Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute

A colleague is not copied on an email and spends the afternoon unable to work. A friend’s joke lands slightly wrong and the friendship cools for a month. A compliment arrives with one qualifying word attached and the whole thing is heard as an insult. What makes these reactions puzzling is the gap between the size of the event and the size of the response. Psychoanalysis call...

In 1924 Freud published a short, strange paper called The Economic Problem of Masochism, in which he tried to solve a puzzle his own theory had created. If the mind seeks pleasure and avoids pain, why do some people arrange their lives so reliably around suffering? His answer divided masochism into three forms, and the third of them, moral masochism, remains one of the most c...

Some people can be furious with a partner at nine in the morning and still know, without effort, that they love them. Others lose the loving feeling entirely the moment conflict starts, as though the good version of that person has been deleted. The psychoanalytic name for the capacity that separates these two experiences is object constancy, and it is one of the quieter deve...

Sigmund Freud trained as a neurologist before he founded psychoanalysis, and he spent his early career trying to describe the mind in the language of nerve cells. In 1895 he abandoned the attempt, concluding that the science of his day was not ready for it. A century later a generation of researchers picked up the unfinished work, and the field they built is called neuropsych...

A familiar sequence unfolds in psychotherapy. A person arrives in real distress, works productively for a few months, begins to approach something painful, and then announces the problem has resolved. Symptoms gone, mood lifted, treatment no longer necessary. Sometimes this is genuine recovery. Sometimes it is what analysts call a flight into health.

At the Chicago ...