Mary Oliver - “Listen, the heart-shackles are not, as you think, death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, selfishness.”

Camus - Myth of Sisyphus “It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me…I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering,

A pop up box on Tylenol dot com

I like to think of myself as someone who knows depth, who appreciates good writing and literature. Who is, you know, deeeeeep But damn I get fucking disappointed when a book doesn’t come in the latest cover that I was expecting 😅

It’s a weird feeling of listening to music of a past age/generation, evoking memories of younger selves, then looking across time, only to realize that certain artists have passed, and some groups have ceased to exist where they just weren’t meant to last, regardless of how talented.

I love books

Steph Curry “There will always be stronger, faster guys out there who try to make my life miserable. But I try to counter that with never staying in the same spot for more than a second… The point of conditioning is that it allows you to do whatever your best thing is all the time, not just in

Steph Curry You can be so busy trying to absorb lessons early in your career that you don’t realize it when you start to meet the moment…You’re no longer struggling for answers and hoping for the best. Now you believe. You are supposed to be successful.

Mary Oliver - “Man finds he has two halves to his existence - leisure and occupation - and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world. In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass Backwards I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mocking or arguments…I witness and wait. I believe in you my soul…the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other

Mary Oliver, excerpt from The Summer Day

“The long-term therapeutic relationship is a casualty of today’s healthcare.” “The quality of the [therapeutic] relationship…profoundly influences the quality of the information the therapist uses to make the diagnosis.” “Good chemistry [of therapeutic alliance] is literally good chemistry.”

🧵 1/3 Some of my favorite quotes speak to the paradoxes inherent in psychotherapy: If the analyst cannot be experienced as a new object, analysis never gets under way; if he cannot be experienced as an old one, it never ends. - Jay Greenberg

I started reading Robert Jay Lifton's *Nazi Doctors* in the late 90s & then his other books, including his searing memoirs and his works on totalized thinking. I've recommended those & his other books to students for many years. Eternal memory! provincetownindependent.org/featured/202...

The history of the US is drenched in blood. Any rights gained in this country for the marginalized—for workers, women, Black and brown people—were gained through violence and bloodshed. The myth that the US is virtuous is a lie. They made these rules. Not us.

Essential parenting

“But just remember that all you’ll see in the media is a product, not a process…No one is made of wins.” Steph Curry

I may never get to train at an institute…but I love the learning gathered along the way (when I read the books….eventually…maybe…probably…)

I have asked this question many times before, but is there truly anything stopping us all from getting analytic couches and allowing patients to use them, or does this cross over into territory that will get us sanctioned by the IPA or APsA, or does the psychoanalytic police really NOT exist?

The demand to “know” and intervene quickly interferes with receptive listening and observation. Without that, in-depth understanding and case formulation moves further out of reach. The irony is that trying to “know” quickly may prevent us from ever knowing at all.

So excited that @poul-rohleder.bsky.social’s Oedipus book has arrived! It opens by pointing to a popular YouTube video that shows the enduring power of and some evidence for the Oedipus Complex. 1/2

A wonderful/essential thread on the challenges of learning as a clinician and training clinicians There are a lot of external, internal, and internalized forces that are hard to overcome Some may never realize what’s missing Some do but have trouble getting it Some get it but hard to overcome

XIII) is difficult for any number of reasons, but perhaps primarily so because the current therapy zeitgeist emphasizes knowing, and younger clinicians are often anxious and unskilled in embracing not-knowing. This creates a particular challenge in early supervision which can be frustrating.

X- ... Working with various modalities requires thoughtfulness, care, precision, collaboration, and restraint. Given that so much of the relationship and process is ignored in current training, clinicians are not thoughtful about these factors. They are excited about their recent EMDR training and

9) ... types of working, clinicians are attending weekend workshops and attempting to integrate methodologies with little to no consideration for relationship dynamics and potential impacts on treatment. Not all techniques can peacefully coexist. Some are, in fact, mutually exclusive.

H. ... as though integration and collectivism is heavily promoted with a naive and misguided assumption that theories and techniques can be interchanged spontaneously and easily. Little regard is given for how to work across different models. With the abundance of more and more new alphabet-soup

f- ... It has been very difficult for many clinicians to emerge from this model. They are often wanting to work differently, but some are so entrenched in those old models that it can feel sometimes like it takes years to undo the past mindset. When I'm offering supervision, it feels even more

Training new clinicians in the age of behavioral treatment and managed care is very challenging and disheartening. I very much enjoy supervising young clinicians. I appreciate their passion and enthusiasm. It is very difficult, though, because the way in which I practice often seems fundamentally

9) "The tenacity of the psychoanalytic politics of neutrality ... sabotages our ability to engage patients in exploring how we are implicated subjects in the reproduction of asymmetrical relations of power, based on class, race and gender and sexuality."

Mary Oliver - “For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground – and, inseparable from those wisdom because demanded by them,

A rapid improvement is not necessarily a lasting improvement. - Strupp & Binder

Hi folks: A few days ago, @hcrichardson.bsky.social and I talked about the threat of armies serving the government throughout American history. History is YELLING at us these days. It's posted on my YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyw0...

Contemporary psychoanalysis can be summed up in a single sentence: We treat ourselves as we were treated, and the only way to really learn to treat ourselves differently is to be treated differently. There’s nothing magical or unscientific about this. - Michael Karson

“Modern [humans are] anxious and tempted to surrender their freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming themselves into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not free but automatons” - Erich Fromm.

Therapy is 100% political. You can’t freely practice the therapy that you’d like despite its clinical evidence. Insurance dominated and controls and limits who you see and what you can do At some companies, you have to say you are for CBT/DBT/SFT and brief therapy, or you are disqualified

The "mistakenly" deleted Constitution sections (at least awhile ago) deal w/the need for congressional approval of: suspension of habeas corpus (due process); things like imposing tariffs; & using the military to enforce laws & suppress "insurrections" Read the original online version for yourself

And if patients become too dependent, how do they avoid that as the omnipotent arbiter of skills for life? And what are they trying to “solve,” in their terms.

How do we decide how one should feel or think? How does this person know the skills necessary for life? And how can we comprehensively acquire skills for life, a massive, overdetermined, culturally-bound, thing, which poets, philosophers, & artists have been trying to describe for millennia.

Make connections along the way and don’t just call when you need something. The best collegial relationships have elements of friendship.

“𝑃𝑠𝑦𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑎𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑠 is a labor of love and a one-person-plus-friends operation.” “One-person-plus-friends operation” also describes psychotherapeutic practice and the vital role good colleagues play in our work. Cheers to good colleagues and to @awaisaftab.bsky.social on 15K followers.

chilly = 🥶 chili = 🌶️ Chile = 🇨🇱 Chilli = 💃🏾🎤🚫🧽

Reuben Fine (chess grandmaster and psychoanalyst) famously writes about how we know a lot more about how to open and close a chess match than about anything that happens in between

“Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential to the survival of the subordinate” - Patricia Hill Collins

Yup. You need to know how to write and express yourself. How to evaluate and reason with evidence. In business as much as anything else.

It’s important to note that the extreme violence and poverty they are fleeing are US-caused extreme violence and poverty.

For more on Northerners fighting back against Southern pro-slavery violence in Congress in the 1850s: www.thehistoryreader.com/us-history/t...

Hey folks, Given some closings for July 4, I’ll be experimenting with doing “History Matters” from my YouTube channel. Was planning to discuss what 1775 has to tell us. Now I’ve got more to say. Join us at 10 AM ET at: m.youtube.com/@joannefreem...

Announcing a new 3-volume book anthology series exploring the strengths and insights of first-generation college students! Volume 1, "How First-Generation Students Navigate Higher Education through An Embrace of Their Multiple Identities," is officially published & will be released July 1st! 🎉