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kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
New Adam Phillips piece in the LRB, for the psychoanalysis nerds lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n20/…
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
No one is an expert in their life. We all have an unconscious. We all have hard to see (but can be accessed) motives and wishes. We dip in and out of awareness of our various motives, it would be absurdly costly (calories) to be perfectly consciously aware of all things (e.g., blood pressure) that motivate us
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
My early years of therapy, I didn't yet understand that one can, at once, feel sadness on behalf of someone and not judge them for their predicament. For sympathy and pity are two different constructs, yet they're often confounded. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/…
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a real relationship with a real person. It is a boundaried attachment experience which the therapeutic contract demands we observe with excruciating honesty. It must happen between two sentient beings that are capable of emotions and especially shame. The therapists unique responsibility is to bring a reflective function to that relationship (whether the client has that reflective function or not), and that reflective function comes from learning to lovingly tolerate shame.
Nothing you can get from an AI will provide what I wrote above, although AI can help with other aspects of therapy such as frame-shifting, psychoeducation, and identifying cognitive distortions.
This is why I think AI will replace (already is replacing) therapies such as CBT and many other "evidence based" therapies, but it cannot replace psychodyhamic relational psychotherapy. – at Islington, London
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
🧵I would never choose my losses, but being able to mourn has been one of the greatest gifts of my life.
I say gift, because it seems a matter somewhat out of my hands - the product of luck over having parents with enough good to internalize and stabilize; perhaps also being
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
🧵 More on mourning: perhaps a more complicated aspect of grief is when the object was not lost through death - but rather when infantile phantasies are interrupted too violently, shutting down omnipotent control and leaving the terror of reality. Or Oedipal phantasies are made
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
“If a child’s parents are bad objects, he cannot reject them…for he cannot do without them.”
Listen i like analytic ideas but this is lazy horseshit fantasizing about what is “normal” or typical.
The idea that kids “have to ‘need’ their parents” is empirically not true. Many kids dissociate and learn not to need objects. Many kids are autistic. Many kids have (early) antisocial tendencies. Other infants might be more extroverted and narcissitic in their temperament, and not care about objects. Others are unintelligent (memory deficits) and not able to be aware of how “bad” an object the parents are. Various types of internal dynamics exist and not all infants have the same hardware and software for “needing” an external object.
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
Paul Williams: There are “three qualities needed in a genuine analyst: patience, honesty and kindness – in other words, intelligence. Cleverness is not intelligence. Joseph Sandler was fond of saying, ‘Analysis is about making friends with parts of ourselves we don’t like’
1/
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
On women mothering their partners.
A passage that irrevocably changed my life—a real wake-up call.
ALT A woman who has not yet 'sacrificed the son,' that is sacrificed the instinctual maternal within herself, may have no actual children, but will nonetheless carry the maternal attitude into her relationships. She is under an inner compulsion to mother all for whom she cares. She cannot bear to see anyone unhappy or in difficulties. Motherliness dominates in her. She never realises that her inability to accept hardness for her friends reflects her own inability to face the hard things of life for herself; still less does she appreciate the fact that her oversolicitous attitude towards them cultivates their worst weakness, throws them back into childishness and self-pity, by which a man's very manhood is undermined. By this attitude she robs her son of his individuality. He is made soft, feminine. He is rendered impotent, all his virility is drained out of him. This is the false castration through the mother by which no redemption is achieved. — M. Esther Harding, Woman's Mysteries
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
Stop saying anger is "really" something else! (my latest post)
darrenhaber.substack.com/p/w…
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
Devoted Raja fans, with diverted reflection faculty, a long contemplative thread.
I consider myself a student of Music by being a deep listener to Maestro Ilayaraja music, many online blogs and forums educated me since I was 15, among them are @Sylvianism work,
@kaveinthran I don’t want to give more value to the engagement farming tweet. I don’t have any problem with inspirations, imitations (as you call it) or sampling etc., but I have problem with people claiming it original.
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
Ayad Akhtar’s new novel is a masterpiece. Listen to him talk about it. theatlantic.com/podcasts/202…
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
Laughter in psychotherapy >
One of the biggest problems facing our culture: the loss of mutual playfulness and spontaneity in our communication. We've become far too focused on written, text conversations, poring over others' words, sifting and weighing for any offense or 'red flag,' and obsessing over our own responses. We edit and reread our casual conversations as if they're Pulitzer Prize nominated essays, when what we truly need is some lighthearted joy and authentic, playful connection.
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
"The unconscious is structured like a language". OK, how ARE languages "structured"? Metonymy for eg doesn't *structure* English. We've phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics which describe linguistic de/composition. Are they how "the" unconscious is structured?
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
My personal truth as a clinical psychologist, for today (September 27, 2026): Love requires repair. No relationship avoids injury; the capacity to repair distinguishes healthy bonds.
You will say something cruel in an argument. You will forget something that mattered enormously to the other person. You will be distracted when they needed your attention. You will get defensive instead of listening. You will make a joke that lands as an insult. You will promise something and fail to follow through. Sometimes you won’t even understand why what you did hurt so much.
That is not the test of a relationship. The test is what happens next.
Do you explain yourself, or try to understand? Do you insist, “That’s not what I meant,” or become curious about how it felt? Can you say, “I see why that hurt you,” without immediately adding a but?
Repair can be very small. Reaching for a hand after an argument. Coming back into the room instead of staying withdrawn. Saying, “I was defensive before. Try telling me again.” Sending a text from work: “I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning. You were right that I wasn’t really listening.”
And repair is not just apology. It is changed behavior. If I keep hurting you in exactly the same way and keep saying I’m sorry, eventually the apology becomes part of the injury.
The strongest relationships are not the ones in which people never wound each other. They are the ones in which neither person has to wonder forever whether the wound matters.
kaveinology👨🦯 retweeted
Empathy is dangerous because it’s more fantasy and projection than it is accurately scanning another person and determining their internal states….
“To empathize means to share, to experience the feelings of another human being. One participates in the quality but not the quantity” (Greenson, 1960, p. 419).
“Empathy" has fallen prey to immense re-definition and misinformation. Here are some psychoanalytic definitions, so that we can understand what empathy is and what it isn't.
It is an attempt to understand someone else's mental logic and functioning, without becoming merged with that person.
Empathy is not an emotional "performance" in which the therapist serves as a "validation vendor," like a toy with only a few stock phrases to utter. It is not endless compliments and endorsement of maladaptive, dysfunctional, or harmful behavior, just because the client is a sympathetic protagonist in his or her own story.
