Sublime

To his credit, Freud correctly read the landscape of modern culture and made a tactical decision that allowed psychotherapy to become a mainstream institution in an era in which scientific modernity obliged us to leave contemplative healing and pedagogy behind, as artifacts of humanity’s religious past.

The mad man is he who allows his subconscious mind to dominate all his thinking.

We train in nondirective free association conversations (FACs) with empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard (Rogers, 1957).9

So many people insist on being either pro-Freudian or anti-Freudian, pro-scientific-psychology or anti-scientific-psychology, etc. In my opinion all such loyalty-positions are silly. Our job is to integrate these various truths into the whole truth, which should be our only loyalty.

Freud (1927), the father of psychology, divided the psyche into three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. He saw the id as our primal, animal nature; the superego as the judgment system that society has instilled within us; and the ego as our representative to the outside world that struggles to maintain a balance between the other two

As a therapist, I have three sources of information: each client’s report, what happens in front of me in the room, and how I feel sitting with the client.

All our psychotherapy is administered within the same framework. Whether a patient is in group or individual psychotherapy, the therapist’s job is the same: to help the patients attain a greater understanding of the defensive structure that is shielding their conscious selves from the destructive aspects of their unconscious rage, and to increase

As Carl Jung put it, “You are what you do, not what you say you will do.”