Posts by Griffin Hansbury

Alone Together, the new book by social scientist Sherry Turkle explores the many ways that “technology is changing how people relate to one another and construct their own inner lives…” Read the whole review here.

Annoying, by Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman, is a new book about the science and psychology behind why we get annoyed: “Formulating a good working definition of annoyance is a persistent challenge for researchers. One calls it the weakest form of anger, simply diluted rage. Others cite overtones of disgust (a persistently belching dinner guest),…

I recently came upon an article by author Rick Moody published a few years ago in the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis. On transference, he says: “Transference, however, does seem incredibly important to me. Transference describes an easy-to-verify emotional relationship between people. If Freud’s theory in general is about the notion of interpretation, about the idea that interpretation is how…

Psychologist and psychotherapist Marsha Linehan, creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for people with borderline personality disorder, comes out about her history of struggling with mental illness. She says, “So many people have begged me to come forward, and I just thought — well, I have to do this. I owe it to them. I cannot die…

from Thomas Ogden’s paper “Comments on Transference and Countertransference in the Initial Analytic Meeting”: “Everything the analyst does in the first face-to-face analytic session is intended as an invitation to the patient to consider the meaning of his experience. All that has been most obvious to the patient will no longer be treated as self-evident;…

When I heard of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s sudden death last week, I was shocked and saddened. She was a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. I had just seen her two weeks before at a lecture she gave on homophobia and “childism,” the subject of her new book, out this month from Yale University Press. During…

Freud’s Victorian hysterics have not disappeared. They’re right here–in this amazing story about mass psychogenic illness sweeping through a group of teenage girls in upstate New York. But people are loathe to believe it. They’d prefer the cause to be toxins in the water, poisonous gases in the air, hazardous waste in the soil. They’d rather be…

The New York Times wonders, “Where Have All the Neurotics Gone?” Benedict Carey writes, “For a generation of postwar middle-class Americans, being neurotic meant something more than merely being anxious, and something other than exhibiting the hysteria or other disabling mood problems for which Freud used the term. It meant being interesting (if sometimes exasperating) at a time when…