Many people are talking about the new movie by Jonah Hill, “Stutz,” about his psychotherapist Phil Stutz. I thought I would share some of my thoughts. I am always heartened by a new public presentation about psychotherapy and mental illness. From Dr. Melfi, the psychiatrist, in the “Sopranos”; Billy Crystal in “Analyze This”; and Robin […]
I’d like to close out the year with a poem. It is a habit of mine to include a poem in this blog posting at the end of the year. Unfortunately, a practice I’ve gotten away from in recent years. Poetry and psychotherapy (and psychoanalysis) have much in common. Both mediums are focused on words. […]
The following article is also available on Psyched in Sf. With the help of my clients, I have been thinking lately about transcendence. Generally when people talk about transcendence, they are talking about some exalted spiritual state. In both Eastern and Western religions, there are concepts that connote an experience of a realm that is […]
The following essay can also be found on Psyched in San Francisco, a blog for psychotherapists in the San Francisco Bay Area. People come to psychotherapy looking for a good fit between themselves and the therapist. I often suggest that a client meet with me for a few sessions so that we can get a […]
The following is a revised version of a blog piece posted earlier in the year. This revision can also be found at Psyched in San Francisco, a blog of writings by psychotherapists in San Francisco. I was recently reminded of the last line of the great novel “The Great Gatsby”: “So we beat on, boats […]
Psychotherapy was invented as a treatment for trauma. That is where Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis (the progenitor of psychotherapy) began. He formulated that the patients he was seeing with illnesses not related to an organic cause were the victims of some sort of trauma. He believed their symptoms were responses to these traumas. And […]
Psychotherapy provides a unique opportunity to have a meaningful conversation – the conversation about your life. In the frantic tempo of modern life, it can be difficult to have time or energy for any conversation. I often hear from my clients about how tired they are when they get home, about how the last thing […]
I was recently reminded of the last lines of the great novel “The Great Gatsby”: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” These words are also inscribed on the tombstone of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Sayre. Gatsby is, of course, a novel about the inevitable […]
Depression is a complicated phenomenon, with multiple ways of seeing and understanding it. There are perspectives that focus on an organic causality (an imbalance in brain chemistry, a disease). Other perspectives focus on problems in cognition (something wrong with one’s thinking). From a psychological perspective, the one that I endeavor with my clients to understand, […]
I wrote the following words some time ago in my journal, and now I can’t remember if they were mine or someone else’s that I had read. So with apologies to whoever might have written them (which may have been me), here they are: “Psychotherapy is uncovering these strategies for protection, which can cause more […]
