The following essay can also be found on Psyched in San Francisco, a blog for psychotherapists in the San Francisco Bay Area. People come to psychotherapy looking for a good fit between themselves and the therapist. I often suggest that a client meet with me for a few sessions so that we can get a […]

The following is a revised version of a blog piece posted earlier in the year. This revision can also be found at Psyched in San Francisco, a blog of writings by psychotherapists in San Francisco. I was recently reminded of the last line of the great novel “The Great Gatsby”: “So we beat on, boats […]

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 […]

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 […]

I was recently reminded of the last lines of the great novel “The Great Gatsby”: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” These words are also inscribed on the tombstone of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Sayre. Gatsby is, of course, a novel about the inevitable […]

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, […]

I wrote the following words some time ago in my journal, and now I can’t remember if they were mine or someone else’s that I had read. So with apologies to whoever might have written them (which may have been me), here they are: “Psychotherapy is uncovering these strategies for protection, which can cause more […]

I have previously written about psychotherapy as a spiritual act: a means for a person to rediscover and be his or her true self. I believe that that is the essence of spiritual life: a person living fully as his or her true self. But it occurred to me that I had not said much […]

I think that is one of the most beautiful words in the English language: “reflection.” I’d like to reflect on it for a moment. One meaning of the word is to do what I am doing now: reflection as a time of quiet thought and consideration. A person may reflect at different times throughout the […]

I am reluctant to reduce psychotherapy, at least as I understand the practice, to one word. Could one be more reductionist? Psychotherapy is a complex relationship between two people and their unconscious worlds. It is anything but simple. And yet, that is what I feel like doing at the moment: reducing the scope of psychotherapy […]