Looking forward to reading The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz, a new book on psychoanalysis–how it works and what it’s like. From the New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani: “…an insightful and beautifully written book about the process of psychoanalysis, and the ways people’s efforts to connect the past, present and future reflect their…

“Numerous findings over the last two decades demonstrate how talk therapy alters the brain. Disabling conditions like clinical depression and anxiety can be treated effectively by understanding distorted patterns of thought, becoming aware of emotional conflicts that have not been conscious, or practicing new behaviors. Talk therapy is a potent treatment for serious mental disorders

I wrote a short review of Alison Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?, for the e-newsletter of IARPP (International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy). A wonderful book for anyone interested in the analytic process–and mother-child relations. Click here to check it out.  

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)

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