“Ask Dr Neuman” Advice Column
Falling in Love and Out of Love A subject of great interest. I read another article this morning by a woman who fell in love and then was rejected, “breaking her heart.” Then she meets a man whom she falls in love with and marries. As she put it in her last sentence,...
Perverted Bears Caught in the Act! A possible explanation for fellatio Disclaimer: First off, I want to say that I do not claim to have observed these bears. I don’t personally know anything at all about bears. If you told me that bears had sex while humming a Beatles...
They didn’t use a blackboard and a pointer. Sex education is very controversial. On one side are the more or less liberals, on the other the more or less conservatives. The liberals take the view that sex is part of nature, and, therefore, should be taught as...
A personal history of passing out. A cardinal symptom of panic disorder is the sudden, inexplicable sense of an imminent loss of control. Panicky persons become afraid that if they do not leave wherever they happen to be when they suffer an attack and return to a...
Straightening out the world An old diagnosis: the common scold. The desire to tell everyone off Most of the time most of us have a pretty good idea what motivates the people around us. We see them behaving in a certain way, and we think we understand them. A neighbor,...
What difference does it make? There is a particular situation– and a time in psychotherapy– when I may be asked by a patient what his girlfriend—or her boyfriend–is thinking “deep down.” The situation I am referring to is at a point where the patient has come to...
Love comes in many forms and involves a varying degree of commitment. Probably, the most unequivocal love is that which a mother feels for a newborn child. Nothing special is required from the baby to justify the parent’s attention and concern. That feeling is a...
A way of having sex with everyone. Recently a man came to me feeling guilty about a lot of things. He felt guilty about the fact that he does not pray properly, which means, evidently, that he gets distracted sometimes when he prays before going to sleep. He would...
You can’t always tell from the beginnings of a relationship, how things will turn out. A romance can burn brightly in the beginning and then sputter and die. We have all seen marriages that have broken apart after ten, twenty or forty years, and probably even...
A particular kind of bad behavior. This is a scenario I have seen played out many times with the protagonist sometimes a young woman and sometimes a man. A woman, let us call her Carol, was in a romantic relationship that lasted for a few months. She and the man she...
Every once in a while, I google myself, in order to prove I still exist. I have come to believe that true success is a long list of google entries—as opposed to my previous standards of success, which revolved about money and, possibly, academic credentials. By this...
I suspect my corporation has some strange religious principles. Corporations used to be described as a “legal fiction” which could be treated for certain business purposes as an individual. It had certain rights, including the right to hire and fire employees and to...