Karen Dougherty

This is the first in a highly watchable four-part series of educational videos from the Freud Museum in London about psychoanalysis. Yes, it's weird. But that's a good thing.

This is a link to an enjoyable interview I did with GenW magazine offering career advice to young women who are interested in training as a psychotherapist. I'm always open to mentoring young people who are as passionate as I am about this work.

I live in a city with two psychoanalytic institutes.  I trained for two years in the newer, “contemporary” institute before switching to the older, “conservative” one. I've now completed all the training requirements at the Toronto Institute and have never regretted the change.  In this paper, published two years ago in "The Candidate Journal," I explain what motivated my decision, the challenges in its execution, and how it has affected me.  I explore the meaning of such a m

This exceptional BBC radio series, called "In Therapy," powerfully conveys a sense of how therapy works. Every psychotherapist has a unique style. Susie Orbach's gentle empathy comes across well. The patients are played by actors to protect confidentiality.

This lecture, by Adam Phillips, is from a paper entitled, "Against Self-Criticism." We would rarely speak to another person the way we speak to ourselves. In true Adam Phillips style, he articulates something we don't quite know we know. Here is a pithy excerpt: "But the self-critical part of ourselves, the part that Freud calls the super-ego, has some striking deficiencies: it is remarkably narrow-minded; it has an unusually impoverished vocabulary; and it is, like all propa