It would be a hard thing to do—to over emphasize the importance of satisfaction in clinical work.  Your patient’s satisfaction.  And yours! If we’re talking baseball, it’s that sweet spot on the bat.  If we’re talking sex, well—you know that place!  The contact just feels right.  Couldn’t feel better.  And wow—something amazing happens! So yes! …

I’ve written previously that being alone brings us face to face with important questions about self—what is the core inclination of self, and how has the lived experience diverted or required compromise of the core self?  I’m connecting these questions to the experience of being alone because I think these are question that persist within…

I’d like to try to capture, here, something of a description of what it feels like to be alone with the self and to explore why this is both an important but also difficult experience. As I consider this question, it becomes apparent to me that when we inquire about being alone, we are also…

The brilliant writer and psychoanalytic thinker, Christopher Bollas, writes this about trauma: Trauma results in psychic processes that are “conservative, fundamentally aiming to control .  .  . psychic damage, desensitizing the self to further toxic events .  .  . and to preserve a constant state by ridding the [person] of excitation.  The psychic process here…

As we think about trauma here—I’m referring to my most recent two blog posts in which I’ve talked about the split-off self, the deadened self, and the challenge this poses in therapy, it makes sense to think about the question what does treatment offer? We can look back to early life, to infanthood and childhood…

I want to continue to talk about trauma here, and to try to get to a bit about how trauma affects the self.  I wrote in my recent post that trauma is often (but not always) compounded by the problem of its having occurred outside of language—either because the victim was too young to have…