20 years ago when I became trained as a psychotherapist, I was exposed to a number of different theories.

And whenever I heard about object relations or psychoanalysis or psychodynamic theory.

I was always thoroughly confused.

I was thoroughly confused about a lot of things

about therapy back then,

but I was particularly confused about psychodynamic therapy or psychoanalysis or object relations.

But at the same time, I knew that there was something I liked about it.

There was something that seemed to resonate with me.

And when I was in graduate school, getting my masters 20 years ago,

I was asked by instructors to choose one theory to identify as a theory that I wanted to know more about and I wanted to

investigate and research and try to apply to the clients I was seeing at my internship.

And I chose object relations family therapy.

And ever since then, I have made it a point

to learn more about it and to understand it more and the more I

learn about it the more I like. There's certainly a lot of things about

psychoanalysis, a particularly classical psychoanalysis that is quite silly to me

but there's a lot of it that I really really enjoy as a therapist.

And at my university I'm sort of known as the psychodynamic guy when people want to know more about object relations and psychoanalysis.

They know that I'm the professor that knows about such things.

And so, I don't know why I'm telling you that, but just so you know how dedicated I am to it and how well known it is, I suppose.

And then, I've been, since I started the podcast I've been getting a lot of requests to talk about

psychodynamic theory and other kinds of things along these lines and then patron

...