As a psychologist, the deeper question i like to ask is: what in particular do you do with your own darkness? – at Brighton, England

There's something uniquely British about closing several train stations in order to prevent overcrowding. – at Brighton, England

Getting my Pre-Raphaelite fix during my last days in London. – at Lambeth, London

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a real relationship with a real person. It is a boundaried attachment experience which the therapeutic contract demands we observe with excruciating honesty. It must happen between two sentient beings that are capable of emotions and especially shame. The therapists unique responsibility is to bring a reflective function to that relationship (whether the client has that reflective function or not), and that reflective function comes from learning to lovingly tolerate shame. Nothing you can get from an AI will provide what I wrote above, although AI can help with other aspects of therapy such as frame-shifting, psychoeducation, and identifying cognitive distortions. This is why I think AI will replace (already is replacing) therapies such as CBT and many other "evidence based" therapies, but it cannot replace psychodyhamic relational psychotherapy. – at Islington, London

The hidden motivation of depressive introjection is to continue to find a way to idealize, and therefore love, the other. As is common among children who tend to blame themselves for their parents’ divorce, the depressive calculus is that it is better to believe that “this is all my fault” than to countenance the alternative, that love itself sometimes fails. In this sense, depressive introjection serves a defensive value against abandonment anxiety, and amounts to wishfully populating the world with idealized objects who can be trusted with love. – at Islington, London

Where did i get all this trickster energy, and what do I do with it? – at Kensington, London

People with history of trauma are like holes in the walls of the universe. They allow extraplanar possibilities to leak through. – at Kensington, London

Therapist challenge: In session, don't say more than you can say on one breath. – at Kensington, London

In many ways, the term “narcissism” as a label is an unfortunate one. Freud (1905) picks up use of the myth of Narcissus, who is cursed by the gods for spurning Echo and falls in love with his own reflection in a pool of water (Havelock Ellis seems to have first evoked the myth of Narcissus as a kind of diagnostic term). This mythological parallel has engendered all kinds of misunderstandings about the nature of narcissism and narcissists, especially in equating it with “self-love.” The popular conceptualizations of narcissistic personalities “in love” with themselves has led the culture further away from understanding the pathological outcomes of narcissistic personality disorder. A better metaphor comes from the Buddhist tradition of the Hungry Ghost, which are beings driven by animalistic needs that can never be sated: the more a Hungry Ghost eats, the hungrier it becomes. – at Kensington, London

If an evil leader does evil things, and you support that leader because of the leader's "policies," you have some thinking to do. – at London, England