Cover artwork by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh, from an unpublished reusable sketchbook in progress. Other work from my sketchbook practice.
In the early 2020s, after a long stretch of psychotherapy, I decided to study psychology myself. I had seen psychological help make a real difference, and I wanted to understand more deeply how it worked.
I studied psychology, neuropsychology and related subjects. When the full-scale war began in Ukraine in 2022, I was living in Kyiv. My attention shifted towards trauma psychology, and I worked as a volunteer psychologist with military personnel and civilians who needed support.
Throughout that time, I kept notebooks.
Some entries were thoughts of my own. Others came from lectures, study, reading and conversations. There are paraphrases, quotations, things remembered imperfectly, jokes, blunt observations and longer reflections.
That mixture is the point of Psychology Notebook.
A notebook, translated
This is not a textbook, an academic publication or a collection of quotations that I claim to have invented.
The English posts bring together thematic selections from the archive. Short entries stay short. Longer entries keep their space. Some are ironic, some provocative, some sweary. They do not all share the same register, and I am not trying to turn them into a single smooth essay.
An entry can be a useful way of looking at something without being a universal explanation of it. The fact that I wrote an idea down does not make it an established psychological finding. Where a quotation or paraphrase can be identified, it remains somebody else's idea rather than becoming mine through translation.
The book and the notebooks
Fragments from a Therapist’s Notebook — book cover.
The existing book Fragments from a Therapist’s Notebook is another part of this work. It is not a claim that every fragment in this online series appeared in the book.
The covers are another notebook practice
The cover photographs come from a reusable sketchbook I am still working on. It is an independent art project: drawings, handwriting, layers, stains and the marks left by using the pages again.
Those pages are original artworks, not illustrations generated to explain the psychology entries. A particular drawing is not a diagnosis, a case history or a literal depiction of the fragments beneath it.
The photographed sketchbook has not yet been published as a project. Other projects from the same broader practice include Pologonal, Monocell and Palimpseste Géométrique.