It is largely fashionable today to bash the founder of psychotherapy, to either ignore or disregard him altogether, and easy to understand why so many have taken umbrage at many or most of his ideas, to think of him as autodidactic, misogynist, tyrannical, homophobic, and so forth. I don”t wish to engage in a defense of Freud, but I do think it”s worth at least considering some of his concepts, to at least KNOW what youre dismissing before moving on to narrative, cog B, solution-focused, what have you. One needn”t dismiss the Oedipus complex altogether, or the notion that “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious”, or that jokes, slips of the tongue and dreams could possibly be portals into unconsciously-held wishes or impulses…without at least a consideration or … Read entire article »

One way I’ve reconciled with Freud’s hard-wired determinism is to filter the material through my imagination, seeing it as metaphor rather than diamond-hard fact. Freud was literal to a fault, and this may be partly what offends about him. (Jung could be strident in his writing, but not so literal or unyielding. Jung describes a journey, not a fact sheet.) If one looks at Freud with a certain lightness, the entire enterprise becomes a tad more digestible. Rather than a literal yearning for sexual intercourse with the parent, one might see an infant”s yearning for attachment, or safety, both physical and emotional — or, better still, mythological. The womb becomes a mythic place in the mind as we move forward in life, battling with what Freud termed the “death instinct” (thanatos) … Read entire article »

I think I may have forgotten to practice beginner’s mind with a prospective client who came for a consultation a month or so ago. He was a very intelligent middle-aged man having marital difficulties, a man who’d never been to therapy before. He was a little bit hard to connect with, and his therapeutic “goals” appeared at first blush to be somewhat simplistic (which isn’t that uncommon): namely, he wanted to “make sure I’m doing things right” in helping his newly-sober wife stay on the recovery path. I fielded various questions he had about living with a newly sober spouse, he gave me examples on a micro and macro-level: his wife was fairly new to recovery and he didn’t want to “enable” her (by coddling her after she blew off … Read entire article »

But I would argue…that it may actually be useful for us to be in this predicament (i.e., being new in our field), and that in a way we ourselves are our first (and last) client – certainly the client with which we have the longest relationship, with whom we wake up and go to sleep, and with whom we must make peace if we want to carry ourselves with any sort of integrity and/or calm. This experience of “newness” thus appears, I think, to help us empathize with a client coming to therapy for the first time. It’s very easy to forget what these “first times” are like. In recovery, for instance, you’ll hear that the person with 10 days is more helpful to the newcomer than the person with 10 … Read entire article »