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Introducing SUBGAP & Make The Leap
Sigmund Freud's greatest contribution to humankind was the discovery that, instead of choosing our own destinies, the unconscious mind makes some of our decisions for us. When the unconscious takes over, we function as if on autopilot and this limits us from fulfilling our life potential in love and at work. Freud's discovery was fully cultivated only within my own profession as we have studied and practiced treatment in accordance with the specialized psychoanalytic knowledge of the unconscious.
Early in my career, I recognized that there was also a need to create a beneficial solution that was more relevant to modern life and more far-reaching -- not just for professionals and patients. A true populist psychology was needed. In an era proliferated with superficial "self-help" that contradicts what psychotherapists know, I believed that there is a way of sharing our insights into better wresting control from the unconscious and proactively setting the stage for more fulfilling lives. Finally, I have arrived at an updated distillation of psychoanalytic principles intended to empower everyday people to understand the possibilities and move in the direction of fulfilling their own destinies. This distillation is published in my 2005 book: Make the Leap: A practical guide to breaking the patterns that hold you back.
My wonderfully simple reformulation is called SUBGAP -- an acronym for: Seeing, Understanding, Breaking and Guarding Against Patterns. These are the four keys to fulfilling our actual but hidden potential by breaking the unconscious patterns that hold us back. I am convinced, and many readers have substantiated my belief, that these four steps can be performed in a self-guided fashion with the help of a good manual. While the British Journal of Psychiatry recently reported that professionally-based cognitive behavioral self-guided programs have been investigated and proven to be successful, a professionally-based psychoanalytic self-guided method did not yet exist until now.
Though not a replacement for psychotherapy, SUBGAP is a self-applied way to address the current epidemic of life dissatisfaction. It is possible that many of the people diagnosed as depressed, and even medicated, are actually dissatisfied instead -- the two concepts are often lumped together. Make the Leap is specifically intended as a bridge between professional knowledge and the public's need for legitimate and professionally-based life-fulfillment tools -- whether applied on one's own or along with treatment.
Illuminated by life stories (including my own), Make the Leap conveys the great truths about life that psychoanalysts have come to trust.
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