A Bulimia Device
When I was doing research for my book, I ran across a report of a weight loss device that seemed absurd at the time — the AspireAssist. At that time, the inventor of the Segway was applying for approval for a device he calls AspireAssist which is medical device with a tube which is surgically implanted in the stomach and is attached to a skin-port which is equipped with a valve which is attached to a battery operated pump which sucks a portion of your stomach contents out of your gut and mechanically vomits them into your toilet. About 30% of what has been eaten is removed. In short it is medically induced bulimia. In ...
Source: Jung At Heart - June 19, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Is it ethical?
Someone I know is studying end of life care. She made me familiar with what is called “the surprise question” — a question put to a patient’s medical team asking if they would be surprised if the patient were dead in 6 months or a year. The answer can help guide treatment to meet the realistic expectations for the patient’s outcome. Because modern medicine is oriented toward treatment and more treatment until no further options remain, all too infrequently patients with little hope of recovery are submitted to considerable painful and experience a lot of suffering because of the notion that the fight must go on. ...
Source: Jung At Heart - June 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Why I have not been posting
The tulips there are in a vase next to where I am sitting. When e first moved into this house 11 years ago, there were a few tulips at the bottom of a yard - red ones and yellow ones. I have no idea when they were planted. I assume years before we moved here. We’ve never done anything with them. Some years there would be more flowers than others. Then came this year. The wind seems to have been blowing seeds from those few tulips around where they were planted. It takes several years for tulips grown from seed to produce flowers and this seems to be the year for ours. Red ones, yellow ones, and a pretty yellow and red-or...
Source: Jung At Heart - May 16, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
When we make mistakes
Eventually every therapist will make a mistake -- forget something important, be late, forget to return a call -- something. It will happen because it must, because we are human and part of the therapeutic process is learning to accept both one's own and the other's humanness. Some patients will stubbornly hold on to demands for perfection and not forgive even the most minor slips. As the therapist, I have to be willing to stay with it and apologize for the mistake and listen to the patient's hurt and anger while also trying to help them see that life has gone on, that the relationship is not over and that there is room fo...
Source: Jung At Heart - March 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
What we do
I found myself getting irritated a couple of times recently about casually dismissive remarks I have heard about therapy and therapists. That therapy is just good listening and if friends could learn good listening skills, then therapy wouldn't be necessary. That and the usual fantasy about therapists getting rich off people's suffering.
Listening empathically can and does provide catharsis and catharsis is an element of therapy. But it is only an element, not the whole thing.
The inferior and even the worthless belongs to me as my shadow and give me substance and mass. How can I be substant...
Source: Jung At Heart - March 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Jung At Heart Has A Birthday.
Jung At Heart is now 9 years old! I never thought when I first started posting in February of 2007 that nine years later I would still be doing this, albeit less often than in the early years. But here I am. I still have things I want to say and I am working on an exciting new project too.
Alert readers will notice I have made some changes here. Three years ago, I deactivated my other blog, TheFatChronicles, because I wanted to integrate that kind of content into this blog as symbolic of embracing those issues as part of who and what I am. In this three years I have worked on and now finished the manuscript for what...
Source: Jung At Heart - February 29, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Everything Old is New Again
Eight years ago during the campaign season, i took a look at some of the issues around sexism that were coming to the fore and I related some of it to the negative other complex, because after all, I am a Jungian and I like to look at how archetypal themes and issues wind heir way through our lives. Here we are again with the same issues, updated to a new intensity so it seems worthwhile to revisit them. Today a dive into Jungian theory and the mother complex.
The mother complex is a potentially active component of everyone's psyche, informed first of all by experience of the personal mother, then by significant conta...
Source: Jung At Heart - February 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
On Being a Patient
Internationalpsychoanalysis.net posted the link to this video last week. Do take a look as it is one of the best looks at what it is to be a patient in depth psychotherapy. (Source: Jung At Heart)
Source: Jung At Heart - January 25, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Millennials and psychotherapy
A Tweet about this article caught my eye before the holidays: Millennials and the false allure of online psychotherapy. Just the term “online psychotherapy” can mean anything from Skype or FaceTime sessions to email. Not all therapists are comfortable with or accepting of therapy except when done face to face in the consulting room. So I am used to seeing articles here and there decrying therapy which occurs via telephone or Skype. And that is what I expected to read about in this article. To a degree, that is indeed what I found.
After describing factors that seem to make millennials “the most stressed out gro...
Source: Jung At Heart - January 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Her Best Body
The new year always brings a rush of ads, news pieces, magazine articles on dieting, the assumption being that we will have been gluttonous over the holidays and now feel shame which will motivate us to correct the error of our ways — or should that be “weighs”? This year, of course is no exception.
In 2015 Oprah Winfrey bought 10% of Weight Watchers for $40 million. And because she likely expects her investment to yield healthy returns, it lends additional weight to her perennial quest to find a body she can love.
So Oprah opens 2016 with a long commercial about what she claims all fat women feel — tha...
Source: Jung At Heart - January 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Moving forward
Here we are, the last day f the year and my good intentions for regular posts have fallen by the wayside yet again. Clearly these days I write as something moves me and not on a schedule. So it seems wisest to commit myself to paying attention and when something catches my interest, build on that and post. Let’s see how that works. So here is to 2016 and a wish that whatever faithful followers among you will find food for thought in the year ahead.
Coming up this week, several posts about fat, fat shaming, and about psychotherapy. Happy New Year! (Source: Jung At Heart)
Source: Jung At Heart - December 31, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Trauma in every day life
As any of you who have been following me know, I have been working on and am in the process of finishing a book about fat. Rooted in analytical psychology, in it I challenge the notion that it is the fat patient who must be changed to fit into a thin world. I also look at fat and our culture, about the fat complex our culture is gripped by and how to respond to it. It grows out of my life as a fat woman, my work as a Jungian psychotherapist, and my experience as a patient in analysis.
Almost every approach to working with the fat patient in psychotherapy involves somewhere the notion that problems she brings will imp...
Source: Jung At Heart - October 24, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
A funny thing happened...
I was about to write a new post last weekend when I got lost in yet another revision of my book manuscript — just how do other writers decide they are finally finished and satisfied with what they have done anyway? And then the next day, a request that I make some changes go the chapter I have submitted for a book on Jung and feminism. The next thing I knew the week was gone.
It’s like that these days. I blink, turn around and poof! another week, another month, another year gone so quickly. Remember when you were 5 or 10 and summer lasted forever? Or Sundays when you were in college - Sunday the day that could be ...
Source: Jung At Heart - October 11, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
The Haunting Image
Since July I have been haunted by this image:
This computer generated image of a little girl whose body washed up on the shore of Boston Harbor has been on the news again and again as the search for her identity went on. We knew she was a toddler, a beautiful little girl. Surely someone missed her, someone knew her, someone would come forward to identify her. Three months passed. Fifty million people saw her image — online, on the news, on the billboards in the Boston area. But no one said anything. No one could tell us who she was..
Every time I saw that litt...
Source: Jung At Heart - September 19, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
Surrender
In the last post, I told you about the wonderful book, The Last Asylum, by Barbara Thomas. It’s one of those books that has stayed with me and leads me to think more deeply about the things she writes about — madness, analysis, healing. Today I am thinking about surrender.
Thomas came to analysis wanting her analyst to take care of her, much as she wanted and got friends to take care of her. She wanted him to give her answers, to tell her what to do to feel better. It took a number of years for her to come to the place of accepting that he could not and would not tell her what to do or give her answers or take car...
Source: Jung At Heart - September 10, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs
