Practice
I take my cue from the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, who describes the hostility and contempt directed toward social Others as part of a practice of cruelty centuries in the making. My approach to treatment draws on contemporary psychoanalysis and a long tradition of thinking immanence—what Spinoza calls Deus sive Natura, or God/Nature—as key to human emancipation. We cannot live well if we don’t first learn to love ourselves and the world as if God/Nature were already here, inside each of us and in every part of the natural world. Up against notions of self-ownership, discipline, and productivity as metrics of the human, the contours of what I think of as a therapeutic environment of letting go depart from what child psychologist Donald Winnicott calls the holding environment. As an ethics of care based on hospitality, mutuality, and the working through of our attachments to property and things—a giving freely instead of holding tight—this model of care draws heavily on networks of mutual aid, small groups for support and community activism, and self-narration in whatever form you might choose, from poetry and short stories to thought logs, dream journals, and song.