Beyond the Pines Therapy

02/11/2026

02/07/2026

There are many definitions of a "self". Here is a version that demonstrates a self that can recognize and tolerate ambivalence. This demonstrates Melanie Klein's PS -> D move.

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02/04/2026

This reverses Freud's notion of making the unconscious conscious. Ogden, echoing Bion, is making the claim that both conscious and unconscious processing are required for growth to happen. Sometimes conscious experiences require the psychological digestion of the dream state, the non-linear, symbolic capacities of right-brain unconscious process to metabolize experience.

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01/29/2026

I highly recommend following and reading everything from psychotherapist & philosopher Alain de Botton's .

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23s

01/27/2026

From Dr. Jonathan Shedler:

"Here’s one of the most important things I’ve learned:

Severe personality problems find camouflage. No one thinks “I’m a sadist” or “I’m a malignant narcissist.”

They find a belief system or social group that validates their most hateful, destructive impulses and construes them as virtues.

The most toxic and hateful people are utterly convinced they fight on the side all that is true and right.

They find a way to give free rein to their hate—to attack, to treat others cruelly and viciously—and find allies to cheer them on, equally convinced they’re on the side of all that is good and righteous.

For professional colleagues looking for a more theoretical explanation, the psychological processes are splitting, projection, and projective identification.

Splitting means not recognizing one’s own capacity for hate, cruelty, and destructiveness. The person is blind to the bad in themselves. Instead, they project the badness onto some designated other—who now becomes the repository of all that is bad and evil, and that must be attacked.

That’s the projection. What is split off from the self is projected onto someone else.

The person now feels fully justified in unleashing their hate on the other person, who is seen (via projection) as someone monstrous, who must be punished or destroyed.

If the person on the receiving end of the projection responds to the intense provocation with anger or dares to fight back, this is taken as further proof of how hateful and evil they are, and why attacking them is just and right. This process is called projective identification.

The end result is that the person can deny their own sa**sm, cruelty, and hate, while simultaneously acting it out without restraint—and feel entirely on the side of truth and right as they do it."

How personality pathology hides behind virtue.

01/14/2026

“It is in the space between inner and outer world, which is also the space between people - the transitional space - that intimate relationships and creativity occur.” - D.W. Winnicott

01/10/2026

This is one of the greatest insights from studying Bion: that the development of thought is tied to feeling, and that the avoidance of difficult feelings leads to developmental arrest. Helping clients suffer their difficult feelings within a trusted relationship is so much of the work of psychotherapy.

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12/14/2025

Affect (emotion) is primary! To work in depth with clients or oneself requires understanding this. Cognition and behaviour are not equal points on the triangle. Thankfully, I had a professor in grad school emphasize to me that "big B beliefs" are rooted in affect. This has been helpful for working with clients (and myself) who tend to stay in the rational/intellectual realm.

This comes from Mark Solms' paper you can find for free online: The Neurobiological Underpinnings of Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy

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12/09/2025

Bion's pioneering work on group psychology is foundational for understanding the phenomena we see when people get together.

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12/03/2025

Ian McGilchrist's research into hemispheric differences in the human brain gives tremendous insights in the larger problems within our western culture. The mechanistic and highly rational left brain has overthrown the wisdom of the right brain, which brings the capacity for holding complexity, paradox, symbolic attention, etc. I highly recommend reading his work!

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11/17/2025

It's all connected!

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11/04/2025

The only way out is through. And this is very difficult, often impossible, to do on our own. We are relational animals and are meant to bring our pain into empathic relational space - where it can be better understood, digested, and transformed.

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