Tricycle | Awake in the World

Last week, Daphne Merkin wrote an excellent personal essay, entitled “My Life in Therapy,” about her varied experiences as a patient within the therapeutic establishment (lasting over 40 years!), that appeared in The New York Times Magazine. The piece is entertaining, thoughtful, and, not surprisingly, painfully “self-aware.” From the piece: I learned, that is, to construct an ongoing narrative of the self, composed of what the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller calls “microdots” (“the consciously experienced moments selected from the whole and arranged to present a point of view”), one that might have been more or less cohesive than my actual self but that at any rate was supposed to illuminate puzzling behavior and onerous symptoms—my beh More »