Welcome to Process Notes

Freud held his Wednesday meetings in a waiting room. A handful of physicians would gather in his Vienna apartment, cigars in hand, to discuss cases. They called themselves the “Wednesday Psychological Society,” and from those smoke-filled evenings emerged the entire vocabulary of the interior life that the twentieth century would inherit—repression, projection, the unconscious, the Oedipal drama. The meetings were private, the discussions frank, and the notes were kept for the doctor’s eyes only.

Those notes were called process notes—the clinician’s private record of what actually happened in the room. Not the polished case study for publication, but the raw material: the patient’s contradictions, the therapist’s own reactions, the moments of resistance and rupture that reveal more than any textbook formulation. Process notes are where the real thinking happens.

I have been a clinical psychologist for fifteen years. I have sat across from the anxious executive, the scrupulous seminarian, the couple on the brink, the teenager who cannot name what is wrong. I have learned that what people say is rarely the whole story, and that the truth usually emerges sideways—in a slip of the tongue, a flash of anger, an unexpected association. The same, I have come to believe, is true of cultures.

We are living through what can only be called a civilizational crisis of mental health. Anxiety and depression are endemic. Young people are drowning in diagnosis. The language of therapy has colonized public discourse—we speak of “trauma” and “boundaries” and “self-care” as though these clinical terms could bear the weight of meaning that was once carried by sin, virtue, and salvation. And yet for all our therapeutic sophistication, we do not seem to be getting better. We seem to be getting worse.

Something has gone wrong in the clinic. And what goes wrong in the clinic eventually goes wrong in the public square.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus understood this. The late priest and editor of First Things spent his career arguing that a society that excludes transcendence from public life will not remain neutral—it will go mad. The “naked public square,” stripped of religious reference, does not stay empty. It gets filled with substitutes. Neuhaus saw that the twentieth century’s political religions—communism, fascism, the various utopianisms—were not rejections of the religious impulse but perversions of it. Man cannot live without meaning, and if he is denied the sacred, he will sacralize something else.

What Neuhaus did for politics, I want to do for psychology.

The modern therapeutic project has made the same error. It stripped the soul from its vocabulary and expected the psyche to remain intact. It told people they were nothing but neurons and hormones and conditioning, then acted surprised when they felt empty. It promised liberation from guilt and delivered instead a population that cannot forgive itself. It rejected the concept of sin and got, in its place, the concept of trauma—which has all of sin’s weight and none of its remedy.

This publication is my attempt to think out loud about what has gone wrong and what might be done about it. I am calling it Process Notes because I want to preserve the frankness of the Wednesday Society—the willingness to say what is actually observed, even when it is unflattering or unfashionable. And I am subtitling it “Sanity for the Public Square” because I believe Neuhaus was right: we cannot have a healthy society without a healthy anthropology, and we cannot have a healthy anthropology if we have abandoned the soul.

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What to Expect

I will write essays. Not listicles, not hot takes, not “content.” Essays in the old sense—attempts to think through a problem in public, following an argument wherever it leads. The topics will range from clinical observation to cultural criticism to the intersection of faith and reason that has always been the Catholic intellectual tradition’s particular gift to the world.

These essays will be free. I want them read widely. The sickness I am diagnosing is not confined to the paying class.

For those who want to go deeper, I am offering something I have never done before: a kind of ongoing conversation. Paid subscribers will receive access to Doorknob Comments—a weekly audio show in which I answer your questions directly. In a standard therapy session, the doorknob comment is when the session is wrapping up and the patient finally says the thing they came to say. I want to create a space for that kind of honesty.

Paid subscribers will also hear me read each essay aloud, for those who prefer to listen. And they will have access to the comments where the discussion happens.

The details of the paid tiers are below for those interested. But to be clear: the substance is free. The engagement is what costs.

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Why Now

I have spent fifteen years building a clinical practice and an institute dedicated to the integration of Catholic anthropology with sound psychology. I have written books, hosted a podcast, trained therapists. I am grateful for all of it.

But I have come to believe that the crisis we face is not primarily clinical. It is cultural. And cultural problems require cultural responses—not more techniques, but better thinking. Not more diagnoses, but clearer vision.

“The Wednesday Society” changed the world because a handful of serious people were willing to gather and think honestly about what they were observing. Fr. Neuhaus’s after-mass gatherings broadened the scope of that phenomenon and deepened its anchor in timeless truth. I do not know if this publication will change anything. But I know that the thinking needs to be done, and I would rather do it in public, with you, than alone.

Welcome to my parlor.

—Dr. Greg Bottaro

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A note on subscriptions:

Process Notes operates on a simple model: the essays are free, the conversation is paid.

Free subscribers receive every written essay and occasional shorter updates I’m calling “Freudian Slips.”

Paid subscribers ($8/month or $80/year) receive:

• Doorknob Comments: weekly audio Q&A where I answer your voice messages

• Audio narration of every essay

• Access to leave comments and engage in dialogue on each essay

• A private line to submit questions

• 10% discount on CatholicPsych Institute courses

Founding Members ($250/year) receive all of the above, plus priority for Q&A selection and a signed copy of one of my books; The Mindful Catholic or my forthcoming book, The Personalist Cure.