Perhaps it might be true to say that at its core psychotherapy provides an environment for change through the experience of recognizing that there is help out there. That might be the best synonym for psychotherapy: help on the way. Often people who come to therapy come from histories where that was not the case. […]
“We are experienced mental health clinicians whose expertise spans various disciplines: psychoanalysis, psychology, marriage and family therapy, social work and psychiatry. As psychotherapists we have privileged access to people’s inner worlds, including anxieties and other forms of distress they may keep hidden from others. We are deeply concerned by our observations that the erratic, negative […]
“The human species is fantastically complex and often doesn’t know what it is doing. The search for a better understanding of our behavior is vital. It’s also difficult, never-ending and still very much worth the struggle.” Those are the last sentences of a review in the New York Times Book Review by David Leonhardt of […]
I write these thoughts during these very scary and uncertain times for many people. As one client of mine put it, times that feel very different than any that have come before. I’m mindful of this as I write about space and about psychotherapy (and psychoanalysis) as about having a space, a place, to inhabit […]
On this Thanksgiving Day, I’m thinking of so many people in the country living in heightened fear as an aftermath of the recent election. People who have come to this country to escape atrocities in their home countries, or who have come seeking more opportunity for themselves and their families. People of color now fearing […]
In the wake of the recent election, what one commentator called a “traumatic election,” many people, myself and many of my patients included, are reeling with an array of troubling feelings. As the shock of a “President Trump” fades, we are left with disturbing fears, feelings of anger, rage and at times despair. People are […]
A recent KQED Forum program addressed in some complexity issues pertaining to access to mental health treatment. The program, “Despite Laws to Increase Access, Many Californians Struggle to Find Mental Health Services,” addresses problems of access for consumers and difficulties providers face who accept insurance for their services. Given this informative and insightful program, I’m […]
It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found. ― D.W. Winnicott I absolutely love the above quotation from one of the most influential people of the last century. Winnicott was a psychoanalyst and a pediatrician whose work with children informed his thinking. Contained in so few words is something […]
“It is not just that the patient sees that he has been active in bringing on his own misery, whereas he thought he had been merely passive, but he sees, too, that he can also be active in another way that alters his past, present, and future all at once (Schafer, 1973).” It’s a ludicrous […]
Freud, writing one year into World War I, as war waged, not in some far foreign land, but in Europe’s backyard, his backyard, wrote about the war: “It destroyed not only the beauty of the country sides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it […]
