More research and writing is coming out in support of daydreaming, that aimless mental activity that happens when you’re not using your brain for Facebooking or playing a video game or watching TV. When you try to multitask, says Daniel Levitin in Mother Jones, “your brain starts to produce cortisol—the stress hormone. And you do…

Science shows: “By writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events, participants were significantly more likely to have fewer illnesses and be less affected by trauma. Participants ultimately spent less time in the hospital, enjoyed lower blood pressure and had better liver functionality than their counterparts.” Just 15 minutes a day can make a difference. The…

From an article by Michael S. Roth on the enduring importance of Freud’s ideas: “Questions about what desires are being satisfied extend from the political to the personal (and back again). What desire is the war against terrorism really satisfying? Why do police departments in small towns want to acquire big tanks? Why are some…

From the NY Times: “It took Sebastian Zimmermann, a psychiatrist on the Upper West Side, 13 years to produce Fifty Shrinks, a book of portraits depicting ‘therapists in their natural habitats.’” My favorite quote from the slideshow comes from Martin Bergmann: “I have been an analyst for more than fifty years and I still find…

In the New Yorker magazine, Lena Dunham tells the story of her time in therapy: “One evening, I see her on the subway, and our interaction, warm but disorienting, inspires a poem, the last lines of which are ‘I guess you are not my mother. You will never be my mother.’” Read the whole essay…