I cannot remember now where I read or heard it, but a certain adage has always stayed in my mind and impressed me: to be intimate is to be vulnerable. The intimacy of the psychotherapy relationship comes about from the experience of vulnerability. In therapy, one comes to experience that softer, more open side of […]

It is a pleasure, and a rare occurrence these “summer” days, to be outside writing this while enjoying a hot sunny day. Given how summer has been in the Bay Area this year, and how good this albeit brief respite from the fog and cold feels, it is somewhat surprising to me that my thoughts […]

There is much to be said about what beneficial effects psychotherapy can have on a person’s life and just how it works. A person feeling certain distress in his life comes to psychotherapy for relief. And the principle means of that relief, at least from my perspective, comes from talking. Putting into words one’s feelings […]

I don’t like to get too technical in these postings – that would make for pretty boring reading. But I did want to talk about a technical aspect of psychotherapy which I am fascinated about. That is called transference. It was Freud who first hatched the idea of transference. The idea basically being that we […]

Many times the question comes up during therapy: “What heals?” A client will ask, “How do I get past these issues?” And sometimes clients will say, “I’ve dealt with these issues before and they don’t go away.” Or “I’ve felt these feelings my whole life.” The question of what heals is an essential, but complicated […]

Many of my clients have had their minds taken over in childhood. This situation is not one that might be reflected in a B horror movie – though there is something horrible and sad in it. Rather, it is a too often common experience from childhood of growing up with a dominant figure who infiltrates […]

What is all this focus on emotions in psychotherapy anyways? Sometimes I wonder if my clients are wondering that. Sometimes they ask me directly. And indeed there is a lot of focus on feelings ones feelings. Often in a session, when a client is getting in touch with feelings –sadness, anger, joy – I will […]

I’m sure you have had the experience that when engaged in a conversation, you realize something that you had not realized before. Or when conversing with someone else, you have thoughts that you hadn’t quite had before. This is the power of relationship – and it is the essence of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is about the […]

Last week I wrote about psychotherapy as a process of memory – the act of remembering what is painful but which has gone unremembered and thus remains lodged in the body. Some more thoughts about memory. As I mentioned last week, Freud’s patients presented with mysterious illnesses and disabilities for which no organic cause could […]

Over a hundred year ago, one of the astonishing discoveries that Freud made was that through the act of psychotherapy a person heals through memory. Freud, working with patients with physical symptoms for which no organic cause could be found, discovered that these symptoms were the stored up effects of emotional and psychological trauma. His […]