A personal and eclectic list, not meant to be comprehensive or to provide didactic overviews. 
​Items are books unless otherwise noted.  Click on the links for articles and websites.  
To be updated and expanded as life goes on…
PSYCHOANALYSIS and PSYCHOTHERAPY
​Articles
  • The Couch: Personal Experiences in Therapy, The New York Times
    An ongoing series of Opinionator columns online and in the Sunday Review.  Touching accounts by therapists of experiences with their patients.
  • The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Therapy, by Jonathan Shedler
    American Psychologist, March/April 2010; academic, but accessible.  Evidence supports the effectiveness of the distinctive treatment of analytic therapy.
  • The Idea That Wouldn't Die: Analytic Therapy Now, by Molly Knight Raskin
    Quick and easy read.  Analytic therapy in the 21st century is a flexible, patient friendly, uniquely helpful treatment whose principles are supported by modern science.  
Books

  • Nine Lives: Nine Case Histories Reflecting the Human condition, by Newell Fischer, 2011. Moving, detailed descriptions of an analyst and his patients working together.
  • The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, by Stephen Grosz, 2013
    ​Brief and compelling vignettes of patients in treatment as illustrations of our feeling experience: beginnings, endings, changes, lies, love.
Web
Movies

  • Ordinary People
    ​1980 academy award winner about an adolescent riven by guilt after surviving his brother in a boating accident. A compelling account of psychotherapy in the context of anguished family dynamics.  Masterful performances by Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch and Timothy Hutton.
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PSYCHOANALYIS AND SOCIETY
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Books

Articles
  • The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: A Developmental Approach, Vamik Volkan
    ​Political psychology classic. How individuals under perceived threats revert to childhood ways of reinforcing their identity, promoting cohesion within their group and corrosive conflict with others.  By an active participant in international conflict resolution.
LAUGHING MATTERS​
CHILDHOOD
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Books
  • The Magic Years, by Selma Fraiberg, 1996 (original 1959)
    ​Beautifully conveys her understanding of the psychology of the child from zero to six years. Marvelous depictions of the world as experienced by the wildly imaginative mind of the toddler unfettered by adult reason.
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Videos

  • Life's First Feelings, PBS Nova, first aired 1986.
    ​The emotional development of early childhood, featuring eye-opening footage from ingenious research projects.
LOSS, ILLNESS, AGING, MORTALITY and OTHER LIGHT TOPICS
  • The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, 2005
    A gripping memoir of irrationally imaginative reactions to loss of her beloved husband and fellow writer in sharp, clear faceted prose.
  • Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom, 1997
    Moving memoir of the author’s experience with his college professor, who demonstrated how to live well even as he progressively lost function to ALS.
  • Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, by Roz Chast, 2014
    ​Memoir of coping with the last years of her parents’ lives, told by means of her quirky, emotionally dead-on cartoons familiar to New Yorker readers.
BETTER LIVING [DR. MOTLEY RECOMMENDS]
​[don’t be misled by the cheesy subtitles; these are pretty good]
OUR UNIVERSE, OURSELVES
  • Our Cosmic Habitat, by Martin Rees, 2003
    Modern cosmology in 200 lucid pages.  Is our universe “biophilic”?  When the science is well chosen and explained, you can focus on everything fascinating about our being here and how all that makes you feel.
  • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovelli, 2015
    ​Both frustrating and poetic in its compactness.  What do quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and general relativity have to do with our experience of ourselves?  Find out, and feel good that despite how much you don’t know about our universe you are one piece of it’s strange and wonderful nature.