• Day 28: The Capacity To Be Alone

    In Theory: Within the psychodynamic tradition, D. W. Winnicott made a paradoxical observation that the capacity to be alone is acquired in…

  • Day 27: Object Constancy

    In Theory: Object constancy, in object relations and attachment theory, is the capacity to maintain a stable sense of another person even…

  • Day 26: Integration

    In Theory: Within the psychodynamic tradition, the goal of therapy is not happiness or the elimination of conflict. It is the gradual…

  • Day 25: Working Through

    In Theory: In psychodynamic therapy, insight alone is rarely sufficient for change. The same material, pattern, and relational dynamic must be revisited…

  • Day 24: The Depressive Position

    In Theory: Within the object relations tradition, Melanie Klein described the depressive position as a developmental achievement in which a person recognizes…

  • Day 23: Mourning

    In Theory: Sigmund Freud distinguished between mourning and melancholia within the foundational psychodynamic tradition. In mourning, the loss is known and grief…

  • Day 22: Ambivalence

    In Theory: Melanie Klein, within the object relations tradition, described ambivalence as the capacity to hold love and anger, admiration and resentment,…

  • Day 21: Repetition Compulsion

    In Theory: One of Sigmund Freud’s most enduring clinical observations is that patterns repeat, not deliberately or consciously, but with regularity that…

  • Day 20: The True & False Self

    In Theory: D. W. Winnicott distinguished between two modes of selfhood within the object relations tradition. The True Self refers to spontaneous…

  • Day 19: Afterwardsness

    In Theory: Psychodynamic thought proposes that experience does not always acquire meaning at the moment it occurs, but only afterward under different…

  • Day 18: Rupture & Repair

    In Theory: Developmental research on attachment and psychodynamic observation show that the health of a relationship is not determined by the absence…

  • Day 17: Enactment

    In Theory: An enactment in contemporary psychodynamic theory occurs when something that cannot be spoken, such as a feeling, a relational dynamic,…