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At the risk of seeming maybe just a tad pretentious I’m going to talk today about and reveal the secret cause of almost all mental suffering, at least the suffering that I see and have treated in my office for over 40 years. The secret cause of suffering can be found in the concept of pathogenic beliefs.

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So today, I want to consider and explore some of the profound existential, and perhaps even incendiary questions like: Do women speak dolphin? Now, that’s ridiculous, right? And it might even be a bit off-putting to some of you. But hopefully, if you stay tuned, I’ll explain what that might just mean. I promise you that my explanation will, hopefully, make this dolphin thing seem more charming than offensive, but we’ll see.

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So I was reading an interview the other day with this real asshole Tom Homan who used to run ICE when Trump was president the first time around. And he’s called the father of family separations. And now he’s the so-called border czar And what he’s saying is that he’s going to do it again. He’s going to deport illegal parents with or without kids. He’s bad news and we really need to prepare for it. And one way of being prepared for it I think is to look at what happened the last time that Trump and Homan and his cronies set about to separate families at the border.

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In this episode I try to provide some understanding of how and why so many people get depressed around Christmas time. I begin by noting that there are broad cultural and social issues here at stake, including the ways in which non-Christians can experience themselves as excluded and depressively relegated to the sidelines in a culture that, driven by the capitalist engine, literally floods us every day with commodities and the promise that if we purchase and consume these commodities we will be happy.  However, my interest here is in exploring the internal interest psychic world in which people react to various parts of this holiday with depression and disappointment. And I argue that this is an expression of the ways that the child in us affects our adult emotional life. As children, we symbolically equate receiving gifts with receiving love, and this stimulates various narcissistic wishes for perfection that are doomed to be frustrated and disappointed. It is these moments of discrepancy between the longed for and fantasized gratification of our wish for perfect love and the reality that depression arises.  While common, “Christmas depression” is by no means universal and my analysis in no way denies that some or even many people might avoid suffering and even enjoy this time of year.  Still, the pressures and undercurrents of depression, disappointment, loss and envy are great enough to warrant discussion.