About Therapy
If you find the idea of therapy to be weird and confusing, one place to start is Deborah Lupenitz’s book Schopenhauer’s Porcupines. She writes about her work as a therapist, and the vignettes paint a rich picture of what individual therapy can look like.
I also believe very much in the power of group therapy, but many people are skeptical of group because they have a hard time imagining what it would be like. The series Group (on YouTube, search “Group series;” there are 7 episodes) is available free and is probably the best mix of “accurate” and “interesting” I’ve ever seen. The series is based on a novel, but it was improvised by trained actors. It’s a little spiced up for dramatic purposes, but it poignantly captures how a therapy group can become a place to learn about oneself and about relationships.
A great docu-series is the eponymously named Couples Therapy (available on Amazon). This follows real couples in therapy, and somehow the producers resisted the temptation of glitzing up the reality TV element.
If you’re new to therapy, it can sometimes be confusing to figure out how to sort through the different kinds of programs and resources. It’s best to let a professional help you, and that alone— asking, “Hey I’ve got my hands full with some troubles! Can you help me figure out what I should be doing?”— is worth scheduling an appointment with a provider.
In the world of mental health, people use the phrase “levels of care” to describe different amounts of intervention and treatment. For example, if you needed to be in a locked in-patient unit, that’s considered “being hospitalized” and is the “highest” level of care. My private practice (where people come to see me typically once a week) is considered “outpatient” and is generally considered a “low” level of care. It’s not uncommon for people to move “up” or “down” in terms of levels of care as they work through different problems. Whether the level is “high” or “low” has no meaning in terms of how valuable it is or the kinds of challenges it will present you. It’s more about how much intensive intervention do you need in order to be stable. Again, it’s important to let a professional help you decide what level of care is best for you. If you want to learn more terminology used in discussing “levels of care,” you can check out this website from the Mass Behavioral Health Partnership: https://www.mabhaccess.com
About Psychodynamic Therapy
I approach my clinical work from a psychodynamic perspective, which draws on many different disciplines like medicine, neuroscience, anthropology, literature, and more. Freud was originally a neurologist, and like all good 19th century scientists, his method was to watch closely and make detailed observations. While his colleagues were focusing on the world around them, he trained his attention on the human mind, and he listened very carefully to what his patients said. He came up with theories to explain why his patients struggled and then why they got better. Some of his ideas sound strange from a contemporary perspective; after all, his explanations were products of his time— just like our theories are products of our time.
The reason why people still look back at Freud’s work is because his careful observations led to some great ideas. That’s what the psychodynamic tradition tries to carry on today, even as we revise the theories that explain our observations. There are many foundational psychodynamic concepts that have become so commonplace that we have collectively forgotten that they were once radical ideas. For example: the idea of the unconscious; or, that people “defend” themselves psychologically from painful experiences; that childhood has a lifelong impact on human development; that psychological trauma impacts the body and the mind; or even that our early relationships set the template for relationships in later life. Now, these are considered more as common sense, and many are well documented by empirical science. Some of the books in this section offer an introduction to psychodynamic thinking as well as other books that showcase research that builds on these ideas.
Some people have a hard time accepting the idea of the unconscious and the outsized role it plays in our lives. After all, it can seem kinda weird to think about everything going on in your head that’s still outside of your awareness. Two reader-friendly books about how the mind “goes on automatic” are Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow These aren’t books about psychodynamic thinking, per se, but they include some of the evidence we have about unconscious perception and information processing.
If you want to dive deep and read the theory for yourself, a good introduction is Freud and Beyond by Stephen Mitchell and Margaret Black. Psychodynamic writing can sometimes be painfully obtuse, but one of the few writers whose depth of insight is matched by clarity is Nancy McWilliams. Again, this is an academic text, but her book Psychoanalytic Case Formulation is an incredible resource.