Ten ideas helpful to know if you want to be a therapist, understand human nature, or have an incisive ability to effect matters 1) Easterbrook hypothesis, essential for understanding ADHD, procrastination, work productivity. This was the basis of my dissertation way back in 1987, and remains a central explanatory concept for me. 2) Yerkes Dodson Law, the relationship between arousal and task efficiency 3) The structure of intelligence as formulated by the Wechsler scales 4) The active/passive dichotomy of Theodore Millon 5) Shadow pathologies 6) Diagnostic fashions 7) The unreliability of clinical versus actuarial diagnosis 8) Cultural and legal context of disorders 9) Rules of active listening 10) B versus D cognition by Abraham Maslow
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memoirs
Among the mishmash of memories from student years, the long march towards turning an unremarkable teen into a psychologist, a few memories stand out. One particular learning experience that I recall, somewhat hazily, occurred when I was an intern at University of Nebraska Medical Center in 1984. I was supervised by Louise Eaton, a psychiatrist in Nebraska at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and by Gary Gaard, a very supportive psychologist. The client was a four-year-old girl with Down syndrome, very slight of build, with a bowl-like haircut, and almost completely mute. She could draw, though, and produced one of those tadpole-like drawings with two long lines dropping from a circle. The therapy style was a certain kind of play therapy in which you avoided any kind of evaluation. The idea was that praising did not help, since it implied the potential for criticism. So you avoided both. Every day this four-year-old would serve me tea in the unit playroom. There were plastic c...