ABOUT MITCHELL SMOLKIN

I am interested in the space in between.

I initially became curious about the field of psychology when I read about Carl Jung’s preoccupation with glitches in our consciousness, moments when our identities briefly collapse, and something in between is present. I believe this is one of the hardest moments for us to sustain as human beings, yet it is also where there is the most opportunity.

In my clinic, I see people in that moment freeze or lash out in anger. I have watched them pause and have felt time stand still. I have experienced my own mind go blank. I know the fear of not knowing what comes next, but also the strange certainty that what comes next will somehow be exactly right.

It is this space that I want to explore.

Children and young people will occupy an important place here. I think they often get a bad rap. Much of what we identify as a problem in children is, I believe, entangled with the anxiety of adults attempting to manage their own fragmented world. Children then become the place where that anxiety goes.

Adults need a world of their own that exists alongside but separate from the world of children. We need to be able to encounter the simple sadness of our own predicament—the limits of our control, the compromises of adulthood, the things we cannot repair—in order to make room for the joy, play, freedom and love that children need and deserve. It is an astounding challenge to raise children and simultaneously continue to pursue our own dreams. We should endeavour to make use of the extraordinary capacity we have to feel the full spectrum of our emotions.

We thrive on kindness and love. We need and yearn for those who care for us to make emotional and intellectual space for us, so that we can discover and build our own minds. This is crucial if we are to explore our wildest dreams. For more than thirty years, I have been committed to understanding what makes that possible. I have spent thousands of hours clinically with people from around the world, sitting in the spaces in between—in marriages, dreams, families, suffering and life goals. The neurobiology of healthy child development and attachment is central to my work, but I am equally interested in the mythopoetic frame through which human beings have always tried to understand suffering and meaning.

I am fascinated by the cleft that opens when we are able to slow things down and explore with care what emerges. I am interested in sharing my questions about and obsession with this space with you.

I am a husband and a father as well as a therapist and writer, and I have seen firsthand what going inside and discovering our own inner lives can do to help us love and help the people around us feel safe. I am interested in childhood, but also in how childhood affects adulthood: in relationships, dreams, ambition and the ways we continually need to reinvent ourselves to meet the next stages of life head on.

I have published in the areas of intergenerational trauma and development, and I teach on a wide array of subjects, particularly the art of repair in human relationships. My work draws from psychology, neuroscience and culture. I am also a professional singer and actor and have performed around the world to audiences large and small. There is a space in both the flow of therapy and the vulnerability of performing that asks for a surrender of control, and this is a state that I am infinitely curious about.

I will publish an essay every two weeks and offer opportunities to engage as a community and discuss the work. I want this to be a place where ideas are taken seriously without having to become prescriptions, and where psychology remains connected to the successes and failures of everyday life.

I do not believe that we are ever really “done,” or that everything eventually gets “resolved.” I am suspicious of the wild-goose-chase culture in which we are led to believe that, if only we work hard enough, analyse ourselves deeply enough or discover the right technique, we will finally “get to the bottom of things.”

Nonetheless, I think the effort is worthwhile. Life does not fully resolve either. I believe that this attempt—the essai, in the original French sense of a trial, an attempt—is at the heart of everything.

We get as close as we can. Jung would say that we circumambulate a dream or a symbol: we go around and around it, gleaning more with each pass. And from this vantage point we enrich our lives by complicating our perspectives. We find rooms we did not know existed but were there all along.

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