What does it mean to play in psychotherapy? And what does it mean to become, especially in adolescence? Two books that have shaped my clinical thinking in profound ways are D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality  and Richard Frankel’s The Adolescent Psyche . Though written in different contexts, both works invite us to reconsider how we understand psychological growth, creativity, and transformation. At their heart is a shared concern with something alive in the psyche: the spa

"If explanation is the self-cure for curiosity, we have a lot of explaining to stop doing; if desire is the refuge from wide-angled attention, we have a lot of wanting to relinquish." Attention is something we give and receive, and is in turns needed, wanted, and feared in its various forms. In psychotherapy we notice that a symptom, a state of mind, is something that claims our attention in a particular way, and as Adam Phillips suggests, psychoanalysis (and by extension I a