psychodynamic

OK let's call it "psychodynamic" instead of "talk"

This is known as psychodynamic therapy for others who want a name for it. There are therapists that specialize in it.

I went through psychodynamic and gestalt therapy and I've managed to suggest therapy to several of my friends. I'll even go as far as to offer to lend people money so that they go to therapy.

I'd be curious if the author had every tried psychodynamic therapy, which has a different approach from CBT.

Lacan as a person/analyst doesn't seem appealing to me, but some kind of psychodynamic therapy surely has a future in the long term, as insight accumulates into the mind. So Lacan seems like something to cautiously sift through for insight.

While I don't fully subscribe to the "you have to be a psychologist to indulge in psychodynamic theory", I do tend to agree with you in this instance. It's unlikely he is generally that myopic, and more plausible that an emotional reaction is occurring.

It is not, however, an in-depth, psychodynamic therapy in the psychoanalytic tradition, so you won't be unearthing profound insights into your personality. The focus is on specific symptoms and quick results.

I had a few sessions with a psychodynamic therapist that I thought were pleasant but mostly pointless because there was no accountability or impetus to actually change my behavior

As far as I can tell, Sarno himself is mostly rebranding much older ideas from psychosomatic medicine and psychodynamic psychotherapy, with his main contribution being that he presents them in a way that people are less likely to reject than the "proper" forms.

In fact I would say that applying the notion of root cause to a distressed individual is part of the problem with the establishment—the situation is inherently complex, involving social context and psychodynamic aspects as well as biology. If we had a solid reductionist biological theory of mental illness, we would still sometimes discover that the cause was strictly "outside" the patient's own physiology.

Imagine hearing this claim: "Most psychologists nowadays use cognitive behavioral therapy, or some kind of statistically-backed similar therapy involving cognitive work, while psychodynamic approaches have almost all but died except in southern California." This doesn't make a claim about psychological phenomena.

There are different therapy orientations: cognitive-behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, psychodynamic therapy, etc. They approach these outdated programs in different ways.

[1] It's funny how "biopsychiatry" is expected to identify precise molecular pathways or anatomical derangements or genetic markers, but once the paradigm is flipped to the more psychodynamic approaches, rigor suddenly doesn't matter so long as we can tell a compelling story about how our experiences shaped us.

Which are essentially psychodynamic in all but name, that these discussions never admit for the possibility that maybe some individuals do fit a classical psychodynamic profile... I really don't know anything in particular about this guy other than what the article stated, but I'm sort of frustrated by the tendency to think that because medicine went way overboard with psychoanalysis decades ago, that it means there wasn't something essentially accurate about it in some cases, and that every claim by every patient about their symptoms should be taken at face value because it feeds some contemporary medical paradigm.

Psychodynamic approaches and group therapy had much more palpable impact, as the missing piece I think was seeing and relating to others. not being alone and talking through issues made a world of difference compared to applying what felt like mechanical exercises of CBT.