Jon-David Settell

Message to clients

My work imagines the form and content of a psychoanalysis to come by asking how we might remake ourselves and the world in radical joy and affirmation. I believe we can work through the sad passions of modern life. Together we can stop looking away from the pain it causes and begin to imagine a life worth living.

Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic and critical theories that link immanence and materiality—being present as a natural and permanent part of something—to emancipation, I start out by accepting that we cannot live lives worth living if we don’t first learn to love ourselves and the world. I build on what Donald Winnicott calls the holding environment of therapy, akin to the nurturing of early childhood. After being held in your pain, together we work through the pain and sad passions of contemporary life. This model of care draws heavily on self-narration, taken here as a giving of the Self to an Other—the therapist—in the interests of letting go of what hurts and narrating the Self into new forms of being. This takes whatever form you choose, from dream work, narrating your life from birth to now, reading poetry and fiction, to art and music-making. I accept that you are the expert not only in your pain, but also in your joy. As therapist I offer both a vessel for holding pain and a guide to remembering how to wonder at the world, and find joy in it.