There is perhaps nothing that can be said about modern life more true than observing the ubiquity of the internet. It is indeed everywhere. People now meet through the internet for purposes of casual acquaintance, sexual encounters, and potential long-lasting relationships. People plan their travel online (does anyone remember travel agents?). People bank. People read. […]

The other day I heard the neuroscientist Stuart Firestein on Forum echoing the philosophy of Socrates. Mr. Firestein, the author of a new book called “Ignorance,’ argued that science is less about an accumulation of facts and more about embracing what we don’t know. He was talking about maintaining a view that the more one […]

Writing in 1946, Franz Alexander coined the term “corrective emotional experience” to describe what he thought of as the key aspect of psychotherapy treatment. In his work, he expanded on Freud’s discoveries of half a century earlier. Freud maintained that people in a sense forget their traumatic experiences by repressing the memory of those experiences. […]

There was a wonderful article recently in the New York Times, by a wonderful and favorite writer of mine, Diane Ackerman, that talks about how science has proved what psychotherapy has known for some time now: change takes place through relationship. Citing the new field of interpersonal neurobiology, Ms. Ackerman, in her piece called “The […]

Much can be known about the American psyche from even a casual glance at American politics. My focus here is to address the psyche and not the politics of the politicians. Take what happened yesterday. A spokesman for the Romney campaign said some things about hitting the “reset button” when the general election campaign begins […]

Earlier I wrote about the more conventional understanding of feeling: as an emotion that one experiences or perhaps one defends against experiencing. There are some other ways, however, that we use the term “feeling.” There is another type of feeling, what is commonly referred to as a kind of knowing in one’s core or “gut.” […]

I came across the following passage in a journal article. The author of the article quotes from Sheldon Bach, Ph.D., a contemporary psychoanalyst: “Most importantly, since I am implicitly asking my patients to trust me with their minds, I struggle to attain a position where I can trust them with my own mind and feel […]

Feelings often occupy the focus in psychotherapy. Often I will ask my clients how they feel; often they will either speak of or show their feelings, particularly the distressing ones. I have been thinking about feelings lately and it occurs to me that there are different types – I’m inclined to say species – of […]

I recently came upon the following passage in a journal article. The writer, Muriel Dimen, a psychoanalyst practicing in New York, quotes from an early pioneer of psychoanalysis, someone in the inner circle with Freud, and alludes to the writer Franz Kafka. Here’s the passage that caught my eye: “Ferenczi writes, ‘It is not within […]

On this national day of remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, I want to take a moment to think about him. He is, in my humble opinion, not only one of the truly great Americans in our history, but he is one of the truly great human beings in all of history. There is so much […]