Articles
Reflections on psychoanalytic therapy
Writing on what this work is, how it unfolds, and how to know whether it's right for you.
-
Psychotherapy
What is Psychoanalytic Therapy?
When people hear "psychoanalytic therapy," they usually picture a patient on a couch talking while the therapist listens quietly. That's not entirely wrong — but the practice has evolved a great deal since Freud, and its three core ideas still shape how the work happens today.
-
Psychotherapy
How to Find a Good Therapist
Seven reflections — drawn from research, clinical experience, and Dr. Neville Symington's work — on how to tell, once you're actually in the room, whether a therapy and a therapist are right for you.
-
Trauma
An Introduction to the Concept of Trauma
What distinguishes a traumatic event from the ordinary misfortunes of daily life, and five of trauma's most common psychological consequences.
-
Trauma
Trauma of Human Making
Why trauma caused by other human beings — war, betrayal, organized violence — settles more deeply into the psyche than trauma of natural origin.
-
Trauma
Chronic Trauma
How chronic trauma takes shape within relationships and spaces that are supposed to be places of safety, and the mechanisms persecutors use to sustain it.
-
Trauma
The Traumatized Body and Mind
The most common mental and bodily responses to traumatic events — hyperarousal, intrusive re-experiencing, and numbing — and why they make sense.
-
Trauma
Collective Trauma
How catastrophic events can wound not only individuals but a group's shared image of itself, its past, and its future.
-
Trauma
Unresolved Mourning and the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma
How unresolved collective grief passes from one generation to the next, and why testimony and narration matter to breaking that cycle.
-
Trauma
The Psychology of the Abuser in Traumatic Relationships
The psychic and relational logic of abuse within traumatic relationships, and why an abuser's own history does not absolve responsibility.