Happy Birthday!
Welcome to this blog, which will offer regular notes on, comments about, and reviews of books, old and new, in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, pastoral counselling, and clinical mental health counselling. I will also draw your attention to new and forthcoming books, some of which I may eventually get around to reviewing but others of which are simply posted for your own information.
I have blogged elsewhere for nearly a decade, concentrating in other academic areas in which I have expertise.
Beyond blogging, I have written extensively for popular and professional periodicals, and peer-reviewed journals in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States. I have two books in print, and two more that should be in print by the end of this calendar year or early 2021. In addition, I am working on a book tentatively titled Theology After Freud.
After a process of careful consideration, including a fellowship at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in 2018-2019, I decided in 2019 to resume clinical training that I set aside (temporarily, I thought) in the late 1990s when, quite unexpectedly, I was offered a teaching position at a Catholic high-school in Ottawa. Up until that point my plan had been to pursue graduate training in pastoral counselling or classical psychoanalysis, but teaching quickly became, and remains, a great love, and I have now done it in three different countries with both high-school and university students for more than two decades.
During all that time, my scholarly research has continued to draw on contemporary clinical and theoretical insights, especially from a psychoanalytic perspective. My most recent book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, draws on Freud and more contemporary psychoanalysts in trying to understand some of the problems within the Catholic Church.
The books to be noted on here will reflect some of my reading and research during the course of my clinical training, but will also discuss many other books besides that, for I read constantly and far more widely than what is assigned in a given course. I will also import reviews I have written elsewhere for several years now, especially of books in psychoanalysis, of which I remain an unapologetic proponent for its therapeutic value in my own life as well as its intellectually compelling explanatory power in many (but certainly not all) areas.
At the same time, however, I am not an ideologue, and fully recognize--thanks to the works of such as Paul Roazen, Peter Rudnytsky, and Adam Phillips, inter alia, as well, more recently, Jonathan Shedler--the dangers of turning psychoanalysis, or any other therapeutic tradition into an all-encompassing explanation of the human condition or a technique for treating human suffering to the exclusion of all other traditions and perspectives. The conformism of too many psychoanalytic institutes has been destructive and pernicious, but so too has been the blind faith some have put more recently in psychotropics as well as so-called evidence-based treatments like CBT, whose bloated eminence I regard with a wary eye precisely insofar as its apologists seem unconsciously bent on replicating exactly the same political dynamics that turned psychoanalysis into a closed system and an ideology in many places, unwilling and unable to bear legitimate criticism.
But psychoanalysis, as I have learned from Adam Phillips, Todd McGowan, and Todd Dufresne, at least contains the seeds of undoing its own tendency toward closed ideological thinking. It retains, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre would say, the capacity both for putting itself into an epistemological crisis, and for conceiving of ways by which to emerge from such a crisis.
My formation in and debts to the psychoanalytic tradition broadly and diversely conceived (especially the British Independent/Middle school of people like Nina Coltart, W.R.D. Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, and D.W. Winnicott) do not prevent me from realizing the huge insights that have been gained since Freud's death just over eighty years ago. I continue to learn from as many traditions as possible--inside and outside the psychoanalytic family--and I am not at all opposed to newer traditions and techniques like, e.g., EMDR, which I have been reading about with great interest for a couple of months now, and about which will write more later.
One thing I have learned from psychoanalysis is a wariness of system-building and of overly systematic or overly tidy approaches to most things. It has also engendered in me a deep skepticism for romanticism and idealism, and any form of rigid ideological thinking, especially in historiography and humanities scholarship more generally. All this is perhaps best captured in what I regard as a stunning recent book by a Spanish psychoanalyst and Jesuit, Carlos Dominguez-Morano (about whom much more another time). In his Belief After Freud, he writes that the benefits of both theology and psychoanalysis are the same: they disabuse one of the “haughty pretension of having reached ‘the answer.’ Many taxing questions will remain open forever. We are, thus, invited to the healthy asceticism of renouncing total synthesis. The faith that confronts psychoanalysis learns to live and remain in the modesty of tentative formulations”
This blog will offer a lot of tentative formulations. So do not expect it to be concerned with constructing grand theories or building or defending empires based on any one tradition or technique. It will range freely and widely across traditions and times, looking at what is new and what is old in books published about psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and counselling, guided primarily by this question: what here is good and will contribute to the healing and flourishing of the human person?
Thus, this blog will not be anything other than a "loose baggy monster," an eclectic collection of books, an omnium gatherum if you will. Notes and reviews will be posted simply according to what I happen to be reading at any given moment--which is usually not less than six books at least--or what happens to attract my eye in, e.g., new catalogues of forthcoming books from various publishers.
In the meantime, let us begin this blog's birthday by going back to say happy birthday to the great man who was born on this day in 1856. It was Freud who taught us--in Auden's words--to "approach the Future as a friend/without a wardrobe of excuses." I look forward to continuing to do that in here in the months ahead. Welcome!
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| Taken by me in June 2016 in Vienna at Bergasse 19. |
Beyond blogging, I have written extensively for popular and professional periodicals, and peer-reviewed journals in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States. I have two books in print, and two more that should be in print by the end of this calendar year or early 2021. In addition, I am working on a book tentatively titled Theology After Freud.
After a process of careful consideration, including a fellowship at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in 2018-2019, I decided in 2019 to resume clinical training that I set aside (temporarily, I thought) in the late 1990s when, quite unexpectedly, I was offered a teaching position at a Catholic high-school in Ottawa. Up until that point my plan had been to pursue graduate training in pastoral counselling or classical psychoanalysis, but teaching quickly became, and remains, a great love, and I have now done it in three different countries with both high-school and university students for more than two decades.
During all that time, my scholarly research has continued to draw on contemporary clinical and theoretical insights, especially from a psychoanalytic perspective. My most recent book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, draws on Freud and more contemporary psychoanalysts in trying to understand some of the problems within the Catholic Church.
The books to be noted on here will reflect some of my reading and research during the course of my clinical training, but will also discuss many other books besides that, for I read constantly and far more widely than what is assigned in a given course. I will also import reviews I have written elsewhere for several years now, especially of books in psychoanalysis, of which I remain an unapologetic proponent for its therapeutic value in my own life as well as its intellectually compelling explanatory power in many (but certainly not all) areas.
At the same time, however, I am not an ideologue, and fully recognize--thanks to the works of such as Paul Roazen, Peter Rudnytsky, and Adam Phillips, inter alia, as well, more recently, Jonathan Shedler--the dangers of turning psychoanalysis, or any other therapeutic tradition into an all-encompassing explanation of the human condition or a technique for treating human suffering to the exclusion of all other traditions and perspectives. The conformism of too many psychoanalytic institutes has been destructive and pernicious, but so too has been the blind faith some have put more recently in psychotropics as well as so-called evidence-based treatments like CBT, whose bloated eminence I regard with a wary eye precisely insofar as its apologists seem unconsciously bent on replicating exactly the same political dynamics that turned psychoanalysis into a closed system and an ideology in many places, unwilling and unable to bear legitimate criticism.
But psychoanalysis, as I have learned from Adam Phillips, Todd McGowan, and Todd Dufresne, at least contains the seeds of undoing its own tendency toward closed ideological thinking. It retains, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre would say, the capacity both for putting itself into an epistemological crisis, and for conceiving of ways by which to emerge from such a crisis.
My formation in and debts to the psychoanalytic tradition broadly and diversely conceived (especially the British Independent/Middle school of people like Nina Coltart, W.R.D. Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, and D.W. Winnicott) do not prevent me from realizing the huge insights that have been gained since Freud's death just over eighty years ago. I continue to learn from as many traditions as possible--inside and outside the psychoanalytic family--and I am not at all opposed to newer traditions and techniques like, e.g., EMDR, which I have been reading about with great interest for a couple of months now, and about which will write more later.
One thing I have learned from psychoanalysis is a wariness of system-building and of overly systematic or overly tidy approaches to most things. It has also engendered in me a deep skepticism for romanticism and idealism, and any form of rigid ideological thinking, especially in historiography and humanities scholarship more generally. All this is perhaps best captured in what I regard as a stunning recent book by a Spanish psychoanalyst and Jesuit, Carlos Dominguez-Morano (about whom much more another time). In his Belief After Freud, he writes that the benefits of both theology and psychoanalysis are the same: they disabuse one of the “haughty pretension of having reached ‘the answer.’ Many taxing questions will remain open forever. We are, thus, invited to the healthy asceticism of renouncing total synthesis. The faith that confronts psychoanalysis learns to live and remain in the modesty of tentative formulations”
This blog will offer a lot of tentative formulations. So do not expect it to be concerned with constructing grand theories or building or defending empires based on any one tradition or technique. It will range freely and widely across traditions and times, looking at what is new and what is old in books published about psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and counselling, guided primarily by this question: what here is good and will contribute to the healing and flourishing of the human person?
Thus, this blog will not be anything other than a "loose baggy monster," an eclectic collection of books, an omnium gatherum if you will. Notes and reviews will be posted simply according to what I happen to be reading at any given moment--which is usually not less than six books at least--or what happens to attract my eye in, e.g., new catalogues of forthcoming books from various publishers.
In the meantime, let us begin this blog's birthday by going back to say happy birthday to the great man who was born on this day in 1856. It was Freud who taught us--in Auden's words--to "approach the Future as a friend/without a wardrobe of excuses." I look forward to continuing to do that in here in the months ahead. Welcome!
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