“Be sure to set me to ‘delicate,’ Alison. It’d be a shame to ruin that sweater, you know, in case it ever comes back in style.”

When the out of office is on but you WFH 🙃

My work can be emotionally intense//that’s why I have tears in my eyes and jammie bottoms on//waiting outside the school//to be year 4 Secret Santa/I’ll put proper trousers on for my last two sessions of the day, and year.

My secret talent is turning securely attached people into avoidant ones 💁‍♀️

Putting on my brave festive face like the Mary on top of our tree.

The ‘let my advent chocolates pile up’ pile of champions 🍫

And psychoanalysts everywhere wept.

My husband: I’ve never heard anyone quote the second law of thermodynamics to a three year old before. Well, if he will continually cry to me that his omelette is too hot eventually I’ll overcome my cuddles and empathy to just boring him to death.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if I say ‘dw bbz I’m not going to make any rash decisions by next week’ in my last therapy session of the week… Monday morning will be fun. 🫣

I hurt my back in the way to the airport. She asked me if it was a Freudian injury because I didn’t want to go home. 🥹 I’ll make an analyst out of her yet.

One of the benefits of long term psychoanalytic psychotherapy is that they see you day after day being different person after different person, things that bother you one day are fine the next, plans you have one year are abandoned the next, feelings are expressed and received and you get to do…

Just introduced my mother to the concept of the Unconscious. Her response: ‘I’ve never thought about that before’ Given I’ve studied psychoanalysis for years and have talked to her about it throughout that time, the only conclusion I have is that I’m a bad communicator 😅

Quite a joy to finish work to start on the olive harvest…

This is the best explanation of the SEND crisis I have read.

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Got my family photos down from the attic to take to Spain tomorrow. This is my third birthday resting bitch face 😅

Just did an interview with someone writing a dissertation on the therapeutic use of videogames (using a psychoanalytic/dynamic framework) and it was so refreshing to talk with someone who gets both worlds. AND I made my favourite Freudian slip of the day ‘psychoanalysts hate Freud - er, videogames’

It really bothers me how often trauma recovery narratives are, broadly speaking, so *nice*. And it concerns me that some therapists may be expecting *nice* clients who will steadily work towards vulnerability and not give them too hard a time. 1/

“Ownership structures in children’s social care can be highly complex.” In effect, a euphemism for owners, often offshore, who extract hundreds of millions of pounds from social care.

The full scale of the exploitative market in children in care is laid bare in a new report from Ofsted, published today. Four out every 10 children in care now earn a profit for investors. www.gov.uk/government/s...

A fair summarisation of the psychoanalytic process.

‘As long as the patient is in treatment, he cannot escape from this compulsion to repeat; and in the end we understand that _this is his way of remembering_’ - Freud, by Jonathan Lear

Tried to enter the Tavi’s library into my search bar. Started typing ‘Klein’. 💀 Nurturing mother Tavi, how much I love and hate you.

'Y look beautiful. And fluffy. You look like a sheep!' Compliments courtesy of the toddler this morning 🐏

Re that "what's the lore behind your career" meme that was going around a few days ago... Pre-teen me once remarked that I didn't like the holiday season, there's always all this extra pressure look good &be happy- but it's so contrived, etc. Which pissed off my mother. Anyway, I'm a therapist 🙃

Guilt tripped! By the cat food company 🥺

Looking forward to presenting on Dora in a seminar this week. My bit goes from: 'inter urinas et faeces nascimur' to the bit where her dad and Frau K start sharing a room on the family holiday, to her father's suicide threat, to the bit where 'all these illnesses ...

Never have I felt more 'it's not about having a particularly bright light, it's just about being willing to sit alongside someone in the dark forest' As I slowly fend off my first panic attack in years on the school run.

Walking to preschool. Me: I don’t want to go to work today Toddler: I know, but you have to. And you’ll feel happy when you’ve done it. Can’t argue with that sage wisdom. 😅

Care package for my mother 🙃 Which means this time next week I’ll be in Spain 😎

I love this poem by psychiatrist, poet, and general wonderful human Tulika Jha, about the importance and power of rest. Happy Saturday y’all.

Oh you found my people…

Back on my bullshit (Finding myself giving an impassioned lecture on Kleinian psychoanalysis at 3AM, yet starting work at 9AM 🥱)

'Even though I'm doing good, I'm working hard, the work is strong It might be fun, just for a while, to go back where my hurt is from And rinse myself to emptiness and push my body close To anybody that can recognize the presence of my ghosts.' From: Let them eat chaos by Kae Tempest

Please stop me asking this seminar group if Freud would consider a breeding kink healthy or perverse 😅

No no no begs every archivist. You are never going to be able to find anything. Please don’t start using emojis in file names. Who asked for this? What fresh hell is next?

'The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.' - Freud

We discussed the difference between murder and manslaughter on the school run (crime and punishment topic) At dinner, I asked my eight year old what she thought corporate manslaughter meant. Her response was 'Nestle?' Proudest I've ever been as a parent #boycottnestle

Me: I'm ambivalent about [x] Them: ... you don't care? 🤨 Me: nooooo.

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.~Adam Phillips

'I should therefore be inclined to believe that sexual precocity is a correlate, which is seldom absent, of intellectual precocity, and that it is therefore to be met with in gifted children more often than might be expected.' - Freud, patron saint of gifted and talented schemes 😅

Sometimes I spend a lot of therapy complaining that I can't think straight and that my mind makes no sense and... Then I go straight into work sessions where I have to use the exact same mind. Which worries me 🙃 But surely I'm not the only one?

'It seems to me that we concentrate too much upon symptoms and concern ourselves too little with their causes.' - Freud

Some friends and I have a jokey group chat called 'random porn sharing'. My friend just posted something from a smutty book and asked me to give it a Freudian analysis. Finally, I am useful at something 🙃

After a long rant that I was sick of therapy and wanted to quit, my therapist said 'I think we need to hold in mind that you recently asked if I'd ever wanted to stop working with you, and when I said no, you told me you would have to try harder. I think that's what's happening now' I am dead 😅😅😅

My son wants to know how rare it is that he was born in a University. Do you know anyone who was born in a University? Or did you have a baby there? I don't think there can be more than 100 people in the country with a birth certificate like his - but I may be wrong!

Looking Again at SSRIs in Adolescent Depression and Anxiety “Society gets the type of adolescent that it expects and deserves.” A response of sorts to @ploederl.bsky.social‘s recent blogpost www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/looking-ag...

'I once put forward the view that there was no need to be too much horrified at finding in a woman the idea of sucking at a male organ.' - Sigmund Freud, ladies' man.

Memorable qotes of the seminar: 'we all have our madnesses and psychoses - there is no such thing as the perfectly developed human psyche' 'too much reality is too hard - we can only take a little bit of reality at one time'