
Second Thoughts


Socrates’ suicide as an affirmative choice.

"Two ways of talking and living in the world.”

America is in the world, the world is in America.

On the border between philosophy and psychiatry.

“Call no man happy before he is dead.”

Breaking with the past—a history of the manifesto.

Truth is a collective verdict in the slow cooker of time, not an individual alloy smelted in the crucible of the moment.

A social psychiatrist who stays on the ethical way.

“Poets don’t have biographies. The work is their biography.”


Festina lente—hurry up and slow down!

Going deep by staying shallow.

“Only the shallow know themselves.”

The relational self is at once both social and intimate.

The relational dialogue is to relational therapy what free association is to psychoanalysis.

“Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.”

Our chosen image of what and who we are in this world.


A therapist asks a question that makes me glimpse the eternal.

Ethics as first therapy.

Finding social truth in poetic metaphors.



Hopes and failures of community psychiatry.


Ideas are a product of their context.

Children are subject to the world’s largest biosocial experiment.

Expanding the medical model to embrace the humanities.

Society starts with two—one is a fiction.

