What is therapy for?
What is therapy for?
12th December 2025
Freud's answer to this question is deliberately deflating. The aim of psychoanalytic treatment, he said,...
'Porn addiction'
Giving up the term 'porn addiction' is not just a matter of maintaining a non-judgmental stance, nor a way of avoiding the pessimism of 'you're powerless...
The Soulmate Myth
In a romantic couple, we cannot complete each other.The 'you complete me' soulmate fantasy sounds romantic, but it's thankfully impossible. Were it possible,...
Fading Desire
Why does desire become inhibited in so many long-term relationships? The conventional explanation is familiarity. But this would oddly single out sex...
Misrepresenting Bowlby
The language of 'attachment wounds' quietly pathologises what are, in fact, structural adaptations. Bowlby did not describe damaged children but resourceful...
Alcohol
Alcohol can become a libidinal investment — a source of pleasure not only in its immediate sensory aspects (the taste, the pleasant burning sensation,...
Oceanic need
Our oceanic need for love, warmth, not to be hungry or afraid or bored, to be affirmed, can transmute into the desire of a single signifier: for example....
Babies
It's tempting to think a baby enters the world of language when it learns to speak: but in fact it is within language as soon it is spoken of. So it's...
Models of sex
There is model of sex which speaks of a 'mystical union of two bodies made one.’ But as Esther Perel correctly asserts, 'sex is not something you do,...
Symptoms
If the symptom is a form of ‘inarticulate’ self-expression, then psychotherapy is about enabling the patient realize what they are already ‘know’.