Please stop trying to save me
As Ragen Chastain noted yesterday, "The American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, and the Obesity Society released new guidelines urging doctors to be “more aggressive” in urging fat patients to lose weight."
Here are the guidelines(from Ragen's blog post linked above):
At least once year, calculate patients’ BMI, measure their waists and tell them if they are overweight or obese.Develop a weight-loss plan that includes exercise and moderate calorie-cutting.Consider recommending weight-loss surgery for patients with a BMI of 40 or for those with a BMI of 35 who al...
Source: Jung At Heart - November 19, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Interested in Writing?
If like me you are interested in writing from a depth psychological perspective, do I have a program for you!
A couple of years ago I read something that referred to a writing program for therapists and others interested in writing informed by depth psychology. Then this spring I looked for it and found it and applied to New Directions: Writing With a Psychoanalytic Edge. I had some trepidation because it is psychoanalytic and when I asked, I discovered I would be the first and so far only Jungian. But really, where else would I find a program like this on writing?
I have written since I was a kid. I have kept ...
Source: Jung At Heart - November 15, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Shadow
My daughter found this on Facebook --
This cat should be mine! (Source: Jung At Heart)
Source: Jung At Heart - October 27, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Healing?
"Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize most the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth."Jung CW, vol. 4, para. 442
People come to therapy expecting cure or healing from their problems. I don't think of therapy as healing in the usual sense. To heal means to make whole or healthy, to recover or restore and comes from the root kailo meaning whole or uninjured. In order to think of what I...
Source: Jung At Heart - October 27, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Treatment or mutilation?
I have been sitting with the following image from Dr. Sharma's Obesity Notes for a coupe of weeks now. The image is an illustration of a procedure known as sleeve gastrectomy, defined in Wikipedia as "a surgical weight-loss procedure in which the stomach is reduced to about 25% of its original size, by surgical removal of a large portion of the stomach along the greater curvature."
This is not a procedure done on a diseased organ but on a healthy functioning one. When an adult chooses this procedure in order to lose weight, I understand that, though I have grave res...
Source: Jung At Heart - October 8, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Every once in a while...
Every once in a while, I find myself pulling away from writing here and this past few weeks has been one of those times. I have been a panelist on an IAJS (International Association of Jungian Studies) seminar in which six women have explored the relationship of feminism with Jungian thought. The topic intrigues me and certainly intersects my interest in fat and body stigma. When the seminar is over and I have had time to digest the discussions, I will have more to say about this topic.
I am also teaching another Senior College course on In Treatment -- this time using the patient Laura from season 1 to explore the is...
Source: Jung At Heart - October 6, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Still Silent
Remember this?
Here we have the Silent Woman, 2013
You have seen her many times, as she is one of the stock "headless fatty" images used on television and in print for stories about the evils of obesity. In such stories fat people are almost without exception shown without heads -- because the images are used without permission of the person photographed? because anyone who looks like this would/should be ashamed to have her face show? because it allows the viewer to see her as an object and not a person?
...
Source: Jung At Heart - September 14, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
For today...
I am deep into work on a writing project. So for today, a repost about memory.
I first saw Magritte’s “La Memoir” or “Mnemosyne” on a book jacket 20 or so years ago. As is often the case with Magritte, there are a number of versions of La Memoire. She is an arresting image, Memory with a wound to her head. Is it memory bleeding out? Will memory be lost if the wound is not bandaged and the blood flow stopped? Or does she show the wound to the head that any of us has from one or another childhood insult or injury? Does the effort to re-member heal the wound and thus stanch the bleeding? Save the memory? And ...
Source: Jung At Heart - September 14, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Breaking Up Is So Very Hard...
Today I am reposting something that originally appeared here a couple of years ago as I muse about a recent abrupt ending.
Every therapy comes to an end eventually. Under ideal conditions, therapist and patient arrive together at the decision to end and they take the time necessary to fully and respectfully end the relationship. It s a ritual of goodbyes -- taking the time to look back at what has happened, what has changed. It's time to look at what has been accomplished and what has not. It is an exit interview and a farewell all in one and ideally takes up a number of sessions. When this happens there are good feel...
Source: Jung At Heart - September 2, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
A woman without a man...
Back in the early 70's I had a button with this famous feminist slogan:
I have been thinking about that a lot lately as I continue to gather the bits and pieces for my work on women's bodies and more specifically the fat woman's body.
It came to me this week that we can speak of "phallic energy" and of "phallocentric" thinking but what is the female equivalent? I turned to Google of course and the best I could find was that really there is not except for maybe "yonic" which doesn't really work. An then there is "seminal" which led me to this:
...
Source: Jung At Heart - August 25, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Silence
My first trip to Maine was in 1963 when I came on vacation with my brother and his family. I remember driving by Waterville and seeing a large sign advertising a restaurant called The Silent Woman. The sign and the restaurant are long gone. I cannot find images of the sign on Google but I did find this picture of plates used there -- the woman on the plate is the woman who was the sign.
Now in 1963, I had no notions at all about feminism but I viscerally understood what a horrible image that was -- a headless woman performing her service function with the implication...
Source: Jung At Heart - August 17, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
In the eye of the beholder
Here you see the Venus of Cupertino, one of the best birthday presents I have ever received. She is both a lovely sculpture and an iPad charger. She was designed by Scott Eaton and when I first saw pictures of her, I laughed with delight.
Another view of her --
She asks to be touched, her surface is smooth and curved. Like the Venus of Willendorf, she is beautiful.
Or look at the paintings and sculptures of Botero
Botero's women are sensual and ...
Source: Jung At Heart - August 3, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
lazy days
This morning I woke up to dense fog which had made little drops of water on the screens (Source: Jung At Heart)
Source: Jung At Heart - August 3, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Saying Everything
I am reading a lovely new book, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves. It brought to mind the reality that we ultimately behave with the therapist the way we do with most important people in our lives, with the same kinds of assumptions about the therapist and about ourselves. And we do so unquestioningly.
It is also true that it is difficult for the therapist to respond to feelings and issues that the patient does not talk about. All rumors to the contrary, we are not mind readers! This underlies the basic therapeutic dictum that the patient should say whatever comes to mind.
In one of the vignett...
Source: Jung At Heart - July 13, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
I was there
Regular readers know that I am a fan of the blog, 1boringoldman. Last week he did a post that set me to reflecting on my own career. In a long and lonely wait, he describes his experience of having his identity as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst pretty much thrown on the trash heap by the powers that be who are considered the leaders in psychiatry today.
Wednesday I was at a meeting of the curriculum committee of our Senior College and there was talk of developing a course looking at the future. One of the other members asked if I would be interested in taking an hour or so to look at mental health and I said sure...
Source: Jung At Heart - June 25, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
