preface to new readers
My big thanks for being a “charter-” reader/subscriber of the newShrink newsletter. I anticipate some weeks of getting-the-bugs-out here and hope you’ll find you want to stay.
You’ll be receiving a maximum of two emails a week in your inbox, each bringing a psychology perspective to all kinds of news. Some will be News Notebooks, a digest of clips and notes on ongoing issues surfacing in news. This may include politics, arts, entertainment, comedy and other cultural trends and identify psychological themes, patterns and markers in them. Others may be more like Postcard or Sampler small-bite editions.
And other more feature-type editions may be Shrink-Wraps pieces engaging ideas, practices and writers from depth psychology to focus on individual life-story — that of public figures in the news and our own. (Depth or psychodynamic psychology is the kind that takes into account the unconscious, the soul, keeping the psyche in psychology. The root psyche is a Greek word for soul and logos means word or language.)
Details, logistics and some virtual tour are in the orientation piece below.
My vision for newShrink addresses the question of what a healthy American psyche or soul might look like… what the different dimensions of my psychology profession contribute to that understanding… and how we individually and collectively might aim and work toward that health.
A quote I like a lot has been attributed to 20th century Catholic social-justice activist Dorothy Day, who said that for her, “writing is a form of community.” The very idea of writing as a form of soul-healing and feeding- community seems a novel if not revolutionary antidote to the perversions of it we’ve experienced over the past several years — the dark web, conspiracy-driven sites, trolls, ALL-CAP Twitter rants, to name a few.
NewShrink is full of the things I most deeply care, think, and want to be talking about. (These things include people, both living and dead, some of whom I have never met in real life or even in their lifetimes.)
Those in the initial (May 2021) invited charter-group are from a wide range of ages, shared interests and contexts, professional and personal, across most decades of my life. Although I have worked and studied with many of you, the selection wasn’t an effort at some representative cross-section or statistical sample. Rather it’s from what I think of, in very non-shrink language, as “inside-out” vs “outside-in” — a felt-experience of connection beyond the one- or even two-dimensional.
It’s in that spirit that newShrink has steadily grown since that time. So please do share newShrink with anyone you choose.
A poem from William Stafford at the end of the orientation piece below makes me smile and describes my sense of this group, far better than I can.
Again, my sincere thanks for being here.
🦋💙 tish
So…
Here’s your comprehensive intro to what newShrink is about. ( I promise most regular posts shorter than this one-time orientation.)
Concern and conversation about the American psyche, our collective soul, are showing up everywhere, and this has been happening for a while now.
Both reflecting and inspiring this, U.S. President Joe Biden’s enduring theme of “Heal the Soul of America and Build Back Better” for over two years has undergirded his uniquely waged, COVID-constrained campaign and continues to anchor his programs and governance.
why i’m here
NewShrink is kind of a stake in the ground to hold me to a pledge to devote my daily news-, research- and writing- time to track this prevalent “soul of America” theme and what it might mean.
This may be a labor of love, spitting in the wind or a mix of both. But it keeps following me home and seems to have my name on it.
By profession and résumé I’ve been a daily-newspaper reporter, a mega-bank corporate communicator, and since 2010 a licensed psychotherapist in private practice. My degrees are in journalism, counseling psychotherapy and depth psychology.
(I’m pretty old.)
Since 2008 my doctoral- and post-PhD work in depth psychology have tracked and focused on life-stories of psychologically mature, authentic (ie. soul-engaged) adults in the news and what they can teach us about our own paths — and that of an American culture in many ways stuck in arrested adolescence.
My graduate-study institute, Pacifica, even has as its motto animae mundi colendae gratia. In the Latin that’s “for the sake of tending the soul of the world.”
I don’t think it’s possible to think or talk about whatever we mean by healing the soul of America, without its being about both individuals and our democracy. I count myself among many who think we have recently come perilously close to destroying ours and that the need remains urgent to find fresh ways and venues to think, talk and act about that.
It nags that by now I ought to be able to discuss in broader community some coherent things that even might add healing in a wounded — and a wounding — time.
You may have heard psychologists say stuff like “extraverts talk-to-think.”
I write.
surveying the news-scape
Since January on the national scene there’s been plenty of hope, with dramatic improvements reflected in many stories and poll numbers, yet also plenty of pain, churn and chaos.
One recent data-point stopped me cold: A few Fridays ago the CDC announced that 50 percent of American adults now have at least one diagnosed mental-health disorder (and that echoes data on psychotropic medication prescriptions.) Even given the long siege and psychological tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic, political turmoil and violent social upheavals, the exponential escalation rates and totals are staggering.
Symptom-treatment via cognitive tools and medications and efforts to increase mental-health awareness and acceptance are necessary and useful parts of my field. Much of mainstream journalism and commentary — and much of psychotherapy — focuses on this dimension of psychology, and that is valuable.
We also need different, broader, deeper.
By now it’s all too clear what empty, chaotic and soul-sick looks and feels like, both collectively and in individual lives. We need to recognize and aim with similar clarity for the robust, the resilient, the animated (a word that, again from Latin, means, literally, soul-enlivened).
The diverse news-scape is about the closest thing we have to a common public square. Psychologically it offers an at-times-literal screen on which we each can recognize ourselves, develop empathy and learn from both our projections there and what they mirror back.
Getting at this calls on perspectives and skills of journalists; of authors, scholars and experts; and of psychologists. First is persistent, fact-grounded, democracy-preserving excellence of the journalists — whose dailiness is the "jour” in journalism. The Friday News Notebook represents this collective scope and focus on current issues. (News sources are attributed or linked within News Notebook posts. Also embedded are references from the wide range of current-issues-focused books and other works, many of them digital or audio — Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist and Robin DeAngelo’s White Fragility, for example.)
Sunday Shrink-Wrap pieces then will draw more historically from authors, scholars, ideas and practices relevant to depth psychology to explore individual life-story — that of public figures in the news and our own. (Full references will be titled Library on the website. And imaginal material like photos, cartoons, video and music clips, poems and some back-story will be titled Postcards from the Field on the website.)
… to form a more perfect union
Much of what I draw from in newShrink is grounded historically in a few core concepts about the unconscious/soul and human character developed over centuries and woven forward by authors and thinkers across disciplines that inform depth psychology. I gathered a few of them for an imagined dinner-table dialogue… and here’s an example of how our blind-spots find us: The immediate jolt of this snapshot’s white-male Western-European-ness, and the absence of my diverse library of news-relevant digital and audio voices, underscore the need for both the current-news and the long-historic scholar perspectives.)
From Pulitzer-prize winning historian Jon Meacham: “…soul is the vital center, the heart, the essence of life. Heroes and martyrs have such a vital center; so do killers and haters… Socrates believed the soul was nothing less than the animating force of reality… in Genesis in the Hebrew Bible the soul was life itself… in Western thought… soul is what makes us us.”
That “animating force of reality” is foundational for C. G. Jung’s entire psychology of an energetic unconscious push to “individuate” (become fully ourselves) throughout adulthood. He described the process over time as remembering, reconnecting, reuniting the “lower case-(ego) self,” which we each form in youth to adapt and function in the world, with a “capital-S Self,” our larger innate soul-character. Jungian James Hollis suggests we have “first adulthood” and “second adulthood,” the two more like levels within us to be reconciled than chronological.
For Jungian James Hillman, author and founder of Imaginal Psychology: the “soul’s code… in a nutshell… is about character, about innate image. Together they make up the ‘acorn theory’ which holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived…”
In his exquisite mid-20th Century memoir, Speak, Memory, novelist Vladimir Nabokov conceived that innate character image as “… a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.” (Perhaps as a fellow curmudgeon) Hillman clearly appreciated Nabokov, too, citing this full quote among “Epigraphs in Lieu of a Preface” to his bestselling 1996 book, The Soul’s Code, about the “acorn theory.”
Journalist David Brooks, whose own apparent deepening journey emerges in his columns I’ve read and cited over years, echoes these themes in his 2015 book, The Road to Character. Though Brooks hasn’t mentioned or aligned his ideas with many he shares in depth psychology, I’ve long wanted to welcome him! Adapting his idea of a “résumé version” vs “eulogy version” of our life-stories can be a useful shorthand. (I’ll share here and later revisit this lovely Brooks column from Thursday.) Brooks’ “crucibles” that forge and deepen our character over time also point to Joseph Henderson’s work with “thresholds of initiation” from indigenous cultures.
With the line “… hold to the truth of the image you were born with…” and overall themes of his poem “All the True Vows” , Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte describes this need and challenge to hear and reconcile these equally real voices of the different levels within us. (Perhaps an apt if sobering poem for this season of commencements, career launches and weddings!)
And now Dante Alighieri, one of my favorites at the table, with particular relevance as we look at today’s public figures in the news. Despite the beauty of his Divine Comedy, Alighieri didn’t start out as a poet. He was a prominent middle-aged public figure himself, when he found himself exiled during brutally polarized political battles of his 13th-14th Century Italy. His Commedia is in a sense a memoir of his own initiatory descent-death-rebirth crucible that is also rich with his political philosophy.
This idea, that our very adulthood’s defining mission — like that of our nation — is a persistent, unfolding inner push “to form a more perfect union” within ourselves is interesting to keep in mind as we begin to look at public figures like Dante in our time.
(And on a lighter note, back in the kitchen…)
now a virtual tour
mind-space
work-space
home-space
“There is no house like the house of belonging,” David Whyte again (unusually chatty this week) portrays a deeply authentic soul-home that’s beyond, not necessarily even similar to, street address or physical dwelling.
(Shortly I will write more on several dimensions of “home” on both the news and psychological fronts. Home has particular power these days in literal and factual terms, as we collectively and individually emerge from the seclusions of COVID-19. And it is of course a theme in the challenges of both immigration and homelessness, as well.)
logistics, comments, privacy
NewShrink is free now, and you will always have a free option.
Your contact information is confidential and only your participation in Comments (or hitting “reply all”) will identify you as a subscriber.
Email me individually anytime (charter-group can reply here or on my personal account.) Daily email volume is still pretty second-nature after years in corporate life, so I can likely respond most promptly there.
And I’ll respond as possible in group Comments. Energy-bandwidth will limit my time there, especially at first.
some caveats:
NewShrink isn’t a forum to debate about news providers or what journalism is. I’ll post tips and strategies on choosing and managing news, media and social media volume in the Archive, and you can email me for other suggestions.
NewShrink isn’t psychotherapy and my role here is not as a therapist (which professional ethics rightly prohibit.) Meanwhile, piqued interest or paying new attention to unconscious patterns in the world can also bring unexpected focus on the personal for you, which merits exploration in skilled, guided privacy. I limit my clinical practice these days to existing, long-term or returning clients, and I have an excellent referral-partner colleague and friend who can assess and either provide or steer you to the right resources. Do email me anytime for information.
And, that’s all I have! Talk to you Friday with News Notebook,
tish 🦋💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
NewShrink is public, so please do share with anyone you choose.
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Congratulations and thank you for the design, execution and sweet equity of such a great concept and forum. Great piece laying out the framework, purpose and process. Looking forward to thinking and feeling more deeply thanks to the process.