Dive into the archives.
- “Recession Psychosis”
My psychotherapist colleagues knew it was coming, but Saturday’s Times confirmed it: the severe symptoms of anxiety, despair, and even sucidality they’re calling “recession psychosis”— not a formal DSM diagnosis— but descriptive enough. Studies of unemployment reflect that downsizing is the only traumatizing life event which prevents sufferers from returning to their pre-morbid ‘setpoint” of [...]
- Retirement Tsunami
Those of us who have worked in organizations know that as individuals leave their roles in departments, or on committees, vital knowledge is often lost. With single departures, we find that certain problem dimensions are not addressed. My colleague Angela, for example, paid particular attention to economic trends in the staffing of R&D departments. With [...]
- The CEC: Stacking the Middle-Aged Deck To Failure
The developmental effect of the “Current Economic Climate” upon the under-employed middle aged worker, is to force the normative later-life crisis of generativity vs stagnation before its time. The crisis itself is to be expected– worked through across the years in contemplation of one’s lifetime of accomplishments and failures. But the additional external pressures of [...]
- The Real Shift in Middle Age Development
The current economic climate in the United States serves as a catalyst for a shift in the normative developmental tasks of middle age. The popular twentieth century pattern of career leading to retirement has ended. Partly obscured within the spiraling numbers of unemployed workers of all ages, is the high incidence of professional knowledge workers, [...]
- Financial Regression in the Service of Banking
Very rarely does Finance so precisely mirror Psychoanalysis. Yet, this week, the financial world both in the UK and in the US achieved a milestone: the peculiar mixture of positively valued and negatively valued assets upon the balance sheets of our quickly failing banks— an unsteady blend which might be seen as “ambivalent”—is to be [...]
- Passivity,Activity, and the Current Economic Climate
The reframing of problem as opportunity is the mantra of the current economic climate (CEC). And from within our chanting, whether through gritted teeth or genuine optimism, we have the choice of passivity or activity. Passively, we may be mesmerized by our decrements: in spending power, in the small luxuries we’d become accustomed to, and [...]
- A Very Human Response
The poignancy and resilience of the human experience, especially as we undergo difficulty and hard times, is not only a “human asset”. It is our blessing. A reader shares this response to the blog post a few weeks back. Ian- Just finished rereading your post on “Adrenaline Withdrawal” and feel like it was addressed directly [...]
- The Present Necessity for Kindness
When despair, fear, exhaustion and external answers beyond the encouragement to “keep on keeping on” are all: when the terror of occupational “redundancy” strips one’s sense of personal contribution, of meaning to others- what is left? The harsh formula of winner-loser is clear: this is no tv game show proclaiming, you are the weakest link: [...]
- What Banks Know
Some years ago, before Depression panic gripped the world, I had the opportunity to consult with several members of the banking industry. Each was involved in an obscure area of work, destined to become headline news within a few years. And whether discussing complex derivative trades or the structuring of collateralized debt obligation tranches, each [...]
- Thanksgiving: Holidays and Loss
Unlike my experiences of posting resumes to the internet, my experiences of blog posting have been rich and rewarding. Your comments, however, conveyed by e-mail, have been personal because the posts have evoked a feeling or memory that is sensitive and private. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I am thankful that reciprocally, even through we’re [...]
