If my analyst were a woman instead of a man, I wouldn’t have felt that defiance with her. I think I would have shown up the next day to submit to whatever emotional torment she offered. Because I do that with every woman in my life. medium.com/know-thys...

I could write historical fiction about a psychoanalyst. No, I already did that. Ooo… but he’s a vampire! Wait, I already did that one, too. Okay… I’ll write about a psychoanalyst who’s also… a superhero. lostintransference.m...

When I told David about Tammy, it was just history. Things that happened. He said it made him feel sick, and I flinched. I didn’t feel anything, but maybe that meant he had to feel it. lostintransference.m...

To sink, to float, to turn. Water holds but lets you choose. It’s not the thrust of plot, but the spill of theme. The ache before the kiss, the surface before it breaks, the memory that lingers, the mess that follows, the stickiness you can’t stand. medium.com/know-thys...

David asked if I was seeing a maternal gaze. Does he wonder why tenderness is unbearable? Absence always is. medium.com/know-thys...

I feel crazy, this meditation on the absence of knowing. And that’s why I started writing this essay so early in my analytic week. I want to keep in mind the erotic feeling I had today. medium.com/know-thys...

I guess the point is I have no explanation for why I feel this void. I’ve had a few experiences with real people that were exquisitely erotic, desperate even. I crave those experiences, but they haven’t happened in a long time, at least not off the page. medium.com/know-thys...

All my previous therapists tried to get close, pushed me to talk in words they recognized as feeling. I feel plenty. They couldn’t see it, and I call that a them problem. medium.com/know-thys...

For a moment, David wasn’t my analyst but a man who was vulnerable. For a moment, I wasn’t his analysand but a woman who stabilized him. So, when I found myself thinking about his erection, I connected all these things and realized the room is charged. medium.com/know-thys...

It's not too late to register for our next online event this Saturday 8 November. It's the first of a major new series exploring key Kleinian and post-Kleinian concepts, this time with speakers David Bell and Francesca Hume. Details here: bit.ly/47GRFci #psychoanalysis #MelanieKleinTrust

The fact that I’m old and that David’s gay gives me a sense of safety from pressure but not dismissal. Can he understand how a woman will agree to self-nullifying behavior because she needs to believe in her own agency? medium.com/know-thys...

As I’m gaining clarity in my writing, analysis has been extra hard. David has made a few incisive interpretations. Yes, cutting. They cut right through to the heart of the matter. #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys...

I’m looking for myself in these psychoanalytic theories — men’s theories, men’s lived experience, where they conjecture on what is not them. These theories don’t contain me. They don’t master me. #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys..#PersonalEssay

My personal essay series started a year ago this week. It's been 54 essays about my experience of 4 sessions/week on the couch. "Though I frame the work in terms of transgression, its deeper tension is maternal: the ambivalence of care and withdrawal." #psychoanalysis medium.com/@lostintrans...

The asymmetry matters. I give him my interior; he largely stays behind the screen. My taste for edges and for trespass is magnetized by the very architecture. Speech and writing give me another border. I live in both. medium.com/know-thyself...

"But I’m always sexually active. I would say we all are. And yet, the one thing I didn’t think about in that whole long moment of staring, but that came to me later, is that the most intensely erotic relationship I have right now is with David." #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys..#PersonalEssay

"So anyway, this essay started with that dream about the pool and the kiss, and it brought us to David’s voice and sex sounds. Maybe because that’s also where the kiss went. To David." #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys...

"David asked if I sensed him — his presence, maybe how he felt or experienced what was happening — through all this. I didn’t. I had no sense of him or his feelings at all. But I couldn’t feel myself, either." #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys..#PersonalEssay

"I share a lot in these essays. Some readers have told me I overshare. I call that a them problem, not a me problem." #personalessay medium.com/know-thys...

"But while he’s avoiding death, I’m avoiding bad ends. Death, to me, is a good end. Bad ends are all about people." #personalessay medium.com/know-thys...

"Seduction is a dangerous word. It threads through my fiction, essays, and research, but nowhere is it more potent than with David." #personalessay #writing #transference #therapy medium.com/know-thys...

"I’m aware that the very fact I designed a research project to challenge the diagnosis of schizoid and stall an encroaching analytic relationship is pretty much enough to confirm the diagnosis." #personalessay medium.com/know-thys..#personalessay

Lacan’s lamella — that absurd immortal scrap of desire — is nothing but the ghost of ownership that refuses to die. Stirner would laugh: even the drive wants to possess me. I tear it apart and eat it; my will digests what psychoanalysis dares to call eternal.

I had to look up the word Jouissance

"He noted I was sitting instead of using the couch. No way would I have my back to him. I wanted him in my sight and at a distance." #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys...

"She was in her twenties, and I was in my fifties; a lot of life separated us, a lot of understanding. Kimmie called herself pansexual and had many relationships with men. I was her first lesbian experience." #PersonalEssay #polyamory #sexuality medium.com/know-thys..#PersonalEssay

In a paper on the theory of countertransference, whose polemical and intemperate tone makes it difficult to fully recommend, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein offers a helpful (Lacanian) critique of the American relational school’s tendency to confuse subjectivity with personhood.

"Fish that stray too deep can drown, their wide-eyed corpses frozen in eternal surprise. If fish can drown here, what is this but the place where boundaries dissolve and reason sleeps?" #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys..#PersonalEssay

"From the absent hands of the Essanti in Darklaw to the commanding hands of Avila in Lesdom Lessons and the therapeutic touch in Secrets of the Velvet Trap, hands symbolize control, vulnerability, and transformation. #PersonalEssay medium.com/redemptio..#PersonalEssay

"Five women have friend-zoned or ghosted me. Rejection is always demoralizing, but there are plenty of fish in the sea. Well, not lesbian fish over fifty still swimming." #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys..#PersonalEssay

I explained Melanie Klein's good breast/bad breast, infantile terror, and depressive position to my tantruming 8yo in the car this morning and it calmed her down immediately. So anybody who says psychoanalysis doesn't work is just doing it wrong.

"Tired of harrowing stories devoid of meaning, I said, no, in fact, that potato-sack dress is a fucking tragic memory from a lonely girl’s devastating childhood where she was neglected and degraded by a narcissistic bitch of a mother." #trauma medium.com/know-thys..#trauma

"How could they think their use of my body meant anything to me? What moment in that emotional desert of sexual theft told them I enjoyed any of it? I hated them all, which was so simply obvious to me that I assumed they didn’t care and this was normal." medium.com/know-thys...

"I mused that, as much as I prefer women, men are just easier. And at least it's sex, right? Is it that simple? David doesn't think it is. I don't suppose I do, either." #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys..#PersonalEssay

"That would require a 35-year-old narcissistic predator — my ecology teacher, Bill. He taught me how to suffocate butterflies and shoved his cock into my mouth. He told me I was special, but he wasn’t done with me." #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys..#PersonalEssay

"It’s about the compulsion to heal ourselves through transgression, only to discover that damage, not desire, is what defines us." #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys...

"Dad demanded a quiet house so he could read. He was unpredictably vicious and ridiculed every sentiment. Mom sat alone, smoking and drinking coffee, absorbed by her inner world. She was predictably dutiful and had no intention of feeling anything." medium.com/know-thys...

"I thought getting old would be an effort to stay healthy and active, but that seems to be the easy part." #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys...

"Today, I wonder if I ache more for Laura or Terry. During that time, the most real part of me came out into the world and experienced love. Deeply. Wrenchingly. It was magical. It was crushing." #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys..#PersonalEssay

The truth is not that I avoid personal knowledge of my therapist because I respect his privacy. The truth is the less I know about David, the less real he is and the safer I feel. #therapy medium.com/know-thys...

if the desire for self-destruction follows from the desire to be a subject, then warfare is necessarily part of the subject’s internal necessity. (Marriott)

Transgression is a theme in my life. Like many women, I was raped once. Molested by my older brother’s friends. Sexually violated by a high school teacher and a college professor. #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys...

His patience is less sandpaper and more cattle prod. Here’s where I notice I want to provoke him. And here’s where I realize the hostility I thought was him all those months was probably me. Yeah. Transference. #PersonalEssay medium.com/know-thys..#PersonalEssay

As if lying on a couch doesn’t require a plunge into water without bottom in sight and no promise of surfacing, while a guy sits behind you with who knows what on his mind. Um… faith. medium.com/know-thys...

I don’t want catharsis, just continuity, where scars are a warranty. Love redeems violation by acknowledging its legacy and refusing erasure. In this frame, fiction keeps speaking the unconscious and analysis becomes the place that believes it. lostintransference.m...

I guess by keeping the memory and wishing I had more, I did feel something. He has a body, but I haven’t thought about that much. I don’t want to. Because it’s a male body. medium.com/know-thys...

Is the popularity of the admonition to children "use your words" the apotheosis of Lacanian psychoanalysis or what

As if lying on a couch doesn’t require a plunge into water without bottom in sight and no promise of surfacing, while a guy sits behind you with who knows what on his mind. Um… faith. medium.com/know-thyself...

Life is big. That’s been my motto forever. There are always other people, always other opportunities. But even if it’s the end of a relationship or the last opportunity I’ll ever have for something, I’d rather be alone than be humiliated. medium.com/know-thys...

And I keep asking myself how does one just walk away from a crying child? On principle, I guess. medium.com/know-thys...