I’ve just published a little eBooklet!

Jung Life: Jungian Fundamentals for Everyday Living

I recently had the chance to speak with Jeremy Hobson on WBUR’s Here and Now, broadcast on NPR.

We spoke about public failure, censure and shaming and our collective challenges moving through the processes of healthy guilt.

If you would like to listen or read more please click here.

Two new chapters are available from the 45 Dreams Project:

Chapter 2 – Dreams of Hubris and Inflation.

“The purpose of this chapter is not to diagnose, but to examine the themes of grandiosity and inflation – as demonstrated by approximately twenty-three dreams in this collection- which are focused on the current president as a titular manifestation of our national hubris…”

Chapter 3: Dreams of Humiliation and Hair 

“Nature corrects our course and sets limits on our accomplishments and our failures just as the sea and atmosphere and the sun do. If our conscious ego becomes expanded and moves toward inflated imbalance, the pendulum of the unconscious swings toward deflation and humiliation. This chapter examines the themes that emerge in approximately fifty-seven dreams of humiliation and debasement.”

For those who would like to start at the beginning:

Chapter One: Understanding This Project

As far back as 1918 I published a paper in which I called the attention of my contemporaries to astounding development in the German edition of the collective unconscious. I had caught hold of certain collective dreams of Germans which convinced me that they portrayed the beginning of a national regression analogous to the regression of a frightened and helpless individual, becoming first infantile and then primitive or archaic. I saw Nietzsche’s “blond beast” looming up with all that it implies” ~ C.G. Jung, Psychology and National Problems, CW, loc 250564

I will be posting one chapter each month at 45dreamsproject.com which you may follow directly and I will post occasional updates here at What a Shrink Thinks as well.

“Let’s listen in and see if we can hear the wisdom of the collective unconscious… “

Sharing an essay I wrote for the First Person series at Vox:

White people are doing a lot of soul-searching these days.

Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who recently admitted to wearing blackface in a Michael Jackson impersonation competition, just announced that he’s going on a “listening tour” to learn about racism. Actor Liam Neeson admitted to wanting to commit a racist murder in his youth, saying, “It was horrible, horrible, when I think back, that I did that.”

I’ve been thinking about the complexities around confession and forgiveness. As a psychotherapist for 25 years who has worked immersed in issues of race and racism, I believe it is important for white people to find spaces where we can name our past racist failures and identify the ways we have been both contaminated by racist systems and have perpetrated racist acts.

But…

Click here to continue reading…

You haven’t heard much from me at this blog – unless you are a subscriber to the online reading group/Seminar essays – because I have been working hard sorting and writing about the 3000 or so dreams about our current president that I have collected at the 45 Dreams Project.

I will be releasing a new chapter each month at the projects new webpage – and I invite you to click over to read Chapter One – which explains how I came to start this project, how I understand dream work and my thoughts about “interpretation” and the wider perspective that dream collections can offer us into our collective and unconscious response to a troubled era. If you find the project interesting and want to read along, I encourage you to sign up to follow 45 Dreams Project so that you will receive a monthly notice when the new chapters are released.

Here is an excerpt:

It started with my own dream, as so many things do in my world, a month or so before the 2016 presidential election:

A friend, who has worked with various celebrities as a personal assistant and a dresser called: He was leaving town, and needed me to cover for him. “Its easy!” he said, “you just have to stop by and feed him – I’ve left everything out with a note!” He gave me an address that leads to the top floor of a six floor walk up apartment building.

                  When I arrived, I unlocked the door, unsure of who or what I would be feeding. The door opened into a family/television room – the curtains drawn, a large TV blaring on the wall. On the glass coffee table sat a large metal dog bowl. A bag of kibble sat near the door. And on the sofa, Donald Trump, in a large adult diaper, sat sleeping with his chin on his chest. I filled the bowl with nuggets and slid it toward him on the table. As I looked at him sleeping, I was filled with disgust, and then flooded with pity. He is obviously sick. Disabled. Infantile and senile. Feeble. Something was profoundly wrong with him. He then woke and without acknowledging me in any way, began gobbling the food, chewing loudly with his mouth open.

                  I decide that it would be too cruel to let him just starve to death, but at least he was contained – as he could never be able to walk up or down all those stairs. I did the bare minimum for him, only what I would offer to any stranger, any human being. I got him a cheap pre-paid flip phone for emergencies only. All his previous handlers abandoned him, he seems a debilitated pawn, whose delusions, phobias and bigotries were being exploited. Yet somehow despite his incompetence he was still able to head an effective, angry, divisive, xenophobic campaign.

I woke, both disturbed and confused by the dream. It seemed to confront me with the ways that it was easier for me to think of Trump and Trumpism as “sick” and “not responsible” for his actions. I suspected it was a dream that compensated for the conscious anger and horror I felt as I watched and took what action I could to push back against xenophobic campaign rhetoric and negotiated the daily barrage of lies.

I also noted the dream’s warning that my wish to be a good kind person kept the campaign regularly “fed.” The belief that he was “contained” and “feeble” and should be treated with the same basic concern as “any human being” in distress – seemed to provide the movement a with a life-line, and offered just enough assistance to allow his campaign to flourish.

I thought about how difficult it is to discern “sick” from “bad” – that the course of normal empathy seems to lean towards offering deviant behavior the benefit of a doubt, assuming that it emerges out of illness and suffering – eliciting pity and making excuses for “bad” and immoral behavior. The dream pressed me to confront my own complicity, my desire to consciously view Trumpism and the resurgence of right wing extremism as something aging, feeble, and powerless – nothing to take seriously. A wish to relax out of my own assertive impulses left me with an inability to confront regressive, propagandist messages. My dream-ego confronted me with an image of myself as someone who could unwittingly feed a virulent movement.

It was a dream of complicity, of the bonds of empathy and common humanity exploited. It was also a dream that revealed a desire to let my guard down, and the potential consequences. And certainly I was not the only one experiencing this bind as we headed toward an election that no one I knew imagined he could ever win. The comfortable certainty surrounding me frightened me even more.

When he won, I was not surprised.

To continue reading – click here:

I also want to let you know that I have opened a new dream collection – Climate Dreams – gathering dreams of climate breakdown and our psyche’s response to the crises of global warming.

If you, or someone you know, would like to share such a dream – you may simply leave a comment on the Climate Dreams blog page  – all dreams will be stripped of identifying information before they are made public. Additionally, I am gathering and retweeting climate related dreams shared publicly at the Twitter account @Climatedreams  . You may also email dreams to whatashrinkthinks@yahoo.com.

Every once in a while i feel compelled to dash off some writing that I don’t know what to do with – so I put it at my other blog at Subtext Consultations and release it to the wild for it to do whatever it is supposed to do on its own.

You can read it over there if you like by clicking below:

illustration by the brilliant Cranky Muse Projects

I learned yesterday that a dear friend, colleague and collaborator, Jason Evan Mihalko, Psy.D. died last week.

I first contacted Jason after I came across a stunningly brave series of essays he had written after surviving a client’s suicide, and quickly we became fellow advocates for a new kind of transparency in our profession and the value of psychotherapeutic perspectives in our national social conversation.

He was a brave, loving, radically compassionate, fierce and funny man, who will be dearly missed by the thousands of people whose lives he impacted.

But his words, at The Irreverent Psychologist should speak for him. His beautiful series of essays: “Dear Young Therapist”  remind us all of the core values that sit at the heart of this impossible profession.

And this is from my favorite of those essays:

Dear Young Therapist, Don’t be Afraid To Love.

I’m old enough to no longer care how my fellow psychologists evaluate me. I’m skilled enough to know how to wield these twin tools of relational growth and change within the safe boundaries of a therapeutic relationship.

I’m thankful that I’ve never met a patient that I couldn’t love or couldn’t learn to love. It’s from that space that I begin to see the seeds of where a person might be able to go, grow, and let go. It’s from that space that I can find the confidence to let go of wanting a patient to be something I need them to be (or society needs them to be) and let them go about finding what they need themselves to be.

Still, young therapist, I don’t frequently tell my patients that I love them. It is often dangerous and disruptive to use the word. Patients can become incredibly confused and conflicted. Too many therapists also become confused and conflicted.

Just because love is dangerous, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be thought about.

I am not afraid to love and to say that I do when a moment of genuine honesty is the best intervention. Don’t forget this, young therapist. Don’t forget that our work is built on a foundation of faith in humanity and love of the person who sits across from you.

Please go read this series and explore his blog if you haven’t.

I don’t know if this blog, What a Shrink Thinks, would exist if I hadn’t met Jason. He made me feel braver as I stuck my nose out into an online world and we made joyful noise together.

If you want to hear us gabbing and laughing our fool heads off you can listen in to the one podcast we had a chance to record before  life took a detour that derailed us.

And if you feel so moved, please consider making a donation in his memory here.

Grateful for all that he gave. Words fail me.

I sat down with Jon Christian, reporter for The Outline to discuss the 45 Dreams Project.

I thought I would share the outcomes: An article and a podcast.

And remember you can post your presidential dreams anonymously: 45dreams.wordpress.com