Inside Out – Exploring the Life of the Mind
Using psychoanalysis to explore current events, trends, and human behavior.
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register.
The very unstable economic surround in which we now find ourselves has unleashed an epidemic of anxiety-related complaints. Stomach upsets, irritability, sleep disturbances, hives and rashes and unpleasantly intrusive thoughts or mental imagery have become increasingly common even among the usually serene and composed. Continue reading “Terribilities”
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register.
Much has been written lately about impulsive behavior, particularly excessive spending or shopping, as its problematic consequences have become increasingly obvious as our economy continues to implode. Continue reading “I Just Can’t Live Without It”
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register.
Most of us would agree that balanced concern for self and others constitutes a measure of psychological maturity and health. While other, mostly mammalian, species share our capacity to live cooperatively and care for one another, only human beings are able to reflect consciously upon this attribute, to develop it and direct it purposefully. Continue reading “Empathy, Ethics and Morality”
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register.
Greed is not a word used frequently any more. Tending to be associated with quaintly prim eras and Victorian novels, the sooty world of Charles Dickens comes to mind with its pickpockets and severe judgments. Continue reading “Greedy for Love”
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register.
One more time…
Once again, thin veneers of public pose have cracked exposing very private lives. So common as to be utterly prosaic, another powerful politician has been caught in an extramarital tryst with a political groupie, a less dominant woman aroused by power. Continue reading “Isn’t it just a scandal…?”
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register.
“He’s gotten completely paranoid and is speaking in vernacular I don’t recognize,” my friend explained slowly and evenly, though clearly in an anxious state. “The psychiatrist put him on medication, and I don’t know why. I think he’s having a bad reaction.” Continue reading “Aging: the coda to life’s mythic themes”
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register
A screenwriter friend gave me an article discussing the salutary aspects of sadness and the ways in which our contemporary culture tends to quickly erase it or prematurely foreclose upon its gritty psychological usefulness in a quest for perennial cheery happiness. As if happiness were a concrete object one could hold instead of a transitory state of being, one of many, that links specific inner notations of experience with external ones. Continue reading “Sadness and Mourning”
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register.
We are too often saturated with regrettable accounts of public figures exposed in salacious but banal trysts. Illicit sex sells. What a thumping bore. Continue reading “Inside Out”
The other day I received a disquieting video email. A clip from a local broadcast news segment illuminated, for any petty crook who might not have already known, the proper use of an interesting adaptable key that fits easily into almost any lock. Continue reading “Tumbling the locks”
The uncanny content of dreams often makes them appear to be communications from afar. However seductive it is to imagine mysterious and distant origins, the equally fascinating explanation is that dream images are your own mental products. Continue reading “Perchance to Dream: Part II”