Author: ML Heller
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register. One more time… Once again, thin veneers of public pose have cracked exposing very private lives. So common as to be utterly prosaic, another powerful politician has been caught in an extramarital tryst with a political groupie, a less dominant woman aroused by power.
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register. “He’s gotten completely paranoid and is speaking in vernacular I don’t recognize,” my friend explained slowly and evenly, though clearly in an anxious state. “The psychiatrist put him on medication, and I don’t know why. I think he’s having a bad reaction.”
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register. Because I often emphasize the importance of mothers, mothering and the maternal, it may appear that I completely disregard the masculine and paternal. I’ll clarify that by distinguishing between an actual mother and a maternal function. Parental functions may be construed as active or passive, directive […]
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register A screenwriter friend gave me an article discussing the salutary aspects of sadness and the ways in which our contemporary culture tends to quickly erase it or prematurely foreclose upon its gritty psychological usefulness in a quest for perennial cheery happiness. As if happiness were a […]
This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register. We are too often saturated with regrettable accounts of public figures exposed in salacious but banal trysts. Illicit sex sells. What a thumping bore.
The other day I received a disquieting video email. A clip from a local broadcast news segment illuminated, for any petty crook who might not have already known, the proper use of an interesting adaptable key that fits easily into almost any lock.
A relationship, by design, is a two-person field. Actually more if you consider all the people inhabiting your mind. With mom, dad and your third grade teacher with the quivering upper arms, it’s a pretty crowded place. You are the unique product of all your relationships. This internal constellation of characters forming your identity is […]
The uncanny content of dreams often makes them appear to be communications from afar. However seductive it is to imagine mysterious and distant origins, the equally fascinating explanation is that dream images are your own mental products.
Since the dawn of human consciousness, we have been fascinated by our dreams, visitations from the depths of our psyches. Nothing brings us into contact more intimately with our own mental mechanics than a profound dream. Universally appealing, no other topic of mind is quite as compelling, confounding or captivating. Almost everyone has an opinion […]
Upon answering the phone early one morning last week, I heard a friend ask tentatively, “Did you hear about the school shooting yesterday?” “Of course,” I responded, wondering why this particular shooting inspired a phone call. “That was where I went to school,” she said sadly and paused. “That was my college.”