August readings about life, love, care and loss
“Nevertheless, in the study of anyone individual we find the past as well as the present, the infant as well as the adult.” Doanld W.Winnicott
“Is not this contribution of the devoted mother unrecognized precisely because it is immense?” Doanld W.Winnicott
“…. what are those forces that spin us into these backwaters and make it difficult to get out and get back into the mainstream?” Forrest and Rick Hanson / Being Well podcast
Part 1 of today’s post is a kind of potpouri of brief references to some of my August readings by Donald W. Winnicott, Joan Didion and Susanna Kaysen. Part 2 contains a summary of a recent Being Well podcast concerning important figures in the field of psychoanalysis and psychdynamic informed theories and therapeutic practices. They are actually two posts that I have beenn writing simultaneously this last month, but because they are to some extent thematically connected, I’ve decided to post them together. I’ve also uploaded some thematically related older artwork.
Part 1
The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) by Joan Didion, [an American writer and journalist, considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism [a style of journalism developed in the 1960s-70s, which uses literary techniques and is characterized by a subjective perspective, Reporters interpolate subjective language within facts, immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them; whereas in traditional journalism, the journalist is supposed to be “invisible”], is a surgically precise examination of her grief and bereavement process following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. It is an acute, poignant and yet detached and detailed examination of a loss that devastated her. And one could say it is both candid and discreet, and I think this contributes to her succeeding in turning the very personal into something universal, a story that can concern and reflect the experience of the bereaved wherever they may find themselves. Didion narrates a year that started when her husband collapsed from a fatal heart attack while they were having dinner on December 30th, 2003, after having visited their daughter who was put on life support in an intensive care unit. There’s a haunting sentence in the book: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
Didion is called to deal with the loss of her husband and the caring of her daughter, Quintana Roo, who was in an induced comma in hospital, at the same time.There is from the beginning a parallel or rather intertwined narrative about her daughter’s unfolding drama, a case of double pneumonia that turned into septic shock. Didion could only tell her about her father’s death sixteen days later, after the doctors had managed to remove the breathing tube and reduce sedation to a point at which she could gradually wake up.
The expression in the title of the book, magical thinking, points to a childlike way of thinking, a psychological defense or mechanism of denial that Didion recruits, semi-consciously, to move through the days and weeks and months after the event. She reports several instances of her engaging with magical thinking and her inability to fully come to terms with the reality and finality of her husband’s death, hoping that he will somehow magically reappear to wear his shoes or pick up his book.
First she turns to literature, studies and medical books and articles to understand what happened, if it oculd have been avoided and what decisions to make concerning her daughter because as she explains: “In times of trouble I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare. There was the journal CS Lewis kept after the death of his wife, A Grief Observed, but not much else.” “Grief comes in waves,” she writes, “paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves,”and elsewhere she turns to Freud and Melanie Klein’s writings about grief and mourning.
Eventually, her defenses crumble as she comes to grips with the abyss of grief and the reality of her husband’s sudden departure. She’s easily distracted and she feels fragile, disoriented. She notices a decrease in her cognitive capacities. She writes: “attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.” On grief she writes: “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
The second book I read by Joan Didion was Notes to John (2025), consisting of 46, I think, largely unedited diary entries.The book was put together after her death. In 1999 Didion began therapy sessions because her family “had had a few rough years.” Didion described these sessions in a journal she had created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Over some length of time she recorded conversations she had with psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon. It is a very intimate account. The sessions focused on her adopted daughter’s serious alcoholism and its effect on her work and decision making, Didion’s constant worrying, motherhood, individuation, over-protectiveness, guilt, adoption and the complexities of her relationship with her daughter. Later they discussed Didion’s own work and the difficulty she had in sustaining it amidst her worries, her own childhood, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe, the question of her legacy. They also discussed ways of responding and supporting her daughter’s participation in AA groups when Didion herself disapproved of them intellectually, and whether to support her daughter financially, suicide risk, financial decisions, and more.
While I was reading the book I kept wondering whether this packaging of her notes and diary pages into a book after her death without her ever having expressed any desire for them to be published, was wise or ethical. I also wondered if it was just my view or whether others or book critics had similar notions. So, I looked at some reviews on the Net, and yes, there were people who thought that maybe it was a misguided decision to publish these very intimate and personal notes. The fact that she was a writer and that she had written these pages did not instantly mean that they were meant for publishing. These diary entries could have been a way for Didion to further process what took place during the analysis, a way of also involving her husband in the process, or simply a recording of a period in her life, perhaps for use in future books. Also, Didion had written The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, both very personal books, about her husband and daughter’s deaths, so the publishing of the diary pages did not seem necessary. Some critics referred to a crude fascination in seeing the material below or behind the finished books, but I think it’s still an invasion of Didion and her family’s privacy after her death.
The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001), written by Susanna Kaysen, is a memoir-novel, one could say. Defining it as a novel allows the writer more freedom to tell a personal story while shaping her narrative the way she needs. The title is an artistic reference to the body organ she writes about. Kaysen writes unflinchingly about a gynaecologically related health condition and her long struggle for answers and relief from pain from the physicians and the health providers she visits when there seems to be no satisfactory answer or agreement among them about neither the causes nor the treatment.
As we might guess when it comes to health, things can be complex, and a variety of causes, some more obvious and others less apparent, can contribute to a singular issue or a condition can be linked to other symptoms or difficulties. Moreover, it is often difficult to separate physical conditions and symptoms from psychology, early trauma or current relationships. Kaysen writes: “Don’t separate the mind from the body….. Don’t separate even character—you can’t. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously. Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It’s up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.”
She gradually comes to some understanding about certain things about herself, others and broader contexts. She notices a more forceful and non empathic aspect of her boyfriend, she is befriended by a younger man, who sends her conflicting messages, she remembers her mother, who is deceased. She writes: “Watching my mother die had made me realize that it’s important to have a doctor you like. She did. He couldn’t stop her from dying, but he didn’t leave her to die by herself.” One of the health care professionals reminds her of certain aspects of her childhood toilet training. During a meal with friends, who knew her as a child, and while she was recounting a particularly unpleasant incident, when her high school principal had accused her of going barefoot and become furious about it, when in fact she’d been wearing beige shoes, and under the influence of a medication she had been given, she began to dissociate and then have trouble remembering words. Visits to friends, wit and humor, and fresh realizations, get her through this odyssey of uncertainty, pain, frquent visits to doctors and experimentation with a variety of treatments, which cause her more problems than relief.
I also read The Child, the Family, and the Outside World by Donald W.Winnicott (1896-1971), a pioneering and influential paediatrician and psychoanalyst. Much of the book is based on talks broadcast by the BBC at various times and was first published in 1964. Because it’s for mothers, parents and caregivers, of babies and young children, and the general public, the language is very accessible. It provides clear, practical and empathic guidance, and the tone is non-judgmental and humane, respecting mothers’ intuitions about child-rearing. In the introduction he writes: “To begin with, you will be relieved to know that I am not going to be telling you what to do. I am a man, and so I can never really know what it is like to see wrapped up over there in the cot a bit of my own self, a bit of me living an independent life, yet at the same time dependent and gradually becoming a person. Only a woman can experience this….”
Winnicott draws on his long experience, as both a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, to take us on a journey from infancy to independence, creating a supportive frame for mothers and parents to navigate the challenges of child care and parenting. I should add though that all books and works exist inside a historical context, and therefore, books written over sixty years ago need to be read with this in mind, in order to both better understand the material, and also, to glean what is relevant and of value. Having said this, and although the book was first published in the 60s, there is a lot of wisdom in its pages and its insights and information remain highly relevant and continue to influence the understanding of child psychology and parenting today.
The book covers a variety of themes concerning child development, parenting and the dynamic interaction between family and environment. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of development: feeding, breast feeding, food, the digestive process, weaning and the necessity to view the baby as a person from the start. He notes: “The story of a human being does not start at five years or two, or at six months, but starts at birth – and before birth if you like; and each baby is from the start a person, and needs to be known by someone. No one can get to know a baby as well as the baby’s own mother can.” He clarifies that the tendency towards life and growth is something inherent in the baby, and discusses the innate morality of the baby and how far parents should try to impose their standards and beliefs on the growing child, instincts and normal difficulties, young children and their relationships with father and other people, the need for support for parents, siblings, the only child, twins, shyness, natural aggression, distress, anger, jealousy and independence. Winnicott recognises that living and human development has its inherent difficulties. He writes: “Even the most kindly, understanding background of home-life cannot alter the fact that ordinary human development is hard, and indeed a perfectly adaptive home would be difficult to endure, because there would be no relief through justified anger.”
He stresses the great significance and value of play in a child’s development and the child’s experiments for independence. He writes: “Whereas it is easy to see that children play for pleasure, it is much more difficult for people to see that children play to master anxiety or to master ideas and impulses that lead to anxiety if they are not in control. Anxiety is always a factor in a child’s play, and often it is a major factor…..For in so far as children only play for pleasure they can be asked to give it up, whereas, in so far as play deals with anxiety, we cannot keep children from it without causing distress, actual anxiety, or new defences against anxiety.”
Finally, in the third part, The Outside World, there is an exploration of the the needs of the under-five, the role of the nursery school, which he writes,“is not to be a substitute for an absent mother, but to supplement and extend the role which in the child’s earliest years the mother alone plays,” parents and teachers and the issue of influencing and being influenced, sex education in school, visiting children in hospital, juvenile delinquency, the role of dreaming in a child’s maturation, and aggression, which, Winnicott says has two meaning, “…it is directly or indirectly a reaction to frustration.,,,,& ,,,, it is one of the two main sources of an individual’s energy.”
Two extracts from the book:
“It is vitally important that we should get to understand the part played by those who care for the infant, so that we can protect the young mother from whatever tends to get between herself and her child. If she is without understanding of the thing she does so well she is without means to defend her position, and only too easily she spoils her job by trying to do what she is told, or what her own mother did, or what the books say. Fathers come into this, not only by the fact that they can be good mothers for limited periods of time, but also because they can help to protect the mother and baby from whatever tends to interfere with the bond between them, which is the essence and very nature of child care.”
“As to the theory that training baby must start as early as possible, the truth is that training is out of place until the infant has accepted the world outside himself and come to terms with it. And the foundation of this acceptance of external reality is the first brief period in which a mother naturally follows the desires of her infant………. This word ‘training’ always seems to me to be something that belongs to the care of dogs. Dogs do need to be trained. I suppose we can learn something from dogs, in that if you know your own mind your dog is happier than if you do not; and children, too, like you to have your own ideas about things. But a dog doesn’t have to grow up eventually into a human being, so when we come to your baby we have to start again, and the best thing is to see how far we can leave out the word ‘training’ altogether. There’s room for the idea that the sense of good and bad, like much else, comes naturally to each infant and child provided certain conditions of environmental care can be taken for granted. But it is a complex matter, this process of development from impulsiveness and claiming to control everyone and everything, to an ability to conform. I cannot tell you how complex it is. Such development takes time. Only if you feel it is worth while will you allow opportunity for what has to happen……..In the process of integration, impulses to attack and destroy, and impulses to give and share are related, one lessening the effect of the other. Coercive training fails to make use of this child’s integrative process. What I am describing here is in fact the gradual build-up in the child of a capacity to feel a sense of responsibility……”
There’s a little more on Winnicott’s ideas and work in the text below:
Part 2
I also listened to two Being Well podcasts this month, worth listening to for those interested in the material. One could say it’s a critical introduction to leading figures of the psychoanalytical world or people in the field of psychotherapy that were influenced by psychoanalytical ideas. Forrest and Rick Hanson present key ideas, the movemnt of these ideas through time, and how we can understand the idea of psychodynamics. Forrest expalins that psychodynamics is just the notion that we’re not a fixed system and that there are different kinds of often conflicting forces at play inside of us. Consequently, the mind is not always in agreement with itself. By going through some kind of psychoanalytic process we’re practically trying make sense of what’s happening in the deeper layers of the mind. By bringing this material into conscious awareness, we can increase our understanding of our decisions, behaviours, and also better our life. They also provide some critical commentary, and discuss the practical takeaways and what we can apply to our lives.
I will focus on Part 2 (Watch at: https://rickhanson.com/being-well-podcast-9-lessons-from-the-great-minds-of-psychoanalysis/)
In this second part Forrest and Rick begin their discussion by loosely discerning “three schools”, one could say: a) the ego school; b) the more relational and developmental school and c) the depth and meaning school.
The first school of thought involves Alfred Adler, Anna Freud and Erik Erikson’s work and theories. Forrest and Rick summarize their work by asking the questions explored or answered in their work: How do we develop this thing that we call ego strength? How do we reinforce the ego’s ability to make good choices, to do the things that bring us closer to what we want to accomplish in life and overcome different kinds of challenges?
In brief, the first school was founded when Alfred Adler broke away from Freud at the beginning of the 20th century, mainly due to Freud’s focus on sexual drives and Adler’s view of Freud’s ideas as “a grim approach to psychology.” About Frued’s grim view of things Rick comments: “Freud’s description of the individual almost in isolation as a kind of victim or passenger of these primal instinctual processes slamming into societal and Victorian era rules….” They note that in Adler’s work there’s no Oedipus complex, instead it is a more growth-oriented, future-focused, aspirational model of development than what we see in more classic psychoanalysis with Freud, and also that Adler promoted a more egalitarian power dynamic, “much flatter power dynamic,” between the analyst and the client.
Adler also located the individual in a social context and explored people’s adaptations to their social context, as we all start by being little bodies that have to manage a sense of inferiority, in a complicated world full of big, powerful adults. The common notion of the inferiority complex comes from Adler, who was interested in how we gradually develop a healthy sense of worth and how we manage to build up our own sense of identity as a “me” in a complex relational world. Rick says that there is within us an important need as social primates to contribute to the world, to contribute to others, to feel of value, and for our contributions to not be thwarted, and that “Adler was one of the first people to really normalize that longing to contribute, to be of worth, to matter, including in terms of the social contextualizing of mattering.” However he cautions us “to be aware of doomed quests in which we’re trying to grow corn in the Sahara,” maybe repeating a pattern from childhood. So, we need a suitable and repsonsive environment.
Anna Freud, who, as Forrest notes, has probably contributed more to the actual practice of therapy as we know it today than her father, particularly in terms of her work on defense mechanisms. Her basic insight was that our ego, stuck between the id and the superego, tries to overcome this position by adopting a variety of defense strategies to protect itself from painful thoughts and feelings. Anna Freud was in particular interested in how the ego operates in children and in how their ego responded when under attack in the moment. Some defenses are repression, denial, projection, rationalization, sublimation, which involves the channeling of feared material, unwanted impulses and emotions, or trauma material into one’s work, art or other activities that can contribute to the world. Defenses are normal, useful and protective, and they help us cope in life, especially early on; however they can be both adaptive and maladaptive.That is why we need to learn and be able to function from a different place as we get older. Even awareness of how and when we fall back on them can be freeing. As Forrest (I think) says, as we increase our tolerance of the dreaded experience and we increase our capacity to express ourself fully, we are able to gradually push back the bars on the invisible cage.
The third person of the “ego focused school” they talk about is Erik Erikson (1902-1994). Development and questions of identity were central issues in his personal life and work, and he is known for his stages of development. On the podcast it is said that Erikson used Freud’s idea of internal conflict and expanded this out into a socially embedded and contextual developmental framework. Erikson suggested that the ego needs to adapt to face different kinds of real-world challenges, which he broke down into eight stages. He framed each stage “around a core conflict that we need to face, and we are either able to overcome it or we’re not.” If we don’t negotiate each developmental stage successfully, we carry it with us into the next phase of our life. However, we can if we choose to or have the opportunity, through therapy or other practices, “try to revisit that conflict in effective ways.” Rick adds that the stage series in Erikson is grounded in new science on neuroplasticity, and that there is an opportunity for all of us to keep growing and learning throughout our entire lifespan.
These stages according to Erikson were: Trust versus Mistrust, in infancy; Autonomy versus Shame or Doubt when one is a toddler; Initiative versus Guilt, basically developed from three to five; Industry versus Inferiority, developed mostly from six to eleven; Identity versus Role Confusion, tasks that to some extent need to be negotiated from the age of 12 to 18; Intimacy versus Isolation during adulthood (18 to 40); Generativity versus Stagnation, during middle age (40 to 65); and finally, Integrity versus Despair, during the final years of our life. Rick explains that what we’re talking about during this phase of life is acquiring a sense of wholeness, acceptance, inclusion, reflection and inner peace.
Others. like Daniel Levinson, built on Erikson’s ideas, and on notions of inevitable periods of construction, destruction and reconstruction during our life. Rick clarifies: “where you are constructing a life structure of some kind, which then sometimes kind of falls apart as it gets reorganized, not so much destroyed, but reorganized into the next stage. So, they’re normal rhythms, and there’s a wisdom in accepting the rhythms.” It is good to bear in mind that there is overlap between stages and drawing strict arbitrary lines between stages can be a bit problematic and the takeaways, Rick notes, are that we never stop growing and changing.
Concerning the “relational and developmental school,” which mostly focused on primary caregiver relationships, and how early experiences get played out in different ways throughout our life, Forrest and Rick focus on Klein, Winnicott and Kohut.
Melanie Klein (1882-1960) was one of the most influential psychologists and her most important contribution was object relations theory, which suggests we internalize our mother, father, and people we are in relationship with as objects. Forrest and Rick provide examples to explain the basic idea of this theory: “we develop knowledge of the world in a frame, in which there is a me over here and then everything else over there…” The over there object, they explain, could be the ache in my tummy, or the over there could be the cup of milk, or my father, or children at school. We understand ourself in part due to our relationship with the external object, whether it is a group of people or person or thing. They become the foundation of how we understand relationships, love, loss, trust, and so on. We then generalize these learned object relations patterns, with associated feelings, desires, scripts, expectations, and behavior patterns, and we transfer old experiences into our current settings.
Klein’s theory suggests that we internalize the people that we depend on as objects, and over time, if we have had a healthy relationship with our mother or / and primary caregivers we internalize ourselves as also being something that we can depend on. Forrest says that the idea is that all babies by nature are quite “paranoid and schizoidal.” Practically, this means that if the infant is hungry and the mom can’t or doesn’t respond, anger is directed at that bad object. Over time if things go okay, infants realize that “their mom is in fact, both the good breast and the bad breast at the same time. The caregiver that they love and the one that has kind of made them suffer in their mind, at least, is actually the same person. And this then moves the child into the depressive position. So, they experience grief and mixed feelings and complexity about the fact that their mom is both of these individuals…” This is a healthy part of development, and if the mother responds effectively to the distressed infant and the rupture is repaired, then this positive outcome is internalized, and this enables the child to gradually hold conflicitng or different things in their mind.
However, what happens when things weren’t good enough? Various learnt defense mechanisms like splitting, for instance, develop, which can cause problems in adulthood, and features like idealization and devaluation can be present in a relationship or an inability to accept that people contain multitudes. They conclude with questions that can help us in adulthood to discern our internalized objects and modes of relating: What are we carrying around? What are those relationships like for us? Forrest notes that even awareness of the presence of the objects that we’ve internalized and are functioning as a kind of script for our behavior can be so useful and freeing. Klein was also one of the early developers of play therapy believing that for children it was a more effective way than free association to access their unconscious material.
Donald W. Winnicott paediatrician and a psychoanalyst (1896 – 1971), referred to above, focused on the ideas of good enough parenting, a holding environment and the notion a true self that exists inside of all of us. We become that true self through early relationships that support emotional authenticity, and value what is real in us. Forrest asks: “How do we develop authenticity, and how is authenticity developed in a child? How do they feel safe enough to be authentic? And what are the kinds of conditions that support that”
Winnicott believed that infants and children do not need perfect but good enough parenting, a responsive caregiver, who pays attention to the baby’s needs and is not fearful or impatient with the infant’s distress or aggression. His notion of a holding environment, as described in the podcast, is “both literal holding and kind of metaphorical, emotional, psychological holding where the caregiver could survive the child’s distress…” In the book mentioned above Winnicott allows us to see what a holding environment could look like.
Heinz Kohut (1913 – 1981) moved his focus from Freud’s internal drive states to a more relational stance that focused on ideas of cohesion and mirroring. Rick mentions that Kohut explored how we express our subjective sense of self and how we feel felt by other people in different relationships. And one way that we do that is through mirroring, which is how parents and others respond to us, a smile, a nod, an encouraging gesture, feeling like we are valued and like our inner life is seen and affirmed by them. Healthy self-esteem requires supportive relationships. The question then that arises is whether these needs were met for a person when they were very young or did they feel more or less invisible, fearful even. Forrest says that “In the sense that we to a great extent become ourselves through our relationships, when we haven’t been supported adequately, we might need to “reckon with our developmental history a little bit…”
The third person discussed in this school of thought on the podcast is Otto Kernberg, who focused on pathological narcissism and borderline conditions and pointed to the combination of unmet normal narcissistic needs, which when unmet in our earlier years, then “typically, in adulthood people either suppress and deny those normal narcissistic needs for mirroring, validation, joining, and cherishing and prizing,” or they develop a fragile ego and become angry and pathological narcissistic, constantly looking for a way to fill themselves up from the outside. In the case that the process described above in relation to Klein’s theory didn’t go so well, some people will deal with this, as Rick puts it, by “looking to others to get plugged in to their frame, their motherboard, to complete their sense of healthy person-ness, and that leads to often treating others as objects that are just plugins. And you know kind of what it feels like when you realize that you’re just sort of a plugin module into someone’s motherboard to enable them to maintain some kind of emotional equilibrium……”
Rick and Forrest move on to other important figues, who took the psychoanalytic view of the layered and complicated mind in a very different direction. One of the people discussed is Wilhelm Reich (1897 – 1957). Many of us have read something by him. Forrest refers to The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933, one of the most political pieces of writing in the history of psychology. Reich, to focus on the positive part of his work, explored how trauma and repressed emotions can have a physical toll on our body, and the idea of character armor, which are the defenses that we developed to protect ourselves, the ways of holding ourselves or modes of posture. By investigating these, we can learn something about our deeper psychology. There is mention on the podcast of Antonio Damasio’s notions of somatic markers, the subtle ways in which musculoskeletal processes are adjuncts to our overall emotional memory systems, and how a lot of today’s trauma-informed work builds on his ideas that the residues of experiences are not purely psychological or purely mental, but have a physical cost to us.
Towards the end they briefly move through Jung and the neo Jungians and their ideas about fundamental archetypes and the collective unconscious, which Jung used to explain why we “share various themes in our psychology, even if two groups of people have never met each other.” These people focus on the symbolic mind of dreams, fantasies and myths, are less focused on pathology or symptoms, and are more interested in existential goals. Jung believed that “The archetypes are the images of the instincts,” and Rick expands on this saying that “….something deep within our biology is imagined, like as a functional process in the psyche as it gradually bubbles into awareness through imagery of one kind or another that can often take forms.And to realize, that you are that jungle…. It’s too big to control. You can’t control the jungle. Maybe you can hack out a tiny clearing, sit in it next to your campfire … there’s this kind of underlying current of different forms of art will sort of show us the way or connect us to something….. more meaningful for ourselves.”
They refer to one of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a feminist analyst, who reframed myths and fairy tales. In her books she analyses well known fairy tales through feminist lens.They also briefly mention Marie-Louise von Franz’s work on fairy tales. Finally, they discuss James Hillman (1926 – 2011), who believed that we need not try to recover or better ourselves, but that the psyche expresses itself through our dreams, desires, and even our “pathologies.” His relationship with depression, for instance, was unlike the typical approaches to psychology, which consider it a negative thing. Hillman framed depression as a rational response to a world that includes a lot of pain and ugliness, and therefore, by exploring what the depression, for instance, might be trying to say could help a person understand parts of their self, and also depathologizes the experience.
Finally, they discuss the basic ideas of Irvin Yalom’s existential psychotherapy. Yalom is still alive, aged 94, and was a professor at Standford and a psychotherapist. He has also written many books. Many of his books have been translated into Greek, where, I believe, he enjoys a large readership. Rick and Forrest suggest that his core insight is that a lot of our distress in life comes from trauma, relational wounds, but also from a kind of confrontation with existential facts of life, particularly death, freedom, isolation, and the need for each one of us to construct their own meaning. These deeper existential fears shape the unconscious mind, and to some degree or other, we all have to grapple with the existential anxiety that comes up in life. This knowledge of our mortality can give rise to different defenses like obsessions and compulsions, anxiety or depression, or other activites and behaviours that we might employ to stave off our often unacknowledged fears.
