Inner voice

23.September 2026 Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

“Better a grave than a slave”

What elements might an official definition of slavery have? The first is possession - a person completely belongs to someone else, has no freedom, rights, choices, as if he is a "talking tool"; the second is the possibility and right of the slave owner to sell his slave without asking for any consent, to barter him or lose him at roulette; thirdly, slaves are most often used to perform forced labor, which they cannot refuse, which they cannot discuss or change. And finally, slaves were allowed to be physically and sexually abused and even killed. Without chains on their hands or the danger of someone exchanging them for money, at least three large groups of people still live like slaves to this day

Inner voice

16.September 2026 Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Inner peace, that blissful state

If one moment you think you're the best in the world, and the next you despise yourself and think you're worthless, it's only logical that you'll be depressed all the time. If someone has accepted his limitations and has clear indications that he knows how to be good at something, feelings are naturally more moderate, and peace comes without much effort.

Inner voice

19.August 2026 Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Authenticity, which is conquered again and again

Since all parents are obsessed with making their kids eat broccoli, and they naturally hate the taste of it, parents know that it's necessary to pretend it's magically delicious and the kids will accept it, and maybe love it just because of it. Now try to imagine how many such "broccoli" each of us carries inside us and how much they hinder the recognition of what we ourselves find delicious. And apply the same to schools, ideologies, churches, peer groups and all those millions of people whose job it is to convince you that you've been dreaming from the bottom of your heart all your life about buying their face cream.

Inner voice

What are supervisors for?

An incredible number of people seek psychotherapy help, and an equally incredible number of people want to study psychotherapy and make it their profession. Considering the high demand in the market, the power of greed and the unorganized regulation in Serbia, it should be expected that supervisors spring up like mushrooms after the rain, are not prepared for the job and receive money and/or narcissistic gratuities from beginners who will not be able to adequately prepare for an extremely responsible job

Frank Zappa

Inner voice

“Freak out!”

Books are still written about Frank Zappa, his music is performed and heard all over the world, he is recognized as an unsuspecting politician and social critic whose every interview brought a new original thought, a band leader who held the most complicated auditions, a conductor with his own unique approach

Inner voice

Dangerous and unbridled competitive spirit

We do not compete when it is necessary, but because of that necessity we have brought our social lives to the point of absurdity. Hierarchies, ranks, titles, titles, luxury - everything serves only to show that someone is more successful and powerful, that he has won, so that others should admire him, fear him and envy him. Psychology showed long ago that it is best to turn competitiveness into a competition with yourself. But what does that actually mean

23. May

Inner voice

Without hope, there is no struggle.

In Serbia, there is a very strong belief that everything is in vain, that no matter what you try, it cannot be better. To me, however, while I envied everyone who was present at Slavia on May 23, it seemed that this persistence of spontaneous protests must be based on some invincible hope - in people young enough not to be broken by disappointments and whose enthusiasm pours out all around. Just don't forget that it is just a necessary introduction

Inner voice

Envy, that unusual feeling

It is important to ask whether it is possible not to be envious or whether this feeling is inevitable. It is realistic to say that all people feel envy occasionally, to some extent, at least in some aspects of life, probably less so with development. Only for some people, envy eats up the rest of their lives, turns into an obsession and becomes destructive for themselves, a potential victim or someone else around them.

Sigmund Freud

Inner voice

29.April 2026. Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Freud's century

Even the fiercest critics should not lose sight of the fact that all of Freud's questions are our questions to this day, and that they will probably continue to haunt future generations. What are the causes of emotional suffering? How do dreams come about? Where are the traumatic memories until we are able to think about them? What is it in our unconscious that psychotherapy cannot help us change? Why someone is unable to grieve... It takes incredible insight to be able to formulate all these questions, and Freud's texts contain an incredible number of them.

Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Inner voice

22.April 2026. Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Bard's Day

An American Shakespearean scholar claimed that Shakespeare is the inventor of modern people, that he showed us how we can express our feelings and shape our identities. As for the first, it seems strange to us today that people once did not know how to express love, jealousy, greed, ambition or grief with words. All these feelings were best described by Shakespeare, at least until that historical moment, and some were even described first in the entire history of literature.

A man

09.April 2026. Dragan Radovancevic

Horns: a story older than marriage

When we say "cuckoldry", most people think of shame, laughter, parody. But the history of this phenomenon is uneven and often unexpected. Welcome to one of the greatest secrets of modern sexuality

The influence of social networks on the mental and cognitive development of young people

02.April 2026. Milan Milošević

Little Red Riding Hood and the Cyber ​​Wolf

Likes trigger dopamine hits of pleasure, fueling addictive behavior. The need to be constantly online increases feelings of loneliness. Idealized images of other people's lives and bodies increase dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms. Around the world, there are more and more calls for stricter regulation of the work of social network owners

Psychotherapy

Inner voice

02.April 2026. Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

What do psychotherapists actually do?

When the session begins, it may seem like a conversation to you, although it is obvious that you are doing more of the talking than the therapist. During that time, however, a good psychotherapist listens so much that the only comparison I can think of is the black-and-white footage of Mravinsky trying Unfinished and reacts to subtleties that I will never be able to discern. I don't care if everyone gives better advice, the therapist is an Olympian winner in recognizing that your voice trembles because you hide tears, that your pauses are longer than usual and you hesitate on some topics, that you often return to some experiences while you never mention others...

Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Inner voice

How to take advantage of psychotherapy sessions

So what should you do so that psychotherapy can help you too? This is where we come to a harsh element. It is almost certain that the key factor in successful therapy is the client. Very reputable researchers claim that it is possible to express this numerically and that the client's contribution is at the level of 30 percent, while, for example, the type of psychotherapy does not exceed 10 percent. So, not only will the therapy take a long time, but you have to do most of the work yourself

Psychotherapy

Inner voice

How to choose a psychotherapist

Despite different beliefs, titles mean nothing. You need a person who will be able to understand and put up with you. "Some big drmr" might be great at it, another might use titles just to charge you a fortune. Although we put a lot of faith in experience, research shows that younger therapists help better than older ones, probably due to enthusiasm and supervision. Neither should the impressions you get in the media be decisive, regardless of how eloquently and convincingly someone might speak

Inner voice

Director of the Invisible

Three colors they seem like the work of someone who has studied psychology all his life. "Blue" can be used in lessons about grieving and recovery from loss, with suicide attempts, loss of boundaries and their re-establishment, escape from people and the discovery of love, while "White" is an excellent representation of men's fear of impotence and all defenses against it, and "Red" is a portrait of kindness, solidarity and self-sacrifice

Loneliness

Psychopathology of society

25.February 2026. Dragan Radovancevic

Being with the wrong people: Actively losing the self

As we sit alone, we are in a state of potential closeness. As we sit in the "wrong" society, we are in a state of active self-loss. In a world of perverted values, where intimacy is often turned into a commodity, retreating into a small circle is a survival strategy

"Times" file: A century of solitude (2)

19.February 2026. Milan Milošević

Eleanor Rigby and all those lonely people

Felton about a 106-word song that announced today's loneliness epidemic six decades ago, about loneliness to the beat of light music, about the business of loneliness, about the lonely class gap, the homeless and the loners, about possessive individualism, about the loneliness economy, about "un-American loneliness" and the crisis of male friendship, about networked loners, about old age, about American singles, about the 40 percent of Russian single-member households and two percent of people without anywhere in the solitude of old people in Serbia, about the incorrect name of the daily lament

Child with chemical formulas

Parenting and psychology

16.February 2026. Dragan Radovancevic

Stifling Pride: How Parental Vanity Turns Children into Projects

In the era of social networks and obsession with achievement, parental pride increasingly crosses an invisible line and becomes a pressure under which the child loses the right to make mistakes, ordinariness and own identity. Behind the brilliant successes there is often a quiet generation that has learned to be a trophy, but not to be themselves

Blackboard at the Fifth Belgrade High School

Psychologists

05.February 2026. B. B.

Serbian Association of Psychologists: Examining and intimidating students is an abuse of psychology

There is a suspicion that certain school psychologists carried out procedures that included conversations with students that did not have the character of psychological support but of "investigation". Such actions can cause direct damage to students and permanent damage to the public's trust in the psychological profession, announced the Association of Psychologists of Serbia.

Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Inner voice

05.February 2026. Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Boredom - needed, but persecuted

The world of an adult is designed to have boredom at its core, but we all pretend that renewing an ID card makes sense and plays an important role in anything. If we agree that it is not boring where some adults have managed to preserve traces of childish playfulness, then we must be clear that it is limited to creativity, the circus, some Summerhills, if they still exist at all, and hobbies to which one devotes himself with great passion and without any ambition

The woman is lying on her stomach on the bed.

Inner voice

21.January 2026 Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Hesitation and its sources

Some people try to curb the fundamental insecurity in their inner voice by excessive use of opinion, rational assessment, too frequent consultations. And that thinking then postpones the whole thing, takes away its initial excitement, dries it up, so that the center of the event becomes the dilemma itself, and not the possible gain or loss.

Psychology

16.January 2026 Dragan Radovancevic

The world's pain of an individual

Today, mental health is most often presented as a personal problem that needs to be "fixed", but the question of why suffering has become an almost universal condition is persistently avoided. It is precisely in this avoidance that the key problem is hidden

Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Inner voice

06.January 2026 Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

Dedication

If loneliness didn't hurt as much as it does, no one would ever give up the privilege of locking the door from the inside. The life of several generations in the same household, even harmonious and solid marriages, best friends who live together during studies - none of this is possible without occasional (ideally alternating) sacrifice, without taking on other people's burdens and understanding other people's flaws. But the question remains - how long to suffer? How each of us should learn to recognize that line beyond which self-sacrifice becomes self-effacement and self-abasement

How to succeed

06.January 2026 Dragan Radovancevic

Psychology in the service of inequality

Each decade brings its own messianic theory that will finally reveal the formula for success in life. And each, under the skeptical gaze of other scientists, fell apart like a house of cards. But what is fascinating is not their decline, but society's hunger for such explanations