Psychoanalysis and Addiction

In this episode, Graeme Daniels, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction, shares from his essay entitled "The Shadow of Esther Perel" which reviews the Belgian therapist's 2017 book, State of Affairs: rethinking infidelity, and links his commentary to psychoanalytic principles and in particular, the current state of sex addiction treatment.

In this episode, Graeme Daniels, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction, welcomes clinical psychologist Pedro Job as a guest from Portugal to discuss the psychic defenses of projection and projective identification: what is projecting into versus projecting onto, and how does this apply to the workings of addictive thinking. 

In this episode, Graeme Daniels, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction, gets back into analytic theory, expounding upon Freud's repetition compulsion, Melanie Klein's theories of projective identification, oral and anal sadistic impulses, and locates them as antecedents to some concepts that are prominent in modern day pop psychology.

In this episode, Graeme Daniels, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction, pays tribute to the late Martin Amis, a novelist and essayist who had something to say about porn addiction. Daniels also provides an informal post-mortem on the Covid-psychotherapy era: what's changed about how therapists work, how sex addicts play, and what might now stick around?

In this episode, Graeme Daniels, co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction, expands upon ideas of group psychology, adding elements that influence the practice of group therapy: from the tacit rules or "contracts" that bind groups, segregate groups, protect from external groups, to the habits that people exhibit when expressing themselves in company.

In this episode, Graeme Daniels, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction, wades again into the intersection of addiction theory and social mores, exploring how societal "groups" that are institutions, niche fields in psychotherapy, recovery movements, philosophical traditions, shape the values that are insinuated into mental health treatments.

In this episode, Graeme Daniels and Joe Farley, authors of Getting Real About Sex Addiction, talk about how the consumer of psychotherapy and addiction services has been lied to about what is effective treatment, providing illustrations from their book, including contemporary empirical research on treatment efficacy. 

In this episode, Graeme Daniels, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction, again remarks on the staples of psychotherapy, this time time commenting upon non-verbal versus verbal communication, citing illustrations relevant to addiction and couples' communication, and relaying theory by the likes of D.W. Winnicott, Jacques Lacan, and Sigmund Freud.

In this episode, Graeme Daniels, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction, critiques some commonplace ideas within psychotherapy, remarking on the verbosity with which ideas of empathy, "boundaries", "I" statement prescription, love language tropes are invoked and dispensed in the field of treatment

In this episode, Graeme Daniels, co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction, shares a short story that illustrates conflict avoidance, inhibition, plus fantasies of disinhibition and redemption via a symbol of romance and apology, in the context of a group experience.