A new and quite flavorful Substack piece is up today! I wrote this one purely for the purpose of pleasure and enjoyment. So, please enjoy! 🍨 Link in the reply below! 👇

Theory is important, but it is not everything. Becoming too absorbed in theory can remove the therapist from the intuitive, felt sense that emerges in treatment. Theory is helpful when it allows us to listen more deeply to our patients...each time differently, and with no guarantees! We are talking about the unconscious here, peeps.

why do i love clarice lispector? why did i write a book on her work? because she writes things like this... 💕

A true innovator in photography. The realest one because he fundamentally distrusted photography as a medium. As a result he squeezed every bit of potential out of it to try to replicate our natural way of seeing. Distrust any artist who loves gear and lenses more than seeing.

No one captures the heartbreak of ordinary life like Elizabeth Strout. “So blind we humans are - so blind. To each other & to ourselves, moving thru life as though thru shadows, putting out a hand in the dark & thinking we have touched someone. And maybe we have …

Here is a list of things to practice/work on (in sequence of which you should focus on) to become a “good enough” beginner-ish therapist. IMO. FWIW. It’s all stuff we continue to refine and master over years, but you can get the hang of it enough to be “good enough” first. 1/

In terms of choosing a new therapist or analyst, here is some unsolicited advice, for all who might need it: People talk a great deal about “fit” and “comfort,” but I feel, at times, things get rather blurry. People feel comfortable with what is familiar, and perhaps what is familiar is not without its challenges? So, I feel compelled to make this simpler. It may sound obvious, but it is not just about if you feel drawn to, excited, inspired, or intrigued by this particular person, but also, do they seem like they would like to work with you? Do you get this impression, from the very first session? I do not mean to ask if they are overly demonstrative, solicitous, or obsequious. And I don’t mean, “are they ‘selling’ themselves on you?” (e.g., by formulating something about you in the initial session, and suggesting that they believe that they can help you with the very construct they’ve created — this is a clever tactic from high-pressure sales strategy, and honestly, I don’t like hearing about the therapists who “sell” themselves, and their services, with this particular technique). I simply mean something more like: curious, interested, open, giving you the chance to express yourself freely, and overall demonstrating simply enough that they have been listening to you closely; and they already understand a little bit about you and your needs; and that they would like to get to know you further, and see what develops from there. And they are happy to schedule another session with you, but also do not seem to be too desperate or unwilling to hear you express your uncertainty or ambivalence. In contrast, if in the first session, they strike you as: confused; bored; irritated; struggling to listen to you or understand what you are trying to tell them; showing signs that they seem shocked, disturbed, or disoriented by you; or are hesitant and/or expressing mixed feelings about whether they are the right clinician for you; then my personal opinion is that these are all good signs to look elsewhere. If you want to be sure, it is usually a good idea to schedule at least three sessions before making your final determination. And this is because this can take some time; people’s clinical and personal styles can differ considerably from one another, and you may need more exposure to this person and their style to make a clearer assessment and determination of whether or not you feel like THIS therapist or analyst could be potentially helpful for YOU. Of course, we tend to make our initial judgments and impressions of others rather immediately, but sometimes, this can lead us to go towards the “comfortable” that may no longer be as beneficial for ourselves. So, we hold our gut instincts in a certain tension with our broader personal questions about what we are looking for in OUR treatment. This is very individual and subjective for each patient. However, my two red flags are: 1) when therapists try to “hard sell” themselves on you by basically just talking TOO much in your first session (as it is easy to sound “humble” but also be working quite hard to suggest something about their unique qualities and brilliance in an indirect, but still rather manipulative, approach); And 2) when a therapist or analyst expresses so much uncertainty and ambivalence that this invokes a compulsion for a person to “prove” themselves, and their worthiness as a potential patient, to this provider. You should truly never have to jump through any hoops to convince someone to “take a chance” on working with you. And you should also not feel so pressured by the therapist or analyst that you start to feel anxious and scared about disappointing them, and hurting their feelings. Of course, some people may experience one or the other outcome regardless of whoever they are meeting with — but it still may be more active in some situations than in others. The red flags you may have ignored can be, in the end, why this does not work out well for you.

The complicated part of this is that there is a positive point to all that, which is to be able to remove oneself from the immediacy of one’s personal emotional and often times overwhelming and possibly over-reactive process to make more sober-minded decisions, and a negative, which is what is described here. In fact, we see a lot of people in therapy or analysis who have this secondary, dissociative problem as their primary issue, which few of them recognize at the beginning. Often, it’s in response to someone growing up who had outsized “big feelings” that took up a lot of room. So they suppress their own feelings, and they act them out unconsciously, while assuming they have a great deal of emotional maturity and control. Sometimes, we need them to experience being a little less “in control.” A practical piece of advice is to do some kind of team sport, intense physical exercise, or even something like joining an improv team or acting class. Anything that exposes them, heightens their emotional and bodily awareness, and allows them to learn to manage the stress and anxiety that comes from doing something that they can’t do quietly, privately, and without their feelings and their bodies involved. If they don’t learn to do that, then what they don’t necessarily realize is how much their feelings are still “leaking out” everywhere and anywhere, regardless of how “professorial” or self-contained they might imagine they appear. Analysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy of course, also helps with this, but especially with an analyst who expresses less interest in their analysands’ intellectual processing and far more on their emotional and/or somatic experiences, including all that occur in vivo in their sessions.

"Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention." theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i…

Elizabeth Strout’s Latest Feels Like a Fresh Start. A fine thoughtful review of another moving Strout novel about the epics of everyday life. nytimes.com/2026/05/04/books…

Felice Casorati. Girls at Nervi (1926).

“The effects of his [Moustafa Safouan] silences were equally powerful, at times even more so. At the end of my admitting something shameful or having just related a particularly painful memory, his silence could stun me, as if I'd been struck with a blunt object. In that silence my own words would come back to me as if someone else had uttered them. It's the most basic tenet of Lacan's teaching. Regardless of our intentions, we almost always say something more than we mean to.” (p. 42) —Richard Boothby, Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide (2022)

Have been reflecting a lot on antipsychiatry, anti-medicine (eg anti-vax), anti-introspection (eg Andreesen, but also Shrier), anti-therapy, anti-involved parenting, pro-AI “therapy,” and “psychosomatics are never a factor in any cases” movements. They all share a sort of

If you want to get really under the skin of Welsh-language working-class culture, you’ve got to go to the north. That’s where the kids fuck and fight in Welsh... theguardian.com/film/2026/ju…

"I don't feel safe". What makes this so obnoxious? (When it is, I mean; obvs!) Because it dresses up "I get anxious when you're righteously angry at me" in the clothes of "I've reasonable grounds to think you'll wound me", so is covert blame-shifting and victim-playing.

Ted Chiang is right; chatbots are manipulative and harmful as a technology. Remove the personal pronouns, remove the cute, cloying, conversational tone. A good product would just provide the results with links and citations to point you toward primary sources.

This is great.

Here’s the preface to Maud Mannoni’s “The Child, his ‘Illness,’ and the Others.”

I have a lot to say about POSSIBLE psychosomatic symptoms but here is the most important thing: Individual clinicians MUST take the patient and the symptoms seriously. BOTH must FEEL and explore the possibility that the symptoms aren’t or aren’t entirely psychosomatic AND the 1/

I wrote about the Pope and why Christian tech critics often have a more compelling response to the AI crisis than their secular counterparts. Simply, Christian writers aren't afraid of "human nature" talk, and they understand THE question of the AI Age is: what are people for? 🧵