Posts about Psychoanalysis
On March 19th
covering Psychoanalysis
Reading D.T. Max’s New Yorker article on the writing life and bitterly sad death of David Foster Wallace, I cannot escape a nagging question: Through the years of pharmacotherapy, did anybody try to talk to the guy? By which I mean a sustained, serious, patient psychotherapy. As a marker of where we are as a culture — is it that the biological explanation of human nature has taken hold so throughly that a major cultural figure can suffer unto death without it apparently occurring (publicly) to anybody that a full-court press for depression includes deep psychotherapy? If only to maintain human connection while all the medical things are being tried, and perhaps for something much more. Read more »
On March 17th
covering Life, Psychoanalysis, Uncategorized
People are always being apologetic about this. They don’t feel it’s right for them to be in my office unless they are prepared to condemn their parents or make accusations of abuse or neglect.
The longer I do this, the more I’m impressed by how complex the task of being a human being is. We all have to live with ourselves somehow. Yes, we’re interested in your childhood because that’s when you first developed your basic approach to inner and outer reality. And there’s a lot to deal with in childhood. I don’t think he put it this way exactly, but Freud realized that childhood is inherently traumatic. Read more »
On March 3rd
covering Psychoanalysis, Uncategorized
This zoomable map shows the extent and distribution of the victims of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Ghastly viewing, especially when you consider how many lives are touched by each dot.
My field, the study of why smart people do irrational things, should be booming about now.
On February 15th
covering Culture, Psychoanalysis
When did it happen that nothing we know about human nature counts until a brain researcher says so? This article reports on, to be sure, an interesting and worthwhile study. What we know about the mind from the inside (through psychoanalysis and all the rest) is converging with what we know about the brain from the outside — and that is really something.
BUT, it seems that the brain researchers have become the go-to explainers of human nature in a way that can be strained and ridiculous. I notice my patients seem to increasingly talk about one part of their “brain” feeling or doing something — when they’re really using “brain” as a metaphor for “mind” — because they’re talking about how they experience their mental life, not about how the hardware is configured. Read more »
On October 2nd
covering Psychoanalysis
One of the great enduring clichés about psychoanalysis and deep psychotherapy is that it’s all about delving deeply into the past. It is true that we’re really interested in the totality of experiences that make a person the person they are, including early development and family relationships.
But a thing that happens when we meet several times a week, as we do in psychoanalysis, is that we get closer and closer to the present moment. What a delicious paradox.
Here’s how it works: when a person comes in for the first time, they have to tell all about who they are and where it hurts, where they’ve come from and want they want. After a while when we’re used to one another, it becomes more about how it’s going this week or today, plus all of the connections we make with their experiences in the past. They might start to find their feelings are not as mysterious, and they might begin to feel better. Read more »
