I recently listened to a podcast of Dr. Louis Cozolino, a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, discussing what he would teach if he were training psychotherapists. The first year would be phenomenology: the power of Carl Rogers’ perspective to train how to develop an alliance through reflective listening while keeping countertransference out
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A Puff of Absurdity: Yalom’s Gift
I recently binge-watched all of Group, a show inspired by a novel by Irvin Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure. So I revisited Yalom’s non-fiction to see how closely the series aligns to his actual practices. The Gift of Therapy is a fascinating read from 2017 in which Yalom dives openly into his
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: A Fruitful Exploration of the Core
Maybe there are seeds of potential deep within ourselves, but maybe there’s nothing there but a collection of signals. Regardless the outcome, we need to dig in to see what we can find. In several classes I took last term, the idea of a core self that’s fluid came through
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Frankl’s Logotherapy
The second half of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was added in 1962 to provide greater detail of Logotherapy, in which patients must hear difficult things in contrast to psychoanalysts provoking telling difficult things (see the first part here). It’s less introspective and more focused on our place in the world: “Logotherapy defocuses all
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Frankl’s Phases of Life in the Camps
My lovely friend and former colleague recently passed away unexpectedly. The kindest people go far too soon. We also went to teacher’s college together over 30 years ago, and his quips and just the calm and jovial way about him helped make the ridiculous assignments there far more tolerable. Sitting next to
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Hannah Arendt’s On Violence
Unfortunately, this is really timely. Arendt wrote this short book in 1970, but there’s nothing in it that needs to be updated today. Absolutely nothing significant has changed; it’s just more. She was responding to the violence of WWII, Vietnam, the student riots in Paris, and, most specifically, the People’s
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On the Necessity for a Public Takedown
When, a couple months back, I read Katie Way’s depiction of a date between “Grace” and Aziz Ansari, at first I felt badly for him to be outed as such a crappy date. How embarrassing. Then in the New York Times, Bari Weiss responded that Ansari was being asked to be a mindreader. My
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Comparing Existentialism and Stoicism
This summer, I went on one camping trip with a book on Stoicism, then another camping trip with a book on Existentialism, and I was intrigued by the many similarities. Then I came across this video that has some overlap with what I had noticed. As they say in the video,
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Boredom
I’m not talking about the “nausea of ennui” discussed from Seneca (“many who judge life to be not bitter, but superfluous”) to Sartre, that total lack of interest in anything that makes it difficult for some to get out of bed in the morning, but of that feeling that overcomes
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Not-So-Awful Truth About Being Single
“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” Jean-Paul Sartre In yesterday’s Globe & Mail, Margaret Wente claims that people can get to a much greater depth of understanding and “perfection” of self through a married relationship than they can possibly do if they remain single. “…the road
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