Jeff Fine-Thomas

”Any therapist becomes impressed over time with how hard it is to find a way to talk with someone that avoids getting subsumed into that person’s preexisting personal schemas.” - Nancy mcWilliams

Working collaboratively, the therapist and patient find ways to help that process along when the patient gets stuck because of dangers that accompanied the developmental exigencies in his or her history.” - Nancy McWilliams

They view treatment as the opportunity for a new person, the therapist, to facilitate a benign maturational process that naturally unfolds in an atmosphere of safety and honesty.

“Psychodynamic clinicians understand individual psychologies and psychopathologies as determined by complex interactions between lived experience and a person’s constitutional makeup and normal developmental challenges. 🧵

“Affects are contagious; they induce many complex emotional reactions in us.” - Nancy McWilliams

“Practitioners, unlike those who consider mental health issues from a greater distance, have no choice but to deal with affect: A client’s pain or hostility or excitement can flood the space between two people in ways that go far beyond words.” - Nancy McWilliams

Without the capacity to appreciate subjectively the emotional worlds of their patients, therapists would be missing a huge chunk of data, and their effectiveness would be severely compromised. - Nancy McWilliams

“Empirical studies of emotion confirm the observation of generations of clinicians that affect plays a determinative role in the process of growth and change. 🧵

To change, we need to appreciate our condition in a way that feels visceral as oppo
sed to cerebral.“ - Nancy McWilliams

“Early in his therapeutic endeavors, Freud learned that there is a difference between intellectual and emotional insight. That is, we can ‘know’ something cognitively and yet not know it at all. 🧵

“Analytic therapists embrace their subjectivity, and they learn from their affective reactions a lot about what their clients are trying to say.” - Nancy McWilliams

The therapist must be prudent so as not to misuse the great sphere of influence granted to him by his patients.
- Freida Fromm-Reichmann (1950)

It seems to me that openness and curiosity serve as a potential guard against the allure of "objectivity." Whether we will ever know everything about the human condition, it is certainly true that if we hold what we do know too tightly, we shut down exploration.

they tend to fragment complex, interrelated issues to make them empirically research able; they have been known to be methodologically rigorous but substantively vacuous.” - Nancy McWilliams

“But objectivity is full of liabilities as well. Researchers striving for objectivity tend to ignore data that cannot be operationalized, manipulated, or studied by randomized clinical trials; 🧵

we are all handicapped by our individual backgrounds, assumptions, and limitations; we cannot construct a cumulative science without objectively derived reliability and validity.” - Nancy McWilliams

“The perils of subjectivity are well known: We can easily distort in service of our personal needs; 🧵

“Closely related to identification and empathy is the assumption that subjectivity, far from being the enemy of truth, can promote a much more comprehensive understanding of psychological phenomena than objectivity alone.” - Nancy McWilliams

yeah, I think the algorithm on X definitely favors anyone who posts controversial or affectively charged material. People that do that probably don't notice the part of the algorithm that involves intermittent reinforcement.

I’ve been posting a ton of quotes from Nancy McWilliams (because she’s amazing!). I was also testing the idea that the X algorithm uses intermittent reinforcement. X seems to put one post in front of more people every 10 to 12 days. I probably could have googled that.

This week I’ll be writing a few pages to add a section on motivation to a chapter. I’m reading The Archaeology of Mind by Panksepp and Biven to prep for the section.

Just a quick update on the book Nancy McWilliams and I are co-authoring - Our deadline to get the complete draft to the publisher is the end of Sept. At this point, we have all 7 chapters written and are making some adjustments to concepts here and there.

There is an important difference between true humility and counterfeit humility, with the latter being more concerned about appearing to others as humble, but with the person having less wholesome motivations…Fawning humility masks sycophancy, disingenuousness, and selfishness.
- Paul Marcus

I’m going to try to cross post on X and Bluesky (my handle there is @jefffine-thomas.bsky.social) so if you prefer one, you can find my account there.

YouTube video by wtf is life is AI about to take over the world or just take our jobs? is psychotherapy f*#cked?

I was a guest on the WTF is Life? podcast recently and Dr. Max and I had a fun conversation on how AI might impact psychotherapy. Should we be optimistic? Scared? Run for the hills? Check it out: youtu.be/IT_tGk4xt3I

A clinician who believes that they have it all figured out probably has a lot to learn.