Each May, Mental Health Awareness Month invites us to speak more openly about distress. Psychoanalysis asks something related, but more demanding: that we listen to what resists easy understanding.
In the consulting room, this often means sitting with ambiguity—about boundaries, about knowledge, about what is felt but not yet said. Clinical technique requires holding that uncertainty without rushing to resolve it.
Below, we’ve gathered five of TAP’s most widely read essays that center on the clinical encounter. They trace a set of recurring questions: What does a patient want to know about their therapist? How much of the therapist’s real life enters the room? What happens when the frame is strained by culture, crisis, or the urgency of care itself?
Handling Positive Transference — Stephanie Newman
This advice column explores how positive feelings toward a therapist—which can feel too flattering, shameful, or dangerous to discuss—may also be what most needs interpretation.
Skin in the Game: Psychoanalysis, AI Chatbots, and Digital Mentalization — Karyne E. Messina
Psychotherapy depends on risk, implication, and the possibility of being affected. Against the fantasy of disembodied care, the piece argues for the irreducibly human stakes of the clinical encounter.
Fantasies of the Therapist’s Inner World — Santiago Delboy
Patients often want to know what their therapist is thinking—not biographical details, but the texture of another mind.
Carl Rogers Meets Donald Winnicott — James Barnes
What happens when two influential visions of therapy—one emphasizing empathy and transparency, the other the containing function of the analytic frame—are brought into conversation?
Are Psychoanalysts Method Actors? — Adam Blum
This essay reflects on the ethical and clinical stakes of attention itself—what it means to listen not just well, but responsibly, when the consequences feel immediate.
Write to TAP’s advice column, Ask a Psychoanalyst.
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