Sublime

By their questions and their attention, their careful probing and investigative stealth, the therapist tries – harder than anyone may yet have done – to discover how our presenting problem might be related to the rest of our existence and, in particular, to the turmoils of childhood. Over many sessions, a succession of small discoveries contributes

... See more

In fact, it is possible to read The Interpretation of Dreams as a first-person, experimental novel; a book about a late nineteenth-century bourgeois doctor's obsessive search for the solution to an ancient mystery. His single-mindedness is vaguely reminiscent of Ahab's obstinate pursuit of the great white whale in Moby Dick. As the quest proceeds,

... See more

The writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner, on the value of writing and journaling:

I had often thought that novelists and poets had a special advantage in learning how to live, their writings providing them with an instrument that most of us were denied. By being able to dramatize their own difficulties they were in a far better position for solvin

... See more

In my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me. • There was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. This mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from ev

... See more