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Stutz

Stutz

Many people are talking about the new movie by Jonah Hill, “Stutz,” about his psychotherapist Phil Stutz. I thought I would share some of my thoughts.  I am always heartened by a new public presentation about psychotherapy and mental illness.  From Dr. Melfi, the psychiatrist, in the “Sopranos”; Billy Crystal in “Analyze This”; and Robin […]

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A Poem at the End of the Year

I’d like to close out the year with a poem. It is a habit of mine to include a poem in this blog posting at the end of the year. Unfortunately, a practice I’ve gotten away from in recent years. Poetry and psychotherapy (and psychoanalysis) have much in common. Both mediums are focused on words. […]

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Psychotherapy and Transcendence: A Greater Sense of Freedom

The following article is also available on Psyched in Sf. With the help of my clients, I have been thinking lately about transcendence. Generally when people talk about transcendence, they are talking about some exalted spiritual state. In both Eastern and Western religions, there are concepts that connote an experience of a realm that is […]

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Psychotherapy as a Treatment for Trauma

Psychotherapy was invented as a treatment for trauma. That is where Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis (the progenitor of psychotherapy) began. He formulated that the patients he was seeing with illnesses not related to an organic cause were the victims of some sort of trauma. He believed their symptoms were responses to these traumas. And […]

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The Conversation of Your LIfe

Psychotherapy provides a unique opportunity to have a meaningful conversation – the conversation about your life. In the frantic tempo of modern life, it can be difficult to have time or energy for any conversation. I often hear from my clients about how tired they are when they get home, about how the last thing […]

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Sentences Left Unsaid

Depression is a complicated phenomenon, with multiple ways of seeing and understanding it. There are perspectives that focus on an organic causality (an imbalance in brain chemistry, a disease). Other perspectives focus on problems in cognition (something wrong with one’s thinking). From a psychological perspective, the one that I endeavor with my clients to understand, […]

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