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“Feeling stuck in psychotherapy is actually the place of opportunity. Stuck is where our patient has been living before she met us, or else she would not have made her first appointment. The difference is this time she and we are arriving at her place of stuck together.” - Peebles, M.J. (2022).

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“Psychotherapy grows a sense of value and contentment that we can generate internally. Our well-being becomes less dependent on external circumstances over which we have lessening control.” - Peebles, M.J. (2022).

Peebles (2022) on how change—in psychotherapy—takes time. “The quandary is that the patient arriving for her first session, the one who is intuitively seeking for her Monday-maps to change, is also likely, given our culture, expecting this change to happen fast.”

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“The place where we don’t-know, and feel stuck in the therapeutic process, is often the place that holds the nub of why our patients came to see us.” - Peebles, M.J. (2022).

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BiteSize Therapy @bitesizetherapy.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

“Discussions in classrooms could not explain what it would feel like to sit in a room with someone who wanted, and at the same time did not want, to be there with me.” - Peebles, M.J. (2022).

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Reposted by Chiara S.

The papers I vowed to read over the summer.

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I’m in full denial that summer is over, and I’ll definitely finish the pile of papers and books before summer ends.

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“CBT is not without virtue, and in a sense the problem is not with CBT itself, (…). Problems became apparent when CBT’s ambitions expanded to colonize all forms of psychological suffering.” - Dalal, F. (2018).

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- Dalal, F. (2018). CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami. Managerialism, Politics, and the Corruption of Science.

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“As things stand today, in order for something to count, it must be countable. But further, and more worryingly, in some contexts the number itself becomes more real than the thing it is apparently representing, some much so that in some instances the numbers become the reality.” 1/

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“Psychoanalytically, Bion suggests, the royal road to O is through the analyst’s suspension of memory, desire, and understanding. Since memory focuses on a past that is already gone and desire on a future that does not yet exist, one is left only with the present.” - Reiner, A. (2023).

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These unconscious lies are a mode of ‘thinking’ that is not thinking, using ‘words’ that are not really words, for they are not being used to communicate but to obstruct communication.” - Reiner, A. (2023). 2/2

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“Bion’s ideas about lies are also among his most useful ideas in understanding mental functioning. We may see patients who function at a high level but whose primary mode of mental functioning is a lie. 1/

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

“Apropos of Bion’s (1962) early idea that thinking develops ‘as a method or apparatus for dealing with thoughts’, many writers say that they don’t write to express what they think, but rather to find out what they think, as their unthought thoughts are revealed to them.” - Reiner, A. (2023).

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“To hear the selected fact requires the intuitive waking dream state of the unknowable O, which starts with our having the faith and courage to face our own ignorance, to stop thinking about what we know so we can focus on learning what we don’t know.” - Reiner, A. (2023).

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“Bion adds that if one can suffer pain one can also ‘suffer’ pleasure, so the real issue isn’t pleasure or pain but the capacity for a mind able to tolerate the reality of feeling.” - Reiner, A. (2023).

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“How does one address an absent self when the false self knows nothing of the true self or its needs?” - Reiner, A. (2023).

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“Silence has an important role in analysis, for one has to take time to feel, and think, and keep observing without preconceived ideas, in order to detect the underlying meaning of a session.” - Reiner, A. (2023).

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“Some people may be frightened of Bion’s ideas without recognising that what is actually feared is the uncertainty of a vast, unknowable human mind beyond our control.” - Reiner, A. (2023).

Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

“His [Bion’s] tendency to leave space for people to think for themselves seemed evasive to some, or purposefully confusing, and others wondered if he was psychotic.” - Reiner, A. (2023).

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“A rigid allegiance to one or the other type of analytic thinking can narrow the way one listens to the patient. Worse, it can lead to a situation where the analyst does not listen at all because his theory offers him a prepackaged and formulaic understanding.” - Akhtar, S. (2012).

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

“The relevance of silence to psychoanalysis becomes unmistakably clear when one takes into account that silence between two (or more) human beings can signify a vast range of feelings and psychic configurations.” - Akhtar, S. (2012).

Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

“Analytic listening, for Freud, was not restricted to the patient’s spoken words. It also included paying attention to his silences, and to the non-verbal cues he offered. Attention of such breadth required a relaxed submission to all the input that was coming one’s way.” - Akhtar, S. (2012).

Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Can we just skip to that part right away? That sounds fun.

Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

He seems to be a rising star in some Dutch psychoanalytic circles. Might have to put him on the list, right after finishing Bion. In 2525.

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Seriously, what is with this sudden rise of Laplanche? And why does he seem just as confusing as Bion? 🤣

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

Helping the patient is a vehicle for regulating her own sense of helplessness, and the helplessness of her own internal objects, projected onto the patient.” - Mitchell, S.A. (1993). In: Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis. 2/2

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

“The analyst’s investment in her own therapeutic powers probably inevitably always functions partly to help the analyst heal herself. 1/

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

“Being the analyst is never simple; when it seems to be, there is something wrong.” - Mitchell, S.A. (1993).

Freud (1917) on the existence of unconscious mental processes and the importance of drives: “With two of its assertions, psychoanalysis offends the whole world and draws aversion upon itself. One of these assertions offends an intellectual prejudice, the other an aesthetic-moral one.”

- Freud, S. (1917). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. 3/3

We hold before him the difficulties of the method, its length, the exertions and sacrifices which it will cost him; and, as to the result, we tell him that we make no definite promises, that the result depends on his conduct, on his understanding, on his adaptability, on his perseverance.” 2/

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

“Usually when we introduce a patient to a medical technique which is strange to him we minimize its difficulties and give him confident promises concerning the result of the treatment. When we undertake psychoanalytic treatment with a neurotic patient we proceed differently. 1/

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“Feeling your pain is what makes movement possible, while turning away from it ensures you will stay stuck in it. Perhaps this is what the psychoanalyst Bion was exploring when he wrote that good therapy should ‘increase the patient’s capacity for suffering’”. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

theguardian.com

Terrible things happen in life - but it is possible to recover from them

We go to all sorts of lengths, often unconsciously, to hide from what has hurt us. But only by attuning to pain can we hope to heal

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

“Ideally, the process of training should educate but not indoctrinate, and encourage freedom of thought within a psychoanalytic framework without espousing any one variety of psychoanalysis.” - Bateman, A.W., Holmes, J., & Allison, E. (2022).

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

“There is an inherent tension in psychoanalysis between the need for creative uncertainty, and the search for safe footholds in the uncharted terrain of the mind. The former can all too easily degenerate into muddle and mystery, the latter into dogmatism.” - Bateman, Holmes & Allison. (2022).

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

even if we agree in theory that knowing more about what shapes and motivates us might be a good thing.". - Bateman, A.W., Holmes, J., & Allison, E. (2022). Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice. 2/2

Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

"[Freud] became more and more convinced that our thinking is influenced by processes of which we are not consciously aware, that we are actively invested in remaining unaware of these processes, and that we will resist efforts to make us aware, (…) 1/

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Chiara S. @psychiara.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

“The point of his work and my own, is that our true reasons for being therapists are mostly unconscious (although capable of being brought into awareness) and have historically been ignored as a subject of scrutiny - even in personal analysis”. - Maroda, K.J. (2022). 2/2