In 2021, I taught a postgraduate seminar called “Trans-Gender Psychoanalysis” as part of the curriculum of the Adult Psychoanalytic Training Program and Fellowship in Hospital-Based Psychotherapy at the Austen Riggs Center. Teaching this seminar meant a lot to me personally, and I am making the syllabus available publicly to provide a resource for other people looking to teach or learn about trans identities in psychoanalysis. (Image credit: Ted Eytan [CC BY-SA 2.0])
Psychoanalysis has somewhat neglected the study of substance use disorders—frequently seeing them as a symptom of “the real problem” and hence not attending closely to addiction and substance use in and of themselves. This post documents a syllabus for a postgraduate seminar I taught on contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives on addiction.
Conventional wisdom holds that avoiding your emotions cuts you off from important data about yourself, but did you know that habitually flinching from feeling can also lead to severe distortions of social cognition, conceptual coherence, and reality testing? In this post, I explore this idea and draw out some of the relational implications of the intimate connection between thinking, self-coherence, and affect.
To be able to work with dreams, whether psychologically or magically, requires building a relationship with them. Many people are alienated from their dream life. Their dreams are like wild animals that bolt and disappear into the recesses of the wilderness of their psyche almost as soon as they are spotted. Some people even go so far as to say that they do not dream. I doubt very much whether this claim is ever accurate, since I tend toward the position that dream is the default state of waking matter. More likely, various factors conspire to keep dreams hidden in the liminal, underworld places that incubate and animate them. So, in this post, as a preliminary to future posts on dreams, I would like to spell out eight practical suggestions for how to improve your dream recall.
A recent New York Times article claimed that “most psychologists agree that astrology’s appeal rests largely on ‘confirmation bias’—the human tendency to seek out, recall and favor information that confirms what we already believe.” This claim reflects a long history within psychology of reducing belief or interest in astrology to error or psychopathology. In doing so, my fellow psychologists fail to do justice to the empirical data and miss an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the meanings and purposes of astrology in people’s lives.