I heard a snippet of Edith Piaf singing “Non, je ne regette rien!” on the radio as I was driving home the other day. Boy, it steers about as close to kitsch as a song can steer while remaining on two wheels, and of course by the time we get to Piaf’s final “Aujourd’hui, ça  Read More

There are a small handful of genuinely insightful beings in the world, and one of them is Pema Chodron, who was born Deirdre Brown in 1936, went to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington Conn., but is now a very highly respected Buddhist teacher and abbot, and who runs Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.  Read More

This is neat little article in the New York Times about two new books about the absence of empathy. The first, by Jon Ronson, is a book about psychopaths, whom, he points out, are often found in prison and in corporate boardrooms, the other, by a Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen called The Science of Evil,  Read More

Can good parenting be too much of a good thing? Psychologist Lori Gottlieb writing in The Atlantic says so. She talks about the young patients that she sees who come in her office, have great jobs, money, loving parents, great New York apartments, but who complain of being “not happy enough.” Certainly, our expectations are  Read More

I think we all know that there are good therapists and not-so-good therapists, and also that a good therapeutic experience is very much about fit — I can remember when I was young walking into a therapists office, seeing the quality of the art in the waiting room, and thinking: “Umm…no.” I was younger and  Read More

At one time, this vain and powerful woman would have no doubt believed that her son was… the center of the universe

As someone who spends most of my day listening to people’s most deeply personal inner lives, there isn’t much that shocks me anymore. That’s good of course. Being shocked is not a very helpful response. But what is also true is that when you get to know people, the things that they do that make  Read More

Not that we need scientific “proof” as such to know that being pushed around and made to feel insignificant is bad for us, but a new study using mice at Rockefeller University managed to create neurotic mice after submitting a few poor trembling creatures to the bullying of dominant mice. Here is a quote from  Read More