
This is the silent foghorn ranting of one more self-important speck of insignificance in the fizzpop candyfloss content generation game.
Here you will find the stumbling meander of an itinerant mind in the maze of the modern.
If you make it through a post consider slagging me off in the comments. It’s sure to hurt my feelings.
Psychologists are usually sensibly clothed. Some are more stylish than others but their haberdashery is reliably demure with only occasional splashes of sartorial libido spilling over into brightly coloured socks, an eccentric waistcoat or outlandish hat. On this site, the doors of the perceptual wardrobe are thrown wide open and the shrunken bits are allowed to hang out.
Here at the Naked Psychologist blog, an obscure Cape Town psychotherapist (David van der Want) shares his ambivalence towards humanity as a collective and hopefully some of the pathos of our individual lives shows up too. The aim is to strip down to the naked thoughts, to expose the unexpurgated haphazard harvest of a distracted mind that has spent three decades trying to hear the tune and rhythm in the socio-cultural-economic cacaphony of the pre-apocalyptic zeitgeist that is context for the tender drama of our individual lives.
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