the enemy of the body and that the way to combat that is to be active. As someone who works with people with the mind-body connection in mind, I’m always interested in learning about new findings about what affects […]

I rarely write in this blog about sporting events (actually this is the first time) given that the theme is psychotherapy and human psychology. However, an image from last night’s NBA Finals encourages me to write about it and what it represents about human emotion and psychotherapy. Yesterday, the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder […]