Why Insight-Oriented Therapy Often Falls Outside the Insurance Model When people begin therapy, it’s completely reasonable to ask whether insurance can be used. Many of us pay significant monthly premiums and want to make practical use of our benefits. Insurance can be helpful for certain types of care, particularly short-term or crisis-focused treatment. However, for individuals seeking longer-term, insight-oriented psychotherapy, the insurance model often works at cross-pur

In spite of psychology’s vast empirical literature on the importance of individual differences, the current trend in the field is to treat a symptom as a “thing” in-and-of-itself rather than an expression of a client’s complex and unique subjectivity. So, this has produced a generation of therapists and patients whose main response to suffering is, “Oh, there’s a manual for that!” But people who have similar symptoms but different personalities cannot be given a one size fits

Psychotherapy appears quite often in films, series and books, sometimes to add depth to a character, sometimes as the main subject of the story, and other times as a comedic aside. This is all a part of the writers’ creative material and it can turn out to be very effective narratively. We are moved, for instance, when we discover the unsuspected fragility of a character, or we marvel at the psychologist's phenomenal insight, and we often delight in the fact that we’re enter

Mindfulness is big business, worth in excess of $1.0 billion in the US alone and linked – somewhat paradoxically – to an expanding range of “must have” products. These include downloadable apps (1300 at the last count), books to read or color in, and online courses. Mindfulness practice and training is now part of a global health and wellness industry worth trillions of dollars. The rapid rise and mainstreaming of what was once regarded as the preserve of a 1960s hippie coun

I am always amused with people’s reaction when they find out that I am a psychoanalytic psychologist. One of the most common reactions that I receive is, "So, are you reading my mind?" To which I typically reply in jest, "Don’t worry; Voldemort and I didn't train at Hogwarts together." Laughing aside, a real confusion takes place when I try to explain to them what a therapist actually does. Maybe they expect something pragmatic, or perhaps it’s my inability to articulate wha

There are currently many schools of psychology - such as psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral...

Axel Hoffer’s book, Freud and the Buddha: the Couch and the Cushion, aims to explore what two traditions dedicated to the alleviation of...

What does it mean to be known by another? To be recognized for who one is, warts and all? The good with the bad and everything in...

In considering what makes life distinctly human and meaningful, Freud famously wrote: “Love and work are the cornerstones of our...