Latest news with #psychoanalysis
Wall Street Journal
16-06-2025
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
Why Is Everything an Existential Crisis?
So-called existential risks seem to be everywhere. Climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear war, pandemics and more threaten to return us to nothingness. Most people using this term aren't consciously evoking the philosophy of Sartre or Camus. Still, they may be drawing on associations with existentialism more than they realize and unconsciously expressing deeper concerns about morality and meaning. In psychoanalysis, it isn't unusual for a word to have an unconscious double meaning. For example, a patient in therapy might say that she can't 'bear' children. She could consciously mean that she's unable to get pregnant, while also unconsciously communicating that she can't stand children. Or a grieving patient who's struggling to find the right word might say, 'I'm at a loss.'
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Therapy isn't about life hacks. The best solutions are simpler
When people seek therapy – and I know this, because I too was once a person seeking therapy – we often want strategies, techniques and tools for our toolboxes. We want to be asked questions and to know the answers; we want to ask questions and to be given answers. We believe that these are the things we need to build a better life. Now that I am a patient in psychoanalysis, and I am a psychodynamic psychotherapist treating patients, I can see why my therapist needed to frustrate this desire, and offer me the opposite. What I wanted was to manage myself out of my emotions rather than feel them, to hack my life rather than live it – and that makes for a shallower existence, not a better one. Meaningful therapy has helped me to understand that what I wanted was not what I needed. That my search for the right answer, born out of my conviction that there is a right way to do life, could only ever keep me stuck. I see now that this powerful treatment can offer something far more valuable than strategies: a fertile environment in which a mind can grow, so that a new space can open up between sensing an emotional experience inside you and having to get rid of it immediately. In this space, you can develop the capacity to tolerate something that previously was experienced as unbearable – and this gives you time to feel, to think and to respond with agency, rather than remaining a slave to your reactions. This can be utterly transformative for our relationships, for our working lives, for our parenting and for our self-respect. It is not something we can try to do, it is not something someone can tell us how to do, it is not something we can read about in a newspaper article (even this one, I'm afraid). It is the outcome of a meaningful, sustained therapeutic relationship, and there is no shortcut. The fact is that strategies, techniques and tools are all out there for you to find if you want them. A quick internet search will serve up more studies than you could possibly wish to read showing that exercise is good for your mental health; that mindfulness can help to manage stress (and there are plenty of apps for that); and that if it makes you feel good, you can buy as many adult colouring books, gratitude journals and weighted blankets as you wish (before you feel so weighed down by all your stuff that it's time to de-clutter again). These things may or may not be helpful, but advice along these lines can also make a person feel worse, if what they really need is to address the underlying difficulties, anxieties, depressions and unconscious dynamics that rob them of the capacity to enjoy the good things in life. Because the thing about building a better life is that it is at the same time incredibly complex and incredibly simple. (One consequence of good psychotherapy – and parenthood – is developing the capacity to recognise and feel two opposing truths at the same time.) In a therapy session, an almost imperceptible movement or sigh from a patient might, when attention is directed towards it, open up a fascinating seam of memories and associations that reveal buried pain and love and heartbreaking assumptions about themselves, which developed in their mind in childhood out of compelling family dynamics and have continued to imprison them for their entire lives. And once these knotty, complex dynamics have been excavated and understood, and the feelings trapped within have been allowed expression, then the cell door can open, and as well as pain and anger and longing and other feelings, all sorts of beautifully simple things become possible. The blissful feeling of warm sunshine on your face. The colours in a David Hockney painting. The deliciousness of a chocolate Hobnob. The heart-swelling sound of a toddler laughing – yours or someone else's. The pleasure of exchanging a nod with a stranger who has also gone for a walk in the park. The joy of watching one of the greatest films of all time. Which brings me to my final point. We have to acknowledge that good therapy can be difficult to find (though there is plenty of information at And if you live in an area where psychotherapy is, outrageously, not available on the NHS, or about to be cut, then it can be expensive (though there are low-fee schemes available at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the British Psychotherapy Foundation, and elsewhere too). It may also be that this kind of therapy might not be useful to you at this moment. And, as I have written previously, good therapy takes time, and there are periods in our lives when that time may not be available to us. Fortunately, there is something else that can help. Here is the one strategy, technique and tool I have found that really does work – the answer to almost any question. Watch Midnight Run. And if you have already watched this exquisite 80s comedy with Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin and Yaphet Kotto, then watch it again. And when you have watched it, find someone else who has watched it – it may be that the greatest value of the internet lies in its facility to connect people who have watched Midnight Run – and swap your favourite quotes and scenes with them. And then make a cup of tea and dunk a chocolate Hobnob in it and eat it. You're welcome. Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
There's no excuse for chopping down a thing of beauty. And I don't just mean the Sycamore Gap tree
I was moved to read of the grief expressed by so many at the brutal felling of the Sycamore Gap tree. I found it surprising. Not the crime itself: I know well the unconscious drive we all have within us to destroy good things – the most valuable, the most beautiful, the most life-affirming things. What took me by surprise was the capacity that so many people found within themselves to express their devastation and anger at this painful loss, not only to us as individuals, but as a nation. On the day the perpetrators were found guilty, I was reeling in my own private grief. I'd just read a different news story that told of another brutal cutting-down: again the destruction of something beautiful and valuable with deep roots, that stood for growth and possibility and life. The article, on this website, told how among other 'savings', talking therapies services are to be cut 'as part of efforts by England's 215 NHS trusts to comply with a 'financial reset''. As a patient in psychoanalysis that I pay for privately because I am privileged enough to be able to afford it; as a psychodynamic psychotherapist working in the NHS because I passionately believe that people should have access to good, sustained mental health treatment regardless of their means; and as your columnist writing about how to build a better life – I find this to be morally wrong. Just as I was not surprised by the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree, I am not surprised by these further cuts to talking therapy on the NHS. The flesh is so thin on the bone already, there is precious little now to cut, with patients facing the (bad) luck of the draw of patchy, postcode lottery-style provision. Many of us as individuals have a tendency to diminish our own mental anguish – to feel that physical pain is somehow more worthy. This is why it is unsurprising that we tolerate such meagre offerings of sustained psychotherapy on the NHS. It is why we have to have a law that mental health and physical health should be treated with parity of esteem – because deep down, we do not do this within ourselves. That law, incidentally, is the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which states it is the Secretary of State for Health's duty to 'continue the promotion of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement […] in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness'. How can he possibly fulfil this duty if the already limited offer of psychotherapy is reduced even further? Whether talking therapy services are scrapped altogether, or treatments are shortened and cheapened and replaced with 'interventions', it seems important to see the truth of what is happening here. There will be cuts to psychotherapy. Psychotherapy in its different modalities is a potent treatment that has been proven again and again, in study after study and in patient after patient, to be effective for many people suffering with mental illness – and, in the case of sustained psychodynamic psychotherapy, to grow more effective over time after treatment ends. Patients can use it and get better. Do we understand this? That psychotherapy works? Of course it doesn't always work, and it is not always indicated for everyone – like any other treatment. But for many, it works. It saves lives. It keeps people out of hospital. It enables people to get back into work. It can repair relationships. It can restore self-respect. It can allow people to stand tall when they have previously had to drag themselves along the ground. It is a treatment that works, and it is being cut, so people will have even less chance of being offered it than they do now. We need to find within ourselves the kind of anger and sadness at cutting down our mental health services that some have found within themselves at the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree. This tree found its home in an empty hollow and grew strong and true and beautiful. Psychotherapy can help people do that too. And what will fill the gap left when psychotherapy is cut down? The usual things people turn to when they are struggling and they feel hopeless, uncared-for and forgotten – none of them good. Suicidality; addiction; relationship and family breakdown. If we want to build a better life, for ourselves and our families and our fellow citizens, we need to do something about this. We need to fight for our cause; we need to protest in the streets and bring legal challenges and write (politely and firmly) to our MPs. We need to demand the Health Secretary fulfil his responsibilities outlined by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. We need to stand up and make it politically impossible for this government that talking therapies provision be further diminished; the NHS must offer psychotherapy treatment for anyone who needs it and who can use it. Receiving and offering psychotherapy has taught me that we all have it in us to cut down and destroy beautiful things – but we also have it in us to come together in our grief, to repair, to help each other, to do good things, to stand up when we see that something is deeply morally wrong. That is how we build a better life not only for ourselves but also for each other. Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
