What I've Been Reading

Learning from Life: Becoming a Psychoanalyst by Patrick Casement. Psychoanalyst is one of the most emotionally draining career one can chose; hurt locker version of dealing with humans. One has to muddle through mundane patients full of BS to others facing the most traumatic experience life can bring about. Thankfully, most of us don't have to go through or listen to most of that. This is a book, where tips to hone emotional intelligence for handling life's hardships can be learned sans any trauma. 

On not faking it:

It was partly because of those memorable three days that I would continue to seek chances to be with real people, for that is how I came to think of those who, unlike me, seemed to have escaped the pressures to conform to the expectations of others. 

On emotional self-reliance:

If you are going to make more of your life than you are doing at the moment, you will have to learn that you have to be responsible for your own actions. This time it is going to be you who gets you out of this problem, and maybe another time you will think twice before allowing yourself to get into a similar problem again.

On mourning:

Mourning has ultimately to do with letting go. What I have not discussed is the essential counterpart to letting go that is refinding of the of the internal relationship to the person who has died. Recovered memories can go a long way towards re-establishing a sense of support from within, which before had mostly come from the external relationship that has been lost. To a surprising extent, an internal relationship to dead parents or dead partner can change over time. Often, an angry relationship can gradually give way to a more forgiving one; a blaming relationship to a more understanding one.

On open-mindedness:

Most analysts and psychotherapists are familiar with the Bion's dictum that the analyst should start every session "without memory. desire or understanding."
The analyst's affective openness, or lack of it, is similar to the resonances in a piano. If we raise some of the dampers in a piano by silently depressing certain notes, let's say the notes of C major chord, this will leave just those notes free to resonate. If we then make a loud noise nearby, we will hear the key of C major resonating in the piano, but no other key will resonate. So, if we happen to be a C major kind of person we may tend to hear our patients in that key, or in a related major key. Likewise, if we are a C minor kind of person we may tend to hear patients in C minor, or in a similar minor key. I believe that an important function of our own analysis is to free us to the point where we can resonate to our patients across as wide an affective and experiential range as possible.

On accepting human diversity:

Any of us might be naturally round or naturally square, or any other shape. We should be able to celebrate the roundness of one person or the squareness of another. I do not think the we should treat either as "out of line". Of course, analytically, there must be a place also for being concerned about a solipsistic attachment to one's own ways of being. But I think it important to respect individuality when this does not in itself indicate pathology.

On fighting against confirmation bias:

During my psychoanalytic training I was questioning every bit of the theory, being devils advocate in my own mind, rather than accepting the theory as "given". This clinical approach certainly made it more difficult for me to find my way through the clinical maze, and yet I preferred to stay with this more problematic way of working rather than make things simpler for myself at the risk of imposing theory upon a clinical sequence.

On religion, dissonance et al.: 

It is, after all, the human dimension that divides each faith from the others, each claiming its own version of the truth to be the only one for the world. It is this human determination to grasp at a particular idea of the divine, and to claim ownership, that creates the definition that divides us. Just possibily there is something that lies entirely beyond us that will always defy definition, that cannot be grasped or owned. I have therefore come to believe that there is still a place for bowing before mystery.

On Certainity: 

It is very interesting to find that, in Sanskrit, the word for "certainity" is same as the word for "imprisonment". And the word for "non-certainity" is same as the word for "freedom". I see non-certainity, as very different from uncertainity. Non-certain is about indecision, nor is it about ignorance. Rather, we can make a positive choice to remain, for the time being, non-certain. This can help to keep us open to meaning that we have not yet arrived at. I also try to return to a position of non-certainity when I notice that I am begining to claim too much sureness in relation to others, because anyone who is too sure can quickly become someone who is sure that those who disagree must be in the wrong. 
We cannot discover what lies beyond the brittle security of certainty until we can recognize how this is failing us. Perhaps only then can we become free to explore what lies beyond the known and the familiar.