It is eleven at night and there is cake in the kitchen. The pull toward it is immediate and unreasoned — no argument, no context, simply wanting. That is the id: a demand with no interest in consequence, tomorrow, or anything outside itself. Almost simultaneously there is a second voice, and it is not gentle. […]
A woman finds a new colleague almost unbearable. He is, in her description, self-promoting — he takes credit in meetings, mentions his own work unprompted, puts himself forward. Her reaction is out of all proportion to a man she has known for three weeks and who has done her no harm. The disproportion is the […]
The situation: an email to a manager goes unanswered for two days. The automatic thought: she is annoyed with me and is deciding what to do about it. The feeling: anxiety, rated seven out of ten. Two distortions are operating. Mind reading — a confident claim about someone’s internal state with no evidence. And catastrophising […]
A man is passed over for a promotion he expected. Asked about it, he says the role was never really what he wanted, that the hours would have been impossible, and that the person appointed is welcome to the headache. He is entirely convincing, including to himself. That is rationalisation, and the thing to notice […]
A client arrives for a fourth session and mentions, lightly, that she assumed the therapist had been irritated by her last week. Nothing in the previous session supports this. The therapist was, if anything, unusually warm. But the client has spent the intervening days fairly certain she had been a nuisance. The unhelpful response is […]
A composite reader finishes Attached, recognises herself as anxious and her partner, with some satisfaction, as avoidant, and goes looking for the next book. Which one she should pick depends on a question the first book does not ask: what does she want to do with the vocabulary? If the answer is to change something […]
Take a composite: a woman in her early thirties who has started avoiding motorway driving after a near-miss, and who also notices, when asked, that she has quietly dropped out of two friendships this year and cannot say why. Both facts are true. Which one she leads with decides which therapy she is likely to […]
Three composite readers, invented for this page, finish The Body Keeps the Score in the same week. The first underlined the brain-scan chapters and skimmed the treatment ones. The second did the opposite and has a notebook of things to try. The third kept thinking about the chapter on childhood and the argument that the […]
Suppose a man in his forties reports a recurring dream: he is in his childhood house, a door he does not remember leads to a flooded basement, and something is moving in the water. This is a composite built for illustration, not a case from anyone’s practice. Put it in front of a Freudian and […]
Section 146 of Beyond Good and Evil is the one most people have seen on a poster: the warning about fighting monsters and the abyss that looks back. It is two sentences long, which makes it a fair test. Kaufmann renders it with a slightly formal cadence and adds a footnote connecting it to Nietzsche’s […]