The future is up for grabs, so let’s grab it. What’s on the horizon? How do we get there? These are the questions that excite me. Freud claimed that love and work are the foundations of our humanness, and yet so rarely do we love or work with the satisfaction…

I met with a group of clients this morning, and the question of how to work through shame, guilt, and embarrassment arose. Shame is obviously a difficult experience. However, it’s complicated by the fact that much of what we experience as shame isn’t actually shame. I’ll clarify my meaning, but…

Most of us learn ugliness towards ourselves at a very early age. We then suffer the consequences well into our adulthood. We push ourselves too hard. We rely on substances to blur ourselves. We become critical or negligent of ourselves. We distance from ourselves and others. So much ugliness, in…

Each psychology is a confession, and the worth of a psychology for another person lies not in the places where he can identify with it because it satisfies his psychic needs, but where it provokes him to work out his own psychology in response. (Hillman, 1975, p. xviii) James Hillman…

Reconnecting with the body is a difficult process. It puts us into more direct contact with our everyday experience, and for many people everyday experience isn’t a pleasant thing. When I’m working with clients this is often one of the first places that we start. What sort of environment would…

Let’s put this in perspective: Sigmund Freud, for all of the brilliance he had as a clinician, went through some convoluted mental acrobatics in terms of theorizing what was taking place in his clinical practice. He was brilliant when working with clients, but in thinking through some of the explanations…

It seems to me that we often neglect the agency of the thoughts that occur to us. Through a strange trick we believe that it’s we who think thoughts, but the more honest formulation seems to be that we are thought through. Do you ever get that sense? If we…

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” - Gregory Bateson A primary characteristic of this difference comes down to the question of what is given primacy? If the way that people think is any indication, the…

I’m always struck by this line in W. H. Auden’s tribute to Sigmund Freud. We’re profoundly enmeshed in a social matrix even before we’re born, and as soon as we enter the world of language we’re faced with the task of mapping our experience of the world onto the shared…