Teaching About the Dynamic Mind: Then and Now  

Jonathan Shedler, PhD

We begin our conversation on the importance of communicating our basic concepts in jargon-free language. Jonathan shares with us the limitations he finds in academic psychology where analytic ideas are meaningfully misunderstood. We work our way through his paper discussing ‘unconscious mental life’, the ‘mind in conflict’, ‘disavowal’ (instead of ‘repression’) and ‘psychic continuity’ (instead of ‘psychic determinism’) to name but a few of the topics we cover. We recognize the analytic opportunity to discover the ways that we live in the childhood ‘then’ as opposed to the novel ‘now’. Jonathan presents clinical material to demonstrate these concepts including his own ‘disavowal’ as he began his analysis. We close with an appreciation of the importance of one’s own affective discovery of these otherwise unconscious forces. I also note Jonathan’s passion and clarity about our work.

Our Guest: Jonathan Shedler, PhD is an author, consultant, and teacher. His article The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy helped establish psychoanalytic therapy as an evidence-based treatment. He’s the author of over 100 scholarly articles, creator of the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP) for personality diagnosis and case formulation, and co-author of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Follow Jonathan at: https://jonathanshedler.substack.com/ .

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30 November 2025