Contributed by Mary Sykes Wylie

48 Results

Turns in the Road

Highlights from the Networker Journey

Out of all the hundreds and hundreds of articles that have appeared in the Networker over the past four decades, we’ve chosen a small sampling that captures... Read more

Living Brave

From Vulnerability to Daring

With millions of people having seen her TED talks and read her books, researcher and bestselling author Brené Brown is a phenomenon. But aside from her... Read more

Symposium Highlight May 6, 2016

From Attachment to Creativity

Highlights from the 2016 Symposium

At a time in which our society seems immersed in a toxic stew of fear and anger, this year's Symposium provided a celebration of human values and ideas that... Read more

The Unspeakable Language of Sex

Why Are We Still so Tongue-Tied?

If you’re like most couples therapists, you know how to help partners communicate more clearly, handle conflict with less uproar, and connect more... Read more

Community Mental Health Today

Encompassing the Big & the Small

The promise of the community mental health movement of the 1960s, providing high-quality psychological and social services to poor families, remains unfullled... Read more

What the Financial Crisis Reveals About Our Psyche and Values

Confronting our Definitions of Wealth in the Therapy Room

The current economic crisis may be no more than a rather large bump in the golden road of endlessly self-renewing American prosperity. Still, it's hard not to... Read more

The State of Our Art

Do Our Old Ways Fit the New Times?

While the number of people in psychotherapy keeps declining, surveys reveal that potential clients would still rather talk to a therapist than fill a... Read more

Larger than Life

Marianne Walters Was Family Therapy's Foremost Feminist

Marianne Walters didn't invent a brilliant new therapeutic paradigm, publish a large and magisterial body of research, or establish her own unique school of... Read more

The Mindfulness Explosion

The Perils of Mainstream Acceptance

By replacing the exotic aura of spirituality with the language of science and a down-to-earth self-help approach, mindfulness has brought practices once... Read more

The CBT Path Out of Depression

Two Perspectives on How It Works

While widely acknowledged to be the most empirically supported therapy ever invented, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is often criticized for being too... Read more

Symposium Highlight October 20, 2014

Rediscovering the Myth

For John O'Donohue, Therapy Is a Journey into the Unknown Self

Poet John O'Donohue's introduction to the therapy field came through his unlikely friendship with neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel, known for his book The... Read more

Symposium Highlight September 11, 2014

The Power of Paying Attention

What Jon Kabat Zinn Has Against Spirituality

Jon Kabat-Zinn is acknowledged as one of the pioneers in mind-body medicine--a field that integrates ancient spiritual traditions like yoga and meditation with... Read more

The Accidental Therapist

Jay Haley Didn't Set Out to Transform Psychotherapy

Jay Haley, who died earlier this year at the age of 83, was an unlikely candidate to become a founder of the early family therapy movement. An outsider to the... Read more

The Politics of PTSD

How a Diagnosis Battled Its Way into the DSM

During Vietnam, there were proportionately far fewer reported cases of trauma on the actual battlefield than there'd been in previous wars. The primary reason... Read more

Falling in Love Again

A Brief History of Psychoactive Drugs

Over the last 150 years, we’ve seen waves of mass infatuations with psychotropic drugs—antidepressants being the latest. While all these drugs are... Read more

What the PTSD Diagnosis Leaves Out

Broadening Our Understanding of Trauma

Back in the late 1970s, a motley crew of Vietnam War vets, sympathetic psychiatrists, antiwar activists, and church groups undertook a crusade to have a... Read more

Managing Transference and Countertransference in Somatic Therapy

Does Body-Oriented Therapy Increase the Risk of Transference and Countertransference Responses?

Therapeutic skeptics still cite the possibility of stirring up intense transference and countertransference responses as a compelling reason not to use more... Read more

The Book We Love to Hate

Why DSM-5 Makes Nobody Happy

From small insignificant beginnings in 1952, when almost nobody read it, DSM has become a kind of sacred literary monster. Today, it’s the most detested and... Read more

The Therapy Beat March 7, 2014

Therapists’ Perspectives on the Woody Allen Allegations Read more

The Adult Attachment Interview & How it Changed Attachment Research History

How the Adult Attachment Interview Became the 'Most Important Development in Attachment Research'

When attachment theory was blossoming, it didn’t provide an accompanying toolbox of tactics and techniques, though it did offer a new therapeutic attitude... Read more

Understanding Somatic Experience: Working With the Body to Heal the Mind

How Can Therapists Overcome Fears About the Body with Clients Who Struggle to Heal from Painful Somatic Experiences?

It’s the very fact that both emotion and reasoning ability are held hostage by their body’s continuing physical reaction to trauma that makes healing so... Read more

The ACE Studies: Calculating the Effects of Child Abuse

How the Effects of Child Abuse Have Become the Biggest Public Health Issue in America

Since the publication of DSM-IV in 1994, a massive body of neurobiological research has accumulated, revealing how protracted childhood abuse and neglect can... Read more

Adult Attachment Disorder: 3 Detours to the Right Hemisphere

For Clients with Adult Attachment Disorder, Use the Left Hemisphere to Guide You to the Right

"People with avoidant attachment histories are too closed down to have access to experience their right-hemisphere processes," says Daniel Siegel, who's... Read more

The Mindful Body: Communicating With the Body in Therapy

How a Transition to Mindful Body-Focused Therapy Enriched a Formerly Talk-Only Practice

It’s an article of faith among many somatically-oriented practitioners that the body knows more, knows it more directly, and expresses it more honestly than... Read more

Beyond Phrenology

Let’s Look at How the Brain Really Works

If therapists are going to bring genuine insights—not just soundbites—from neuroscience into the practice of therapy, they need the nuanced, sophisticated... Read more

Attachment Theory & Treatment: 4 Maxims for Therapeutic Change

Attachment-Oriented Therapists Live by Four Strategies for Working Through Attachment Theory and its Associated Disorders

Are there any downsides to basing clinical treatment on attachment theory? David Schnarch, a leading advocate of differentiation in the therapy process... Read more

Developmental Trauma Disorder: Distinguishing, Diagnosing, and the DSM

How One Tenacious Task Force Worked to Separate Developmental Trauma Disorder from PTSD in DSM-5

In 2005, a complex trauma task force began working on constructing a new diagnosis called Developmental Trauma Disorder, which, they hoped, would capture the... Read more

The Therapist’s Most Important Tool

Salvador Minuchin on What Today's Training Approaches Are Missing

Trainees today are buried beneath textbooks on theory, bombarded by lectures on current research, and taught to be experts in a variety of methods. But where... Read more

Psychotherapy’s Mark Twain

For Frank Pittman, Self-Seriousness Was the One Unpardonable Sin

Networker movie critic and contributor Frank Pittman delighted in pointing out the follies, foibles, and excesses of the therapy world, especially anything he... Read more

A Brief History of Psychotherapy

A Mosaic of the Psychotherapy Networker, 1982-2012

Over the years, our front-of-the-book department has not only given readers plenty of tasty factoids to chew on, but also revealed how the seasons of the... Read more

Symposium Highlight May 1, 2011

Mapping The Future

Symposium 2011 Charts Terra Incognita

Emerging from their monastic little cells, 3,000 psychotherapists had a schmooze-fest celebrating the power of face-to-face connection and joined forces to... Read more

The Attuned Therapist

Does Attachment Theory Really Matter?

In recent years, attachment theory, with its emphasis on early bonding, connection and relationship, has exerted as much influence over the field of... Read more

Cyberspaced

Sherry Turkle Sees e-Life at the Crossroads

MIT professor Sherry Turkle has spent the last 30 years studying what our machines have come to mean to us, and how they're altering—sometimes... Read more

As the Twig Is Bent

Understanding the Health Implications of Early Life Trauma

While it's common knowledge that childhood trauma can have far-reaching consequences for adult mental health, its impact on adult physical health is less... Read more

The www.Addiction

Few of Us Can Resist the Seduction of the Internet

Have you ever noticed how often you surf the net or check e-mail when you feel bored or restless or depressed, as if relief is just a click away? The Internet... Read more

The Long Shadow of Trauma

Childhood Abuse May Be Our Number One Public Health Issue

As the battles and controversies over the forthcoming DSM-V heat up, a determined group of trauma experts and researchers are mounting a passionate challenge... Read more

Breaking Through

Poet David Whyte Invites Us to the Edge of Discovery

Poet David Whyte offers an idiosyncratic fusion of verse, myth, story, and personal charisma, demonstrating to audiences all over the world that psychology... Read more

Sleepless in America

Making it Through the Night in a Wired World

If a vast conspiracy were afoot to create an entire civilization of insomniacs, it would operate pretty much the way our society does now. In a nonstop... Read more

The Accidental Therapist

Jay Haley Didn't Set Out to Transform Psychotherapy

Although he influenced a generation of therapists with his strategic methods, Jay Haley was always more at home as an observer of behavior than as an... Read more

Maestro of Consulting Room

At 83, Salvador Minuchin is still reflecting on clinical wisdom

At 83, family therapy pioneer Salvador Minuchin, the most dazzling therapeutic practitioner of his generation, continues on in his search for clinical wisdom. Read more

The Limits of Talk

Bessel Van der Kolk Wants to Transform the Treatment of Trauma

For more than 20 years, Bessel van der Kolk has been in the forefront of research in the psychobiology of trauma and in the quest for more effective... Read more

Why Is This Man Smiling?

A Self-Described Grouch is Trying to Turn Happiness into a Science

Self-Described grouch Martin Seligman, the father of the positive psychology movement, is trying to turn happiness into a science. Read more

The Untold Story: An Interview with Carol Gilligan

Carol Gilligan on recapturing the lost voice of pleasure

In her new book, The Birth of Pleasure, Carol Gilligan has tried to probe the root of what makes intimate partnership between men and women so difficult. What... Read more

Discoveries from the Black Box

How the Neuroscience Revolution Can Change Your Practice

Increasingly, therapists are trying to make sense of the cavalcade of neuroscientific discoveries regularly trumpeted in the research literature and the... Read more

The Good Therapist

Continually Reassessing Its Role, Psychotherapy Gallops into a New Era

The culture of therapy in America has gone through periods of dramatic change every 15 or 20 years with almost clock-like regularity, as succeeding generations... Read more

Crazy Like a Fox

Remembering Carl Whitaker

When Carl Whitaker died at age 83 on April 21st of this year after a long illness, it might be said that the therapy world lost its oldest, wisest and most... Read more

Not surprisingly, almost nothing makes children, including adolescents, feel as insecure and adrift as parents who also feel insecure and adrift, tossed by... Read more

Challenging cases are the least of many therapists' worries these days. The Golden Age of Private Practice is coming to an end and no one is-quite sure what... Read more

Mary Sykes Wylie

Mary Sykes Wylie, PhD, is a former senior editor of the Psychotherapy Networker.