You find it's October And she's gone And she's gone Summer's gone You've been fooled by April And he's gone And he's gone Winter's gone

I do not love the word healing regarding psychology. We are complex, overdetermined creatures whose pain & suffering shape us. I would undo many if I could, but I do not heal from them as much as I attempt to integrate my hurt in ways that provide enrichment to my life.

I have things in my life which are rewarding and enriching, but all my experiences provide meaning. The painful ones, although unpleasant, dialectically inform the joyful moments, all providing meaning and a sort of purpose.

Overcoming the limitations of the zip code I was born in, and accomplishing the things my parents made tremendous sacrifices to provide. And trying my best to be compassionate along the way.

A particular hope that I have about a person.

More than what serves me. I care so much that it forces me to be in service to others as a clinician, teacher, partner, father, and son. It propels me to more rigorous study and introspection, and helps drive a desire to be exceptional. It can also be overly critical and deferential.

One thing my decades of work in clinical psychology has shown me is that we all hide parts of ourselves, from others, and from ourselves as well.

Sincerity, companionship, openness, receptivity, trust.

My experience in therapy has been more ontological than epistemological. I have come more fully into myself partially through the process of therapy.

I am a clinical psychologist. My own therapy is critical to my work.

I am always me although it is a struggle, I try and appreciate that even brief dissociative moments are an aspect of my self, that I have no monita subjectivity but contain multitudes which are constantly shifting, forming, reforming, deforming, and moving with fluidity and intersectionality.

Mr. Stevie Wonder

Today. It wasn’t sadness per se, but more of a malaise that momentarily passed.

The thing that causes emotionally impulsive experience of anger, frustration, or upset the most significantly is anyone disrespecting my son.

Some of the things that contribute to our overall psychological wellbeing which are ignored are sleep and diet. Our violently neoliberal and caste social culture in the US are major contributors, and also don’t help sleep or diet.

My most acute moments of emotional distress and dysregulation were in my early 20s and following my divorce and separation.

Improved? I go back to the idea of not knowing what mental health means. The things that enrich my life and provide me with meaning are my son, friends, partner, parents, work, music, reading and exercise.

I don’t like the phrase “mental health.” What’s my overall mood? Do I feel mentally stable? Am I clinically depressed or psychotic? What does it mean? I would say that my life is overall good with tolerable challenges and inexperience a normal, regulated, wide range of emotional experiences.

This is one of the pieces I'm most proud of writing. Joni Mitchell even included it in her website's media archive. 😉

A large portion of the field of clinical psychology has been taken over by a “feel good” neoliberal, commodified system rebranded as “mental health,” focused on self care & narcissism. Decolonizing clinical psychology involves rejection of this system, ensconced in its privilege & myopia.

A large portion of the function of social media is education, yet it is unregulated. There is research that suggests that over a third of information in mental health on social media is inaugurate. This is a major problem.

“A typical form of splitting endemic to neoliberal practices and ideologies pits omnipotent narcissistic versions of autonomy against degraded narcissistic versions of dependence” - Lynne Layton

“A passive, depoliticized citizen becomes the ideal feature of the system as neoliberalism erodes collective struggles along with public-mindedness.” Nancy Cato Hollander

“[Psychoanalytic therapists] are not doctors practicing psycho-orthopedics; we are more like missionaries, artists, & soldiers in an ethical-cultural-existential slugfest …

“As one of many practices of inductive enchantment, the actual work of ΨΑ lies not in its discursive, rational, and object-related dimensions alone but depends upon the effectiveness with which it weaves the individual into the collective, depends, in other words, on work that takes place beyond

“What ΨΑ has always implicitly acknowledged … is that the impoverishment of rhythmic experience, which erodes the possibility of temporal continuity, has become the most common cause of psychical difficulties. The illness of nontime is the illness of our time” - Blum, Goldberg, & Levin

We think of school as about knowing, but it is about learning how to learn. It is ontological more than epistemological. We come to know in the process of learning to learn, but we end up not knowing more then we know. PhDs then, don’t “know everything,” so much as they expertly know how to learn.

www.hup.harvard.edu/features/jon... I don't really know much of his work, but Radical Hope and Imagining the End were useful to me.

My latest article on STEEVAY just posted on #Albumism (that's the second one this month). And you know I welcome community feedback, so please hit me up after you read it if so inclined! 😉

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, @markchappelle.bsky.social is absolutely one of the most informed, insightful, and talented writers writing about music today. Taking up Stevie twice like this and still bringing something fresh each time? Not easy.

Reading material for a one week trip coming up.

To those in Los Angeles, the 2025 KITFO Film Festival is upcoming. The festival celebrates Ethiopian and Eritrean cinema. www.kitfofilmfestival.com

Currently re-reading Saketopoulou’s “Sexuality Beyond Consent,” because it is a book that is worthy of revisiting repeatedly, both because it is dense and rich and not easily digested, but also because it has a power in its writing not always seen in analytic literature.

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.

I'm very proud of how this turned out. Please message me if you read it!

Happy 40th Anniversary to Stevie Wonder’s twentieth studio album ‘In Square Circle’ originally released September 13, 1985 | Listen to the album + read our tribute by @markchappelle.bsky.social here: album.ink/SWonderISC

When you use the word “trauma” to describe any uncomfortable or difficult feeling, emotion, or experience, it diminishes the power and impact of actual trauma. We need the word trauma to describe a certain type of experience which necessitates attention.

“If we believe that the individual ought 2 be a social individual & his/her happiness should have something to do with connection beyond the self & intimate relations, we should perhaps be troubled by the fact that, too often, our work produces only healthier & happier versions of narcissism” Layton

“Dominant ideology works very diligently on a number of fronts to hide the systemic nature of inequities of all kinds, to make sure that an individual’s problems seem just that, individual” - Lynne Layton

“Two of the major tropes by which bourgeois ideology operates are dehistoricization, which involves naturalizing and universalizing what is actually specific to a given historic moment and a given constellation of relations, and what Barthes calls ex-nomination …

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

“We lack adequate concepts for describing this vicarious responsibility for things we have not done: that is, for the manifold indirect, structural, and collective forms of agency that enable injury, exploitation, and domination but that frequently remain in the shadows” - Michael Rothberg

Most of my time reviewing proofs from publishers is clarifying for them that journals usually did not assign a "doi" for articles before the mid-1990s. You would think they would know this, but it seems like they if they don't see a doi they just automatically create the query.

An excellent article by one of the most insightful and knowledgeable people today writing about music.

Next, I'm jumping out of a writing about Stevie. Into more writing about Stevie. His most recent album to date 'A Time To Love' turns 20yo about 3 weeks from now. So if you see me posting about Prince, En Vogue, Kim Burrell, India.Arie, it's b/c I can't keep all this research to myself.

“One of the greatest paradoxes in the history of psychoanalysis is that pasychoanalytic institutions have developed in directions antithetical to psychoanalytic concepts.” Tim Dean and Christopher Lane.

Some excerpts from "Psychoanalysis as Counter-hegemonic Practice," by Nancy Caro Hollander, presented at APsA, Sept. 2021. "Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci conceptualized ideology as a component of hegemony and postulated that the ruling classes govern by securing consent from ...

“Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the play of …

Cannonball Adderly’s solo on So What is easily my favorite. That’s saying something considering the other solos are Miles, Trane, and Bill Evans. Cannonball’s melodies and motifs are amazing and playful and beautiful all at the same time. Cannonball deserves so much more love than he often gets.