InternalObjects

Adult Psychotherapist. MBACP (Accred). Kit drummer with pocket but little else....searching for god knows what...

[InternalObjects @InternalObjects]

@DrWinarick Extremely helpful paper. Tks

[Alex (Sasha) Krainer @NakedHedgie]

Two minutes worth hearing and pondering.

[InternalObjects @InternalObjects]

I wrote a v short piece on ‘War’ and parental discord (from a child’s perspective).

https://t.co/XBrBYjlxP6

[Dr. Emily Anhalt @dremilyanhalt]

Underneath anxiety is a powerful belief that worrying actually keeps bad things from happening (if I stop worrying will my fears come true?)

The uncomfortable truth is that we’re not that powerful, we don’t have that much control. Scary to accept, but will also set you free.

[Jonathan Shedler @JonathanShedler]

🆕 New post just dropped

“Real psychotherapy isn’t about being ‘helpful’ in everyday, commonsense ways. It is something else entirely.”

Free accesss
https://t.co/TXHUBPowhG

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Yann LeCun just exposed AI’s fundamental flaw. We’re celebrating systems that can’t do what insects do effortlessly.

LeCun: “The biggest difficulty is not to get fooled into thinking that a computer system is intelligent simply because it can manipulate language.”

Language feels like intelligence because we experience it as the highest form of human thought.

So when a machine produces fluent, articulate, convincing text, the instinct is to conclude it understands.

It doesn’t.

LeCun: “It turns out the real world is much, much more complicated.”

Language is actually the easy part.

A sequence of discrete symbols with a finite number of possibilities. Predicting the next word is a tractable mathematical problem. Impressive at scale.

Not understanding. Pattern matching in symbol space.

The real world is something else entirely. A high-dimensional, continuous, noisy signal that changes every millisecond in ways no text corpus can capture.

Physical reality doesn’t come in tokens.

LeCun: “Which your house cat is perfectly able to deal with. But not computers yet.”

This is the Moravec paradox.

The things that feel hard to humans: writing essays, solving equations, passing bar exams. Computationally straightforward.

The things that feel trivially easy: walking across a room, catching a falling object, folding a shirt. Extraordinarily difficult for machines.

Your house cat navigates a complex three-dimensional physical environment in real time.

Predicts trajectories. Adjusts to surprises. Understands cause and effect through direct interaction with the world.

The most powerful AI systems ever built cannot do what your cat does before breakfast.

That’s not a minor gap. That’s the entire frontier.

Language is the easy problem that looks hard to humans.

The physical world is the hard problem that looks easy because evolution solved it billions of years ago.

We’re pouring hundreds of billions into making language models marginally better at the simple problem.

The actual intelligence problem remains unsolved.

LeCun has spent fifteen years on this. Not making chatbots more fluent. Giving machines the ability to understand, predict, and interact with physical reality the way animals do instinctively.

The benchmark that matters isn’t passing a bar exam.

It’s folding a shirt. Loading a dishwasher. Navigating an unfamiliar room without a map.

We built systems that can write your dissertation before we built systems that can tie your shoes.

That’s where AI actually is.

Everything else is autocomplete at scale.

[Psychodynamic Observations @psychodynamobs]

Frankl has something profound here that we psychodynamic folks keep coming back to and that is in the face of unimaginable hell the psyche doesn't just break but often mobilizes every resource it has to keep going, and what looks like heightened emotion or reactivity on the surface is frequently the most adaptive and even healthiest response available.

We don’t need to rush to slap a pathology label on intense affect or hypervigilance when the context is extreme threat, instead, we look at the whole personality structure and the profile of mental functioning which are capacities like affective range, adaptation, resiliency, and that drive toward meaning and purpose, and how the subjective experience of symptoms actually makes sense as a way of preserving self amid annihilation-level stress.

It's not denial or distortion so much as a deep, unconscious refusal to let the soul get erased. The real diagnosis isn't about ticking symptom boxes it's about understanding the person's inner world in context, where what gets pathologized in calmer times might actually be evidence of profound aliveness and resourcefulness under fire. Frankl's point still cuts through the noise. Sometimes the sanest thing a human being can do is feel everything more intensely just to stay human.

[InternalObjects @InternalObjects]

@Demo2020cracy Rutland

[Dominic Frisby @DominicFrisby]

The lighter side of hyper-inflationary collapse … in song.
(Sound on)

[Chris Williamson @DerbyChrisW]

I like you @garyseconomics but you are reinforcing the myth that we're reliant on wealthy elites to pay taxes so we can afford to pay for public services and improved infrastructure etc. But that simply isn't true.

So, here are some basic facts. The govt issues the currency so it has access to all the money it needs to pay for a good society. The only constraint on govt spending is the availability of real resources in the economy such as workers, materials and equipment etc. 

So, it's simply a political choice to leave millions in poverty in the world's sixth biggest economy.

Taxes are necessary predominantly to control inflation. They also generate a value for the currency because taxes have to be paid in pound sterling. They can also be used to deter or encourage consumer spending on certain items, like taxes on cigarettes and tax breaks on electric cars etc. And they can, and should be used to address the economic inequality that you are referring to, Gary.

But you are reinforcing the same myth that's peddled by the media, political class and many economists as well. I can't make my mind up as to whether they're deliberately or ignorantly, misleading the public about how the monetary system operates. 

And when they're not peddling myths about taxes they're talking about the deficit, ie the difference between govt spending and tax revenues, which they say necessitates so-called govt borrowing.

But the govt doesn't borrow money, it sells interest bearing govt bonds to wealthy elites and corporations. It's really a form of corporate welfare. Instead of offering risk-free investments to the super rich, the govt could invest directly in the economy to repair our dilapidated infrastructure, bring the useless profiteering utilities back into public ownership and improve our increasingly inferior public services.

The truth is wealthy elites are surplus to requirements. We don't need their taxes to help pay for public services like the NHS. In fact, if all the billionaires left it would actually be a positive benefit to the country.

So, the reason we need a wealth tax is to address the grotesque level of wealth inequality in Britain and to limit the power that enormous wealth gives to these super-rich oligarchs who use it to buy political favours.

Around a 100 years ago the American industrialist, Henry Ford, said that if people understood how the banking and the monetary system actually operated, there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. 

Gary should be using his significant platform to foment that revolution, instead of encouraging people to think that we're beholden to super-rich oligarchs.

[Jonathan Shedler @JonathanShedler]

Oftentimes, patients do not come to therapy to change. Not really.

They say and think they want to change. It soon becomes evident they want to continue being exactly the person they have been, and living life in the same self-defeating ways—but feel better doing it.

Real psychotherapy begins with helping the person to understand not only intellectually, but to truly take to heart, that what they want is impossible.

In other words, the real work of therapy may begin with crushing disappointment, as the patient struggles to reconcile with the painful truth: neither the therapist nor anyone else has the power to give them what they want.

To feel different, they must become different. And there is no bypass around that psychological work.

Paradoxically, it is this terrible disappointment that opens the door to realistic hope.

Sadly, for every therapist who understands this and is prepared to join the patient in doing the difficult work, there are many more “therapists” happy to bolster the patient's illusion that they can can feel different without becoming different, and therapy can work by magic.

Choose wisely.

[Jayce Long @JayceLong]

The hardest psychodynamic skill is simply listening in a way that encourages clients to keep talking so that the therapist can get a sense of the associative networks behind the patient's experience.

— Nancy McWilliams
Psychoanalytic Supervision

[Jonathan Shedler @JonathanShedler]

As much as we want to get well, there may be powerful psychological incentives to remain ill

✍️ Full essay on my Substack (below)

[InternalObjects @InternalObjects]

@RelearningEcon @ProfSteveKeen Fabio Vighi’s, Lacanian insight into crisis capitalism is a must watch.

https://t.co/uTjlJFGqT1

[Mr. Keynes @TyKeynes]

"The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated."

-John Kenneth Galbraith

[Preston @pressand_turn]

Wow. So much of the essence of psychodynamic psychotherapy condensed into a paragraph.

Narcissism
By Neville Symington

[Jonathan Shedler @JonathanShedler]

Yes

[InternalObjects @InternalObjects]

@JDaviesPhD This. Without hesitation.

[David Puder M.D. @DavidPuder]

Otto Kernberg Masterclass on Envy
Curious what resonates with you here. Did anything surprise you or offer a fresh perspective?
#Psychotherapy #Psychoanalysis #Envy #OttoKernberg

[Jonathan Shedler @JonathanShedler]

How will *just talking* in therapy help me get better?

“Give sorrow words”
—psychoanalyst William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

👉 Words are powerful containers of emotion. The process of putting thoughts and feelings into words *transforms* them

👉It brings thought and feelings into the light of day

👉allows them to be processed in a different way and integrated into the totality of one’s experience and identity

👉brings them increasingly under conscious (voluntary) control

👉and so expands freedom and choice, where previously our responses were automatic or experienced as obligatory

👉the newfound clarity opens the door to solutions previously invisible to us

👉creates relational connection with another human being around experience previously suffered in a state of isolation and aloneness

👉brings to bear all of the emotion-regulatory functions of attachment

👉 builds our capacity for authentic empathy and intimacy with others—which helps counteract emotional pain and make it more bearable

👉mobilizes psychological strengths, resources, and capacities,

👉and opens possibilities for new emotional development and growth

I could go on. At length

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break”
—Shakespeare