Making sure @the-mel-jar.bsky.social ‘s piece makes the rounds on this side of the Split too.

Excellent post by @the-mel-jar.bsky.social , exploring recent diagnostic discourse, with an AvPD nod as the cherry on the Imaginary cake ;) "Kill Your Darlings": analysis, diagnosis, countertransference, and the Imaginary open.substack.com/pub/themelja...

“Another mild orange-gold October day.” Sylvia Plath Letter to Aurelia Plath 18 October 1950

This is how they get you. The books. And the clubs.

“Become a therapist, because this is a way chiller job than being a mental health nonprofit director.” Haha. Hahahahahahaha

An announcement: I have done a thing. I have started a Substack, and I have written an overly long introductory post. What I am asking you to do now is to check this post out, and subscribe to my Substack. Hopefully, you won't totally regret that. themeljar.substack.com/p/im-startin...

I am aware that we are all trapped in our own place and time. While it is always a temptation to judge any specific figure of the past, it’s still very important to know, “there but for the grace of God go I.”

I think that it’s good not to be too wowed by many people in medicine and psychology who lived and worked in certain places during certain periods of time. I think that it’s good to look at their work as a whole with a certain understanding, and, y’know, not fully embrace their terms and ideas.

His whole conception of the Pleasure Principle is from watching his grandson play a wholesome lil game of fort/da and thinking it was TOTES ADORBS. The 1900 theoretician version of polluting your feed with baby pictures.

One thing that is consistently endearing to me about Freud is that he very clearly saw the role of “father” as quite important, because he was also very interested in his own daddy role, and took being a dad very seriously, for better or for worse, perhaps, but really, how can we not admire this?

In case you’re wondering if the Jewish people in your life want to hear about the distant relative that you just learned was actually Jewish: yes, we 100% want to hear about this very thing. There’s a whole Jewish group called Chabad that is p much obsessed with this very thing. But we all love it.

Um, I think You Oughta Know that Alanis Morissette earned a PhD yesterday. You Live, You Learn indeed — nothing particularly Ironic about that, Don’t You Think?

When my nephew was 3 (he’s 13 now) he called Chick-fil-a “Chicka flay” and now everyone in our entire extended family calls it that still. I understand how language evolves.

If the people who vote for Emmys had actually read any Judith Butler et al instead of just pretending to have read any Judith Butler et al then they would’ve given the third season of The White Lotus all the awards. This is my hot Emmys take that everyone clearly wants.

Might finally be depressed enough to start a Substack.

Sometimes I worry that those of us who are still on Twitter/X are either like the analysts who refused to leave Vienna after the rise of Nazism until it was almost too late (e.g., Freud) or we’re like Jung who was free to rise unrestricted in the German-speaking world because everyone else had fled.

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?

Another excellent observation, and a great Patricia Gherovici quote. By the way, Psychoanalysis in El Barrio is *chef’s kiss*.

This is such an insightful thread. I especially love how Oskar describes the issue of how a therapist, newly excited by the possibilities of psychodynamics, may resist accepting what can’t be simply absorbed into how they already work, and that there are certain impasses and then decisions to make.

I regret every day trying to talk about hysteria on social media, because now I have a much better understanding of why this became taboo framing in the first place, and how much people truly don’t like and/or are afraid of women, including, unfortunately, many other women.

What if we got rid of cancel culture for everyone except therapists posting a whole fuck ton of PHI in Facebook and Reddit therapist groups?

Begging therapists to be mindful of acronyms when naming new therapeutic techniques... "FAP with Sexual Minorities" as a chapter title ideally would've never made it out of final edits but when you've chosen "Functional Analytic Psychotherapy" as your modality name, what can ya do? 🙃

Hard to be into maximalism when minimalism is (and perhaps has been for some time) the Current Thing.

Felt like crap, bought new shoes, now feeling slightly less like crap.

I’ve been thinking that one thing it seems like the people have not tried but really should consider trying is not taking the internet seriously, like, at all. Like, maybe that would help the people, maybe quite a bit. What do you think? I think I may be onto something here.

watching a video of Grover being gently cradled by Madeline Kahn and definitely, not at all being jealous

Today we’re avoiding personal responsibility by recalling that “personal responsibility” was a psyop created by Boomers to control us, while listening to Modest Mouse records over and over again, and it’s been helping.

Composing a strongly written email to HBO and Jesse Armstrong because I belatedly discovered that in the fourth season of Succession, Shiv said "disassociate" when she, of course, meant "dissociate." For shame. I'm shook.

Vogue, circa 2003: “here’s an outfit that can take you from Day to Night!” Mel, circa 2025: “here’s an outfit that can take you from Adult Sessions to Child Play Therapy Sessions (now with extra sand tray sand cling resistance)!”

“What type of cheese would every famous psychoanalyst be if they were a cheese?” is a very good question that we have not yet answered here. Obviously, Lacan would be a French cheese, duh. Beyond that, I got nothing. But it’s worth thinking about.

Important announcement: lately, I have been buying fancy cheese on days OTHER than Fancy Cheese Friday. There are no rules, man. No Big Other. 🤯🧀💖

Every time you outsource a piece of creative or intellectual work to AI you exchange a small piece of your soul for a momentary convenience. open.substack.com/pub/appliedp...

Me and my fam, kickin’ it in Ruth Asawa’s living room from the 60s. Go see the exhibit at SFMOMA if you haven’t already!

Another personal problem I’m having is that I no longer feel like it’s the right time to talk about one of my favorite late Lacan concepts, the sinthome, because people might argue that ChatGPT is somehow their sinthome or something, and it most certainly is not.

They should have come up with a better term than “lay analysis” because it calls to mind how people will ask you, “so, do you lay on the couch?” and how you have to suppress the urge to correct them to “lie” and how you fail at that like you do at everything, you obnoxious fuck AKA “lay analyst.”

My favorite doctor and companion

Just reactivated this account to lurk. I miss you X defectors. I do get that, btw. But I personally can’t do two apps at once. I learned that I’m app monogamous. And apparently simply can’t divorce because I took an unconscious oath. Good to follow through on stuff you didn’t consciously commit to.

Whenever I spend time with Jewish New Yorkers, it’s like I can breathe a sigh of relief from stress I didn’t know I was carrying around constantly, and I can go, “OK, now we can speak to one another like normal people and cut the bullshit.”

Guy: “yeah, well, Freud missed __.” Me: “who says? You? Your grad school professors? Stephen Mitchell? Damn.” Guy: “yeah, well, Freud thought psychosis was the result of disavowed homosexuality.” Me: “that was probably true for Schreber, though. Who says it can’t be true for other people.”

Blue isn’t my favorite color in general, but it is my favorite color to wear.

I don’t know if it’s always directly obvious, but I think that what I and a lot of other people do online is essentially just offer up half-baked ideas for psychoanalytic thinking and playing purposes. It’s not that serious. It’s for practice and fun. Some seem to intuitively get this, but not all.

I’m just trying to say that a person like Kim Kardashian is probably influenced by the same intrapsychic logic that produces anyone who is like “hell yeah, let’s really do this Femininity Thing!” Damn, do I have to spell everything out. Did I already fuck up again with “intrapsychic logic.”

Are we ready yet for the conversation about how aggressive levels of plastic surgery on an AFAB or AMAB individual in order to better approximate a certain fetishistic experience of hyper-femininity or masculinity is perhaps no different than performative gender in contrast with one’s birth sex?

If the manic defense fails, then at least you have bottomless, terrible, ceaseless depression for consolation instead.

What’s the deal with podcasts. Who has the time for all that. Why can’t they just put everything they want to say in a 20 page article on PEP Web

Some guy once said we should return to Freud, and I think more and more people are maybe listening to that guy.

Bisexuality, if you’re doing it right, means that you adore hysteria and obsessionality both. You support all the neuroses.

Told a friend recently that “my hope that the analytic community would be somehow different and better than my dysfunctional grad school entirely dominated by personality psychopathology has been well and truly crushed” and now I’m fully sitting in this feeling and wow, it blows.

I am too nice to psychotic people. Like for real tho

I am very, very stupid about two distinct groups of people: 1) people who pull my compassion heart strings (an ongoing problem for many therapist personality types but something I have thankfully improved upon) and 2) women with whom I am too libidinally invested (a much larger problem).