On Clinical Work, Psychoanalytic Technique, and Being Surprised

"One of us remembers being told by a supervisor years ago that with long experience one would no longer be surprised by patients, that the incapacity for further surprise was the mark of a mature clinician. What a loss! So many possibilities of experience for patient, analyst, and analytic couple are foreclosed by devaluing surprise and new experience. Making a routine procedure out of the analytic couch, for example, ignores the developmental importance of mutual gaze regulation and other forms of facial affective communication in forming possibilities of relatedness. We must, instead, retain a thoroughly exploratory attitude toward everything we do and create together in a psychoanalysis, and relentlessly seek the meanings, both individual and cocreated."

Mental Pain and Breakdown

"All people who are having breakdowns, whether it's psychotic breakdowns or non-psychotic breakdowns, have that look of utter bewilderment on their face. It's the first visual indication of a person being in really deep trouble."

Beauty and the Two Selves

In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart’s mother also teaches her daughter that society’s regard is everything. That “a beauty needs more tact than the possessor of an average set of features.” That she must manipulate and manage both her gifts and society’s esteem to get what she needs, to be safe. It makes sense that Lily is always looking in mirrors; she knows very well that the specular self is the social self, the one on which her life depends.
But there are two Lilys: the one ravenous for approval and security, who believes entirely in “the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled,” and another, more private one. When she disobeys society’s rules, the rules of her mother, in that grace period before the other inhabitants of the cage begin to punish her for her transgressions, she can feel it, “one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears.”