What Is the Unconscious

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Some problems yield to thinking, but existential situations do not.

Being logically right and being stuck are compatible.

Notice what opens or closes in you through your felt sense.

Identifying details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.

He could explain it in under five minutes. Several years in a serious professional role, the high salary, the first home he was saving toward, the market being what it is, and the reasonable thing being what the reasonable thing so obviously was. He had told this story to his partner, family, friends, and to himself in the middle of the night. Every listener agreed with him, because they were also being reasonable.

He told it to me the same way each week, in the manner of a man laying out evidence. Then, later, he would often come apart in session. He could not get himself out of bed on work mornings, or his body would lock before the drive to the office, engine running, hands on the wheel, going nowhere. A heaviness would come over him on ordinary Tuesdays and relentlessly consume him.

The ego is not the only voice

Depth psychology begins with a claim that makes most people raised in modern times uncomfortable: The part of us doing the talking is not the whole of us.

The ego is our maker of coherence; it takes the raw weather of a life and shapes it into something a person can live inside, and coherence is how the unbearable becomes survivable. But psyche is older and wider than the story, and it is under no obligation to agree with your rational mind.

Psyche means soul. Psychotherapy, read plainly, is a tending of the soul, named long before we reduced it to the management of symptoms. Soul here belongs........

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