Peter Goldenthal, Ph.D., ABPP

This just-published article explains why trying to be your dog's alpha is based on lots of misinformation and is altogether a bad idea. You can read the complete article on the "Books & Articles " page of this website. The article also appears in the summer issue of "The Chronicle of the Dog," the official publication  Read More 

Constructive entitlement is at the core of Nagy’s ideas about personal growth and growth in close relationship. As I discussed in my previous post about entitlement, it may appear to be a psychological concept, and it certainly overlaps with the concept of “feelings of entitlement.,” but it is not the same. A person  Read More 

Games are a great way to strengthen the bond between you and your dog. When your dog is playing with you, he or she is bonding and strengthening your existing bond. Play is a way of affirming that there is no aggression between you and (contrary to popular opinion) no dominance either. For your  Read More 

In Boszormenyi-Nagy’s view, the accrual of and reliance on entitlement have a huge influence on the ways that people relate to each other and to what are often referred to as personality types and disorders. Entitlement is thus a dimension 4 concept, one relating to ethics, and can be seen to parallel a number  Read More 

I’ve written previously, as have many others, about the ways in which meditation and mindfulness practices can help children. One built in problem, a sort of Catch-22 is that those children who most need to learn to calm themselves and to focus their minds are those least likely to want to sit still,  Read More 

No, I’m not talking about a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou; that’s Omar Kyam. This I and Thou comes from the writings of Martin Buber, a writer and philosopher who lived from 1878 to 1965. Buber made a huge distinction between I and it encounters (that’s the way we  Read More 

Dogs have lived around people for longer than has any other domesticated animal: 20,000 years is regarded as a reasonable estimate. That’s long before the invention of agriculture, long before there was any written language. It’s the time of hunter-gatherers; a time before there is any historical record. Current scientific thinking is that  Read More 

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, CT is unique in explicitly addressing issues of interpersonal ethics and fairness. Many, perhaps most, psychotherapists are concerned about fairness between and among people in close relationships. In general, however, their therapeutic approaches lack a specific language with which to talk about these issues. That is a  Read More 

One of contextual therapy’s great strengths is its ability to incorporate concepts and techniques from other approaches. As I’ve said in previous posts, that allows this approach to go beyond an either-or approach–either individual psychodynamics or family systems– and to move into the realm of both -and.

Contextual therapists are trained  Read More 

The obvious answer to the question posed in the title of this post is: “A therapeutic relationship is the relationship between therapist and a client or patient.” We hope that all patient-therapist and client-therapist relationships are therapeutic, but that answer is, if not circular, close to it: it begs the question. What makes a  Read More