In the 1990s it was fashionable at trainings to urge people:

«Your life isn’t working, take responsibility for your life».

That doesn’t work.

You cannot take ownership of responsibility for a choice that is determined by trauma, by culture, by a reference group, and so on.

The task of psychotherapy is in fact not to issue such calls, but to give the person back their freedom of choice — and then responsibility follows from the very fact of that freedom.

Resistance to change is one of the cornerstones of psychotherapy.

It is precisely thanks to resistance that psychotherapy is possible.

If there were no resistance, everything would come down to trainings in successful social skills.

Resistance allows the therapist to sharpen the client’s attention on the intrapsychic conflict and to make it the subject of analysis.

This matters, because otherwise we are training skills rather than a culture of awareness.

If you look closely, you can notice a strong divergence between the Christian and the existential conceptions of sin and atonement.

In Christianity sin can be atoned for through a life’s feat, through suffering, through sacrifice, or paid off (the indulgence).

In existentialism sins only accumulate; they cannot be atoned for.

Secular psychotherapy is a good support for those who share the ideas of existentialism.

There is a great deal of despair in these words.

Although, as one wise man used to say:

«If you think seriously about life, there aren’t many reasons for joy».

What is left to us?

To press close to one another physically or mentally, first to imitate and then to laugh. Is this not one more of the functions of psychotherapy?

Where did modern psychotherapy begin?

With the analysis of dreams and the psychopathology of everyday life: slips of the tongue, errors, hysterical pareses and paralyses, and so on.

Ambiguity reveals hidden desire, reveals the truth.

Ambivalence is the essence of the human psyche — or, to be more precise still, polyvalence.

In the psychic world of the person sitting opposite us, the truth is whatever eases their suffering; as a rule this is a view that holds both poles of the ambiguity, and not our own hypothesis or interpretation, however well grounded it may be.