Why the “perfect other” is never a person, and never love. Back in 2014 I wrote a piece entitled Porn addiction: the crack cocaine of sex addiction. I stand by what I wrote. Pornography, particularly in its modern forms, can hijack arousal, hollow out desire, and train the mind towards stimulation without relationship. But we…
If narcissism has become the cultural diagnosis of our time, psychotherapy remains one of the few places where the concept can be approached without hysteria. In popular culture, narcissism is often treated as a category of person, the narcissist, as though a character style were identical with the whole human being. In clinical work, this…
Narcissism has become a cultural obsession. It is discussed as though it were a new epidemic, a modern pathology spreading through society like a virus. The phrase “age of narcissism” is now so common that it is rarely questioned. Yet when we look closely, a more accurate formulation emerges. It is not that narcissism is…
Narcissism is one of those clinical terms that has escaped the consulting room and taken on a life of its own. Like many borrowed psychological ideas, it has been flattened. In popular culture, narcissism is routinely used as a moral verdict, a convenient label for a certain kind of person who is selfish, callous, entitled,…
Masochism is perhaps one of the most misunderstood clinical structures in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It has been removed from the DSM for largely political reasons and has thus disappeared from the psychological lexicon. It is a term that is conflated with victimhood, reactivity, or submission; however, its true meaning as a personality style is more complex….
Object relations theory describes the development, structure and functioning of the human psyche. Although evolved from ideas earlier in the 1900’s, it came to fruition with British psychoanalytic thinking and practice in the 1940s and 50s. Its most notable proponent was Child Psychotherapist Melanie Klein, but further developed by others such as Ronald Fairbairn, Donald…