Teaching About the Dynamic Mind: Then and Now with Jonathan Shedler, PhD (San Francisco)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
Release Date: 11/30/2025
The Syntax of Trauma: Parasitic Language, Metaphor and Metonymy with Dana Amir, PhD (Haifa, Israel)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“A saturated state is a state in which the conceptual or emotional object has absolute value, it is already stacked or closed to new meanings and therefore cannot undergo any kind of transformation. An unsaturated state, on the other hand, is a state in which the emotional or conceptual object is in an open state in which it is still open to transformation, to new meanings, to all kinds of change. What I think is interesting and important is to understand that one of the most difficult aims of working with traumatic objects is linked to this transformation from saturated to unsaturated...
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The Unique Characteristics of Supportive Therapy with Rodrigo Sanchez Escandon (Leeds, England)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“This patient taught me a lot. The context was that I just finished my second training as a psychodynamic psychotherapist and I felt I needed to prove a lot, and I clearly arrived with the wrong agenda. It was that if I was good enough and smart enough, a clever enough just graduated psychodynamic psychotherapist, I would manage to get into why the patient is struggling so much with the realization of his mother’s cancer. That is a resistance, he didn't want to touch the topic at all. I thought that if I uncover the underlying reason why the cancer of his mother was so extremely...
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Teaching About the Dynamic Mind: Then and Now with Jonathan Shedler, PhD (San Francisco)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“We bring our patterns with us wherever we go, into every relationship, and we necessarily and inevitably bring them into the therapy relationship or the psychoanalytic relationship, because that's a relationship too. It's not a matter of choice. It simply happens. It happens everywhere. The therapist doesn't do anything to make it happen. This is the human condition. We bring our patterns. The thing that makes psychotherapy, psychotherapy, and not just another relationship, is that we do something different. What we do that's different is, instead of just repeating our same old patterns...
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On Transience and the Cycle of Time: Freud and Ecclesiastes with Paul Marcus, PhD (Great Neck, New York)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“The similarity between Freud and Kohelet [Ecclesiastes] is that both of them believe that there's no overarching totalistic system that integrates all the disparate experiences that one has. You have that, Freud says, in psychotics, and you have that in philosophers, and you have that in devout people - they look for systematicity. They try to cram everything into a framework of meaning. Both Freud and Kohelet reject that. They don't have a worldview in that way. However, in order to flourish, you do need a meaning-giving, affect-integrating and action-guiding set of...
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A Memoir of Transformation: a patient examines two analyses at two stages of life with Joan Peters, PhD (Ojai, California)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“With Kristi [second analyst], it was much, much deeper. This whole dependent and infantile part of me was coming out. This is psychoanalytic language - I was moving into a regression that was terrifying, because I had been trained by my mother, and it was my nature, and it was what had worked for me to really approach things as an ‘independent person’ ie I don't need anybody; I don't need anything; I can function whatever happens. While I explored a little bit of that with Lane [first analyst], it was only very slight, and we never talked about it. With Kristi, she would actually make...
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Psychotherapeutic Aphorisms: Reflections from a Lifetime of Listening with David Joseph, MD (Washington DC)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“Some time ago, I realized that there was such a thing for me as experiencing my patients as being friends, but they were psychoanalytic friends. It was a psychoanalytic friendship that was quite unique and unlike any other friendship. I think that's what people are talking about when they write about psychoanalytic love. It's not love like any other kind of relationship, because the psychoanalytic relationship is so unique. And I feel the same way about psychoanalytic parenting. It's like it's close to mentoring, but it's different because the structure of the relationship is different than...
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An Analyst's Reflections on Her Treatments and Her Life with Beverly Kolsky, MSW (Tupper Lake, New York)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“This really is the full motivation for my having written the memoir. I want people to know what the process is like; not only what the process is like but what the feelings are that don't really make you think of psychoanalysis as a way of changing your life. We're just living and hoping that things will change without really taking account of the fact that we could be living better lives and in a better way. I began to think of the ways of the world and the wickedness in it. There's so many things that we do to keep us going - me and my aphrodisiacs, and I think other people doing other...
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When We Feel Provoked by the Politics of Our Patients with Heribert Blass, Dr. Med. (MD) (Dusseldorf, Germany)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“I think that the comparison [between political and erotic passions] is related to the danger of transgressing boundaries from the side of the analyst. It's not totally the same, but it's because of the emotions and the danger of being too much involved as an analyst, if you don't pay attention to what is happening in ourselves with our own emotions, then it can be similar. I think both are important for the psychoanalytic process, to see it as a real relationship - there is this setting where two people in the room meet. They are real persons, but at the same time, a kind of dramatic...
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Analysts' Reflections on Their Parenting with Andy Cohen (Johannesburg)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
"I was quite protective of the parent reader while I was editing this. I feel that so many of the books out there on the shelf have a real kind of finger wagging quality to parents. They kind of tell parents what to do, what not to do, mostly what they're doing wrong. I felt like I wanted to create a resource that empathized with the parents' position, and that protected them, because this is literally the hardest thing in the world. So the protectiveness felt important to me, and it was one of the things that was really quite important that we always held the parent in mind, which is...
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From Reacting to Reflecting: "How Psychoanalysis Made Us Better Surgeons" with Mauro Vasella, MD and Flavio Vasella, MD, PhD (Zurich)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
"I have had quite some reactions to the article [on their psychoanalyses]. I was also telling Mauro and my colleagues that out of quite a number of articles I've published on maybe more pressing issues in the field of cancer research, for example, brain tumor research that I've spent quite some time with, I think it's actually the article [on psychoanalysis] that probably prompted the most reactions, at least in my personal surroundings, and the reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. So colleagues are very interested. They often ask questions about psychoanalysis, quite specifically, how...
info_outline“We bring our patterns with us wherever we go, into every relationship, and we necessarily and inevitably bring them into the therapy relationship or the psychoanalytic relationship, because that's a relationship too. It's not a matter of choice. It simply happens. It happens everywhere. The therapist doesn't do anything to make it happen. This is the human condition. We bring our patterns. The thing that makes psychotherapy, psychotherapy, and not just another relationship, is that we do something different. What we do that's different is, instead of just repeating our same old patterns with a new person, we create the conditions where it becomes possible to notice the patterns, to recognize them, to put words to them, and understand them and discuss them. Out of that experience and that understanding comes the freedom to do things differently, to not have to repeat the same patterns. I always make a point, is that true for everyone? Does everybody need therapy? Well, everybody repeats earlier characteristic patterns. For some people, those patterns allow you to live a satisfying and rewarding life, with pleasure and connection and meaning and intimacy. So if that's the case, you're still repeating early patterns, but that's what it means to be human. However, some people are living out patterns that cause distress or limitation, that get in the way of living the life they could lead, and that's what we work with in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.”
Episode Description: We begin our conversation on the importance of communicating our basic concepts in jargon-free language. Jonathan shares with us the limitations he finds in academic psychology, where analytic ideas are meaningfully misunderstood. We work our way through his paper discussing 'unconscious mental life', the 'mind in conflict', 'disavowal' (instead of 'repression') and 'psychic continuity' (instead of 'psychic determinism') to name but a few of the topics we cover. We recognize the analytic opportunity to discover the ways that we live in the childhood 'then' as opposed to the novel 'now'. Jonathan presents clinical material to demonstrate these concepts, including his own 'disavowal' as he began his analysis. We close with an appreciation of the importance of one's own affective discovery of these otherwise unconscious forces. I also note Jonathan's passion and clarity about our work.
Our Guest: Jonathan Shedler, PhD is an author, consultant, and teacher. His article The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy helped establish psychoanalytic therapy as an evidence-based treatment. He’s the author of over 100 scholarly articles, creator of the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP) for personality diagnosis and case formulation, and co-author of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Follow Jonathan at: https://jonathanshedler.substack.com/.
Recommended Readings:
Schopenhauer's Porcupines by Deborah Luepnitz offers a series of case studies that read like short stories. They will give you a "feel" for what goes on in the clinical consulting room & in the mind of the clinician.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide by Nancy McWilliams offers a readable introduction to psychodynamic concepts and thinking.
Freud and Man's Soul by Bruno Bettelheim offers real insight into the origins of psychoanalytic theory and how and why it is personally relevant to everyone.
Therapeutic Communication by Paul Wachtel offers answers to the perennial clinician question, "What do I say and how do I say it?"
Long-term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy by Glen Gabbard is the closest thing to a comprehensive course in doing psychodynamic therapy.
Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy by Alessandra Lema
That Was Then, This Is Now: An Introduction to Contemporary Psychodynamic Psychotherapy by Jonathan Shedler, PhD