Undergoing psychoanalytic treatment is, rather like reading a powerful work of literature, a leap into the relative dark. —Adam Phillips

In order to listen deeply to another in the attuned way a therapist needs to listen, we have to quiet ourselves down inside…There is no way to quickly get over the anxiety of occupying the role of therapist. It takes “time in the chair” - lots of it. - Teri Quatman

There is no such thing as the “neurotypical.” Literally 85% of the global population is not typically the same. 'Typicality' vs 'divergence' is a false binary; as simplistic and as crude as the splitting of people into good/bad or civilised/uncivilised. We must do better.

Can references to "depression" explain its symptoms' occurrence?🧵It's oft said that: a) to be depressed *just is* to suffer mood, sleep, inertia etc problems; b) if x causes y, x & y must be independent relata; so c) explaining symptoms by referencing depression is bogus...

But… Self-love. Self-care. Self-talk. Self-healing. Self self self self self

Stated preference (what people say they want in a romantic partner): Loyalty is most important. Revealed preference (in this case, what actually predicts positive romantic evaluations): Being "a good lover" is most important. Lol.

Object relations in Severe Trauma 1996 Stephen Prior's final paragraph.

Muy importante para tener en cuenta respecto de las aproximaciones “informadas” de trauma

Susan Sontag, a few days after 9/11/01. She didn’t flinch. She was widely reviled for this and stood, resilient, anyway.

Waiting for the day when someone is like, "I do shallow, trauma-mis/uninformed, directionless therapy for the shallow, ignorant, aimless masses."

Freud was radical and ahead of his time. He is in many ways ahead of ours… theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

“The first among the three main findings of our study was that watchful waiting, when coupled with psychosocial advice, depathologization and shared decision making, was effective in 64.5 % of patients who ended up with no pharmaco- or psychotherapy after follow-up period.”

Our paper was just published in the Journal of Physical Activity & Health. 🧵1/12

"Diagnose the fewest conditions needed to explain the clinical picture." - DSM-II (1968) Timeless advice. Largely forgotten today.

“I think this is a problem with American psychiatry: most people just think about symptom disorders. ‘It’s a depression, it’s an anxiety disorder, so there’s got to be a medication for it. Well, you can be depressed because of the way your mind works—not because your neurons

Están ganando los matones del curso. Olvidamos que las formas eran el fondo de ese artefacto frágil llamado pacto social. Como tontos buscamos liberación detrás de las ficciones sociales, ya vemos: había algo más parecido al canibalismo. En esa ley gana la psicopatía organizada.

Some people have the perfect life.

In this classic 1958 study, two Yale faculty members, sociologist August Hollingshead and psychiatrist Frederick Redlich, sampled nearly all people from New Haven, Connecticut, who sought psychiatric treatment in the past year. They found, in part, that the place where patients

Freud on classification, from the introduction to Salman Akhtar's (1992) book Broken Structures.