Jane G. Goldberg, Ph.D.

Doubtless, you remember skipping as a child. Some of the moments of happiness you had as a child were surely when you were skipping. I don't mean happiness as in content, or satisfied or feeling good or nice. I mean happy as in joyful. If you look around any playground,...

Throughout my 40 years as a psychoanalyst, many of my patients have expressed interest in wanting to enter the territory of spirituality and authentic soul searching. They are surprised when I present the possibility of using their psychoanalytic therapy as a portal with which to explore this interest. When we...

One of the criticisms of Barack Obama has been that his presidency consists of "just words." Ted Sorenson, whose death we have mourned, expressed astonishment at the sentiment. "'Just words' is how a president manages to operate. 'Just words' is how he engages the country," Sorensen said in...

I have heard from mothers, both biological and adoptive, about the feeling of deep connection with their infant children through eye contact. The profundity of the eye contact between mother and infant is one reason why adoption agencies prefer that birth mothers not see their child. They know that when...

For a few decades now, as both a mother and a psychoanalyst, I have puzzled over what I consider to be an essential question that all mothers must ask themselves: as mothers, how do we embrace the togetherness, the fusion of selves between mother and child that characterizes his or...

If you do some research into the Royal English Archives, you'll come across an interesting little tidbit. It's a recipe for "thieves' oils." So the story goes: In the 17th century, when all of Europe was in the thrust of the Black Plague, a small band of marauding thieves seemed...

The idea that your baby is a genius is a neurological phenomenon. Renowned child educator Maria Montessori has speculated that if our adult ability is compared with the child's, we would need 60 years of hard work to accomplish what he achieves in just three. When a child masters turning...

The brain is not too different from the rest of your body. It needs to be well-nourished. All animals except humans know this instinctively; because the head is elevated whenever an animal moves, sleep is the best time to feed an animal's brain the blood they need for brain nourishment....

Even though there is a mountain of research on sequential processing, and its usefulness as a measure of intelligence, for decades no one had thought to bring the research to the next logical level -- to actually change peoples' digit-span level. Finally, researcher and clinician Bob Doman decided to train...

The concept of the magic number seven, plus or minus two, has a long, revered place in the history of psychological research. It has been well known since the 19th century when a little observational experiment was done by Scottish philosopher, William Hamilton. Hamilton noted that whenever a handful of...

The other day the television stopped working suddenly. I spent almost an hour trying to figure out how to fix it. Then my 17-year-old daughter walked in, took the remote from my hand, and had the thing working again in about a New York nanosecond. I have known, for years...

Comedian Lewis Black does a brilliant riff on the aging brain. The conversation he demonstrates between two adults trying to converse about a film looks something like, at best, a game of charades, or worse, infants trying to communicate wordlessly with each other -- (the very etymology of the word...