psychotherapy, counselling, business coaching, organizational consultation, entrepreneurship, family business consultation
- Disappointed Expectations: The Obstacle of “No Guarantee”
Reading about the history of retirement as a life-stage in the industrialized world, I realized that the expectations held by most of us, born after the Second World War, were “givens” or “truths” that were incredibly new as social phenomena. In fact, funded retirement from work-life only emerged in the mid 19th century, modeled on [...]
- The Slow Lane: Waiting For Godot in a Dublin Bank
Globalization has bound the world into a singular community. Travel, though, sometimes upends this notion. Having left New York a few weeks back, I find myself waiting for my identity to catch up with me in Dublin, which as everyone knows, has experienced some banking problems over the last few years. My own began simply. [...]
- The New American Fantasy: The Imaginary Enemy & Subgroup Rivalry
Down at the dog-run in Riverside Park, the election has already been won for a second term and the smart money is on the impending “fiscal cliff”, with cynical stories of stock broker promises for saving diminished middle class wealth through the next predicted debacle. Cooler heads were discussing the bigger picture and the sterling [...]
- Obama, Romney, and US: Scripting the American Fantasy
Listening to Mitt Romney and the President duke it out, however flaccidly, complete with incoherent mutterings from Clint Eastwood, the iconic High Plains Drifter of Italian spaghetti westerns, loved by conventioneers, who only wanted to hear him mutter his threatening, “c’mon and make my day” to satiate the group lust for blood, I decided to [...]
- On Culture: How E. Bowen Illuminates S. Beckett
Augie March was a Chicagoan, born and bred. But Saul Bellow was born in Canada. Looking at the world from a window on the Upper West Side, I think of my own little piece of globalization. Two generations through Brooklyn and then Manhattan, from the Russo-Polish Pale; and I was looking, last week, at real [...]
- On Pessimism, Beckett, and Optimism
Reading Beckett, reading Beckett’s reading of Proust, reading the intellectual regress back to Schopenhauer and Kant, I put down the books. I stop. It comes down to this in human affairs: we know that on the way to dying, we live and experience. Obviously, not only good times, but the odd “peak” experiences, fade: sometimes [...]
- Increasing Dominance of the Nonhuman Environment
The New York cooperative building was facing a city ordered renovation that would cost each shareholder an additional $5000 this year, in excess of their 6% maintenance increase. It was a heavy burden; but there was nothing else for the board of directors to do, except to approve it. The work was ordered. There was [...]
- Market Irrationality, Personal Insolvency, and Psychoanalytic Study
Keynes’ sage observation that “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” organizes my thoughts today, on the psychoanalytic study of organizations. The movements of financial markets increasingly shape our societal and individual choices, so present themselves as the environing conditions of our lives. While we seek to understand them through our [...]
- Productive Hate
Some weeks back, I discussed the connection of flow—- as the integrative, passionate engagement of competence and skills toward a discrete task —- with an internal, late-life correlate to the mother-child relationship, now freed from external dependency on institutional facilitation or permission. That is, the freedom to demonstrate pleasurably one’s skills and competence. Certainly, from [...]
- A Pluralistic Unconscious
Sometimes, reading too much psychoanalytic theory leaves me confused: a psychic stomach ache. And recently, trolling through a plenitude of historical papers, following the “Controversial Discussions” (those who know will know…), had left me, well, feeling rather claustrophobic! That’s where Christopher Bollas’ The Infinite Question opened the door: rather lyrically, he traces an unconscious beyond [...]
