MARINA OPPENHEIMER BOOKS AND BLOG

  Una de las consecuencias más negativas del sentimiento de soledad es no ser cuidadoso con los amigos que elegimos. Es tan profundo el temor a sentirnos solos en el mundo que cualquier persona que nos demuestra un dejo de simpatía es bienvenida a nuestra vida. Si bien cuando estamos en pareja no tenemos esa necesidad imperiosa de rodearnos de amigos, cuando la pareja se quiebra puede ocurrir que caigamos en la trampa de atraer a nuestro lado relaciones peligrosas. Bien conocidas son las estafas de mafiosos que utilizan fotos de las plataformas sociales para engañar a mujeres, en general de edad mediana y ávidas de cariño. De acuerdo al FBI el monto de estos fraudes alcanza millones de dólares. Pero no me refiero a estos casos desesperados, sino a situaciones más comunes y cotidianas. Mucha de la gente que nos rodea lleva vidas infelices, existencias sin rumbo definido y acosadas por facturas pendientes. No pocas veces el trabajo que hacen no los satisface y su matrimonio tampoco; ...

  One of the most negative consequences of feeling lonely is not being careful about the friends we choose. The fear of feeling alone in the world is so profound that anyone who shows us some kindness is welcome into our lives. While when we have a partner, we don't feel that urgent need to surround ourselves with companions, when we break-up we risk falling into the trap of attracting dangerous relationships alongside us. Well known are the scams with photos of social platforms to defraud women, generally middle-aged and desperate for being loved again. According to the FBI, the amount of these frauds reaches millions of dollars. But I'm not talking here about these desperate cases, but of more common and close to home situations. Many of the people around us lead unhappy lives, aimlessly defined existences harassed by unfinished businesses. Not infrequently the work they do doesn't satisfy them, and neither does their marriage; others have serious problems with their chil...

 

Although I was born a Catholic, I don’t believe in institutionalized religion. I agree with Krishnamurti when he says that “ Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique.” In other words, each one of us has to create his/her own view of the world and transcendence. A gigantic task, no doubt about it; but as luck would have it, life gives us a hand in this endeavor. In my case I realized that, without the assistance of a guardian angel, some of my life events would have ended very differently. It was the year 1976. My parents had gone to spend the summer at a house they had built on the Argentine coast. I was in Buenos Aires and had not planned to go anywhere because I had just started a new job. Suddenly, for no reason, I felt the need to go visit my parents; on Friday afternoon I asked my boyfriend to be my copilot. On Saturday morni...

  This book includes eight sessions with information and activirties. It is a fantastic tool for clinicians who run groups for severely depressed patients. 

    Friedrich Nietzsche once stated that  without music life would be a mistake. I  have    to admit  that it took me a while  to understand the real meaning of his quote. Until one day by pure chance I listened to the music of a Mexican composer, Ernesto Cortazar. Although I have always been a fan of classical music, especially Mozart, alone in my house during the COVID outbreak for some reason Mozart was not what I longed to listen to. Perhaps the life stage I am going through needed something different, more in tune with who I had been and who I was. Being divorced and alone due to social distancing, I needed to reconnect to the beginnings of my journey; to that time of my life before all the tests and the trials. The first day I listened to Cortazar I felt like he had composed his music just for me: it spoke to me of the country I had left behind when I was still young, it reminded me of my youth, of my family of origin and of what my life had...

Psychoanalyst  Melanie Klein  coined the term projective identification in her work  ‘ Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’  in 1946. We can say that projective identification is a defense mechanism that allows us to unload on another person those issues that are too problematic for us to acknowledge. The term identification is used because the victim of the projection ends up believing that the projected issues are really hers. An example will explain better how this psychological mechanism works. I remember one patient of mine from when I was still in private practice, who had a very difficult relationship with his mother. The mother was severely narcissistic, so much so that growing up my patient too developed a narcissistic personality disorder. When the time was right, he chose to marry a woman with a dependent personality disorder; in addition, she suffered abandonment issues due to her insecure attachment to her mother in childhood. Since my patient was unable t...