Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch: Recent Episodes

Harvey Schwartz MD

Psychoanalysis applied outside the office.

View Details

“Now's the time to tell that wonderful story of the little boy. He was about two or three years old, and he went in the icebox to get some milk, and he managed to get this big carton and spill it all over the floor. Now, needless to say, there'd be a lot of parents that would react very negatively and frustrated - this mother happened to be a scientist. So she came in, she saw the bottle of milk, and what had happened. She went and got some paper towels, put them on the milk, and said, ‘Look at this. Look how the milk starts creeping up these fibers of the towel. Isn't that cool?’ And then she said, ‘Look, if you have something heavy you need to get out of the refrigerator, feel free to call me. But how neat is this that the milk is being absorbed by the towel?’ Well, she was a scientist, and he became a world-class scientist. She understood his interest and she didn’t bring a fear and shame-inducing reaction, and all the negative effects that could have resulted if she had handled it differently. Instead, she put a sense of joy and interest in being intrigued with his interests, and turned the whole thing around.”

Episode Description: Paul starts our conversation about affects by referencing Tomkins’ work, which identified 6 negative and 2 positive affects/feeling states, all of which are represented by different facial expressions in infancy. He reports on clinical work that is enhanced by locating the patient's affective surface, which enables meaningful contact within the dyad. We focus on the affect of interest and how essential it is in establishing a sense of self in the world. He also shares the many ways that this interest can be undermined by the child's environment. He describes research on the capacities of 18-month-olds and how they differ from 14-month-olds regarding the awareness of self and other. Paul also emphasizes how destructive corporal punishment is in the lives of children and in society at large. We end with the final sentence from his book, a quote from Abraham Lincoln, "We can succeed only by concert. It is not 'Can any of us imagine better?' but 'Can we all do better?' Object whatsoever is possible, still the question recurs, 'Can we do better?'

Our Guest: Paul Holinger, MD, MPH, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Faculty and Former Dean at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, Training/Supervising and Child/Adolescent Supervising Analyst. He is Professor of Psychiatry (Retired) at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago. His most recent books include Affects, Cognition, and Language as Foundations of Human Development and What Babies Say Before They Can Talk: The Nine Signals Infants Use to Express Their Feelings.

Recommended Readings:

Holinger PC: Violent Deaths in the United States: An Epidemiologic Study of Suicide, Homicide, and Accidents. New York: The Guilford Press, 1987.

Holinger PC: Offer D; Barter JT: Bell CC: Suicide and Homicide Among Adolescents. The Guilford Press, 1994.

Holinger PC: What Babies Say Before They Can Talk: The Nine Signals Infants Use to Express Their Feelings. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. (Several Translations)

Holinger PC: Affects, Cognition, and Language as Foundations of Human Development. New York/London: Routledge, 2024.

Holinger PC: Violent deaths as a leading cause of mortality: An epidemiologic study of suicide, homicide, and accidents. Amer J Psychiatry 137: 472-476, 1980.

Holinger PC: A developmental perspective on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Amer J Psychiatry 146: 1404-1412, 1989.

Holinger PC: Noninterpretive interventions in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy: A developmental perspective. Psychoanalytic Psychology 16: 233-253, 1999.

Holinger PC: Further issues in the psychology of affect and motivation: A developmental perspective. Psychoanalytic Psychology 25: 425-442, 2008.

Holinger PC: Further considerations of theory, technique, and affect in child analysis: Two prelatency cases. International J Psychoanalysis 97: 1279-1297, 2016.

Holinger PC: The problem of physical punishment and its persistence: The potential roles of psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 73:1-9, 2020.

View Details

“In the analysis, the place where you face the experience of otherness, of foreignness, of the unconscious that goes through you, it doesn't appear as knowledge. Of course, in an analysis, you get a lot of knowledge, but it's not an important aspect of an analysis. I think that in the analysis, and that's the idea of using that word ‘transmission’ instead of ‘teaching’, what you receive is something that the analyst doesn't have. When you receive some knowledge from a teacher, you receive the knowledge the teacher has. When you transmit something, or when you receive something that has been transmitted by the analyst or by the psychoanalytical setting, is something that the other doesn't have. It's a kind of void. It's a kind of fire. It's like the baton that every runner passes to others in a relay race. It is something more difficult to be grasped with words, is something elusive to words, but it does exist.”

Episode Description: We begin with describing the 'necessary foreignness' of psychoanalysis, "It is from both a foreign perspective and foreign listening that makes it possible to notice the concealed underpinnings, to discover the new, and to express the unexpressed." We consider the clinical asymmetry that allows for the patient's unbridled freedom to think and speak the unspeakable. Educationally, Mariano discusses the essential transmission of analytic experience as contrasted with the teaching of knowledge - a distinction between science and mystery. He shares his thoughts on eclectisism, hypothesis testing and risk. We close with recognizing that the "anachronistic method of psychoanalytic listening is the most authentic way of being contemporary."

Our Guest: Mariano Horenstein, PhD is a training and supervising analyst who belongs to the IPA, FEPAL (Latin American Psychoanalytical Federation), and the international research group "Geographies of Psychoanalysis". He is an IPA Board member and a former chief editor of Calibán, the official Journal of FEPAL. Former Training Director of APC (Argentina). His articles have been translated into Portuguese, English, Farsi, French, Russian, Italian, Portuguese and German. Author of four books :Psychoanalysis in Minor Language, The Compass and the Couch. Psychoanalysis and its Necessary Foreignness, Funambulistas. Travesía adolescente y riesgo and Artists, Writers and Philosophers on Psychoanalysis. From the Couch. He has received international awards as M. Bergwerk (about the clinic forms of Evil), Lucien Freud (about Psychoanalysis and Culture); Elise Hayman Award for the study of Holocaust and Genocide (given by the IPA); A. Garma (given by the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry); the FEPAL Award and Carolina Zamora Award (given by Madrid Psychoanalytical Association).

http://www.marianohorenstein.com/

Recommended Readings:

Horenstein, Mariano, The compass and the couch. Psychoanalysis and its necessary foreignness, Mimesis, Milan, 2018.

Horenstein, Mariano, Artists, writers and philosophers on Psychoanalysis. From the couch, Routledge, London, 2024.

Horenstein, Mariano, Psicoanálisis en lengua menor, Viento de Fondo, Córdoba, 2015.

Preta, Lorena (ed), Dislocated subject, Mimesis, Milan, 2018.

Preta, Lorena (ed), Geographies of Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, Milan, 2015.

Preta, Lorena, The brutality of things. Psychic transformations of reality, Mimesis, Milan, 2019.

Wohlfarth, I., Hombres del extranjero. Walter Benjamin y el Parnaso judeoalemán, Taurus, CDMX, 2014.

View Details

“I think that my analytic awareness of denial and projection and the concreteness of psychic reality when executive function wanes, that I could help the other caretakers to understand some of what was going on - to give them a way to understand that relieves their sense of frustration and uncertainty. I think that the analytic awareness of denial, of projection, that these things are not generally recognized by many caretakers, but it does reorient and make the caretaking function much more tolerable. It expands the understanding of what goes on in the waning personality. I also think that analytic work fosters the capacity to tolerate ambiguity, uncertainty, pain and frustration and in that way may allow us, the analytic mind, to tolerate some of the intense affect - as sort of the phrase I love from an Italian analyst, as “writings waiting to be completed” - by the analytic mind. We can hold and metabolize the difficulty and offer that kind of function rather than unpleasantness just to be rid of. These are some of the things that I felt are useful as a psychoanalyst.”

Episode Description: We begin with describing how dementia is a cloud over our field both for individuals and for institutes. Maxine then introduces us to 'Sally' who was her analysand 40 years prior to recontacting her to care for her cognitive decline. Maxine mentions that just hearing her former patient's voice instantly brought alive her past experiences with her. We discuss how she approached the issue of caring for her and her neurological condition. We consider the at times overlap between psychogenic and organic symptoms and she shares with us her countertransference experiences of herself losing her memory. Maxine also shares her approach to answering Sally’s questions about the possibility of recovering. We close with her describing how she feels that being an analyst aided her care of Sally and what she learned from that experience that she brought to her other patients -"to face the pain of difficult truths."

Our Guest: Maxine Anderson, MD, is a training and supervising analyst at the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society and the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. Originally trained in psychiatry, she pursued psychoanalytic training in Seattle in the early 1970s and then pursued post-graduate work at the British Psychoanalytical Society for 8 years, returning to Seattle in 1992. Thereafter, she became a Founding Member of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Maxine has published several articles, and chapters and 3 books, the most recent being The Hardest Passage: a psychoanalyst accompanies her patient’s journey into dementia (Karnac, 2025). Feeling herself now to be an Elder in life and in her field, Maxine hopes to continue to think and write about this phase of personal and professional life.

Recommended Readings:

Balfour, A. (2007). Facts, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic contributions to dementia care.

In: R. Davenhill (Ed.) Looking into Later Life: a psychoanalytic approach to depression and dementia in Old Age. (pp. 222–247). London: Routledge, 2007.

Davenhill, R. (Ed.) (2007) Looking into Later Life. A Psychoanalytic approach to Depression and Dementia in Old Age. London: Karnac.

Davenhill, R. (2007). No truce with the furies: issues of containment in the provision of care for people with dementia and those who care for them.

In: R. Davenhill ( Ed.), Looking into later life: a psychoanalytic approach to dementia and depression in old age. (pp. 201-221). London: Routledge.

Evans, S. (2008). “Beyond forgetfulness”: How psychoanalytic ideas can help us to understand the experience of patients with dementia”. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 22(3):155–176.

Kitwood, T. (1997). Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Malloy, L (2009). Thinking about dementia – a psychodynamic understanding of links between early infantile experience and dementia. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 23(2): 109–120.

Plotkin, D. (2014). Older adults and psychoanalytic treatment: It’s about time. Psychodynamic Psychiatry, 42(1): 23–60.

Sherwood, J. (2019). Dementia: childhood and loss. In White, K. Cotter, A. & Leventhal, H. (Eds.), Dementia: An Attachment Approach. London: Routledge.

View Details

“All of this together shaped how I began to think about mind, not as something to be mastered, but as a landscape of the unspoken whether it was ghosts or griefs or desires that were hard to relinquish. I saw that the ghost was not always an ‘other’. It was often intimate, tied to lost ones, sometimes to unmet desires, to unbearable longings, but in some ways possession was an attempt to keep close what was slipping away. The ghost doesn't just haunt, it feels as if it wants something, and we just have to learn to develop ears to listen to what it wants.”

Episode Description: We acknowledge Loewald's concept of 'ghosts becoming ancestors' and consider the similarities and differences with those who hold 'ghosts' to be literal. Shalini shares with us her journey to open herself to the uncertainty and ambiguity of these externalized entities while appreciating both their cultural and intrapsychic sources. We learn of her family's involvement with exorcisms, especially her grandmother's "fearless warmth" and "empathy that saw beyond the terror of the ghosts." She considers the many facets of mind that are represented by 'ghosts' and the essential value of approaching them as guides to the "landscape of the unspoken." Shalini describes a long term engagement that she had with an individual who "taught me to receive the inchoate and horrific...to contain the brokenness and not interpret it away.. and to appreciate the glimpses of beauty in the most grotesque parts of self."

Our Guest: Shalini Masih, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and writer, grew up in India amidst priests and healers, witnessing spirit possession and exorcism. Now based in Worcestershire, UK, she holds a Master’s degree in Psychoanalytic Studies from Tavistock & Portman, London, and a PhD from the University of Delhi. Mentored by psychoanalysts Michael Eigen and Sudhir Kakar, she’s an award-winning scholar of the American Psychological Association. She has taught and supervised psychoanalytic psychotherapists in Ambedkar University, Delhi and in Birkbeck, University of London. Her acclaimed paper, 'Devil! Sing me the Blues', was nominated for Gradiva Awards in 2020. Her debut book is Psychoanalytic Conversations with States of Spirit Possession: Beauty in Brokenness.

Recommended Readings:

Kakar, Sudhir. Shamans, mystics, and doctors: A psychological inquiry into India and its healing traditions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Kakar, Sudhir. Mad and Divine. India: Penguin Books India, 2008.

Eigen, Michael. “On Demonized Aspects of the Self” In The Electrified Tightrope. Routledge. 2018.

Kumar, Mansi, Dhar Anup & Mishra, Anurag. Psychoanalysis from the Indian Terroir: Emerging Themes in Culture, Family, and Childhood. New York:Lexington Books, 2018.

Meltzer, Donald, and Williams, Meg H. The apprehension of beauty: The role of aesthetic conflict in development, art and violence. Karnac, London: The Harris Meltzer Trust, 2008.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Ogden, Thomas. This Art of Psychoanalysis—Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries. East Sussex: Routledge, 2005

Botella, Cesar, and Botella, Sara. The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States without Representation. Brunner-Routledge. Taylor and Francis Group: Hove and New York. 2005.

Winnicott. Donald W. “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, (1953): 89–97

View Details

“The theme that I found with IPSO [International Psychoanalytical Studies Organization] was that there was a common theme [in psychoanalytic training]. There was an initial phase full of terror and excitement, and then a middle phase of maybe some lethargy or apathy or disillusionment. In that middle phase, many candidates found IPSO, or IPSO found them, where they found refuge. They found solace. They found community, not just at their local institutes, but at this kind of world market. Many of the candidates talk about what a timely and wonderful experience it was to be seen, to be validated by fellow candidates in a way that only fellow candidates can do. At least a couple of the authors have written about how they were delighted to see that more than anything else we are similar as human beings, no matter where we're from.”

Episode Description: We begin with recognizing the deep attachment that many analytic candidates have about their training experiences, which includes affections and resentments. Himanshu outlines the process of reaching out to candidates globally, inviting them to share their reflections on their journeys. We read from a sampling of their essays that eloquently describe their idealizations and de-idealizations, their delights and their burdens, their profound regard for the mysteries of the mind and the appreciation of the power of psychoanalysis to engage with it. We discuss the importance of IPSO, the difficulties associated with Covid and the relevance of our field's traumatic origins. Himanshu closes with sharing his story of encountering an insightful analytic supervisor during his residency and declaring "I want to be like him."

Linked Episode:Episode 89: Wisdom and Enthusiasm for Today’s Candidates with Fred Busch, PhD

Our Guest: Himanshu Agrawal, MD is an adult and child psychiatrist and recently completed psychoanalytic training through the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Institute. He is an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee where he sees patients, conducts research, and teaches. He recently completed his term as the president of the candidates’ council of the American Psychoanalytic Association

Recommended Readings:

Busch F (Ed), Dear candidate. Routledge, 2020

Agrawal H, Trials and Tribulations of being a candidate. The American Psychoanalyst, winter 2022

Kernberg O, Thirty methods to destroy the creativity of psychoanalytic candidates. International Journal of psychoanalysis, 77, 1031- 1040

View Details

“When we reconstruct [in a patient] a possible lacking object or role or function, we see that if the analyst himself has been able and the patient allowing him to be able to enter to a deep level the objective reality of the internal world of the patient, it can happen that some new function or position can be achieved. This is something that could be rare but it happens. This is one more reason for not blaming the length of some analytic treatments, because time is needed for entering that internal deep area where the analytic relation can create something new. Transformation is also one of the words that in our analytic world became more and more common and utilized because we have achieved the certainty that there can be a transformation. Not only an understanding or a clarification, but also a transformation of the quality of the objective world and of the relation with it.”

Episode Description: We begin by describing the differences in psychoanalytic approaches today as compared to past generations. This shift has occurred alongside changes in patients' concerns; currently, individuals are disproportionately preoccupied with how they perceive themselves through others' eyes, rather than grappling with internal conflicts related to guilt. Stefano posits that this increased narcissistic investment stems from alterations in family structures and premature disruptions in "the physiological fusionality" with the early maternal caretaker. We discuss how this sense of distrust in the availability and reliability of caretakers affects the manner in which one introduces a patient into analysis, as well as the broader cultural emphasis on superficial bodily care - what he terms the aperitif experience. We consider the fundamental importance of the depth of object relations in understanding sexual diversities. Stefano concludes by reading the final paragraph from his book, which acknowledges the invaluable lessons learned from his analyst. We reflect on the enduring presence within him of this profoundly personal connection.

Linked Episodes: Episode 140: Are Patients Different Today? with Stefano Bolognini, MD (Bologna)

https://youtu.be/rjzpA8QZrWk?si=Srf_Tuxt0zTpsKNK

Our Guest: Stefano Bolognini, MD, is a psychiatrist and training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), where he served as president (2009-2013). He also was an IPA Board member (2002-2012) and was IPA president from 2013-2017. He was a member of the European Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and a founder of the IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. He has published over 280 psychoanalytic papers, and his books on empathy and on the inter-psychic dimension have been translated into several languages.

Recommended Readings:

Bolognini, Stefano -

Secret Passages. The Theory and Technique of the Interpsychic Relations. IPA New Library, Routledge, London, 2010

https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Between-Non-Self-Library-Psychoanalysis/dp/1032132973, Routledge, London, 2022

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21387998/ Psychoanal. Quart., vol. LXXX, 1, 33-54, 2012.

Enchantments and disenchantments in the formation and use of psychoanalytic theories about psychic reality. The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, 13, 11-24, July 2019.

New forms of psychopathology in a changing world: a challenge for psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century. The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, 2020.

Reflections on the institutional Family of the Analyst and proposing a “fourth Pillar” for Education. Opportunities and problems of transferal dynamics in the training pathway“. In Living and containing Psychoanalysis in Institutions. Psychoanalysts Working Together, edited by Gabriele Junkers, 89-104, Taylor & Francis, 2022.

From What to How : A Conversational with Stefano Bolognini on Emotional Attunement by Luca Nicoli & Stefano Bolognini. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91 : 3, 443-477, 2022.

The Interpsychic, the Interpersonal, and the Intersubjective: Response to Steven H. Goldberg’s Discussion. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91:3, 489-494, 2022.

Hidden unconscious, buried unconscious, implicit unconscious. The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, 16, 87-102, 2022.

View Details

“The original papers that were written about the analyst’s unconscious being attuned to the patient's unconscious by Hyman and Racker, in both cases they talk about this phenomenon. But both of them utter a caution, which is that one always has to take into account one's own ‘mishegas’. Essentially, what they're saying is, the unconscious is pretty individualistic and we have our own things, and we have to consider that possibly it's our own difficulties, our own unconscious, that is playing a bigger role in our countertransference reaction to the patient's unconscious.”

Episode Description: We begin by discussing the meaning of the many italics throughout the book and my sense of their being an expression of Fred's wish to be carefully understood. This is part of our conversation where we examine how internal reactions are used to comprehend another person's mind. There are a number of themes to this work, and to Fred's contributions over the years, which focus on helping individuals understand the way their mind works, as distinct from the particular contents of their mind. One of the gifts of psychoanalysis is to facilitate patient's discovery of the freedom to think which allows for a post-termination capacity for self-analysis. We discuss how self-criticism can serve as an unconscious lifeline, the importance of attending to the need for silence as distinct from what is not being said and the seductiveness of gossip, to name but a few of the topics in the book that we cover. Fred closes by describing "The wonderful thing about being a psychoanalyst is there are always things to learn and ways to grow."

Our Guest: Fred Busch, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He has published eight books, and over 80 articles on psychoanalytic technique, along with many book reviews and chapters in books. His work has been translated into many languages, and he has been invited to present over 180 papers and clinical workshops nationally and internationally. His last six books are: Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind (2014); The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept (2019); Dear Candidate: Analyst From Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education, and the Profession (2020); A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique (2021), Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads: An International Perspective (2023).The Ego and Id: 100 years later (2023), How Does Analysis Cure? (2024).

Recommended Readings:

Busch, F. (2014). Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind: A Psychoanalytic

Method and Theory. London: Routledge.

Busch, F. (2019). The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s

Enigmatic Concept. London: Routledge.

Busch, F. (2021). A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique: Selected

papers on Psychoanalysis. Routledge: London.

Busch, F. (2023) The Significance of the Ego in “The Ego

and the Id” and its Unfulfilled Promise. International Journal of

Psychoanalysis 104:1077-1090.

Busch, F. (2000). What is a deep interpretation? J. Amer. Psychoanal.Assn., 48:238-254.

Busch, F. (2005). Conflict Theory/Trauma Theory. Psychoanal.Q., 74: 27-46.

Busch, F. (2006). A shadow concept. Int.J.Psychoanal.,87: 1471-1485. Also appearing as Un oncerto ombra, Psycoanalisi, 11:5-26.

Busch, F. (2015). Our Vital Profession*. Int. J. Psycho-Anal.,

96(3):553-568. Reprinted in Busch, F. (2015). La nostra

professione vitale. Rivista Psicoanal., 61(2):435-456; Busch, F. (2015). Nuestra profesión vital*. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. Es., 1(3):605-627; Busch, F. (2015). Nuestra profesión vital1. Rev. Psicoanál. Asoc. Psico. Madrid, 75:131-153.

View Details

“The idea of analytic neutrality, which was more or less a cliche truth when I was training back in the 1980s, is clearly getting at something very important, which is that we mustn't try to pre-conceive where the patient's development is going to take him or her. But that doesn't mean that the development is not in a direction. Aristotle famously said that the human being is a ‘zoon politikon’, a creature who belongs in a somewhat structured society. Healthy development is in that sort of direction as we become more integrated, as our ‘ghosts become more like ancestors’, to use that famous metaphor. We become more aware of the reality of other people and their real as opposed to their fantasy importance in the ecosystem of which we are all part. And this makes possible the sort of ethical realization that Levinas was talking about. We recognize the reality of the other. We discover that we are interconnected. We are part of something that is hugely greater than ourselves and that goes beyond our knowing. But of course, that doesn't mean that we are not also selfish and unique selves. It's that we are under pressure, so to speak, from both quarters.”

Episode Description: We begin with David's description of Freud's view of religion as offering "compellingly attractive" illusions in the face of the helplessness we face by life's and death's unpredictability. Alternatively, David suggests that religions provide 'objects', ie Gods, that are importantly allegorical and offer an ‘ethical seriousness’ over time. We discuss the ability of these allegories to offer possibilities of 'transcendence' in a world that he sees as often limited to the material. He presents Levinas' view of the responsibility we all have when encountering "the face of the other" - a responsibility that is not chosen but "slipped into my consciousness like a thief." We consider the ethical differences between one’s superego and one's conscience. We close with David sharing with us the vicissitudes of his early life that, as for us all, form a context for our later interests.

Our Guest: David Black studied philosophy and Eastern religions before training in London, first as a pastoral counsellor and later as a psychoanalyst. He is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, now retired, who has written widely on psychoanalysis in relation to matters of ethics and religion. In 2006 he edited Psychoanalysis and Religion in the Twenty-first Century. He has published two collections of his own psychoanalytic papers, most recently Psychoanalysis and Ethics: the Necessity of Perspective. He is also a poet and translator, whose translation of Dante’s Purgatorio was published in 2021 in the New York Review of Books Classics series. (It was later the winner of the annual American National Translation Award in Poetry.) Visit David Black’s website at: https://www.dmblack.net.

Recommended Readings:

Black, D.M. Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective. (2024: Routledge New Library of Psychoanalysis.)

Chetrit-Vatine, V. Primal Seduction, Matricial Space, and Asymmetry in the Psychoanalytic Encounter. (2004: International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85: 4.

Lear, J. Wisdom Won from Illness. (2017: Harvard University Press.)

Lemma, A. First Principles: Applied Ethics for Psychoanalytic Practice. (2023: Oxford University Press.)

Levinas, E. Ethics as First Philosophy. In The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand. (1989: Blackwell Publishing.)

Loewald, H. Papers on Psychoanalysis. (1980: Yale University Press.)

View Details

“There are very specific fears that people have that are specifically related to their own childhood, and I'd like to give an example. A mom with twins had a kidnapping fear. She was afraid every time she saw a car drive by her house that her twins would be kidnapped. Now this mother was herself adopted when she was a newborn, but her adoption did not become final until she was one year old. Her twins were approaching one year. I was struck by the anniversary of her fear of kidnapping, and when I asked her who she thought was driving the car that drove by her house, she blurted out, 'my biological mother - adoption was never an issue for me, I have the best parents,' she said, but her fears about her babies being kidnapped were rooted in her own guilty feelings. She said, 'I get to keep my biological babies and my biological mother did not. I can have biological babies and my adoptive mother could not.' Carrie’s fantasy that her biological mother was threatening to kidnap her babies represented both her fears of retaliation for her aggressive victories over both her biological mother and her adoptive mother, and the repair of her disavowed feeling of loss by a reunion with her biological mother. This meaning of the memory, this understanding of the memory, resolved her kidnapping fear. It dissolved.”

Episode Description: We begin with an overview of the importance of mothers' childhood memories in their experience of their own children. These memories are of the conscious sort and also the not-so conscious. They are of the loving as well as the misattuned versions. "The challenge for mothers is to understand the complexity of their own childhood memories and to help their babies and toddlers adapt to the everyday ups and downs of life, as well as to the exceptional ones." We discuss typical fears, sleep problems, 'mutually-regulated patterns', naming body parts, nakedness, weaning and screen time. Ilene ran mother-baby-toddler groups for 35 years and shares with us her relentless curiosity for what we all bring to the parenting experience.

Our Guest: In 1982, Ilene Lefcourt established the Sackler Lefcourt Center for Child Development - programs for parents and their children from birth to three years. She was the Director, led the Mother-Baby-Toddler Groups, and provided Developmental Consultation to parents for over 35 years. She saw over 1,000 families and taught Child Psychiatry Residents and Parent-Infant Psychotherapy Trainees about her work. She has been a faculty member at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center since 1995. Ms. Lefcourt is currently in private practice in New York City. She is the author of When Mothers Talk, Parenting and Childhood Memories, and Mother-Baby-Toddler Group Guide. Her forthcoming book is, Mothers and Daughters: The First Three Years. Visit Ilene’s website: http://ilenelefcourt.com/.

Recommended Readings:

1975, Fraiberg S. Adelson E., Shapiro V., Ghosts in the Nursery, Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14, 387-421

1975, Mahler, M., F. and Bergman, A. The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, Basic Books

1985, Main, M. Kaplan, N. Cassidy, J. Security in Infancy, Childhood, and Adulthood: A move to the Level of Representation. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development

1991, Fonagy, P., Steele, M., Steele,H., Moran, G. S . The Capacity for Understanding Mental States. Infant Mental Health Journal, 12(3) 201-218

1992, Bretherton, I. The Origins of Attachment Theory. Developmental Psychology, 28(5) 759-775

1993, Lieberman, A ., The Emotional Life of the Toddler, Simon and Schuster

1995, Stern, D. The Motherhood Constellation, Basic Books

1998, Stern, D., Brushwweiler-Stern, N. The Birth of a Mother. Basic Books

2005, Lieberman, A., Angels in The Nursery, Infant Mental Health Journal. Vol. 26(6)

View Details

“The amount of guilt and the sense of alienation that people feel when they fall in love with someone who is ‘outside’, and the struggle that they have to undergo to explain that choice which they fully don't understand themselves, is a very deep conflict that my work tries to capture. The title of my book is ‘Intimacy in Alienation’, and alienation is something that is really very pregnant in the identities of these individuals who feel like aliens to their own community because their community cannot imagine why are they seeing the other as something positive but not as how the community wants them to see. So there's a big gap that often gets deeper and it widens and it really forecloses any conversation and imagination.”

Episode Description: We begin with considering the nature of 'malignant othering' that Ashis describes in parts of the Hindu-Muslim interface in India. His thesis is that transcending the binary into a 'third' is essential in the "quest for newer foundations defining Hindu and Muslim identities that are freed from historically entrenched definitions." He describes the challenges faced by each community that lacks the imagination of what is positive in the other. We discuss the importance of family support for interfaith couples and how often that is lacking. He describes 'love-jihad' where the autonomous agency of the partners is, through the eyes of fundamentalism, reduced to stereotypes of oppressor-oppressed. Ashis describes his research methodology which borrows from the psychoanalytic method in its recognition of transference and repetition. He closes by sharing with us the impact on him of the riots of 2002 and behind that the latent presence of the atrocities of the 1947 Partition. He bemoans "the erosion of the narratives of harmony" and sees his work as his effort at healing.

Our Guest: Ashis Roy (PhD) is a Psychoanalyst at the Delhi Chapter of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society ( IPA London). He works with adults and couples. For more than a decade he was on the Faculty at the Centre of Psychotherapy and Clinical Research, Ambedkar University, where he participated in institution building, taught psychoanalysis, and trained students to become Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists. He is a faculty at CAPA (China-American Psychoanalytic Alliance) and is interested in exploring Asian and South Asian cultures using psychoanalysis. He hosts podcasts on the New Books Network and works with psychoanalysts across the globe. His book, Intimate Hindu-Muslim Relationships: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Self and the Other (2024) has been published by Yoda Press.

Recommended Readings:

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity, youth, and crisis. New York: W.W. Norton.

Kakar, S. (1996). The colors of violence: Cultural identities, religion, and conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wahab. G (2021) Born a Muslim: Some truths about Islam in India. Aleph Book Company.

Altman, N. (2005). The Analyst in the Inner City. Relational Perspective Book Series

Davids, M. F. (2009) The Impact of Islamophobia. Psychoanalysis and History 11:175-191

Green, A., & Kohon, G. (2005). Love and its vicissitudes. London: Routledge.

View Details

“I belong to the race that in the Middle Ages was blamed for all the plagues and such experiences have a sobering effect, and they do not arouse the tendency to believe in illusions. Much of my life has been devoted to trying to shed illusions. But if there is an illusion worth believing in, at least partially, this is the illusion: that we learn how to divert the impulse of destruction from our own kind, how to stop hating each other because of trivial differences, and stop killing each other for profits. That we stop taking advantage of the achievements of progress to control the forces of nature in a way that will lead to our destruction. Without this illusion, what future awaits us?”

Sigmund Freud, Letter to Romain Rolland, 1923

“I found [this letter] in the collection that Eran Rolnik translated into Hebrew. I met it in the Hebrew version, and when I got back to the German, something else happened. In the Hebrew translation it was talking about the ‘hope’. But then the people in Vienna told me in German this is not ‘hope’, this is ‘illusion’. I thought it is even more powerful that he speaks about the power of illusion, the needed illusion. It also brought me back to the beginning of my journey when a friend said the main purpose of the film is to have Freud telling us something like the ‘big father’, how should we live today? A tip and insight from Freud. So this is an insight from Freud, a message from Freud over time to us now. I'm not sure it's prophetic. I think there's no prophecies, but it speaks to us now. It speaks to us now.”

Episode Description: We begin with an opening quote from Freud that characterized his sense of being an 'outsider'. Yair then shares with us his own personal journey of discovering Freud as distinct from his father. Having some analytic exposure awakened in him the capacity to, like Freud, ignite his creativity and discover Freud anew. Unique among the many Freud documentaries, Yair utilizes 3D animation techniques as well as dreamlike imagery, newly uncovered archival film and evocative music to invite the viewer to regressively experience the possibilities of the unconscious. We go through four periods of Freud's life which include his struggles with Viennese antisemitism, his discovery of the role of childhood sexuality, his illness and the deaths of his father, daughter, granddaughter and mother and his exile to London. We conclude with his 1923 letter to Romain Rolland where he pleads "that we stop taking advantage of the achievements of progress to control the forces of nature in a way that will lead to our destruction.”

Our Guest: Yair Qedar is an Israeli documentary filmmaker, social activist and former journalist. In his project "the Hebrews", he had been chronicling the lives of Jewish and Israeli figures of the modern Hebrew literary canon. Qedar's 19 feature length documentaries have all premiered at film festivals and have won the director over 30 prizes. Also, Qedar is a leading LGBTQ activist and created the first Israeli LGBTQ newspaper.

To View the Film: This documentary was first shown at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna on January 9th, 2025. It is currently being screened at film festivals worldwide. To arrange a viewing, please contact Yair Qedar at quedary@gmail.com

Website and Trailer: https://ivrim.co.il/en/films/outsider-freud/

Recommended Readings:

Adam Phillips (2014): Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. Yale University Press.

Ernest Jones (1953): The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Basic Books.

Sigmund Freud (1926): The Ego and the Id. Standard Edition, Vol. XIX, Hogarth Press.

Sigmund Freud (1937): Letter from Sigmund Freud to Marie Bonaparte

Sigmund Freud (1929): Letter to Romain Rolland

View Details

“I've had the experience of having some wonderful supervisees, many of whom have done quite fine work and where it has not been an issue of any kind of great concerns. And allowing the candidate to see what's written and also discussing it with them, obviously makes it quite easy for them to get both positive input, but also at times, input that will help them evolve and deepen their work even more.”

Episode Description: We begin by exploring the critical role of case writing in psychoanalytic training, discussing Stephen’s concept of "a fourth pillar of analytic training." Stephen introduces the dynamic interplay between writing and self-reflection, arguing that the act of writing illuminates resistances, countertransference, and areas of growth that might elude the analyst in supervision or personal analysis. He shares his innovative "three-minute chess match" technique for identifying the heart of a case narrative and reflects on his journey—from his mother’s poetry to his current work mentoring candidates in the art of case writing.

We explore Stephen’s insights on the 're-immersion anxiety' that can inhibit case writing, and how addressing these resistances transforms the writing process and deepens clinical work. We conclude with a discussion of how the process of writing fosters an enduring capacity for self-supervision and analytic insight.

Our Guest: Dr. Stephen Bernstein, MD is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and has chaired a discussion group on writing about analytic cases for over 30 years. He is a prolific author, including his recent paper, The Process of Case Writing: A Fourth Pillar of Analytic Training, published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Bernstein’s work highlights the centrality of case writing as an essential tool for self-reflection and professional development. Beyond his focus on writing, he has contributed to the field with early research demonstrating the compatibility of preparatory psychotherapy with psychoanalysis and continues to mentor candidates, fostering their growth as analysts and writers.

Recommended Readings:

  • Bernstein, S. (2023). The Process of Case Writing: A Fourth Pillar of Analytic Training. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
  • Gabbard, G. O. (2000). Disguise or Consent? Problems and Recommendations Concerning the Publication and Presentation of Clinical Material. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81, 1071-1086.
  • Kantrowitz, J. L. (2004). Writing About Patients: I. Ways of Protecting Confidentiality and Analysts' Conflicts Over Choice of Method. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 52, 69-99.
  • Stimmel, B. (2013). The Conundrum of Confidentiality. Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 21(1), 84-106.
  • Stein, M. H. (1988). Writing About Psychoanalysis: II. Analysts Who Write, Patients Who Read. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 36, 393-408.

View Details

“I feel so strongly about this [collective commemorative ritual]. I think that early psychoanalytic writing overemphasized the value of separation-individuation and pathologized the opposite. It's been through personal experience that I have come to see that in a different way with regard to Jewish commemorative ritual which takes place a couple of times a year. But also some experiences that I have had outside the realm of religion. The one that pops to mind was what President Biden did about a year after the first onslaught of the Covid epidemic. He had candles put all around the reflecting pool in Washington, one candle for every number of people who had died, and this was broadcast on television. I sat there and I wept over thousands of deaths, and then I began to think about the power of the experience of mourning with others. Despite the fact that we didn't all lose the same person, we had all lost somebody to this virus that was not as yet being managed. There was something incredibly powerful about that - in the same way for those who lost someone on 9/11 who go down to the Twin Towers and read the list of names every year. But we analysts have not theorized this stuff and I think it's time that we did.”

Episode Description: We begin with Joyce sharing with us her evolution from being a young analyst who was essentially ever available to her struggling patients to now being "more aware of the problematic edge to a kind of responsiveness that once felt simply necessary." We discuss what she calls analyst's 'secret delinquencies' - when the clinician intentionally withdraws from the patient into personal matters "so that the analyst becomes the single subject in the room." We consider post-treatment friendships between analyst and analysand and the nature of the evolution of the transference. Joyce shares with us her reflections on growing older and the mixed blessings it provides in terms of greater experience and clinical wisdom as well as a tempting "disengagement from an earlier sense of therapeutic discipline." We close with her suggestion that we consider the "dynamic function of commemorative ritual" not as a mere enactment but as a fulsome experience for "reworking old connections."

Our Guest:Joyce Slochower Ph.D., ABPP, is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Hunter College & the Graduate Center, CUNY; faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Steven Mitchell Center, National Training Program of NIP, Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies & and PINC in San Francisco. She is the author of Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (1996; & 2014) and Psychoanalytic Collisions (2006 & 2014), and co-Editor, with Lew Aron and Sue Grand, of “De-idealizing relational theory: a Critique from Within” and “Decentering Relational Theory: a Comparative Critique” (2018). Her new book, Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken, was released by Routledge in June 2024. She is in private practice in New York City.

Recommended Readings:

2024 Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken. NY, London: Routledge.

2024 Factions are Back. Journal of the American Psychoanal. Assn., 72(4): 561-582.

2018 Deidealizing Relational Theory: A Critique from Within. L. Aron, S. Grand, & J. Slochower, Eds. London: Routledge.

2017 Don’t tell anyone. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 34: 195-200.

2014 Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (2nd Edition). New York: Routledge.

2014 Psychoanalytic Collisions: (2nd Edition), New York: Routledge.

View Details

"What Freud may have missed here is that the investment in the lost object is a much more reconstructive and integrative process. It’s one where we remember all the stories that we have heard from the lost object - the repetitive stories about the childhood of the person or how they met significant others and all these stories are within us and revived, and we have questions. We think: ‘Too bad I never asked about this or that’ and in activating these memories we also experience joy and we have a slow process of integration which is not necessarily about loss but about how continuous this person lives in our mind and that is a little bit the focus of this novel. It's in that sense a portrait of the mind and the process of mourning."

Episode Description: We begin with recognizing Cordelia's contributions to clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis in addition to her fiction writing. Her latest novel, Memento, has been described as "a journey through the labyrinth of the dream world" and invites the reader into the experiences of ambiguity, timelessness, and the absurd. On a theoretical level, Cordelia introduces the usefulness of the term lethe - the river in the underworld of Hades that causes people to forget their past when they drink from it. We discuss the distinction between libido and lethe and how they manifest themselves in the analytic setting. She emphasizes the importance of understanding aggression not as a stand-alone but as a container of further meaning. We close with her sharing her childhood story of wanting to please her father with her detailed knowledge - a sublimation that she continues to gain pleasure from to this day.

Our Guest: Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst and on the Faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute as well as of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society. Her area of expertise is metapsychology, in particular drive theory and its clinical applications. An updated version of her monograph of Freud's metapsychology, Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe, is just being published by International Psychoanalytic Books. Her psychoanalytic books and articles have been published in many languages. She has also published three novels and edited a Freud Reader, an Essay Book, and three collections of Short Stories. She is the Chair of the IPA in Culture Committee and works in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Recommended Readings:

Freud, S (1917) Morning and Melancholia. In Freud, S. Standard Edition, Vol IVX, 239 258

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2018) Driven to Survive. Selected Papers Psychoanalysis. New York: International, Psychoanalytic Books.

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2020) Memory’s Eyes. A New-York Oedipus Novel. Queens, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books.

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2023) Memento. A Novel in Dreams, Thoughts, and Images. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books.

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2024) Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe. A clear road through Freud's metapsychology leading to helpful findings and new concepts. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books.

View Details

"A number of art schools in the early 60s said: “Clearly, it is the relationship of the painter to the medium that is the essence of painting - the painter must be emotionally present, and this is what we should instill in our students.” So they started to take away traditional training in art schools of representational drawing, of color theory, of figurative drawing, and what they ended up with was a generation of artists who were passionately throwing paint at canvases but unable to make art. The relationship between the fundamentals and intuition is very complicated. Nobody seemed to make the point that the great abstract expressionists were all trained for decades in traditional art schools. That’s what they came out of, and we see this in our analytic colleagues. Many of them are writing wonderfully at the moment, but they were trained as Kleinians or trained as ego psychologists, and they have that in their bone marrow. The kind of representational work with Apple [painting of his dog] that I am talking about when I say: I draw and I draw and I draw until I can put that aside, in analytic work I go to something basic in my training. For me it happens to be something that's close to Paul Gray, it's not where I'm going to stop, but I can use Paul Gray because that's what I was trained in - I will look for transference, I'll look for defense, I'll look for resistance and I'll go back and look for the derivatives of certain affects that are enacted in the relationship. I go over it and over it until I can relinquish it like I did with the painting of Apple, and then the intuitive comes in, but the intuitive is the reward at the end of decades of hard work."

Episode Description: We begin with Jon's mother's encouragement to paint by finding the bird's vitality through "becoming the bird." This leads us to consider the relationship between intuitive seeing and the "images which I might desire to produce." We discuss his notion of the aesthetic matrix which applies both to the analytic encounter as it does to the painter's relationship to his creative process. Jon shares with us his conviction that basic technique, whether artistic or analytic, must first become part of one's inner make-up before intuition can enlighten an obscure moment. He walks us through his creative process in the face of a blank canvas on the wall in front of him. He discusses the different uses of watercolor and oil paint and how their unique properties parallel his spontaneous engagement at various periods of an analysis. He presents a clinical encounter and how he was able to unpack a countertransference impasse through working on a painting. He closes with sharing an experience he had in his native South Africa which leads him to feel that "it's a blessing to be able to work in America."

Linked Paper and Websites:

The Aesthetic Matrix: A Conversation Between a Painter and a Psychoanalyst

View Details

"The Holocaust seems to me to be the paradigmatic case of the acting out of unconscious fears, fantasies and projections onto another group that has ever occurred. It is the place therefore for psychoanalytic concepts in understanding anti-Semitism and racism more generally. Particularly in this context and thinking about Nazism and Nazi perpetrators is crucial, especially given what for me is so interesting about this is not just thinking as a historian and how can I borrow psychoanalytic ideas to enrich the thing I am interested in explaining. Also, because the history of psychoanalysis is bound up with this history. It’s why I cited Fenichel and Loewenstein - the idea of psychoanalysis as this ‘Jewish science’, of the emigrates all persecuted by Nazism and how they restarted their lives in the US or elsewhere, the grappling with the German psychoanalysts after the war, the conflicts in the International Psychoanalytic Association after the war - these are all part of the history of the Holocaust. For me, this combination of the history of psychoanalysis as an endeavor, plus the usefulness of psychoanalytic concepts in trying to explain this phenomenon in the first place is a hugely enriching conversation.”

Episode Description: We begin with outlining the tension within the 'complemental series' where external events and intrapsychic registration of those events are both contributors to psychic difficulties. This applies to early as well as later life traumas. Dan's book invites us to additionally consider the conflicting psychoanalytic contributions to the question of what enables survival. All research points to the essential dimension of luck in enabling survival in concentration camps. As a historian he fleshes out the contrasting viewpoints of analysts Eddy de Wind and Viktor Frankl as they each describe what they felt were the essential psychological qualities that contributed to survival. De Wind and others point to a state of stupor, also characterized as estrangement or dissociation, as an essential state of mind to facilitate surviving in overwhelming circumstances. He shares with us why he as a historian feels that an analytic way of thinking is essential as "history without psychoanalysis cannot access aspects of the human experience that elude rational thought - and there are sadly many."

Our Guest: Dan Stone, PhD, is Professor of Modern History and director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has taught since 1999. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including, most recently: The Holocaust: An Unfinished History; Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust; and Psychoanalysis, Historiography and the Nazi Camps: Accounting for Survival. He is also the co-editor, with Mark Roseman, of volume I of the Cambridge History of the Holocaust. Dan chaired the academic advisory committee for the Imperial War Museum London’s redesigned Holocaust Galleries (opened in 2021) and is a member of the UK’s Advisory Group on Spoliation Matters.

Recommended Readings:

Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy (eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)

Werner Bohleber, Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2018)

Matt Ffytche and Daniel Pick (eds.), Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism (London: Routledge, 2016)

Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Emily A. Kuriloff, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2014)

Dori Laub and Andreas Hamburger (eds.), Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony: Unwanted Memories of Social Trauma (London: Routledge, 2017)

Steven A. Luel and Paul Marcus (eds.), Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays (New York: Ktav, 1984)

Dan Stone, Psychologists in Auschwitz: Accounting for Survival (lecture at the German Historical Institute,( London, 11 July 2024):

View Details

“The historian [of the vineyard] gave us regular feedback on what she was finding, and she also brought in oral historians to take our own life histories. There's also a psychoanalytical point to be made here - you can take refuge in this scholarly exercise, going into archives and finding out things that happened hundreds of years ago, you can all too easily remove yourself from that: ‘This is what happened long, long ago’. But all of us on this farm, we had all lived through Apartheid. The oral historians who wanted to participate, we met over many sessions in my living room and the oral historians asked each of us who volunteered to participate to tell our stories of our lives and it was a real revelation to me. Despite my abstract awareness, the actual concrete listening to people who I was getting to know as individuals, to hear one after another account of the grinding poverty of what it actually is like to be a poor black farm worker in South Africa under Apartheid."

Episode Description: Mark shares with us his original intent to make a "citizen-sized contribution to the reconstruction" of South Africa through redressing the inequalities that formed a basis of his family's vineyard. He describes going through a painful process of enlightenment where good intentions themselves were insufficient to honor the historical processes that lived inside the owner and the tenant farmers who have been on the land for generations. Psychoanalytically informed, he consulted a historian and archeologist to, along with the farmers, dig into both the land and the lives of all involved. This led to a rebalancing of the pride/shame dynamic that had existed in the owner/workers. When faced with the inevitable question, "Must I give the farm back?" Mark discusses what he felt was the difference between ‘self-interest’ and ‘selfish-interest’. He shares with us the efforts he took to enable the workers to become landowners, to become educated and also to become discoverers and messengers of their historically rich cuisine and music. He also details the ‘not so happy ending; of these efforts as his farm has struggled financially under the burden of these considerable costs and government corruption. Things have turned around of late and there is reason to be optimistic for the long-term flourishing of his vineyard and his “citizen sized” contribution to the well-being of those with whom he works.

Our Guest: Mark Solms, PhD is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the American and South African Psychoanalytic Associations. He is Director of Neuropsychology at the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Sigourney Prize. He has published 350 scientific papers, and eight books, the latest being The Hidden Spring (Norton, 2021). He is the authorized editor and translator of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 volumes) and the forthcoming Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud (4 volumes).

Recommended Reading:

Solms, M. (2015) Psychoanalysis in Pursuit of Truth and Reconciliation on a South African Farm: Commentary on Gobodo-Madikizela. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 63:1147-1158

View Details

"I think it is very interesting to open a debate and talk about this impact of the culture, this epoch, in the subjectivity and never losing the internal work within psychoanalysis, within our consulting room. So when I quote the Lacanian way of saying the ‘declination of the father's name’, I am talking about these times, this epoch, in which the reference and the subjectivity fails in respecting what we can call ‘the authority’. But ‘the authority’ means not authoritarian systems - it is the law, it is the possibility of symbolization, and it's the way of being free too, because without some limits you cannot be creative, you cannot be open to symbolization. We are talking about how the ‘other’ is working in this new social environment and how this evanescence of the father’s name is part of a situation that leaves open to the death drive."

Episode Description: We begin with recognizing the aspects of chaos that surround us in the real-world. Gabriela takes us from there into the chaos that often lives internally. She then addresses the clinical space which allows for its emergence through the dyad. She speaks of the evanescence of the father's name, authority vs authoritarianism, the 'halo of metaphors' and the nature of the analyst's 'open form' of clinical engagement. Gabriela describes analytic cure as "step by step, so that love and not revenge for pain predominate." She shares with us her early life involving her child analysis, her study of architecture and her now working as an analyst and a painter.

Linked Website: Gabriela Goldstein

Our Guest: Gabriela Goldstein, Ph.D. Past President of APA (2020-2023). Training analyst of Argentina Psychoanalytical Association (APA), and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and FEPAL. Doctor Ph.D in Psychology (Universidad del Salvador). Books include The Aesthetic Experience, Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, and Art in Psychoanalysis. Co-author, among others, of the APA book Dreams and Perception APA Editorial and the book Dear Candidate Fred Busch edit. She has won the Mom-Baranger prize for best monograph in Psychoanalysis with The Aesthetics of Memory, Freud at the Acropolis and won the A. Storni prize for conceptual contributions in Psychoanalysis with Transience, or the Time of Beauty. She has served on many IPA and APA committees including the IPA and Culture Committee since 2007.

In addition, Gabriela is both an architect and a painter. Since 1985 she has taken part in solo painting exhibitions in Argentina as well as collective exhibitions in museums, art galleries, and cultural centers in Italy, France and Germany. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.

Recommended Readings:

Baranger, W. y M. (2012). La situación analítica como campo dinámico. Revista de Psicoanálisis. 69(23), pp. 311-352

Bush, F. (editor) (2021) Dear Candidate: Analysts from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education and the Profession. Routledge. London and New York.

Freud, S. (1919) “The Uncanny” The Standard Edition of complete psychological works of S. Freud, V 17

Goldstein, G (2013) Art in Psychoanalysis, A Contemporary Approach to Creativity and Analytic Practice, Karnak-IPA

Goldstein G. (2022): “La no respuesta del Otro: algunas cuestiones sobre la cura” Revista de Psicoanálisis de la Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina, LXXIX-3-4

Goldstein, G (2022): “Los misterios de la creación: Entre cuerpo y cultura”, Revista Uruguaya de Psicoanálisis ( on -line 135)

Mc Dougall, Andre, J., De M´Uzan, Et all,(2010) El artista y el Psicoanalista Ed. Nueva Vision

Winnicott, D.W. (1978). Winnicott, D.W., Green. A, Mannoni, O, Pontalis; J-B y otros

Winnicott, D. W. (1974): “Fear of breakdown” Int. Rev. of Psychoanalysis. (1974) l, 103

View Details

“I was very interested in the unspoken thoughts and feelings of the patient because I think one of the things about free association is that in the beginning most of what's going on with the patient is unsaid. As the analysis evolves more and more of the unspoken becomes spoken and more of it becomes at the center of the analytic space. I wanted to show the evolution of the unsaid. At the beginning of the book, the unsaid is more than the said, and then it evolves as the analysis goes on.”

Episode Description: We begin discussing Roberta’s first career as a sociologist which she described as an effort to disengage from her self-focused ruminations. She pursued psychoanalytic training after receiving her PhD in sociology. She also continued as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Both genres represented her personal as well as other-oriented reflections. Her book Our Time is Up is likewise a combined memoir and novel – she both is and isn’t the young woman 'Rose' whose analysis with ‘Joan’ forms the essence of this work. She reads sections from the book that describe her first meeting with her analyst as well as when the analyst’s illness is introduced into their treatment. The book concludes with 'Rose' saying, “Frida Kahlo said about Diego Rivera, ‘He took me shattered and returned me in one piece, whole.’ I could say the same thing about Joan.”

Our Guest: Roberta Satow is a practicing psychoanalyst in Washington, CT; a senior member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and Professor Emerita of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In addition to her non-fiction books Gender and Social Life and Doing the Right Thing: Taking Care of Your Elderly Parents Even if They Didn’t Take Care of You, she has written two novels, Two Sisters of Coyoacan and Our Time is Up. Dr. Satow also writes blogs on Psychology Today and psychology.net.

Recommended Readings:

Roberta Satow, Our Time is Up, IPBooks, 2024.

Roberta Satow, Two Sisters of Coyoacan, 2017. Roberta Satow, Doing the Right Thing: Taking Care of Your Elderly Parents Even if They Didn’t Take Care of You (Tarcher/Penguin 2006). Roberta Satow, Psychology Today Blog. Roberta Satow, Psychotherapy Blog Roberta Satow, A Case of Severe Penis Envy: The Convergence of Cultural and Individual Intra-Psychic Factors, Journal of the American Acad. of Psychoan. October 1983.

View Details

“There was a lot of dilemma, and I wasn't able to definitely deal with the sudden knowledge of my cancer and to be able to impart that information in a more containing and structured manner so that my patients can be held even in that situation. But the consciousness was there about how to go about it. Whenever I was asked by the patient directly, or if the necessity arose where the hospital needed to impart the information, I did agree later that they can let them know about the cancer situation, and the patient can connect to me directly. When I was in a better stage, I knew how to deal with it, but that was months later. I found that the honest submission was more helpful for me and for the patient because when certain larger than life events happen, it probably connects us in a more humble way to the community - that the analyst as healer is not supreme above all of this, and who can also be affected with such aspects of life."

Episode Description: We begin with honoring the clinical difference between fantasies of physical vulnerability from real life mortal danger. Jhuma shares with us her medical journey that entailed suddenly receiving a diagnosis of cancer. She was immediately hospitalized and faced with, among other challenges, the question of how to inform her patients. She describes her fragility and uncertainty and the various engagements she was able to arrange. We discuss the meanings of "honest submission," patient's curiosity, and their aggression and tenderness towards her. She elaborates on the presence of the Hindu notion of an afterlife and her post-hospital awareness that “the clinical becomes vast" - this refers to the importance of bringing analytic sensibilities to the many venues that are 'off the couch'. We close with her sharing clinical vignettes demonstrating how even real-life current trauma can meaningfully awaken a patient's awareness of their forgotten painful past.

Our Guest: Jhuma Basak is a Training & Supervising Psychoanalyst of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society and member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. She has specific interest in culture & gender in psychoanalysis. She has publications in Japanese, Italian, French and Spanish. Over the past 20 years, she has presented at various IPA Congresses, along with the Keynote for the 53rd IPA Congress in Cartagena in 2023. Other presentations were at the Washington Baltimore Centre for Psychoanalysis, Hakuoh University, and Kyushu University. She is the co-editor of the book Psychoanalytic & Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Women in India and editor of Sculpting Psychoanalysis in India – Sudhir Kakar. Jhuma has been the past Co-Chair of the Asia Committee on Women & Psychoanalysis and continues to be its consultant.

Reading List:

Bernstein, Stephen (2024): The Making of the IPA Podcast: Psychoanalysis On & Off the Couch. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Vol.44. No.2, 166-177.

Fajardo, B (2001): Life-Threatening Illness in the Analyst. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 49:569-586.

Feinsilver, David (1998): The Therapist as a Person Facing Death: The Hardest of External Realities and Therapeutic Action. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79: 1131-1150

Fieldsteel, N. D. (1989): Analysts' expressed attitudes toward dealing with death and illness. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 25 (3): 427-432 o

Halpert, Eugene (1982): When the Analyst is Chronically Ill or Dying. Psychoanal. Q., (51):372-389.

Kitayama, O. (1998) Transience: Its Beauty and Danger. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 79:937-942.

Masur, Corinne (ed) (2018): Flirting with Death: Psychoanalysts Consider Mortality. Routledge.

Rosner, Stanley (1986): The Seriously Ill or Dying Analyst & the Limits of Neutrality. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 5(4), 357-371

View Details

"In my own two analyses, I had observed such transformations for me in a very impressive way. I started my own analysis after the traumatic death of my sister when I was 22 years old. At that time, I had a breakdown, and I suffered from severe depressive and psychosomatic symptoms and sleep disorders but also from terrible nightmares that haunted me almost every night. Fortunately, my two analyses did change my depressive and psychosomatic symptoms, but what was at least as important for me, subjectively, was the change in my dreams, including the manifest dream content. The nightmares became less frequent; I was hardly in the position of an observer anymore but actively involved in the dream event. I was less alone in the dream but accompanied by people close to me and was more often able to solve the problems and conflicts which arose in the dream. In addition, the dreams were no longer predominantly characterized by fear and death anxiety but a whole range of emotions emerged. Towards the end of my second analysis, I will never forget that I had the only dream of my life from which I woke up because I was laughing out loud."

Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the ambivalence that many analysts have towards research. It is seen as distant from the sharing of subjectivities that draw many to our field. Marianne honors the unique transference reliving and then remembering that is central to the analytic encounter and from that position suggests ways that it can be researched. She presents a patient whose manifest dreams were studied over the course of treatment along with his sleep laboratory data. She notes how the stability of the analyst's presence is essential but not sufficient to maximize therapeutic benefit. We discuss the role of theory, the controversy over approaching the veridical past and the seductions of simplified treatments. Marianne closes by sharing her deep respect for the unconscious and how psychoanalysts are living in "rich times of pluralism."

Linked Episode:

https://ipaoffthecouch.org/2019/07/13/episode-10-refugees-germany-psychoanalysis/

Our Guest: Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Prof. Dr. phil, director of the Sigmund-Freud-Institut in Frankfurt Germany (2001-2016), professor for psychoanalysis at the University of Kassel, Senior Research Fellow at the University Medicine in Mainz. She is a training analyst of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV) and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). She has served as the Chair of the Research Subcommittees for Clinical, Conceptual, Epistemological and Historical Research of the IPA (2001-2009), Vice Chair for Europe of the Research Board der IPA (2010-2021); Chair of the IPA Subcommittee for Migration and Refugees 2018/19 and since then member of the committee. She received the Mary Sigourney Award 2016, the Haskell Norman Prize for Excellence in Psychoanalysis 2017, the Robert S. Wallerstein Fellowship (2022-2027) and the IPA’s Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award, 2023. Her research fields are clinical and extra-clinical research in psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic developmental research, prevention studies, interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and literature, educational sciences and the neurosciences.

Recommended Readings:

Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2008): Biographical truths and their clinical consequences: Understanding ‚embodied memories‘ in a third psychoanalysis with a traumatized patient recovered from serve poliomyelitis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89: 1165-1187.

Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2015): Working with severely traumatized, chronically depressed analysands. In: The International Journal of Psychoanalysis Volume 96, Issue 3, June 2015, Pages: 611-636.

Bohleber, W., Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2016): The Special Problem of Interpretation in the Treatment of Traumatized Patients. In: Psychoanalytic Inquiry 36: 60-76, 2016.

Fischmann, T., Ambresin, G., Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2021): Manifest dreams in psychoanalytic treatment. A psychoanalytic outcome measure. Frontiers in Psychology, doi: 10,3389/fpsyg, 2021.678440.

Leuzinger-Bohleber, M., Donié, M., Wichelmann, J., Ambresin, G., & Fischmann, T. (2023). Changes in dreams - the development of a dream-transformation scale in psychoanalysis with chronically depressed, early traumatized patients. The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 46:1-2, 82-93. doi:10.1080/01062301.2023.2297116

Fischmann, T., and Leuzinger-Bohleber, M.: Dreams, Memories, and Trauma—A search for transformations in psychoanalysis (in press).

View Details

"I don't know what to do about this because we do have to use clinical material. It's the best tried and true method in which to inculcate analytic thinking in our students and supervises. On the other hand, we are so indebted to our patients and their trust in us and our responsibilities as ethical practitioners not to divulge their privacy. Principles are what we're trying to teach, we're not trying to teach people, we are not trying to teach that person, the case is not what we are teaching, but the principles in the case."

Episode Description: We begin by acknowledging the tension between our commitment to patient confidentiality and our need to learn, teach and advance our field through the sharing of intimate information. We discuss the difference between using clinical examples to reveal particular individuals as opposed to illustrating principles in psychoanalysis. Barbara describes the well-known case of a famous author whose analyst revealed identifiable details of his analysis in a publication. She shares why she feels that co-writing with one's analyst about one's treatment is problematic - "it stretches the concept of co-construction to a clinical breaking point." We consider how presenting a patient publicly impacts the analyst's interiority and lives on in the treatment. We close with recognizing the challenge of confidentiality and appreciating "the insuperable predicament posed by the mutually exclusive imperatives of protecting patient privacy and educating the next generation, as well as ourselves. Remembering that ego ideals are only approximations is our most effective balm."

Our Guest: Barbara Stimmel, PhD, is an adult and child psychoanalyst in New York city where she has practiced for the past several decades. She teaches and supervises widely and has contributed to psychoanalytic journals as well as editing and contributing chapters in several books. She has also presented papers, discussion groups and workshops in the wide world of psychoanalysis. She has held offices in psychoanalytic institutions on the local, national, and international level. Barbara is involved at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York, where she sits on committees, has taught residents, and serves on the Palliative Care team. She is on the President’s Council of Sanctuary for Families, an organization devoted to women and families surviving domestic violence and trafficking. She also sits on the Shakespeare Council of The Public Theatre in New York. This diversity of interests is reflected in the variety of topics within psychoanalysis and psychotherapy about which she has written, presented, and taught. In some sense, confidentiality is part and parcel of any clinical topic, regardless of theory and patient population.

Recommended Readings:

Crastnopol, M. (1999). The analyst's professional self as a third influence on the dyad: When the analyst writes about the treatment. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 9, 445-470.

Gabbard, G. O. (1997). Case histories and ««confidentiality»». International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78, 820-821.

Gabbard, G. O. (2000). Disguise or consent? Problems and recommendations concerning the publication and presentation of clinical material. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81, 1071-1086.

Kantrowitz, J. L. (2004a). Writing about patients: I. Ways of protecting ««confidentiality»» and analysts' conflicts over choice of method. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 52, 69-99.

Kanwal, G. (2024) To Reveal or not to Reveal, That is the Wrong Question: Thoughts about Clinical Writing in Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 93:135-156.

Stein, M. H. (1988b). Writing about psychoanalysis: II. Analysts who write, patients who read. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 36, 393-408.

Stimmel, B. (2013). The Conundrum of Confidentiality. Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis,21(1):84-106

View Details

"During the whole course of your [psychoanalytic] training, you are laying on the couch and have your personal analysis and beforehand you don't know where it will lead you. You start to discover corners of your unconscious psyche which you don't want, which you are not so eager to explore. This accompanies you during the whole course of training, always confronted with your own psyche and with not-yet-discovered areas of your internal world - this is really an adventurous journey. And you do the same with your patients. It is not that you treat diseases with certain symptoms, but you delve deeply into their souls and this is a shared enterprise. Doing psychoanalysis you are confronted with your own psyche, you are confronted with the psyche of the patient too. This confronts you with surprises, sometimes deep anxieties and terrors that you’ve never known beforehand. So I think the comparison of psychoanalytic training of starting a journey with a sailing ship into the vast areas of the ocean, it’s a good example, you will never know exactly what will be the next day or what you will be confronted with."

Episode Description: We begin with recognizing two aspects of psychoanalytic training - the adventurous and the immersive. These aspects, in addition to the many challenges in the training, can offer the unique opportunity to come to know the depths of the human experience. We discuss the various theoretical models currently available and how they can both enrich and distract from the core competencies that allow for a depth treatment. We consider whether different types of patients need different types of interventions, the centrality of neutrality, and the value and impossibility of free association. Eike addresses the unfortunate conflation of abstinence and unfriendliness, and we consider the clinical moment of receiving a gift from a patient. We close with his sharing his psychoanalytic journey that began in mathematics and then to medicine and then to psychoanalysis.

Our Guest:

Dr. Eike Hinze is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Berlin. He did his psychoanalytic training at the Berlin Karl-Abraham-Institute and works in his private practice. At present he is chair of training in the institute. One of his main areas of interest is the psychoanalytic treatment of elderly patients. For decades he has been active in the training of future psychoanalysts. For more than 15 years, he has been working in the Board of the Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe the objective of which was the development and furthering of psychoanalysis in Eastern Europe. He is co-author of a recently published book studying commonalities and differences between different styles of performing psychoanalysis.

Recommended Readings:

Ch. Brenner (1982) The Mind in Conflict. International Universities Press. New York.

F. Bush (editor) (2021) Dear Candidate: Analysts from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education and the Profession. Routledge. London and New York.

Ferro (2002) In the Analyst’s Consulting Room. Taylor & Francis. New York.

E. Hinze (2015) What do we learn in psychoanalytic training? Int J Psychoanal 96:755-771.

J.-M. Quinodoz (1993) The Taming of Solitude. Routledge, London and New York.

J.-M. Quinodoz (2004) Reading Freud. A Chronological Exploration of Freud’s Writings. Routledge. London and New York.

D. Tuckett, E. Allison, O. Bonard, G. Bruns, A. Christopoulos, M. Diercks. E. Hinze, M. Linardos, M. Sebek (2024) Knowing What Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know. Rowman & Littlefield. Lanham. Boulder. New York. London.

View Details

“I would love for the psychoanalytic world to re-embrace some of these adjunctive treatments that get to non-ordinary states of consciousness in order to enhance psychoanalytic treatment, and that includes psychedelics. The other thing I'd like to see is, I think psychoanalysts are extremely well suited to use psychedelic-assisted therapy in a non-harmful way. I really believe that without an ongoing treatment relationship that these medicines are not going to be quick fixes. There’s an article in the Substack blog, Ecstatic Integration, about an Israeli man who had an MDMA treatment for chronic post-traumatic stress disorder and it's a very interesting read, and it really does speak to the crucial aspect of having an ongoing therapy relationship while we use these medicines. I want people who are in the analytic field who are trained right out of the box to provide these containers to be more involved in the psychedelic field. For the psychedelic field I think sometimes I wish they would be a little more humble, a little less zealous about the efficacy, and a little more concerned about what could happen that's harmful. I also think the psychedelic field, for some reason, has not embraced psychoanalysis as a major tool to enhance the medicine."

Episode Description: Charis begins by discussing her inspiration, attributed to Maimonides, for always seeking new understandings to enhance her care of patients. We also begin with a caution - any time we introduce a frame change in clinical work, we must carefully attend to our countertransference to determine the factors that are contributing to our actions. That said, we should be careful to not use our carefulness to rationalize inhibitions to thinking and acting creatively. Charis describes her thinking underlying her decision to introduce ketamine with a particular patient as well as the process of the ongoing psychotherapy. We discuss the practical aspects of this procedure, the risks, the changes in the patient, and the importance of an ongoing psychotherapy to serve as a productive holding and processing space for this work. She concludes with her recommendation to the analytic world to be more open to such adjunctive approaches to therapy and to the psychedelic world to be more modest in their assumptions of its healing ability.

Linked Webinar and Article:

/g/Communications/Ees4tjM0U1lEtzEkVrUmDjgBmH9Vd6wgap_-Z-7BJVXNDw?e=h8Afay&referrer=Outlook.Win32&referrerScenario=email-linkwithembed">https://ipaworld.sharepoint.com//g/Communications/Ees4tjM0U1lEtzEkVrUmDjgBmH9Vd6wgap_-Z-7BJVXNDw?e=h8Afay&referrer=Outlook.Win32&referrerScenario=email-linkwithembed

https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/successfully-treating-c-ptsd-with?utm…

Our Guest: Dr. Cladouhos is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing in Boston, Massachusetts. She is on the faculty at the Tufts University School of Medicine and in the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute's adult and child analytic training programs. She is the course director of an experiential elective for first-year medical students at Tufts called The Healer's Art: Rekindling the Heart and Soul of Medicine and established a pilot retreat program (First Aid for Physicians) through Tufts Medical Center to address physician burnout. She is trained in EMDR and Deep Brain Reorienting, has completed the first phase of MDMA training through MAPS, and has a certificate in Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy from the Fluence Center for Psychedelic Training in New York. She is a member of the International Society for the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation's Special Interest Group on psychoanalytic contributions to the treatment of trauma and dissociation.

Recommended Readings:

Jeffrey Guss (2022) A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Psychedelic Experience, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 32:5, 452-468, DOI: 10.1080/10481885.2022.2106140

Fischman, Lawrence G. Knowing and being known: Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and the sense of authenticity. 09/20/22. Frontiers in Psychiatry. pp.1-36

Lawrence G. Fischman (2019) Seeing without self: Discovering new meaning with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, Neuropsychoanalysis, 21:2, 53-78, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2019.1689528

Dahlberg, Charles Clay. LSD Facilitation of Psychoanalytic Treatment: A Case Study in Depth

Aaron D. Cherniak, Joel Gruneau Brulin, Mario Mikulincer, Sebastian Östlind, Robin Carhart-Harris & Pehr Granqvist (2023) Psychedelic Science of Spirituality and Religion: An Attachment-Informed Agenda Proposal, The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 33:4, 259-276, DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2022.2148061

Orbach, S. There Is No Such Thing As A Body. John Bowlby Memorial Lecture: British Journal of Psychotherapy. 20 (1) 3-15 2003

Orbach, S. Body Part 2: Psychoanalysis’ Discomfort with Touch. British Journal of Psychotherapy. 20 (1) 17-26.2003.

Essentials of informed consent:

Power Trip: Cover Story New York Magazine. Lily K Ross and David Nickels

View Details

“What is it like to be a clinician with a patient who either comes because they're going to be dying or it happens in the treatment - what is it like for the clinician? It's lonely in a way because there is a lot of parallel with what the patient is going through. To me, and as a field, I would like to think we could talk about this and write about it. My peer group at the time was terribly important to me - colleagues, people that basically would be with me in this. But in the end I was the one that went alone to the service at the funeral home and I went to my patient's luncheon, not to have the lunch but to talk to the family, and then I left - I didn't stay for the lunch, I thought that might be a little intrusive. There's nothing really to read about, talk about, pick somebody's brain about how do they experience this in their work or I don't really understand why we've been so quiet about this in our work.” PW

“You mentioned about being alone in it, and there is a way in which it's very true. I think a large part is that not many of our colleagues have had this experience. But on the flip side, maybe because I’ve worked with so many patients and I’m beginning to notice a certain consistency, but I've also had such an experience of close intimacy with these patients. There's a closeness that is to be had particularly in analytic work and work over time - but it happens quite quickly in the work with dying patients, and in that regard, I felt less alone in my work. In some ways in the rest of our work, because we maintain a careful distance in a way, a boundary with the patient, a frame - I feel with the dying patients, I feel like both of us are more in the room together.” MM

Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the tension that exists between the literal and metaphoric aspects of the analytic relationship and how that is highlighted in the face of physical illness in either party. We focus on patients' illnesses both as they present upon initial consultation and when they develop in the course of treatment. Mark describes his years of work with cancer patients, and Peggy shares her experience with an analysand who, in the 6th year of her treatment, developed a terminal illness. We consider the emotional challenges associated with making home visits, the meaning of 'boundaries', feelings associated with fees, and the shared experience of love between patient and analyst. We consider the ways that the analyst’s affective intensity may also be associated with earlier and feared illnesses in their own life. We close with considering the difficulties that our field has in honestly communicating this aspect of the heart and soul of psychoanalysis.

Linked Episodes:

Episode 23: A Psychoanalyst Encounters the Dying – Discovering ‘Existential Maturity’

Episode 40: How Psycho-Oncology Informs an Approach to the Covid-19 Crises with Norman Straker, MD

Our Guests:

Mark Moore, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who works in private practice in Philadelphia. He was the Director of Psychological Services at the Abramson Cancer Center at Pennsylvania Hospital from 2004-2014 where he supervised psychology interns and post-doctoral fellows during their psycho-oncology rotation and provided psychological services to cancer patients and their families. He is also currently a co-leader for a weekly doctoring group for neurology residents at Penn Medicine. He was the Director of the Psychotherapy Training Program from 2014-2020 at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, where he currently teaches courses on Writing, Assessment, Core Concepts, and a comparative course on Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He was a recipient of the 2020 Edith Sabshin Teaching Award from the American Psychoanalytic Association, and he runs a monthly teaching forum for faculty at his institute. Dr. Moore’s clinical work focuses on health issues, notably chronic illness, losses, and life transitions associated with cancer, and the fear of dying. He has written several book chapters on topics including the concept of harmony in Japan, cultural perspectives on lying, conducting therapy outside the office, the experience of bodily betrayal in illness and aging, the experience of shame across the adult lifespan, and more recently about friendship.

Peggy Warren, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Boston. Originally from Chicago, she danced professionally with Giordano Dance Chicago from ages 15 to 21, which created a lifelong interest in the effects of creativity and mentoring on human development. Fascinated by cell biology, she received a master’s degree in microbiology from Chicago Medical School and then an MD from Rush University. In medical school, she was chosen to be an Osler Honor Fellow in Pathology/Oncology, where she was first exposed to dying patients. Awarded the Nathan Freer prize for excellence in a medical student at graduation, she used the prize money to buy the Complete Works of Freud and began to learn about the power of the unconscious. After completing residency training in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, she pursued analytic training and graduated from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She was on the teaching and supervising faculty of the MGH/McLean psychiatry residency program for 30 years, the Boston Psychoanalytic faculty for 20 years, and won the teaching award from the Harvard Medical School MGH/McLean residency program in 2010. She has given talks on “Vaslav Nijinski: Creativity and Madness,” was a discussant with Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln and depression, lectured on the effect of twinships on siblings, was a discussant in the “Off the Couch Film Series,” (Boston Coolidge Corner theater), a case presenter “On the Dying Patient” at the 2017 American Psychoanalytic meetings, and is a faculty member of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual Workshop on Psychoanalytic Writing. She has been in private practice in Boston as a psychoanalyst for 38 years.

Recommended Readings:

Bergner, S. (2011). Seductive Symbolism: Psychoanalysis in the Context of Oncology. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 28,267-292.

Emanuel, L. (2021). Psychodynamic contributions to palliative care patients and their family members. In H. Schwartz (Ed.), Applying Psychoanalysis to Medical Care. New York: Routledge.

Hitchen, C. (2012). Mortality. New York: Hatchette Book Group.

Minerbo, V. (1998). The patient without a couch: An analysis of a patient with terminal cancer. Int. J. Psych-Anal., 79,83-93.

Norton, J. (1963). Treatment of a Dying Patient. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 18, 541-560

Didion, Joan: The Year of Magical Thinking. Vintage/Random House, 2007

Jaouad, Suleika: Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted;

Random House, 2022.

Bloom, Amy: In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss;Random House, 2023.

View Details

"From such accounts [of Polish atrocities] we can see how incredibly emotional and how incredibly pleasurable it could be on the social level, not only for the people involved, but for the whole group, and we can really see how violence on others becomes the core of social identity, of the national identity. We tend to think about committing violence as anti-social, and that Eros is the only force that brings us together. We can’t see here how eroticized violence or sexualized violence might do it as well. After so many years of research, we don't really have to ask the question: how is it that people can do such things, or how can people become murderers on a social level, on a group level? I'd say that the more interesting question we may ask is how did the murderers stay people and stay citizens? How could after committing such crimes in plain sight of the whole group, how could that group remain a stable group? How could a community of murderers and bystanders to the violence - what is the social glue that brings them all together? I would say that eroticized violence is one of the main aspects, one of the main elements of creating a closed identity based on denial of humanity of the other.”

Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the phenomena of bystanding in the presence of extreme violence. The slaughter of neighbors by neighbors notoriously occurred in the Rwandan genocide and in the Polish Holocaust, which is the focus of Jan's research. He posits that the psychoanalytic concept of perversion best captures the denial and split-off excitement that characterizes bystanding - 'one eye open, one eye closed'. He challenges the possibility of observer's indifference, documents the ever-present knowledge that neighbors have of the history of their neighbors, and discusses the experience of 'ghosts' inhabiting the homes of forgotten/remembered neighbors. We distinguish between being a bystander and a witness, and the state of mind “We will not forgive you for what we did to you.” We close with our sharing the difficulty of listening to this material and how he managed this over the years of his research.

Our Guest: Jan Borowicz, PhD, is a certified psychotherapist and candidate in psychoanalytic training in Polish Psychoanalytic Society (IPA). He is a Member of Holocaust Remembrance Research Group in the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Poland. He is interested in cultural memory, psychoanalytic theory, and Holocaust studies. He published two books in Polish on history and memory of the Holocaust. Recently, he published his first book in English, Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders (2024), in which he explores the deep implications of witnessing mass violence and extermination.

Recommended Readings:

Jessica Benjamin, "A relational psychoanalysis perspective on the necessity of acknowledging failure in order to restore the facilitating and containing features of the intersubjective relationship (the shared third)", International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 9, iss. 3, 2009.

Jan Borowicz, Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders, trans. Mikołaj Golubiewski, Routledge: London and New York, 2024.

Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.

Samuel Gerson, "When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning, and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust", International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 9, iss. 6, 2009.

Grzegorz Niziołek, Polish Theatre of the Holocaust, trans. Ursula Phillips, London: Bloomsbury Publishing and Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego, 2021.

Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, eds. Christina Morina, Krijn Thijs, New York: Berghan Books, 2019.

Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996.

View Details

My conversation with Sudhir Kakar took place five weeks before his untimely death on April 22nd.

“Freud obviously is very brave and courageous to accept that the world is inadequate and that my desires will never be sufficiently fulfilled. My question - is this in fact the case? I think that everyone has had some kind of spiritual experience, some more than others and in many different contexts, not just religious ones. Spiritual experiences contradict Freud’s notion of common unhappiness and the idea of the world as inadequate. What reason do we have to assume that all such common experiences are simply false, that they are based on some kind of false consciousness? Rather, I believe that the inadequacy lies in our own awareness rather than with the world. The world allows for many experiences that would be highly adequate yet we block them - what we call the mundane world is much more enchanted than we think it is."

Episode Description: We begin by considering the embodiment of one's cultural imagination - "one's mental representation of culture" - into one's unconscious mind. Sudhir describes different early child-rearing practices and invites the question about their influence on our later inner lives. He shares with us his early idealization of Freudian/Western ways of thinking and his later development, which returned to the enchanting aspects of his Hindu youth. We discuss the similarities and differences between a Judeo-Christian-based psychoanalysis and one founded on a Hindu imagination. We consider the different notions of God, ritual, and illusion. He distinguishes an 'autonomous person' from a 'communitarian person' and describes the pleasures and burdens of each. We close with his sharing his lovely psychoanalytic origin story connected to his meeting Erik Erikson and discovering "I want to be like him."

Our Guest: Sudhir Kakar was a psychoanalyst, scholar, and writer. He had been a Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Chicago, McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii, and Vienna, Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study, Princeton, Berlin, and Cologne, and was on the board of Freud Archives. He had received the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, Tagore-Merck Award, McArthur Research Fellowship, and Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. `As ‘the psychoanalyst of civilizations’, the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur listed Kakar in 2005 as one of the world’s 25 major thinkers. Sudhir was the author/editor of 20 books of non-fiction and six novels. His books have been translated into 22 languages.

Recommended Readings:

Kakar, Sudhir -

The Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations, Karnac. June 2024

The Capacious Freud, in F. Busch and N. Delgado eds.The Ego and the

Id 100 years Later. London: Routledge 2023

Re-reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion in Hindu India, in O'neill & S.Akhtar.eds.On Freud's the Future of an Illusion. London: Routledge, 2018

The Analyst and the Mystic Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992

Psychoanalysis and Eastern Spiritual Healing Traditions, J. of

Analytical Psychology,48(5).

Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological inquiry into India

and its Healing Traditions. New York: A. Knopf, 1982.

Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World. Chicago: U. of

Chicago Press, 2009

View Details

"Psychoanalysis landed in Finland in the 50s; before the Second World War there were one or two persons familiar with psychoanalysis. In the 50s, psychoanalysis got a lot of interest in Finland but then there was no possibility of training in Finland. The pioneers went abroad, some to Sweden and some to Switzerland. They picked up the theoretical preferences in the new countries and new institutes - the IPA Associations mainly were from people studying in Sweden and coming back to Finland and creating the IPA association. The Therapeia Institute consisted mainly of people studying in Switzerland and got a lot of influence from existential psychoanalysis and Jungian psychoanalysis… I tend to side with Lee Grossman [link below]; I guess the theoretical theories reflect more the character - when you listen to a case presentation of course people present them differently depending on their theoretical background, but in the consulting room I am not sure there is that much difference."

Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the value of meeting and learning from analyst colleagues from around the world. We discover both similarities and differences in both the challenges and pleasures of this work. In Finland there was a government-mandated change in the structure of training in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis starting in 2012. The anticipatory anxieties were considerable. There was input from the university on issues of curricula, research opportunities, and improved pedagogy. The fears of loss of meaningful autonomy proved to be mostly fears - not realized. We also discuss the origins and current state of psychoanalysis in Finland. We close with a few words of the pervasive role of sauna in Finnish life and the ways it manifests in analyses.

Linked Episode:

Episode 135: Technique is Character Rationalized with Lee Grossman, MD (Oakland, Ca.) – IPA Off the Couch

Our Guest: Jan Johansson is a psychologist and a training and supervising analyst at the Therapeia Institute in Helsinki, Finland. Currently, he’s working as a psychoanalyst in private practice in Helsinki. In addition, he supervises psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. He has been interested in issues concerning psychoanalytic training for the last decade and a half. Currently he is the chair of the board of the Institute, while also being a member of board of the Therapeia Society. He also was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies 2014 - 2022. He is interested in promoting the multitude of psychoanalytic voices; while being trained within an object-relational frame, he doesn’t identify exclusively with any particular theoretical frame of reference.

He lives in Espoo, a neighbor city of Helsinki with his wife. After languishing in the darkness of the Finnish winter from October to mid-March, in the summer they enjoy the light and the white nights at their summer-house at the seaside, heating their sauna everyday and swimming in the Finnish Gulf.

Linked Episode:

Episode 135: Technique is Character Rationalized with Lee Grossman, MD (Oakland, Ca.)

Recommended Readings:

Grossman, L. (2023): The psychoanalytic encounter and the misuse of theory. New York: Routledge.

Kernberg, O.F. (2016). Psychoanalytic education at the crossroads: Reformation, change and the future of psychoanalytic training. New York: Routledge

Reeder, J. (2004). Hate and love in psychoanalytic institutions: The dilemmas of a profession. New York: Other Press.

Tuckett, D. (2005). Does anything go? Towards a framework for the more transparent assessment of psychoanalytic competence. Int J Psychoanal. 86: 31–49.

Tuckett, D., Amati Mehler, J., Collins, S., Diercks, M., Flynn, D., Franck, C., Millar, C., Skale, E., Wagtmann, A-M. (2020): Psychoanalytic education in the Eitingon model and its controversies: A way forward. Int J Psychoanal. 101: 1106 – 1135.

View Details

“My interest is to rather than continue with the psychoanalytic tilt which has tended to try to find the words - to find the areas of the analyst that has words to engage with these states and then help the patient transform these states into something thinkable and communicable. [In contrast] my interest has been to take the patient where they are; it’s kind of a radical way of saying ‘meeting the patient where they are’, and find our way and lend ourselves to engaging with them in their own idiom, using Bollas’s term, in their own way of being and to find ways to be with them that don’t necessarily rely on talking about things and making things known.”

Episode Description: We begin by considering patient's non-represented mental states and their manifestation in somatic and motoric registers. Robert describes his understanding and approach to clinically engage those who "barely experience continuity of the self or subjectivity in themselves or others." He recommends 'companioning' with them. This entails not trying to "move the patient out of these regressed areas into greater relatedness ...but to welcome these other dimensions and their full expression within the analytic space." We consider the role of enactive engagements, the non-verbal vs the pre-verbal and 'radical neutrality'. He presents a case where the patient and analyst shared music, food and not discussed emotional intimacy between them that he felt was vital to enable the patient to emerge as a 'real person'. We close with speaking of Robert's professional history of working early on with psychotic individuals and finding that his approach enabled them, often to their surprise, to feel heard. He also describes his attunement to the experience of being an 'other' that emerged from his growing up as an 'other' - a Jew in London.

Our Guest:

Robert Grossmark, Ph.D., ABPP, is a psychoanalyst in New York City. He works with individuals, groups, and couples. He is on the teaching and supervising faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, The National Institute for the Psychotherapies Program in Adult Psychoanalysis, The National Training Program in Psychoanalysis, National Faculty Member, the Florida Psychoanalytic Center and lectures at other psychoanalytic institutes and clinical psychology training programs nationally and internationally. He is an Associate Editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is the author of The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning and co-edited The One and the Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy and Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory.

Recommended Readings:

Grossmark, R. (2024) The Untelling, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. In press.

Grossmark, R. (2019) The anguish of fatherhood, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 16 (3), 316-325.

Grossmark, R. (2023) A child is being murdered: A contemporary psychoanalytic treatment of a compulsion to child pornography, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 40: 25-30

Bach, S. (2011) Chimeras: Immunity, interpenetration and t he true self. Psychoanalytic Review, 98(1): 39-56

Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Fear of breakdown. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1(1-2), 103–107.

Bollas, C. (2011) Character and interformality. In C. Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader (p. 238-248)

Ogden, T.O. (2017) Dreaming the analytic session: A clinical essay. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 86: 1-20.

Stern, D.B. (2022) On coming into possession of oneself: Witnessing and the formulation of experience. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91: 639-667

Symington, N. (2012) The Essence of psychoanalysis as opposed to what is secondary. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 22, 4, 395-409

View Details

"The first line treatment for adolescents with anorexia now is family-based therapy typically, which involves helping the parents facilitate the refeeding of the adolescent. So, I was working with the patient in that way and found it to be helpful and useful, but was consistently struck by the neglect of the patient’s inner life, and found, at least based on my experience with many patients, that while you could get some symptomatic relief, if you didn't, in some way, address the deeper dynamics, the aspects of the patient's personality organization that drove the disorder, that were implicated at the disorder, there was a way that the patient would snap back to their old behaviors over time, that deeper change and a deeper understanding of what was going on was really necessary; and so that's been kind of evolution from my work over the past ten years from my first book, which was about anorexia in males, and tried to present a kind of Integrative understanding of that phenomena, increasingly over time I've become more and more interested in the deeper kind of analytic thinking that we can bring to bear on this kind of suffering.”

Episode Description:

We begin with a description of the common contertransferential pull to intervene behaviorally in the face of repetitive self-destructive eating disorder symptoms. This intention can inform but not compel the clinical decision as to the indicated treatment of choice for someone at any particular moment. Behavioral and pharmacologic treatments can be important in softening the pressure of eating disorder symptoms. They do not, however, give an individual access to their interoceptive life, from which these disturbing self-preoccupations emerge. We discuss the challenges of working with those who have limited capacities for mentalisation and as a result, live out their inner lives somatically and motorically. Immersive treatment leads the clinician to experience these proto-affects in one's own body and in one's own ruminations. Tom discusses alexithymia, typical family structures, and the presence of the 'abject' experience in the lives of these patients. He presents a disguised case of a patient who was able to work through both the early struggles and later neurotic aspects of these conflicts analytically. We close with his sharing with us his vision for the future which includes more integration between the dynamic and adynamic approaches to these challenging patients.

Our Guest: Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, is Chair in the Department of Psychology at Golden Gate University as well as a psychoanalyst and board-certified, licensed psychologist. His first book, Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males, was published in 2016. His second book, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak, an edited volume in the Relational Perspectives Book Series, was published in 2018. His third book, Eating Disorders (New Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis), was released in 2022. His fourth book, co-edited with Burke, Michaels, and Muhr, is entitled Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation: Rehumanizing Mental Health Policy and Practice. He has also written a novel about the process of psychotherapy, Ghosts of the Unremembered Past, additionally released as an audiobook. He is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute for Northern California and a Training Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He is on the Scientific Advisory Council of the National Eating Disorders Association, Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP), the William Alanson White Institute’s Eating Disorders, Compulsions, and Addictions program, and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and has a private practice in Berkeley, CA.

Recommended Readings:

Williams, G. (1997). Reflections On Some Dynamics Of Eating Disorders: ‘No Entry’ Defences and Foreign Bodies. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis., 78, 927-941. Brady, M.T. (2011). Invisibility and insubstantiality in an anorexic adolescent: phenomenology and dynamics. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 37(1), 3 – 15. Bromberg, P.M. (2001). Treating patients with symptoms – and symptoms with patients: Reflections on shame, dissociation, and eating disorders. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 11(6), 891 – 912. Petrucelli, J. (2015). ‘My body is a cage’: Interfacing interpersonal neurobiology, attachment, affect regulation, self-regulation, and the regulation of relatedness in treatment with patients with eating disorders. In J. Petrucelli (Ed.). Body-states: Interpersonal and relational perspectives on the treatment of eating disorders. (Psychoanalysis in a New Key). New York: Routledge. Sands, S. (2003). The subjugation of the body in eating disorders: A Particularly female solution. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 20(1), 103 – 116.

Wooldridge, T. (2021). Anorexia nervosa and the paternal function. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 69(1), 7-32.

Wooldridge, T. (2018). The entropic body: Primitive anxieties and secondary skin formation in anorexia nervosa. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 28(2), 189 – 202.

View Details

"The ability to play means we can indulge in a kind of illusion, not delusion, and make a distinction. It always amazes me that when the patient arrives, they like the routine of an analysis; nobody breaks that, it's an illusion; it is a piece of theater every time. We open the door to our patients and they lie on the couch, and yet there is something enormously gratifying as the patient works out their sense of reality from that illusory field. I think it is exactly what the mother is able to bring to the infant - this capacity to play and this capacity to continue to evolve beyond the analysis as an internalization of that experience of being listened to and being with someone. The details of that is related to an intrapsychic surviving and non- surviving object in the analyst who continues to think and feel and be with the patient in the consulting room.”

Episode Description: Joel begins his conversation with Jan around Winnicott's conceptualization of aggression in development and in the analytic encounter. She noted that he had a very sophisticated developmental theory of aggression which culminated with the role that the destruction of the object plays in constituting reality. Jan explains that she has elaborated Winnicott’s late theory of aggression with her notion of the ‘surviving object'. She distinguishes the 'surviving object' from the 'good object', especially as it stands apart from a moralizing position. She considers its internalization as an essential condition for healthy development. They discussed the role that insight continued to play for Winnicott after he emphasized the importance of the patient’s experience in the analytic process. They also consider the ‘fear of woman’ as a root of misogyny. After discussing the uniqueness of the analytic setting to facilitate play, fantasy, and “magic which is not psychosis,” Jan concludes by emphasizing the importance of in-person treatment in order to have an in vivo experience of the non-retaliatory analyst.

Linked Episode:

Episode 144: Why Winnicott? Joel Whitebook, PhD

Our Interviewer and Guest:

Joel Whitebook, PhD is a philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is on the Faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and was the founding Director of the University’s Psychoanalytic Studies Program. In addition to many articles on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and critical theory, Dr. Whitebook is also the author of Perversion and Utopia (MIT) and Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge).

Jan Abram, PhD is a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and in private practice in London. She is a Visiting Professor of the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London and is currently Vice President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation for the Annual Conferences. She is President-Elect for the EPF to start her term in March 2024. She is a Visiting Lecturer and supervisor at the Tavistock Clinic in London. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Kyoto, Japan, where she resided for a writing sabbatical. Jan Abram has published several books and articles notably The Language of Winnicott, Donald Winnicott Today (2013), The Clinical Paradigms of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott: Comparisons and Dialogues (co-authored with R.D. Hinshelwood 2018); The Surviving Object: psychoanalytic clinical essays on psychic survival-of-the-object (2022) and her second book with R.D. Hinshelwood: The Clinical Paradigms of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion: Comparisons and Dialogues (2023).

Recommended Readings:

ben

Abram, J. (2022) The Surviving Object: Psychoanalytic Clinical Essays on Psychic survival-of-the-object New Library of Psychoanalysis Routledge

Abram, J. (2023) Holding and Containing: on the specificity of Winnicott's object relations theory Holding und Containing: Zur spezifischen Natur der Objektbeziehungen bei Winnicott. Psyche - Z Psychoanal 77 (9), 768-796 DOI 10.21706/ps-77-9-768

View Details

“I was speaking to the tendency of the popular media to perceive narratives of Indian women's sexuality via the lens of oppression. Now, of course, sexual violence against women is an important concern in India, as it is worldwide. But telling the story of violence against women misses the story of how women desire, which is what I wanted to highlight. What struck me from reading the responses from these psychoanalytic interviews that I did was just how much women adapted their Eros to their circumstances. Particularly the older women that were interviewed, those who were older than 35, didn’t feel very oppressed, even as they narrated experiences and circumstances that sounded oppressive to me. Of course, if these were patients instead of the psychoanalytic interviewees that they were, one might wait for a kind of realization of oppression, but I wanted to see how psychoanalysis could be useful in mapping how Eros leaks within a framework where oppression is internalized, as it was for many of my interviewees. What I found very interesting was some of the imaginative ways that women found to satisfy their sexual desires while still maintaining community belonging. Viewed from the outside, this can look like oppressive forms of hypocrisy or enactments. But within the frame of these women's lives, it seems like they had found some creative ways of making Eros central and also of having Eros and breathing it at the same time in order to move forward."

Episode Description: Amrita focuses our attention on the presence of women's active sexual desire which often gets obscured by society's tendency to see women as simply victims of violence and oppression. In her book, Women's Sexuality and Modern India - In a Rapture of Distress, she shares with us the results of in-depth interviews as well as latent clinical data from educated and financially comfortable Indian women. We discuss the erotic aspects of modesty; the differences between Indian and International feminisms; the role of the protective parent to foster girlish excitement, i.e. to offer a helping hand to their daughter; and the importance of the involved father to enable an identification for comfortable aggression. We close with a description of an unusual culturally imbued sexual practice that invites Amrita's deep attunement to multiple levels of meaning.

Our Guest: Amrita Narayanan, PsyD, is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst and the author of Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress. She has a longstanding interest in how a civilization's culture shapes its sexuality and its psychoanalysis. She is an essayist in The Parrots of Desire: 3000 Years of Erotica in India and in Pha(bu)llus: a cultural history of the Phallus. She also writes a monthly column, Sexual Politics, for a newspaper, The Deccan Herald, Bengaluru. Aside from her clinical practice, Amrita is a Visiting Professor of English at Ashoka University, New Delhi, where she teaches psychoanalysis at the undergraduate and Masters level.

Recommended Readings:

Narayanan, A. (2023) Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Kakar, S. (1990) Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. Penguin Books: New Delhi.

Menon, M. (2019). Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India. Speaking Tiger Books: New Delhi.

Narayanan, A and Kakar, S. (2023) The Capacious Freud In Busch, F and Delgado, N. The Ego and Id: 100 Years Later. Contemporary Freud, Turning Points and Critical Issues Series. Routledge: UK.

Narayanan, A. (2018). When the Enthralled Mother Dreams: a clinical and cultural composition. IN Kumar, M. Mishra, A., and Dhar, A. (Eds). Psychoanalysis in the Indian Terroir: Emerging Themes in Culture, Family and Childhood. Lexington Books: USA.

Narayanan. A. (2013). Ambivalent Subjects: Psychoanalysis, Women’s Sexuality in India and the writings of Sudhir Kakar. Psychodynamic Practice. 20-3. 213-227

View Details

"The genetic asymmetry [with sperm donorship] will create issues and complications - it puts a strain on the relationship, i.e. who is excluded; who has more rights to this product? In other words, if the sperm donor is from a stranger, the father feels ‘am I really adequately or sufficiently related that I could claim fatherhood’?”

Episode Description: We begin by acknowledging the erroneous assumption that unconscious conflicts over becoming a parent are etiologic for what had been called 'psychogenic infertility.' Correlation is not causality. We review the widespread use of assisted reproductive technologies, with up to 750,000 babies born per year through these methods. Mali presents a composite case of a 48-year-old woman who went through many arduous IVF cycles before appreciating the degree of omnipotence and denial that characterized her approach to this problem, as it had toward many other issues in her life. She shares with us the common experience of infertility representing a sense of defectiveness and guilt. We consider the many challenges of sperm and egg donorship, including who one chooses as a donor as well as when one should tell children of their biological origins. We close with Mali sharing with us her recommendations to rejuvenate the field of child analysis.

Our Guest:

Mali Mann, M.D, is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst and Child Supervisor at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. She is a clinical professor Adjunct at Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science. Some of her published papers include, "Immigrant Parents and their Emigrant Adolescents: The Tension of Inner and Outer Worlds;" "Shame Veiled and Unveiled," "Aggression in Children: Origins, Manifestation, and Management through Play," Adolescent Psychoanalysis book chapter. "The Formation and Development of Ethnic Identity." Her edited book, Psychoanalytic Aspects of Assisted Reproductive Technology, won three awards: 1) Pinnacle Book Award, 2) International Book Awards in Family and "Parenting and Family" category in 2016, 3) Finalist for Book Vana Award in 2016. She has published two books of poetry: Whisper, Forget Me Not, and A Path with No Name. Her latest book, My Pony, Keran, is a semi-autobiographical children's book. She has been a member of Flying Doctors for nearly three decades (Los Medicos Voladores). She and her late husband, Dr. William James Stover, traveled to the Orphanages in South America and Mexico to offer medical help to children and their families. In her spare time, she paints abstract expressionism and figurative; her art has been exhibited in US galleries and won several awards.

Recommended Readings:

Allison. G. H. (1997). Motherhood, motherliness, and psychogenic infertility. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 66: 1-17

Ludden, J. (2011) A. F. (1961). A new openness for donor kids about their biology. NPR:

Making Babies: 21st Century Families.(17 September).

Bibring, G. L.’ Dwyer, T. F., Huntington, D.S., & Valenstein, A. F. (1961). A Study of Psychological Process in pregnancy and the earliest mother and child relationship. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 16: 9-72

Ehrensaft, D. (2008), When baby makes three or four or more, Psychanal. Study Child, 63:3-23.

Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating, and working through. (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II.) S.E., 12.

Inderbitzin, L. B & Levy, S. (1998). Repetition Compulsion revisited: Implication for Technique, Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 67:32-53

Lester, E. P. & Notman, M. (1986). Pregnancy, developmental crisis, and object relations: Psychoanalytic considerations. Int. J. Psychoanal., 62: 357-366

Notman, M. & Lester, E. P. (1988). Pregnancy: theoretical considerations. Psychoanl. Inq., 8: 139-160

Pines, D. (1982). Relevance of early development to pregnancy and abortion. Int. J. Psychoanal., 61: 311-318

Zallusky, S. (1999). Infertility in The Age of Technology, Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 48: 1541-1562

View Details

"As I elaborate in the book, there was no physical contact or romantic engagement. The reason why I chose the ‘lover’ as the [psychoanalytic] analogy is, in the real world outside of psychoanalytic practice, where else do you have an interpersonal encounter that is so intensely engaging, attentive, respectful, and caring? That would be in the first six weeks or six months of a romantic relationship. If we eliminate the romantic/sexual part and just stay with ‘wow, this other party is paying such attention to me’ - reminds me of Lacan's idea that what we really seek in the other is their desire for us, which by the way, I don't completely agree with because I think it goes both ways - I would say that that is the analogy from the world of lovers that I would map onto psychoanalytic work at least on the part of the psychoanalyst - he or she ideally pays that kind of intense attention, care, respect and attunement, that you would find between lovers.”

Episode Description: We begin with discussing the various ways that we can shape our psychoanalytic frame to enable a deepening of the clinical encounter. This is in contrast to frames that have gone awry. In his book Lover - Exorcist - Critic Alan describes a composite patient where he became over-involved to the detriment of the work that was eventually repaired. We reference a problematic frame in his earlier training analysis that perhaps set the stage for this difficulty. He shares with us his concept that "by enlightening subjectivity, by raising consciousness, depth psychotherapy liberates." We discuss in some detail the forces in him, his patient, and their relationship that led him to greater enactments than were useful. He shares with us the challenges he faced in remedying his emotional imbalance with her and the intense rage it awakened in her, deriving from various periods in her life. We both emphasized the vital role of the consultant at such times. We close with Alan describing his co-founding and leadership in the Rose City Center - a low fee clinic providing dynamic psychotherapy to individuals who would never otherwise see the inside of an analyst's office.

Our Guest: Alan Michael Karbelnig, PhD is a psychoanalyst, writer, teacher, and forensic psychologist and practices in Pasadena, California. He is a supervising and training psychoanalyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He lectures nationally and internationally, including in China, India, Thailand, and Israel. He writes a weekly Substack newsletter titled Journeys to the Unconscious Mind. Alan has published 20 scholarly articles and five book chapters in addition to his book Lover, Exorcist, and Critic. He considers his 2004 founding of Rose City Center—a nonprofit clinic providing psychoanalytic psychotherapy for economically disadvantaged persons throughout California—his proudest professional accomplishment.

Recommended Readings:

Bellow, H. (1962). Herzog. New York: Viking.

Bromberg, P. (1996). The multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship. Standing in the spaces: Essays on clinical process, trauma & dissociation. London: The Analytic Press.

Greenberg, J. and Mitchell, S. (1983) Object relations in psychoanalytic theory. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.

Karbelnig, A. M. (2022). Chasing Infinity: Why clinical psychoanalysis’ future lies in pluralism. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 103(1):5-25.

McEwan, I. (2019). Machines Like Me. New York: Anchor.

Strenger, C. (1989). The classic and romantic visions in psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 70:593-610

View Details

"What's the spiritual room? For me, it does tend to be a connection to something greater than just me; it is a contemplative space; it is getting to the core of who I am, allowing in some ways for the best of me to come to the fore; to have space for grace. I am humbled by what people bring to tell me. I take what I'm doing in the office very seriously because it is really like sacred work in terms of people being able to work, love, and play. I mean that is for them to find their real callings rather than the false selves that they may experience; it's a similar call for finding one's true self, and that is really important work."

Episode Description: We begin by considering the presence of religion as part of the cultural heritage which patients bring to the clinical encounter. Ginta shares with us her upbringing in the Lithuanian Catholic church and its presence in her life, in her journey to medical school and to her psychiatric and analytic training. She speaks of the relationship between her sense of spirituality and God, the importance of Jesus' human/divine amalgam, and how prayer provides her access to her interiority. We consider the similarities and differences between speaking freely to God and speaking freely to one's analyst. We discuss the narthex, the church antechamber, and its association with the analytic waiting room and how the structure of the Mass has similarities with the structure of the analytic session. We also consider her reflections on abortion - including a quote from Freud on the topic. Ginta closes by sharing with us her sense of the sacredness of our work.

Our Guest: Ginta Remeikis, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing in Rockville, MD. Having graduated from Northwestern University Medical School, she completed her psychiatric residency at Georgetown and Chestnut Lodge Hospital, where she then served on the medical staff and psychoanalytic training at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. Most recently, she has presented at meetings of the APCS (Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society) and AABS (Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies) on intergenerational transmission of trauma; diaspora experiences; the psychic role of language, especially bilingualism; the use of literature for processing trauma; and psychodynamics around disability. In 2003 she organized the New Directions weekend conference, “The Future of Religion in the Psychoanalytic World: Revisiting the Mind/Soul Dilemma” and for several years presented on issues of psychiatry and religion to Georgetown’s psychiatry residents. Besides enjoying reading, she has published poetry in Lithuanian in several collections and journals.

Recommended Readings:

Corcoran, Paul, “Seamus Heaney lost his Catholic faith. But his poetry still sought transcendence.” in America; The Jesuit Review, Sept. 15, 2023.

Epstein, Mark, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, Basic Books, 1995.

Greeley, Andrew M., The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1990.

Merton, Thomas, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, NY, 1961.

Rizzuto, Ana-Maria, Why did Freud Reject God?: A Psychodynamic Interpretation, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.

Smith, Joseph H. and Susan A Handelman, editors, Psychoanalysis and Religion, Psychiatry and the Humanities, vol. 11, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1990.

Trinkūnas, Jonas, editor, Of Gods & Holidays; The Baltic Heritage, Tvermė, 1999.

View Details

"My analysis not only allowed me to grieve [my mother], with my analyst patiently pushing me in the direction of my feelings, but it radically transformed my life. I wouldn't have had kids if I hadn't had my analysis because I thought ‘I'm an ambitious person, I want a career, you can't do everything’. I didn't know any models of women who had a career and enjoyed motherhood. In my analysis I learned just through analyzing my own dreams and free associations, that this was all a rationalization. I was a very maternal person and I had the unconscious belief that if you become a mother you die. Once that was conscious, I talked to my husband who was excited about the idea about having kids. We had our two daughters, and so my life is in very concrete ways radically enriched by my psychoanalysis. So I went into the field with a deep conviction of how therapeutic this process is and it's been kind of a straight line from there."

Episode Description: We begin by describing the arc of learning that characterizes our psychoanalytic life journey. The oral tradition starts with our first supervisors and extends from there to study groups and to becoming a supervisor oneself. Nancy shares with us her professional trajectory from being an eager college student first encountering Freud to becoming a best-selling psychoanalytic author. She relates the transformative experience of her own analysis, the steps of maturation in her clinical work, and how she has faced the traumas of older age. We discuss the role that students have in relating to their more experienced colleagues and we close with her sharing her hope for our field's future.

Our Guest: Nancy McWilliams, PhD is Visiting Professor Emerita at Rutgers Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology and has a private practice in Lambertville, NJ. She is author of four textbooks (on psychoanalytic diagnosis, case formulation, therapy, and supervision) and is co-editor of both editions of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual. A former president of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy of the American Psychological Association, she is a member of the Austen Riggs Center Board of Trustees. Her books are available in 20 languages and she has taught in 30 countries.

Recommended Readings:

McWilliams, N. (2022). Credo: Psychoanalysis as a wisdom tradition. In J. Salberg (Ed.), Psychoanalytic credos: Personal and professional journeys of psychoanalysts (pp. 70-77). New York: Routledge.

McWilliams, N. (2021). Psychoanalytic supervision. New York: Guilford Press.

Lingiardi, V., & McWilliams, N. (Eds.) (2019) Special Issue: The PDM-2 and clinical and research Issues in psychoanalytic diagnosis. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 35.

McWilliams, N. (2017). Psychoanalytic reflections on mortality: Aging, dying, generativity, and renewal. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 34, 50-57. Also in C. Masur (2018), Flirting with death: Psychoanalysts consider mortality (pp. 25-40). New York: Routledge.

McWilliams, N. (2011). Psychoanalytic diagnosis: Understanding personality in the clinical process, rev. ed. New York: Guilford Press

McWilliams, N. (2004). Psychoanalytic psychotherapy: A practitioner’s guide. New York: Guilford Press.

View Details

"The fact that music is so important for our constitution - that music is almost how we move in the world, that our own bodies are played through by musical forms, that the way we relate to our own way of being in the world is sort of mediated by music - this is powerful stuff. But it's not always very fitting to us. We hear a lot of music in our lives, we don't always choose what we hear. We don’t choose our analyst’s musicality, we don’t first check what kind of musicality an analyst has. We are bombarded by music; music can be imposed upon us, it can make us feel within ourselves in a way that doesn't feel right to us. There is a lot of complexity here as we think about this matter of music being so central to us. But we can find the music that works for us, but we don’t create the music. It belongs to the realm of collective cultural life. There is a lot of struggle in music, and in the analytic setting there is a lot of struggle - because for many patients a lot of the work rests on whether there can be any shared sensory experience or not.”

Episode Description: We begin with recognizing that the process of human musicalization begins in utero and forms the basis of much of psycho-somatic-social life. Peter, Michael and Adam’s written collaboration, Here I'm Alive - The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis is intended to be a musical book about psychoanalysis - a representation of how music binds us to the individual and cultural domains of life. We discuss rhythmizing consciousness, atavistic vs enhancing music, and the blues as a companion soundtrack for loss and tribulation. We take up the relationship between Freud's dream book and his joke book, how present analytic melodies contain aspects of the past, and how dissociation requires a remusicalization of the psychoanalytic situation. We close with Adam reading a paragraph which includes "The capacity of the sexual drive to propel the body back into musical movement and transmute the seizure of trauma into conducted energy to ground the current."

Our Guests:

Peter Goldberg, Ph.D., is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Chair of Faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and on the faculty of the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He has presented widely and written on a range of clinical and theoretical topics, including the evolution of clinical theory in psychoanalysis, sensory experience in analysis, the concept of the analytic frame, the theory and treatment of dissociative states, non-representational states; and the impact of social trauma on individual psychology. He is in private practice in Albany, CA.

Michael Levin, Psy.D. is a Training Analyst and Faculty Member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He has taught and presented on topics including the work of Laplanche, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, and the place of psychoanalysis in cultural and intellectual history. He is in private practice in San Francisco.

Adam Blum, Psy.D. is an Adjunct Faculty Member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He has written and presented on psychoanalysis and the music of Björk, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Stephen Sondheim, Aretha Franklin, and Michael Jackson. He is in private practice in San Francisco.

Recommended Readings and Videos:

Nicholas Spice, “Winnicott and Music” (2001), in The Elusive Child, ed. Lesley Caldwell (London: Karnac, 2002).

Peter Sloterdijk, “Where Are We When We Hear Music?” (2014), in The Aesthetic Imperative: Writings on Art (London: Polity, 2018).

Francis Grier, “Musicality in the Consulting Room,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 100:827–51.

Sondheim Teaches "My Friends" from Sweeney Todd (video) .

Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (London: Wiley, 2017).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962)

The Late Late Show with James Corden, “Paul McCartney Carpool Karaoke” (video).

Harmut Rosa, Resonance (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).

Meshell Ndegeocello, The Omnichord Real Book (2023) (album), Blue Note Records.

View Details

“Discrimination is something that is needed for the child to create himself as a person. You need to be discriminated from the other, and the other is useful for you, as Freud said, as a model, as a rival, as an enemy. There are different kinds of relationships with the other - you need the other, and we are persons connected with the other. If you discriminate you from the other, this is benign. But if you are doing it from a power position, saying: ‘These people are not like me’ - this is malignant othering. It is malignant because when you are marking these people as different, as the Nazis did with the Jewish people, then it is very easy for these people to become the target for any kind of attack when there will be social or economic problems. Malignant because you are doing it from a position of power and because these people that you are discriminating from you may become targets for possible attacks for different reasons in the community."

Episode Description: We begin with Abel reading a statement from the Prejudices, Discrimination and Racism Committee which is included below. He shares with us his personal and family story that led him to be interested in racism and to chair this committee. We discuss the differences between benign otherness and malignant othering. He emphasizes the presence of negation in all of us, tempting us to ignore the dangers from discrimination. He speaks of the future of psychoanalysis and how he feels it depends upon its application in settings off the couch. We consider the risks of dilution of the training experience and also the great benefit to the many who will receive treatment from analytically oriented care. He warns us of the dangers of making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Statement from the IPA Prejudices, Discrimination, Racism Committee:

The rise of antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas barbaric attack

We strongly condemn the murder, maiming, and abduction of hundreds of Israeli civilians and soldiers during an unprovoked attack by Hamas terrorists. The scale of this terrorist attack is unprecedented in recent history. It can only be viewed as a pogrom, and we express our deep solidarity with the victims. Hamas is a terrorist organization, and Palestinians are also their victims. We feel sorrow for all civilians who are killed or suffering in this war, including so many in Gaza.

In its founding document, the Hamas Charter, Hamas states that it is committed to waging Jihad, or holy war, in order “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine”. Its stated goal is to eliminate the Jewish state and kill Jews. It must be made clear that the terror against Israel is not motivated by economic, geographic, or political conflicts: all of Israel is considered a holy land that must not be defiled by the presence of "infidels", whether Christians or Jews. The statement of freeing Palestine from occupation, “From the River to the Sea”, reveals a clear intent to eliminate the State of Israel. A fight against Hamas is a fight of light against darkness, of liberalism against the forces of oppression.

We, as psychoanalysts, can identify the dehumanization of the Jewish population that was displayed by the horrific massacre on the 7th of October. In addition to the suffering of Israel´s population, antisemitic manifestations and attacks have increased exponentially all over the world. As the Prejudices Discrimination and Racism Committee we are alert to antisemitism and the dangerous consequences of its negation. We hope that in due course, it will be possible to find strong leaders who will have the courage to meet and negotiate peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Abel Fainstein (Chair) Argentine Psychoanalytical Association (APA)

Paula Kliger. Michigan Psychoanalytic Society (MPS)

Rosine Perelberg. British Psychoanalytical Society ( BPS)

Leonie Sullivan. Australian Psychoanalytical Society (AP

Raya Zonana. Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis of Sao Paulo. (SBPSP)

Mira Erlich-Ginor (Ex officio) Israel Psychoanalytic Society (IPS)

Our Guest: Abel Fainstein, MD is a Psychiatrist, Master in Psychoanalysis,

Full Member and former President of the Argentine Psychoanalytical Association (APA) and the Psychoanalytic Federation of Latin America (FEPAL). He is a former member of the IPA Board and Ex Com ,Current Chair of the Prejudice, Discrimination, Racism Committee of the IPA, current advisor of the IRED Interregional Encyclopedic Dictionary in Psychoanalysis by the IPA, and of the Revista Uruguaya de Psicoanálisis by APU. He is a judge for the first IPA Tyresias Award on Sexual and Gender Diversity, 2021. He was awarded the KONEX Award in Psychoanalysis, 2016.

Recommended Readings:

Busch, F. ( 2023) Psychoanalysis at the Crossroad. An international perspective. Routledge. NY.

Cabral. A.C ; Fainstein A.M ( 2019 ) On training analysis .Debates. APAEditorial. Buenos Aires

Sandler,P. ; Pacheco Costa G. (2019 ) On Freud's "The Question of Lay Analysis.” Turning Points and Critical Issues (The International Psychoanalytical Association ... Turning Points and Critical Issues Series) Routledge. London.

Powell, J.A, Menendian, S. (2016) The Problem of Othering. Othering and Belonging. Expanding the Circle of Human Concern.

Othering & Belonging is published by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

Winer,R; Malawista,K (2017 ) Who is behind the couch. Karnac. London

View Details

“The situation was that I went with my husband Danny, who is also a clinical psychologist, and we were on the team that came and told people when family members were identified and that they had been murdered. There was one time when we went to two kids, telling them that their parents were murdered. We were with them in the room with an aunt and another family member. All of a sudden, I said, “Danny’s father and my father were in the Holocaust, and they also lost their parents. And you know they became happy people and good fathers for us. And here we are with you now.” It was like my telling a lullaby - I knew that they hear us and they don't hear us, but I believed that the unconscious can hear me. That's how my personal transgenerational story helped me to help them to believe that a life can become after this disaster.” M.R.

“And the music in your saying whatever you said was part of what worked there, both the liveliness and something that has a real connection to experiences one can survive from. This is a very unusual kind of intervention for psychoanalysts, and also that it may not fit everyone. There is a match between how can one make use of oneself and go out of one’s skin and one’s routines, i.e. the way I always do whatever I do. Instead,to do something different that is echoing the needs of the person with whom you are in contact.” M.E-G.

Episode Description: We begin by tracing the recent history of those organizations that are dedicated to the premeditated butchery of civilians. Both Merav and Mira share with us their experiences when the sirens went off on Saturday morning October 7th. We follow them as they attend to those who physically survived the mutilation, murder and kidnapping of their family members. Merav, building from her personal family Holocaust history, created a series of guidelines with which to engage those who were overwhelmed. It became a sort of proactive psychoanalytic manual to give structure to and help regain the alpha function of those who are suffering while also recognizing the presence of past traumas in their lives. They share with us their personal experiences, the crucial importance of President Biden's speech and visit, and the vital assistance that all the Israeli psychoanalytic organizations are providing. Central to their personal and professional message is We have survived traumas in the past, and we will survive again this time.

Our Guests: Merav Roth, Ph.D. and Mira Erlich-Ginor, Ph.D., are both members of the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society.

Linked Episodes:

Episode 110: PCCA (Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities) and Working with Ukrainian Current Atrocities with Mira Erlich-Ginor

Episode 96: Why Do We Read Books? Literature and Psychoanalysis with Merav Roth, Ph.D.

For Donations: First Line Med

listen/subscribe

IPAOfftheCouch.org

View Details

"The gift of the [traditional] healer that he shares with those of us who do psychoanalytic work is that we are given an idea of the human mind as being always in a process of mediating the real world and the drives of sex and aggression - which if not moderated can lead to terrible things. We're in there, and that's what our training helps us to do.”

Episode Description: We begin with Martha describing her social work background and how it informed her approach to working with overwhelmed children in New York. She recounts her efforts in El Salvador and her understanding that children who were violent were actually children who were over-exposed to violence. She also functioned as one who accompanied those clinicians who themselves were at risk of being overwhelmed by the violence in their work. We take up her engagement in Angola and their cultural model of the individual as "the self that exists for the purpose of social participation." We consider the case of a child soldier who was treated by traditional healers for multiple symptoms related to his involvement in atrocities. We note the similarity with Bion's Knowing and Love as it is lived between the individual, the healer and the community. We close with recognizing the importance of the 'moral third' and the centrality of reparation in both African and American cultures.

Our Guest: Martha Bragin, Ph.D., is jointly appointed Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the Ph.D. Program in Social Welfare at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She joined the faculty after 30 years of experience supporting United Nations agencies, governments, nongovernmental and people’s organizations to address the effects of violence and disaster on children, youth, families, and the communities in which we live. Dr Bragin is a Fellow of the Research Training Program of the IPA and the editorial board of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. She serves as a member of Inter-Agency Standing Committee (UN-IFRC-NGO) Reference Group on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings, a globally representative body that sets and monitors standards for psychosocial interventions in emergencies. Dr Bragin is recipient of the International Psychoanalytic Association’s Tyson Prize as well as the Hayman Prize for published work on traumatized children and adults in 2011 and 2021. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed publications and is in private practice in New York City.

Recommended Readings:

Bragin, M. (2003). The effect of extreme violence on the capacity for symbol formation: Case studies from Afghanistan and New York. In J. Cancelmo, J. Hoffenberg, & H.

Myers (Eds.), Terror and the psychoanalytic space: International perspectives from Ground Zero (pp. 59–67). New York, NY: Pace University.

Bragin, M. (2004). The uses of aggression: Healing the wounds of war and violence in a

community context. In B. Sklarew, S. Twemlow, & S. Wilkinson (Eds.), Analysts in the trenches: Streets, schools and war zones (pp. 169–194). Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

Bragin, M. (2005). Pedrito: The blood of the ancestors. Journal of Infant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 4(1), 1–20.

Bragin, M. (2007). Knowing terrible things: Engaging survivors of extreme violence in treatment. Clinical Social Work Journal, 35(4), 229 – 236.

Bragin, M. (2010). Can anyone here know who I am? Creating meaningful narratives among returning combat veterans, their families, and the communities in which we all live. Clinical Social Work Journal, 38(3), 316–326.

Bragin, M., & Bragin, G. (2010). Making meaning together: Helping survivors of violence and loss to learn at school. Journal of Infant Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy, 9(2), 47-67.

Bragin, M. (2012). So that our dreams will not escape us: Learning to think together in time of war. Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, 32 (2), 115–135.

Bragin, M. (2019) Pour a libation for us: Restoring the sense of a moral universe to children affected by violence. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy 18 (3), 201- 2011.

View Details

"Instead of the analyst being in a position where they know something about the patient, they are with the patient. As Winnicott says in his late work, if you are a philosopher in your armchair, you have to come out of your armchair and be on the floor with the child playing. I don’t think that one should act that out with an adult patient- however it is that approach to actually being with the patient, listening to the patient’s words, listening to their state of mind without preconceived ideas. That’s almost impossible, but Winnicott says that psychoanalysis is an objective study, an objective way of looking at things without preconceived ideas, without preconceived notions. It links with what you said about ‘normative’ - if we go into the consulting room feeling that our patients need to be as we are or need to fit in some kind of norm, then I don’t think this is psychoanalytic. I think it is against the whole aim of psychoanalysis.”

Episode Description: Jan begins her conversation with Joel by sharing her background in theater and the steps she took to train as an analyst. She describes what drew her to Winnicott and how she sees him as broadening, not replacing, Freudian thinking. She distinguishes her understanding of Winnicott from others who believe that, by speaking of the importance of the environment, he minimized constitutional factors and the unconscious. She interprets what he meant by the environment in terms of the ‘psyche-body’ and the mother’s unconscious. Jan discusses a paradox in Winnicott in that he offers a positive theory of health while also being uniquely non-judgmental and non-pathologizing. She concludes with a controversial observation that a five times weekly in person training analysis is essential to achieve a deep regression that will familiarize analysts with the primitive parts of their personalities so they will be able to accept and deal with those parts of their patients' personalities.

Our Interviewer and Guest:

Joel Whitebook, PhD is a philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is on the Faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and was the founding Director of the University's Psychoanalytic Studies Program. In addition to many articles on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and critical theory, Dr. Whitebook is also the author of Perversion and Utopia (MIT) and Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge).

Jan Abram, PhD is a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and in private practice in London. She is Visiting Professor of the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, and is currently Vice President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation for the Annual Conferences. She is President-Elect for the EPF to start her term in March 2024. She is a Visiting Lecturer and supervisor at the Tavistock Clinic, in London. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor for the University of Kyoto, Japan, where she resided for a writing sabbatical. Jan Abram has published several books and articles notably: The Language of Winnicott, Donald Winnicott Today (2013), The Clinical Paradigms of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott: comparisons and Dialogues (co-authored with R.D. Hinshelwood 2018); The Surviving Object: psychoanalytic clinical essays on psychic survival-of-the-object (2022) and her second book with R.D. Hinshelwood: The Clinical Paradigms of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion: comparisons and dialogues (2023).

Learn more about Jan Abram

Recommended Readings:

Abram, J. (2007) The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of

Winnicott’s use of terms Routledge

Abram, J. (ed) (2016) André Green at the Squiggle Foundation Routledge

Abram, J. (2008) Donald Woods Winnicott (1896 – 1971): A brief introduction Education Section Int J of Psychoanal 99: 1189 - 1217

Abram, J. (2021) On Winnicott’s Concept of Trauma Int J of Psychoanal 102: 4 10

View Details

"I made a film for PepWeb on the research of Beatrice Beebe. I made the video for her picture book, The Mother-Infant Interaction Picture Book, and various other short films. These are deep dives into mother-infant dyads that reveal something, i.e. rupture and repair, various kinds of dyadic interchanges. These are available for free on YouTube. That's another way that I use my analytic self and my documentary maker self together. I'm much happier with the YouTube films even though they're less produced because they reach a wide audience - they are for parents, not clinicians. I want to get the story of this way of thinking or various ways of working, or psychoanalysis itself out to the greater public because I’m such an evangelizer for it. It changed my life in so many ways, and I think it's a very different animal than what the wider world (if they've heard of it at all) thinks that it is - it’s so alive these days, so integrative, and so worthy of letting people know.”

Episode Description: We began with Karen sharing with us her journey from documentary filmmaker to psychoanalyst. She discusses her immersion in the world of cinema verité - "a camera capturing life" - as the pathway that brought her to train in psychoanalysis. We consider the similarities and differences between these ways of thinking and how she feels that for her, they are additive in deepening her listening abilities. She describes her films of Beatrice Beebe's work, how she serves as a consultant to filmmakers, and how she often treats those in the field, especially in regard to their (over)involvement with trauma. We close with Karen's recommendations for using YouTube to let the wider community know about psychoanalysis.

Our Guest:

Karen Dougherty is a Psychoanalyst (FIPA) and documentary filmmaker. She has an MA in English Literature (McGill) and an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies (University of Sheffield). She is a clinical supervisor and course instructor at the FPP and the Advanced Training Program in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, with a particular focus on attachment, relationship issues, and trauma. In addition to her private practice in rural Amaranth, Ontario, Karen is the host of the podcast for the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, Conversations in Psychoanalysis. Since 2022, she has been a member of the IPA Think Tank on the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, for which she produces a YouTube Channel. The recipient of a PEPweb video grant, she has made several films on the research of Dr. Beatrice Beebe for clinicians and parents. She continues to collaborate on documentary projects as a researcher and story consultant (recent films include Toxic Beauty; Category: Woman, both directed by Phyllis Ellis). Bridging these two careers, Karen is both a communications consultant for psychoanalytic organizations and a mental health consultant for film and television.

Linked Episode:

Episode 97: Off the Couch and into the Political Arena with John, Lord Alderdice FRCPsych – IPA Off the Couch

Recommended Links:

Karen Dougherty

The CPS podcast will be accessed through the CPS website.

The PEPweb citation for the documentary for clinicians:

Dougherty, K., Beebe, B., Margolis, A., Altstein, R., Berman, J. & Mathieson, G. (2016) Mother-Infant Communication: The Research of Dr. Beatrice Beebe. PEP Video Grants 1:11.

Beebe, Dr. Beatrice, prod., Dougherty, K., dir. “Joining Your Baby’s Distress Moments: A Story of One Mother and Infant”:

“Decoding Mother-Infant Interaction: A Story of One Mother and Infant,” the first two of a series of short films for parents showcasing the research of Dr. Beatrice Beebe:

Allan King, The Criterion Collection

Allan King, Queens University Film and Media Collection

Allan King’s Warrendale, a “direct cinema” documentary about a home for emotionally disturbed children in Toronto:

View Details

"We know as analysts there’s a long literature on mourning and its connection to creativity from the time of Freud’s work to George Pollock's work and others - but that's too intellectual; let me make it more personal, and then I'll talk about Freud and Maimonides. My father and my mother lost a combination of 10 siblings and a granddaughter murdered by the Nazis, plus their parents and aunts and uncles. I've heard stories about their siblings and I think: ‘Look what they would have done, what they would have created not just families but ideas’, and I realized in my analysis that for years I have been trying to make up, by writing books, what would have been done by the aunts, uncles, and cousins that I never knew because they were murdered. So creativity can have a reparative, never enough perhaps, but a reparative quality.”

Episode Description: I introduce the topic of the not fully acknowledged role of religion in the lives of analysts and analysands, which will be explored in future conversations. Nathan begins by sharing his personal connection with his religion, which he feels does not involve a belief in a God. He describes how his relation to his Judaism, like his essence as an analyst, entails an attunement to an inner life, a commitment to proper behavior, and a search for hidden meanings. He describes his family of origin and their almost complete annihilation in the Holocaust. We discuss the similarities he feels exists between Maimonides and Freud, the importance of mourning in their creative processes, and the great attention to 'the word' that both worldviews exhibit. We also take up whether 'belief' is an appropriate term to characterize one's psychoanalytic clinical work. We close with his sharing clinical examples where religion played an important role in the treatment.

Linked Episode: https://harveyschwartzmd.com/2021/04/23/ep-6-how-to-raise-loving-and-creative-30-year-old/

Our Guest:

Nathan Szajnberg, MD, is Retired Freud Professor, the Hebrew University and former Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis. Born in Germany, he attended the University of Chicago College and Medical School. His most recent books are Psychic Mimesis from Bible and Homer to the Present (Lexington) and The Secret Symmetry of Maimonides and Freud (Routledge). His third novel is A Windmill, A Knight, A Jerusalem.

Recommended Readings:

  1. Freud, Future of an Illusion (1928) Hogarth Press.

  2. Meissner, W. W. (1985) Psychoanalysis: The Dilemma of Science and Humanism. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 5:471-498

3.Szajnberg, N. (2019) Jacob and Joseph, Judaism’s Architects and Birth of the Ego Ideal. Cambridge Scholars Publishing

  1. Wallerstein, R. S. (1998) Erikson's Concept of Ego Identity Reconsidered. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 46:229-247

  2. Wallerstein, R. S. (2000) The Analysis of the Hysterical Patient: Limitations?. Forty-Two Lives in Treatment: A Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy 56:293-321

  3. Wallerstein, R. S. (2014) Erik Erikson and His Problematic Identity. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 62:657-675

View Details

"Conscience represents ethics that are not socially constructed and not socially learned but built-in. In fact, the whole of psychoanalysis is grounded in such an ethic - we all as analysts value life over death, we value truth over lies, we value love over hate, kindness over cruelty. Like those little three-month-old infants that Bloom studied at Yale, these values are grounded in our biology. They are part of what Winnicott would call our true self and they are quite distinct from the very different moral notions that wind up in our superego. After all, our superego contains our racism, it contains our sexism, it contains our heterosexism and those values are very distinct from our core values: love over hate, life over death. We all know on a fundamental level what’s right and what’s wrong on that very basic level, and that is the voice of conscience; we don’t need God for this; it is built in biologically.”

Episode Description: Don begins by describing the difference between the narcissistically based superego from the object-oriented conscience. He sees the former as culturally derived and the latter as biologically given. We discuss how in the clinical situation persecutory guilt, i.e., superego, may often be emphasized to defend against the vulnerabilities associated with loving and being loved. We consider the use and overuse of the concept of trauma in contrast to intrapsychic conflict, and he distinguishes between empathy and sympathy. He shares his view that the edges of our political parties are imbued with the self-certainty born from the paranoid position. Ultimately, he concludes, "I’m not afraid that analysis will disappear - people who have problems with their soul will seek out soul doctors."

Our Guest: Don Carveth, Ph.D., is an emeritus professor of sociology and social and political thought at York University in Toronto. He is a training and supervising analyst in the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, a past Director of the Toronto Institute, and past editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience, Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice, and Guilt: A Contemporary Introduction. Many of his publications are available on his York website (yorku.ca/dcarveth) and his current website (doncarveth.com); his video lectures are available on his YouTube channel (YouTube.com/doncarveth). He is in private psychoanalytic practice in Toronto.

Recommended Readings:

Carveth, D. (2016). Why we should stop conflating the superego with the conscience. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society(2017) 22, 15-32.

Carveth, D.(2023). Guilt: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Carveth, D. (2006). Self-Punishment as Guilt Evasion: Theoretical Issues." Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse 14, 2 (Fall2006): 172-96.

View Details

"One of the changes that analysis provided me with was an awareness about how similar we all are, of course with a few differences. For me, an analyst is before all a person who had the opportunity to realize how we all human beings are very similar. We can familiarize with ourselves and with others thanks to these similarities and continuities. I would say like all my colleagues I asked for analysis when I was a young doctor in order to be helped. This is what is common to all analysts - analysts are people who are more aware and more experienced to ask for help than other people because they had the opportunity to be helped by a good treatment and to have the opportunity to integrate better.”

Episode Description: Stefano begins by describing the characteristics of many analysts today who seek treatment through the lens of mistrust of dependency and mutuality. Instead, defensive styles lean towards pseudo-autonomy, entitlement, and suspiciousness. We discuss how dealing with initial resistances to the transference is both similar to and different from generations ago. We consider the theoretical advances in understanding earlier developmental struggles as well as our greater appreciation of the medium of countertransference. Stefano notes that today's longer training analyses are an important contribution to these more profound clinical skills. He discusses some of the environmental contributions to current narcissistic inclinations as well as the temptations to reduce the uniqueness of the analytic experience to the familiar and comfortable. He closes by sharing with us his personal story and the essential step for all of us to be able to "ask for help."

Our Guest: Stefano Bolognini, MD, is a psychiatrist and training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), where he served as president (2009-2013). He also was an IPA Board member (2002-2012) and was IPA president from 2013-2017. He was a member of the European Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and a founder of the IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. He has published over 260 psychoanalytic papers, and his books on empathy and on the inter-psychic dimension have been translated into several languages.

Recommended Links and Readings:

Bolognini, Stefano:

Secret Passages. The Theory and Technique of the Interpsychic Relations. IPA New Library, Routledge, London, 2010

Vital Flows between Self and Not-Self, Routledge, London, 2022

The Analyst’s awkward Gift: balancing Recognition of Sexuality with parental protectiveness. Psychoanal. Quart., vol. LXXX, 1, 33-54, 2012.

Enchantments and disenchantments in the formation and use of psychoanalytic theories about psychic reality. The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, 13, 11-24, July 2019.

New forms of psychopathology in a changing world: a challenge for psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century. The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, 2020.

Reflections on the institutional Family of the Analyst and proposing a “fourth Pillar” for Education. Opportunities and problems of transferal dynamics in the training pathway“. In Living and Containing Psychoanalysis in Institutions. Psychoanalysts Working Together, edited by Gabriele Junkers, 89-104, Taylor & Francis, 2022.

From What to How: A Conversational with Stefano Bolognini on Emotional Attunement by Luca Nicoli & Stefano Bolognini. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91 : 3, 443-477, 2022.

The Interpsychic, the Interpersonal, and the Intersubjective: Response to Steven H. Goldberg’s Discussion”. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91:3, 489-494, 2022.

Hidden unconscious, buried unconscious, implicit unconscious. The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, 16, 87-102, 2022.

View Details

"Technology is based on the premise that there can be an optimization of things through algorithmic understanding. ‘Ones and zeros’ data can be manipulated and thus produce an optimal outcome which is a lovely idea for certain kinds of things. It's not necessarily, in my opinion, the best idea for the psyche or for happiness or for developing a life that's meaningful. I think a psychological mindset is slightly different in that our colleagues are really concerned with being with the person, making meanings, suffering sometimes through difficult things, so there isn't just an automatic assumption as there is in the tech mindset that we're trying to optimize for whatever it is that's good. It becomes very philosophical in the end… What is optimized? What is good? Why should we do it? There are all these kinds of questions that one may ask the technology mindset person: Why would we want to hack our nutrition or our mental health in order to become stronger or better? It is a little problematic, I think, as an end goal."

Episode Description: Nicolle begins by describing her journey from being a math teacher in the inner city to then becoming a consultant in the early days of the tech revolution. She shares the ethical concerns that led her to shift her interest to the mental health field and her eventually becoming Dean of the School of Professional Psychology and Health at California Institute of Integral Studies. While there she observed that "analysts think differently." This led her to seek to train as an analyst while also utilizing her familiarity with the tech mindset to create bridges with those in each field. We discuss the differences in ways of thinking between technologically immersed individuals and those with a psychological orientation - keeping in mind that each has much to learn from the other. We consider the dangers in the developing technological world, which include matters of privacy, distractedness, and a capacity to sit with suffering. We close with Nicolle sharing her vision for the future, which includes analysts playing a part in developing ethical approaches to the upcoming new developments. Her podcast is titled Technology and the Mind.

Our Guest: Nicolle Zapien, Ph.D. is a licensed MFT with 20 years of clinical experience. She is a post-seminar candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC). She serves on the Ethics committee and the Visiting Scholar committee at PINC and also on APsA’s committee for public information. From 2015 to 2019, Dr. Zapien served as Professor and Dean of the School of Professional Psychology and Health at California Institute of Integral Studies, overseeing 6 clinical training degree programs and 5 training clinics. There, she served on the IRB and chaired the research committee. Prior to her clinical work, Dr. Zapien spent a decade as a consultant designing, conducting, and/or overseeing over 200 quantitative and/or qualitative studies for industry clients and non-profits. Some of these studies employed user experience and human factors design methods to optimize the user experiences of technology products and services delivered via smartphones, tablets, websites, or kiosks. She has authored 2 books and several academic articles on themes associated with human decision-making, ethics, and phenomenology.

Recommended Readings:

Bednar, K., & Spiekermann, S. (2022). Eliciting Values for Technology Design with Moral Philosophy: An Empirical Exploration of Effects and Shortcomings. Science, Technology, & Human Values.

Frankel, R. & Krebs, V. (2022). Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations. Routledge: New York, NY.

Greenfield. A. (2021). Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. Verso: New York, NY.

Marshall, Brandeis Hill (2023). Data Conscience: Algorithmic S1ege on our Humanity.John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ.

Millar, I. (2021). The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence. Palgrave MacMillian: Cham, Switzerland.

Turkle, S. (2022) The Empathy Diaries. Penguin Press: New York, NY.

View Details

"In divorce it's fundamental that even though the couple ends, there's not an end to the family. We still owe a debt to the other - that other who offered to love us, who we had the opportunity to love, our debt to the children of that union. We are irrevocably called to ethics and to the continuing sense of responsibility to that other. Even though the marriage doesn't survive, the family needs to. In the high - conflict scenario, not only does the marriage not survive, often the family doesn’t as well. In that sense it is profoundly unethical. So when I attempt to work with people in that situation, I always do so from an ethical perspective - ethical in the sense of creating a third, so that you try and enter into that system, but it has to be a profoundly ethical presence which I also find is distinctly psychoanalytic. I think our method is saturated with ethics without even realizing it, we're always thinking in ethical terms, managing transference, powerful forces within analytic relationship - it's a profoundly ethical task that we do. In that sense we also serve as witnesses to what our patients have experienced. The witnessing is also a kind of engagement and we try to do that when we work with people in the high-conflict position."

Episode Description: We begin by distinguishing high-conflict divorce from less malignant versions. Arthur has found that high-conflict divorce is characterized by a particular timeless destructiveness that lacks regard for the sense of the family or the history of affection that had existed within and between the individuals.

He has noted an experience of overwhelming disillusionment in the histories of those who are unable to mourn and instead remain immersed in vendetta seeking. We discuss the role of ethics, witnessing, and the capacity for the 'third' in these couples. Arthur shares with us his clinical experience with same-sex couples as well as with the unfortunate scenarios of alienated children who attempt to bolster the fragile capacities of one parent by refusing any contact with the other. He concludes by describing that his attention to the inner realities of these individuals is what he uniquely brings as a psychoanalyst to these often behaviorally tumultuous human tragedies.

Our Guest: Arthur Leonoff, Ph.D., is a psychologist and Supervising & Training Analyst of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. He is a past president and recipient of his Society’s Citation of Merit. He is also an Honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Leonoff was the first president of the North American Psychoanalytic Confederation. He currently is chair of the IPA Committee International New Groups.Dr. Leonoff has maintained a private psychoanalytic practice for more than four decades. He is an active clinician, teacher, supervisor, and presenter, as well as author. Recently he has contributed to two edited volumes, Dear Candidate and Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads. He has written on diverse subjects of clinical interest, including the kindling of metaphor in recovering from the impact of early complex psychic trauma.In addition to his psychoanalytic practice, Dr. Leonoff has worked extensively as a consultant and expert witness to the Canadian courts on the confluence of psychopathology and high-conflict divorce. He is the author of three books in this field, most recently The Good Divorce (2015) and When Divorces Fail, Disillusionment, Destructivity & High Conflict Divorce (2021), The Good Divorce has been revised and republished as The Ethical Divorce, which is available from Friesen Press.

Recommended Readings:

Leonoff, A (2021). When Divorces Fail: Disillusionment, Destructivity, and High Conflict Divorce. Rowman & Littlefield.

Leonoff, A. (2021) The Ethical Divorce: A Psychoanalyst’s Guide to Separation, Divorce, and Childcare. Friesen Press.

Fidler, B. and Bala, N. (2020). Conclusions, concepts, controversies, and conundrums of “alienation:” Lessons learned in a decade and reflections on challenges ahead, Family Court Review, 58(2). 576-603.

Greenberg, L., Fidler, B. and Saini, M.A. (Eds). (2019). Evidence-Informed Interventions for Court-Involved Families: Promoting Healthy Coping and Development, Oxford University Press.

Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (R.A. Cohen, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.

Wallerstein, J. and Kelly, J. (1980). Surviving the Breakup: How children and Parents cope with Divorce. Basic Books.

View Details

“The basic principle in defense analysis is that one approaches what is going on right now - it's an experience-near technique. You don't make conjectures about what would be called experience-distant phenomenon until you have a lot of material, a lot of knowledge about the patient. As the treatment goes on you really stick with what the patient is doing right now.”

Episode Description: Leon shares with us what he sees as the fundamental method of analytic treatment, which "regardless of the manifest theoretical orientation of the therapist ... are effectively utilizing the technique of interpreting defenses against unwelcome affects." He emphasizes the importance of being interested in the patient's defenses and less so the warded-off content. We consider the term 'protection' in place of 'defense'; how these interventions are an amalgam of clarification and interpretation; and the source of the bad reputation that attaches to the concept of 'defense interpretation’. He shares with us how this approach links with the neurosciences and the concept of implicit emotion regulation. We discuss the work of Berta Bornstein, who introduced the importance of defending against unpleasant affects. He discusses two cases of disruptive children and their use of aggression in an effort to avoid sadness and loneliness. We close with his sharing his view of our field and his conclusion that "analysis will survive - it's too powerful a tool."

Our Guest:

Leon Hoffman, MD, is a psychiatrist and child and adolescent psychiatrist. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is the Co-Director of the Pacella Research Center of NYSI. Among many publications, he is co-author with Timothy Rice and Tracy Prout of Regulation Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C): A Psychodynamic Approach and with Timothy Rice Defense Mechanisms and Implicit Emotion Regulation: A Comparison of a Psychodynamic Construct with One from Contemporary Neuroscience. In 2022, he presented the Norbert and Charlotte Rieger Psychodynamic Psychotherapy lecture at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry on “Helping Parents Spare the Rod: Addressing Their Unbearable Emotions” based on a paper he authored with Tracy Prout. He presented the Paulina Kernberg Memorial Lecture at Weill Cornell Medicine Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Grand Rounds. On Regulation Focused Psychotherapy: An evidence-based psychodynamic treatment for children with disruptive behaviors. And The Bruce A. Gibbard Lectureship in Psychiatry, University of Vermont, Department of Psychiatry.

Linked Episode:

Episode 38: A Psychoanalyst Studies ‘Why is it easier to get mad than it is to feel sad?’ with Leon Hoffman

Recommended Readings:

  1. Hoffman, L. (2007) Do Children Get Better When We Interpret Their Defenses Against Painful Feelings? Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 62:291-313.

  2. Hoffman, L. (2014). Berta Bornstein’s Frankie: The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic to the Treatment of Children with Disruptive Symptoms. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 68:152-176

  3. Rice, T. R., & Hoffman, L. (2014). Defense mechanisms and implicit emotion regulation: a comparison of a psychodynamic construct with one from contemporary neuroscience. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62(4), 693-708.

  4. Prout, T. A., Rice, T., Chung, H., Gorokhovsky, Y., Murphy, S., & Hoffman, L. (2021) Randomized controlled trial of Regulation Focused Psychotherapy for Children: A manualized psychodynamic treatment for externalizing behaviors. Psychotherapy Research, 32(5), 555-570.

  5. Hoffman, L. (2020). How can I help you? Dimensional versus categorical distinctions in the assessment for child analysis and child psychotherapy. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 19(1), 1-15.

  6. Leon Hoffman, Tracy A. Prout, Timothy Rice & Margo Bernstein (2023): Addressing Emotion Regulation with Children: Play, Verbalization of Feelings, and Reappraisal, Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, DOI: 10.1080/15289168.2023.2165874

  7. Prout, T. A., Malone, A., Rice, T., & Hoffman, L. (2019). Resilience, defenses, and implicit emotion regulation in psychodynamic child psychotherapy. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 49(4). 235-244.

  8. Hoffman, L., & Prout, T. A. (2020). Helping parents spare the rod: Addressing their unbearable emotions. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 73(1), 46-61.

View Details

"He [Bernays] proposed to his uncle that he’d do a translation of this book that had been given to him and Freud, perhaps without thinking too much about it, approved the idea. Bernays went about hiring a translator who was a psychology Ph.D. student that he found at Columbia University and he got Stanley Hall to write an introduction for what was published in 1920 as ‘A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis’. Now, shortly after this happened, Freud had second thoughts about authorizing Bernays to translate his lectures, particularly as he had been working with his trusted colleague Ernest Jones on translations. But by the time Freud wired Bernays to try to stop this publication, Bernays said that it was already too late and that the advertisements had already been placed and the publication was proceeding. Bernays assured Freud that it would be all right and he also assured him that he would get fame and glory and also substantial recompense for the publication. Freud was not too happy about this, nor was Ernest Jones, and when they finally received the translation that Bernays had done they were particularly upset."

Episode Description: We begin by describing the complicated bloodline between Freud and Edward Bernays - Bernays' mother was Freud's sister, and his father was the brother of Freud's wife. We then consider Bernays' role as the founder of the field of public relations. This has led many to inaccurately see him as a manipulator of the masses through the use of his uncle's theories. In fact, Bernays served as the pro-bono literary agent for Freud's books in the US which contributed to his popularization and to providing vital financial support during the years of Austria’s hyperinflation. We also discuss Bernays' role in the American pro-democracy movement, which was designed to counter the influence of Nazi propaganda in the years before WWII. We close with Joseph's describing his interest in this subject and his wish to "set the record straight" about Edward Bernays.

Our Guest: Joseph Malherek is a historian who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He was the Junior Botstiber Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, and he has been a Fulbright Visiting Professor of Austrian-American Studies at the University of Vienna. He has published widely on the topics of transatlantic migration, twentieth-century intellectual history, and the history of capitalism and consumer culture. His book, Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968, was recently published by Central European University Press.

Linked Paper: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/pah.2023.0452?journalCode=pah

Recommended Readings:

Freud’s American Nephew: Edward Bernays and the Selling of Psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis and History 25, no. 1 (2023): 59–78.

Bernays, Edward L. (1923) Crystallizing Public Opinion. New York: Boni and Liveright.

Bernays, Edward L. (1965) Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Freud, Sigmund. (1920) A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. New York: Horace Liveright.

Gay, Peter. (1988) Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton.

Lippmann, Walter. (1922) Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Roudinesco, Élisabeth. (2016) Freud: In His Time and Ours. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

View Details

"Analytic candidates in training struggle with the fact that you tend to get thrown into the deep water before you really know what you're doing. Then, the anxious candidate will typically struggle to find something to hang on to - and it's much easier to hang on to a theory than it is to hang on to the subtle and irreproducible nuances of clinical work. Candidates tend to latch on to theory and displace their anxiety about what they don't know to the theory, which is at least in principle knowable in order to calm down their anxiety about the actual interpersonal event that is the therapy.”

Episode Description: We begin with explaining that our title Technique is Character Rationalized recognizes that we refer to colleagues based on our sense of their character not based on their theoretical orientations. We discuss the use and misuse of theory to offer analysts distancing structures when faced with the uncertainty of intensive treatment. Lee distinguishes between neurotic and perverse mental processes and considers the differing clinical challenges faced with each. We take up sado-masochism as object-preserving, the use of aggression to defend against tenderness, and how privileging psychic reality may for some result in confusing fantasy with reality. We close with Lee sharing with us his personal analytic journey and his reflections on our field now that he is retired.

Our Guest: Lee Grossman, MD trained at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis where he was a training and supervising analyst for 40 years. He served on the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly for fifteen years, and currently serves on the board of JAPA. He is also an exhibiting photographer whose work can be seen at www.leegrossman.net. He and his wife, Jan Baeuerlen, have both just retired from clinical work. They live in Oakland, CA with an English bulldog named Frank.

Recommended Readings:

Bateson, Gregory (2002) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences. Hampton Press.

Erikson, Erik H. (1963). Childhood and Society, 2nd edition. NY: W.W. Norton.

Friedman, Lawrence (1988). The Anatomy of Psychotherapy. Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press

Greenberg, J.R. (1981). Prescription or description: the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Contemp. Psychoanal. 17: 235-57.

Hoffman, I.Z. (1983). The patient as interpreter of the analyst’s experience. Contemp. Psychoanal. 19:389-422.

Levenson, E.A. (1988). Real frogs in imaginary gardens. Facts and fantasies in psychoanalysis. Psa. Inquiry 8:552-67.

Loewald, H.W. (1952). The problem of defense and the neurotic interpretation of reality. Int. J. Psa 33:444-449.

Reed, G. S. (1987) Rules of Clinical Understanding in Classical Psychoanalysis and in Self Psychology: A Comparison. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 35:421-446

Upcoming Episode: Freud's Nephew and the Creation of 'Buzz' for Psychoanalysis with Joseph Malherek, Ph.D. (Raleigh, NC)

View Details

"When you're with a patient you take all that you know in your head, all the theory, and you throw it away. You have to listen to the patient and then maybe afterward something becomes clear - you use that ‘in-between’ as a way maybe in the next session. But if you were sitting there and thinking: ‘Now the patient is in the paranoid/schizoid position…’ that would be disastrous. You have to listen with your guts, your emotions, your intellect, and your body, in order to understand what is going on in a particular moment, in a particular session. Then later on you might be able to make sense of it through theory and through supervision."

Episode Description: We begin with considering the cultural and linguistic contributions to intrapsychic processes and the analytic encounter. Jeanne shares with us her life story involving her 'temporary' visit to California, which became a 37-year stay that included her becoming a psychoanalyst. We discuss the meaning to her and to her analysands of her being German and how she worked with that clinically. She moved to Vienna and began teaching and practicing analysis there, enabling her to compare the two psychoanalytic cultures and methods of practice. We also take up the importance of the German language as the vehicle through which Freud discovered the unconscious. Jeanne concludes by sharing with us her ongoing sense of feeling like an immigrant, a state of mind inherent in the analytic engagement.

Linked Episode: Episode 121: Polish Psychoanalysis, Ukraine and Intergenerational Trauma with Edyta Biernacka (Krakow) – IPA Off the Couch

Our Guest:

Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein is a psychoanalyst living and working in Vienna, Austria. She is a member and training analyst at the Wiener Arbietskreis für Psychoanalyse, where she is a member on the Board. She is also the head of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Vienna Sigmund Freud Museum, where she had also been the Fulbright Freud Visiting Scholar in Psychoanalysis in 2008. Prior to moving to Vienna, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein was the past president and supervising and personal analyst at PINC (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California). She is still on the faculty at PINC and at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, New York, and teaches at the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse (WAP) She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts, and film. Her most recent publications include, Beyond the Bedrock in Good Enough Endings, (2010) ed. by Jill Salberg, The Space of Transition between Winnicott and Lacan in Between Winnicott and Lacan (2011) ed. by Lewis Kirshner, and the section on Jacques Lacan in The Textbook of Psychoanalysis as well as Living between two languages: A Bi-focal Perspective, in Immigration in Psychoanalysis, (2016) Dora, the unending and unraveling story, in Dora, Hysteria & Gender: Reconsidering Freud’s Case Study, 2018 and Unexpected antecedents to the concept of the death drive: a return to the beginnings, in Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive, in Theory, Clinical Practice and Culture. 2019, 55-68.

Her last publication, resulting from the 2022 EPF congress on the subject of Ideals, is entitled From Narcissus to Echo: The Imaginary Working under the Mask of the Symbolic.

Her book on Edouard Manet, Framing the Past and the Gaze, is forthcoming.

Recommended Readings:

Lots of Freud, over and over again.

Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu

Winnicott, several key essays, over and over again

Philip Sands, East / West Street and The Ratline

Francoise Davoine, History Beyond Trauma, Shandean Psychoanalysis

View Details

"I've long had concerns about the practice of psychoanalysis and that the theory underlying it has become a veritable Tower of Babel. We have these multiple views where everything is accepted as ‘psychoanalysis,’ but they really can't be because they're very different models and they call for very different things. I also feel that our field in general is drifting into sociology so that our national and international meetings feel like there is very little room for clinical discussions, and there are just so many clinical discussions that we need to have."

Episode Description: Fred's edited book Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads represents a 'state of the union' for our field. He has brought together contributions representing multiple points of view on a wide range of analytic topics, including those that are considered contentious. After he shares his purpose in compiling this work, we each read a paragraph which serves as a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging discussion. We cover definitions of analysis, the history of narcissistic defenses, the depth of analysis in contrast to more superficial approaches, the role of theory, listening to the impact of one's interventions, curriculum design and the intergenerational struggles around it, and the place of defense analysis. We conclude with Fred sharing with us his concerns for our future and his eagerness to continue to contribute to a depth understanding that can often offer profound relief of suffering to our patients.

Our Guest:

Fred Busch, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and has been invited to teach at many Institutes. He has published over 80 articles on psychoanalytic techniques and six books. His work has been translated into many languages, and he has been invited to present over 180 papers and clinical workshops nationally and internationally. His last five books are: Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind (2014); The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept (2019); Dear Candidate: Analyst from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education, and the Profession (2020); A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique (2021), Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads;: An International Perspective. The Ego and Id: 100 years Later, will appear later this year.

Linked Episode: Wisdom and Enthusiasm for Today's Candidates

Recommended Readings:

Bolognini, S. (1997) Empathy And ‘Empathism.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 78:279-293

Busch, F. (2013). Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind: Psychoanalytic Method and Theory. London: Routledge.

Busch, F. (2019). The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept. London: Routledge.

Da Rocha Barros, E. M. (1995) The Problem Of Originality And Imitation In Psychoanalytic Thought: International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76:835-843.

Diana Diamond, Frank E. Yeomans, Barry L. Stern, and Otto F. Kernberg. (2022). Treating Pathological Narcissism with Transference-Focused Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.

Gray, P. (1982) "Developmental Lag" in the Evolution of Technique for Psychoanalysis of Neurotic Conflict. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 30:621-655.

Joseph, B. (1985) Transference: The Total Situation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 66:447-454

Kris, A. (1982). Free Association. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.

Paniagua, C. (2001) The Attraction of Topographical Technique. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82:671-684

View Details

"They interviewed more than 6,000 American parents and their children from ages eight to thirteen. They wanted to identify what the perception and realities were of the parents' use of technology. It is important to know that about one-third of the children said that their parents spent equal or less time with them than in using their devices. Over half of the children felt that their parents check their devices too often and complained that their parents allow themselves to be distracted by the devices during conversation, something that made a third of them feel unimportant. Many parents too, when asked about their device usage, agreed that it was too frequent and many parents also worried about how this looked to the younger generation. Almost a third concluded that they did not set a good example for their children with their internet devices."

Episode Description: We begin by distinguishing adult addiction to pornography from the situation of childhood overstimulation. Central to the child's experience of being able to psychically metabolize pornographic images is the presence of an adult who is able to recognize "the importance of his presence for the child, the value of their mutual contact so that they can together confront difficult questions and dilemmas." Indeed, Franco and Andrea define the traumatic aspect of pornography for children to be the lack of contact with an object, "a lack that renders impossible the working through of the [pornographic] solicitations." We discuss the three models that characterize parents' rule setting for their children - digital orphans, exiles and heirs - and we also address the meaning to the children of their parents' own dissociative over-involvement in screen watching. They end on an optimistic note finding that "we can view technological experiences as an opportunity to elaborate and construct shared meanings."

Our Guests:

Franco D’Alberton, Ph.D. is a psychologist and child and adolescent psychoanalyst, full member and training analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI/IPA). He worked in NHS services first as a psychologist in the field of child mental health then as consultant in Psychology at the Pediatric Department of S.Orsola University Hospital in Bologna (Italy). Initially focused on adults training in clinical psychology and psychotherapy, he has increasingly turned to children and adolescents and to family problems. He is currently working in private practice.

Andrea Scardovi MD, PHD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and full member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI/IPA). He worked in NHS services and at Bologna University, where for many years taught courses on communicative elements of psychotherapy. He developed a training method to improve interview skills of General Practitioners, which was adopted in various Italian regions. He has been a member of the editorial board of the Italian Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is currently working in private practice.

Linked Episode: Episode 103: Addictive Pornography: Psychoanalytic Considerations with Claudia Spadazzi, MD and Jose Zusman, MD – IPA Off the Couch

Recommended Readings:

Balint, M. (1969) Trauma and Object Relationship. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 50:429-435

Benjamin, J., Atlas, G. (2015). The “Too Muchness” of Excitement: Sexuality in Light of Excess, Attachment, and Affect Regulation. Int. J. Psychoanal, 96(1):39-63.

Freud, S. (1895). Project for a Scientific Psychology. S. E., 1:281-391.

Freud, S. (1908). On the Sexual Theories of Children. S. E., 9:205-226.

Freud, S. (1924). The economic problem of masochism. In S. E., Vol. XIX, 155–70. London: Hogarth Press.

Dodes L. (2019) A general psychoanalytic theory of addiction. In: Savelle-Rocklin, Salman Akhtar, ed., Beyond the Primal Addiction. Food, Sex, Gambling, Internet, Shopping, and Work. Routledge, London.

Gilmore, K. (2017). Development in digital age. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 70(1):82-90.

Green, A. (2000) Time and Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects. London: Free Association Books, 2002, 95-96.

Lemma A., Caparrotta L. (2014). Psychoanalysis in the Technoculture Era. London: Routledge.

Marzi, A. (2013). Introduction. In Marzi, A. (ed.), Psychoanalysis, Identity, and the Internet: Explorations into Cyberspace. London: Karnac, 2016,XXXIII-L.

Tylim, I. (2017). Revisiting adolescents’ narcissism in the age of cyberspace. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 70(1):130-134.

Zusman J.A. (2021) Between Dependency and Addiction. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 74(1): 280-293.

View Details

"Some of the shared concepts - even words that psychoanalysis and musicians use - such as conflict, ambiguity, silences, dissonance, resolution or not, working through, is in the Mozart you've heard. What you hear in the very opening four measures was worked through this entire sonata, it was thematic. If we play the whole sonata, and even in the first movement, you get a taste of it. Those themes are present throughout the sonata just like in the patient’s associations and interactions with you - we have music themes and we have core conflicts, and they get developed.”

Episode Description: We begin by listening to the opening of Mozart's A minor sonata, performed by Professor Louis Nagel. Mozart wrote this during the time of his mother's death, and it was one of the very few instances of his utilizing a minor key. From that example, we explore the interface between the dynamic mind and the layering of classical music. Concepts of core conflict, displacement, and resolution represent important meanings in both fields. Julie shares clinical examples of how music enters her clinical space with her patients. She also shares with us her life story and how music played a central role in helping her negotiate tumultuous personal circumstances. She demonstrates what it means to be an ambassador for both music and psychoanalysis - on and off the couch.

Our Guest: Julie Jaffee Nagel, PhD is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and musician. She graduated from The Juilliard School, the University of Michigan, and The Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She has presented widely on Stage Fright, Careers in the Arts, #Me Too and Music Education, The Value of Music in Mental Life, and “Injustice, Oppression, and Prejudice As ‘Heard’” in Music.” Her fantasy dialogue, A Conversation Between Mozart and Freud, was performed in Steinway Hall, NYC, in February 2020. She is the author of Managing Stage Fright and Melodies of the Mind.

She has served as chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s discussion group Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Music, was a member of the Program Committee, Symposium Committee, and is currently Chair of the Ticho Award Committee. She has presented at The College Music Society, Music Teachers National Conference, and National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy, from whom she received their Distinguished Service Award. Additional Awards include two Nathan Segal Awards (MPI), The Karl Menninger Award, and the Ernst and Gertrude Ticho Award for contribution to psychoanalysis and music.

Her latest book, Career Choices in Music Beyond the Pandemic: Musical and Psychoanalytic Perspectives, offers unique musical and psychological perspectives on one of the most important decisions made in a musician’s (or anyone’s) lifetime: choosing a career.

She is in private practice in Dexter, Michigan.

Louis Nagel is Professor Emeritus of Piano at The University of Michigan School of Music Theatre and Dance and the winner of the Harold Haugh Award for Excellence in Teaching at The University of Michigan

Recommended Readings:

Anderson, E. (1966) The Letters of Mozart and His Family (Second Ed. in two volumes, completed by A. Hyatt King and Monica Carolan). London, Melbourne, Toronto: Macmillan and New New York: St. Martin's Press.

Barale, F. and Minazzi, V. 2008. Off the Beaten Track: Freud, Sound, and Music; Statement of a Problem and Some Historico-critical Notes, 89(5), October: 937-57.

Cheshire, N.M. (1996) The Empire of the Ear: Freud’s Problem with Music. Int. Journal of Psychoanalysis.77: 1177-78.

Feder, S. 1993. “Promissory Notes”: Method in Music and Applied Psychoanalysis, in S. Feder, R.L. Karmel, and GJ. Pollock (eds). Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music. Madison, CT. : International Universities Press. 3-19.

Feder, S., Karmel, and GJ. Pollock (eds) 1990 and 1993. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music.( Vols. 1 and 2) Madison, CT. : International Universities Press

Freud, S. (1914a). The Moses of Michelangelo. S.E.. XIII: 211-36.

Lipson.C. (2006) The Meanings and Functions of Music that Comes into One’s Head. Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 75 (3) 859-78.

McDonald, M. (1970). Transitional Tunes and Music Development. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. 25: 503-20.

Nagel, J.J. 2013. Melodies of the Mind. Routledge, London and New York.

Nagel, J.J. 2017 Managing Stage Fright: A Guide for Musicians and Music Teachers. Oxford University Press.

Nagel, J.J. 2022. Beyond the Consulting Room: How I Discovered “Heard” Immunity Through Music and Psychoanalytic Knowledge. The American Psychoanalyst.

Nagel, JJ. (2023) Career Choices in Music Beyond the Pandemic: Musical and Psychological Perspectives. Rowman and Littlefield. Lanham, Maryland.

Nagel, J.J. (2018) Music. Ch. 32. A Conversation Between Mozart and Freud. In Textbook of Applied Psychoanalysis, (Akhtar, S., and Twemlow, S. Eds.) London and New York. Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 2019. ( This Conversation was revised and performed at Steinway Hall, in New York City on February 13, 2020.)

Noy, P. 1966-1967 a,b,c,d The Psychodynamics of Music. Journal of Music Therapy, 3(4) :126- 34, 4(1);7-23,4 (2);45-51, 4(3);81-94, 4(4);117-25.

Polisi, J. 2005. The Artist as Citizen, New York. Amadeus Press

Ross, A. (2007) The Rest is Noise. New York. Farrar, Straus, and Giraux

Recordings:

Waltz from Gounod’s Faust (Liszt-Gounod-Nagel transcription) - Louis Nagel, Piano - live performance

Variations on a Theme of Beethoven for 2 Pianos, Op. 35 , Camille St. Saens- Julie and Louis Nagel - live performance

View Details

“A child [patient] makes a mistake, upsets things - one doesn't console or complain, but just reflects whatever the patient's affect was at that moment, such as, ‘that seems to bother you’ or ‘it's hard to put those two pieces together’- to just observe it, to not have an affective response of disgust or irritation. The same thing is true if a patient comes in bragging or talking about something that made them very proud - to acknowledge their being proud but to not get all excited. The kind of things that often these children who have a lot of difficulty due to parents’ narcissistic investment in them, and we're all narcissistically invested in our kids - they have a lot of trouble knowing what they really feel and what they really want. I think my non-judgmental, either positively judgmental or negatively judgmental attitude, allows them to begin to experience that what they're doing is what they are doing for themselves for some reason, not what they're doing for me or for the witness, that's an enormously important part.”

Episode Description: We begin with Judy sharing her professional journey that led her to child analysis. She is active as a psychoanalytic clinician, supervisor, teacher, consultant, writer, and editor. We discuss four key papers of hers that study neutrality, enactments, informative experiences, and the role of attachment. Central to her writing and thinking is her curiosity about the inner lives of her patients, especially as action and interaction provide clues to that latent life. We discuss the analyst’s experience of ‘wearing the attributes’ that patients need to project onto us and tolerating the often deep discomfort in doing so. We consider how her model of therapeutic action, entailing surprise and changes in perceptual frame, does and doesn’t have some similarities to psychedelic-assisted therapy. We close with her sharing her analytic experiences with gender-conflicted boys and her hope for the future of our field.

Our Guest: Judith Fingert Chused, MD, is an Emeritus Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Denver, Cleveland, and Seattle Institutes. She is also a Clinical Professor of Behavioral Sciences and of Pediatrics at the George Washington School of Medicine. She is married for 57 years to a former nursery school and medical school classmate and has seven delightful, mischievous grandchildren.

Recommended Readings:

Chused, J. F. (2016) An Analyst's Uncertainty and Fear. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 85:835-850

Chused, J. F. (2000) Discussion: A Clinician's View of Attachment Theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 48:1175-1187

Chused, J. F. (1999) Male Gender Identity and Sexual Behaviour. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 80:1105-1117

Chused, J. F. (1996) The Patient's Perception of the Analyst's Countertransference. Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis 4:231-253

Chused, J. F. (1996) The Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis: Abstinence and Informative Experiences. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 44:1047-1071

Chused, J. F. (1991) The Evocative Power of Enactments. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 39:615-639

Chused, J. F. (1992) The Patient's Perception of the Analyst: The Hidden Transference. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 61:161-184

Chused, J. F. (1990) Neutrality in the Analysis of Action-Prone Adolescents. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 38:679-704

Chused, J. F. (1987) Idealization of the Analyst by the Young Adult. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 35:839-859

Chused, J. F. (1982) The Role of Analytic Neutrality in the Use of the Child Analyst as a New Object. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 30:3-28

View Details

“This is the first time that I really felt what is meant by cell relations. You have object relations and you have part-object relations and anxieties that are depressive and schizophrenic. But when I deal with primitive anxieties, I really felt cell relations. What I felt is that my cells were going beyond my skin and I felt that she felt that my cells were going beyond her skin. You have this diffuse transference and when you have this sort of transference it took me to prenatal life and biological life. Also, I had all those theoretical people like Tustin, Meltzer, and Bion - they were all talking about that.”

Episode Description: Shiri shares with us her journey from immunology to psychology to psychoanalysis. She brings her knowledge of immunologic processes to better grasp the internal mechanisms of the dynamic mind. She sees a relationship between the embryo's capacity to transform the mother's Natural Killer cells into a receptive matrix with later capacities for psychological maturation. We consider how this informed her work with a traumatized 4-year-old girl in a tumultuous analysis that demanded a great deal from each of them. We close with her sharing her vision for the future of psychoanalysis which hopefully will include ongoing collaboration with scientists from many disciplines.

Our Guest: Shiri Ben Bassat is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. She supervises at Franz Brill Mental Health Center (Ramat Chen, Tel Aviv) and teaches in various programs in the Studying Center of The Israel Psychoanalytic Institute. Shiri previously studied biology and holds an MA degree in immunology. She is the recipient of the 24th Frances Tustin Memorial Prize (2021).

Recommended Readings:

EPIGENETICS

Martin, S. (2014) R. Yehuda, N.P. Daskalakis, A. Lehrner, F. Desarnaud, H.N. Bader, I. Makotkine, J.D. Flory, L.M. Bierer, & M.J. Meaney (2014). Influences of maternal and paternal PTSD on epigenetic regulation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene in Holocaust survivor offspring. American Journal of Psychiatry 171:872-880.

Karla Ramirez , Rosa Fernández , Sarah Collet , Meltem Kiyar Enrique Delgado-Zayas , Esther Gómez-Gil , Tibbert Van Den Eynde , Guy T'Sjoen , Antonio Guillamon , Sven C Mueller , Eduardo Pásaro (2021) Epigenetics Is Implicated in the Basis of Gender Incongruence: An Epigenome-Wide Association Analysis. Front Neurosci Aug 19; 15:701017

PRIMITIVE ANXIETIES

Durban, J. (2019) "“Making a person”: Clinical considerations regarding the interpretation of anxieties in the analyses of children on the autisto-psychotic spectrum" The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 100:5, 921-939.

PRENATAL AND POSTNATAL

Meltzer, D. & Williams, M. H. (1988) 2. Aesthetic Conflict: It’s Place in the Developmental Process. The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art, and Violence 146:7-33

Bion, W. R. (1976) "On a quotation from Freud." In Clinical Seminars and Four Papers, Ed. F. Bion. Abingdon: Fleetwood Press, 1987.

Joanna Wilheim (2004) The trauma of conception. Presented at a Meeting of the Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis of São Paulo (SBPSP) on October 7, 2004.

Trnsformation of the mother's immune system. Mandelboim, O. et al’ (2006). Decidual NK cells regulate key developmental processes at the human fetal-maternal interface. Nature Medicine 12: 1065 – 1074.

View Details

"[in the play Freud's Last Session]... with the sound of the bombers both men react as they did the first time - with fear. But this time instead of disguising it they admit to it. That admittance was the bond between them. Freud also was shaken by the whole experience. At the very end of the play, and repeatedly through the play, there were reports on the BBC about the war. The BBC at that point had a live orchestra, and when the news was finished the orchestra would jump in and play music until the next news bulletin. Every time the news was over, Freud immediately turned it off, so he didn’t have to listen to music. Lewis catches on to that at some point and he equates it with Freud's wall that he puts up to shield his emotions because he feels they are being manipulated. But at the very end of the play, after Lewis leaves, Freud listens to the radio and for the first time he doesn't turn off the music. The last image of the play is him just looking at the radio as if trying to really understand music and his own aversion to it.”

Episode Description:

The similarity is noted between the clinical encounter and the structure of Mark's play where there are two men in a room intensely engaging with each other. We discuss how the trajectory of the play, like in the consulting room, allows for the emergence of latent meanings to be revealed between Freud and Lewis. Mark shares with us what drew him to these two thinkers and how he created a storyline that would demonstrate the underlying emotional struggles of each, individually and together. It is set at the beginning of World War II, three weeks before Freud's death. The play touches on Freud's childhood, his intense relationship with his daughter Anna and his planned euthanasia. We listen to a reading of a piece of the play that entails a powerful encounter between the characters. Mark has adapted this play for the screen, starring Anthony Hopkins as Freud, that is currently being filmed. We close with his mentioning his fiction writing and an upcoming theatrical release The World's Happiest Man.

Our Guest:

Mark St. Germain writes for the stage, television, and film. He is a recipient of the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Off-Broadway Alliance Award. Mark has written the plays Freud’s Last Session (Best Play Award from the Off-Broadway Alliance), Camping with Henry and Tom, Forgiving Typhoid Mary (Time Magazine’s “Year’s Ten Best”), and Becoming Dr. Ruth, the story of Dr. Ruth Westheimer. A sampling of his other plays includes Best of Enemies, Ears on a Beatle, Scott and Hem, Dancing Lessons, and Eleanor. His play, The Happiest Man on Earth premieres in the summer of 2023 at the Barrington Stage Company. He has written a memoir, Walking Evil, and a thriller, The Mirror Man. His screen adaptation of his play Freud’s Last Session has begun filming.

Recommended Reading:

Gay, Peter: Freud: A Life for Our Time

Jones, Ernest: The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud

Green, Roger Lancelyn and Hooper, Walter: C. S. Lewis: A Biography

Sayer, George: Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis

St. Germain, Mark: The Mirror Man: A Thriller

St. Germain, Mark: Walking Evil: How Man's Best Friend Became My Worst Enemy

St. Germain, Mark: Becoming Dr. Ruth

St. Germain, Mark: The God Committee

View Details

"I feel as a psychoanalyst one has to respond to the world. We can’t just simply remain in our consulting rooms although that has always been vitally important for my identity and thinking. We can’t turn a blind eye to what is going on in the world. There are a lot of awful things going on - a lot of genocides, a lot of similar kinds of processes that were seen in the Holocaust, that were seen in slavery, and they are continuing. We need to stand up, we need to say what’s going on, we need to tell people ‘Look, these are the elements.’ In America they came close to disaster with what happened with the capitol riots. We came close with populous movements here, but luckily our democratic structures have been fairly resilient. We have been able to stand up, with all this skepticism one may have, to some of these destructive forces. But other places are not so able to. It was a sense of I can’t simply keep quiet.”

Episode Description: We begin with Roger's definition of evil, which references the destruction of the subjectivity of the 'other’. We consider the mutual influences of individual psychology and group forces that permit and encourage the degradation and annihilation of the scapegoated. The two examples that he addresses in his book are the Holocaust and British-American Slavery, acknowledging the similarities and differences between them. Roger considers the capacity to provide a "home for otherness" as a vital alternative to evil. We discuss the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France as an example of those who collectively provided such a home for Jews in World War II. We conclude with his sharing his personal and family story with the Holocaust, which informs his life's work as well as the origin of his last name.

Our Guest: Dr. Roger Kennedy is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and an adult psychoanalyst. He was an NHS consultant in charge of the Family Unit at the Cassel Hospital for nearly thirty years before going into private practice twelve years ago. He was chair of the Child and Family Practice in Bloomsbury and is still a director there.

His work includes being a training analyst and seeing adults for analysis and therapy, as well as children, families, and parents at his clinic. He is a past president of the British Psychoanalytical Society and is a frequent expert witness in the family courts. He has written fourteen books published on psychoanalysis, interdisciplinary studies, and child, family, and court work, as well as many papers. His previous IPA podcast on music is at http://ipaoffthecouch.org/2020/11/22/episode-72-the-musicality-of-psychoanalysis-and-the-psychoanalysis-of-music-with-roger-kennedy-md/

Film: Getting Away with Murder(s)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5078614/

Recommended Readings:

Bohleber, W. (2010). Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma. London: Routledge.

Browning, C. (1992). Ordinary Men. New York: Harper.

Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1990). Reflections of a Psychoanalyst Upon the Nazi Biocracy and Genocide. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 17: 22 167–176.

Hyatt-Williams, A. (1998). Cruelty, Violence, and Murder. Northvale, NJ:

Jason Aronson.

Kennedy, R. (2022), The Evil Imagination, Understanding and Resisting Destructive Forces. London: Phoenix Books.

Mitscherlich, A., & Mitscherlich, M. (1967). The Inability to Mourn. B. Placzek (Trans.). New York: Grove, 1975.

Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Thomas, L. M. (1993). Vessels of Evil. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University

Press.

Warnock, B. (2020). Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust. London: Weiner Holocaust Library.

View Details

"Psychoanalysis is a translation of what I call in Spanish, Psicoanalisis Criollo, which means that we are hybrid cultures in Latin America, and that is something that we should never forget. We have been acting in the Psychoanalytical Society for so long as if we were living in some big modern city of the first world, like London, Paris, San Francisco, New York. I think that this ignoring or even denial of the fact that we are not there, we live in societies which are in many ways different than societies from the first world and we have to take that into account."

Episode Description: We begin with a description of ‘Psicoanalisis Criollo - hybrid psychoanalysis,’ "psychoanalysis by and for Latin Americans." We discuss the ways that the analyst’s awareness of cultural factors impacts the clinical approach to deepening the patient’s self-awareness. Jorge presents vignettes where the appearance of socially defined similarities and differences were important elements to address in the treatment. He highlights the delicacy of our culturally colored countertransferences. He shares with us details about his 28-year weekly newspaper column as well as his 330,000 Twitter followers (@jotabruce). We close with his recounting his early history and its contribution to his current interests.

Our Guest: Jorge Bruce, Licensed in Humanities and Psychology by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. DEA (Master’s degree) by the University of Paris. Member of the Peruvian Society of Psychoanalysis – SPP. Author of several books - the most recent was the new edition of Nos Habíamos Choleado Tanto: Psicoanálisis y Racismo, (2019). Weekly columnist of the national newspaper La República. Former member of the IPA Board (2 periods). Former member of the IPA Executive Committee. Former chair of CAPSA. Former chair of the scientific committee for the IPA Congress on The Infantile. Currant chair of the liaison committee of a Mexican provisional society (ING).

Jorge Bruce will be a Keynote Speaker at the July 2023 IPA Meetings in Cartagena. Further details at www.ipa.world/cartagena

Recommended Readings:

Las Partes en Conflicto: Psicoanálisis, Conflicto y Alteridad. (2015)USMP. Lima, Bruce, Jorge.

Penser/rêver 21 (2012). Le substitut de Dieu. Pp. 171 – 184. Editions de l’Olivier. Paris.

Nos habíamos choleado tanto. Psicoanálisis y Racismo, Bruce Jorge. Penguin Random House (Taurus).(2019). Lima.

Delirio Americano: Una historia cultural y política de América Latina.Granés, C. (2022). Penguin Random House (Taurus).

Psychoanalytic views from afar. Lemlij, M. (2022). Cauces.

Aires de familia: Cultura y sociedad en América Latina. Monsiváis, C. (2002).ANAGRAMA.

Freud and the Non-European. Said, E. (2003). Verso. London.

View Details

“Unconsciously, or sometimes just without really focusing on it, we’re always responding to the musicality of the patient’s voice. I think that careful listening and study of opera really hones our ability to do that. We pay more attention to it and we can potentially make not just unconscious use of it but also conscious use of it. As we listen to how the music itself is conveying the story that the patient is telling, it’s not necessarily the same story as the words are telling. What is often interesting is that the musicality of the voice, whether in opera or in the consulting room, often is at variance with the spoken text and that opens up interesting opportunities for generating meaning.” – S.G.

“The tendency is first to think that the text that is being sung is all important and that the melody and the orchestration behind it are supporting the purpose of the aria. That is generally true in popular Italian operas where the music for the orchestra and the melody seems to support the overall message. Because of Wagner’s influence in wanting to have an orchestration that actually comments on the action on stage as a second opinion, you get into more complex music where often the orchestra is playing something that reminds the listener of a previous theme, a motif, that complexifies the actual aria being sung.” – L.R.

Episode Description: Our conversation revolves around the idea that appreciating opera can “correct the historical tilt towards the verbal text” that often simplifies analytic listening. Steve and Lee use opera to understand universal unconscious themes that are often represented in opera. They suggest as well that it can alert the analytic listener to multiple levels of meanings that can be represented in the orchestration and melodies in addition to the manifest libretto. The ‘case example’ is The Magic Flute where the trajectory of male development is demonstrated through the evolution of maternal and paternal imagoes over the course of the storyline. They use musical excerpts to demonstrate different character’s affect states that enable the listener to experience their increasing complexity. We close with Steve and Lee sharing some of their own life journeys that have brought them to a place of finding great pleasure in this art form.

Our Guests:

Steven Goldberg, M.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He is currently an Associate Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and has for many years co-chaired Opera on the Couch, a collaboration between the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Opera. He has published on a variety of theoretical and technical issues in psychoanalysis as well as on psychoanalytic approaches to opera.

Lee Rather, Ph.D. is on the faculties of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, where he is also a personal and supervising analyst. He has published and presented on a wide range of topics including the integration of psychoanalytic theories, the existential dynamics of desire, mourning, and acceptance, and the unconscious aspects of creativity in drama, literature, and music. He is in private practice in San Francisco.

Recommended Readings:

Bollas, C. (1999). Figures and their functions. In The mystery of things (pp. 35-46). New York: Routledge.

Britton, R. (1989). The missing link: Parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex. InJ. Steiner (Ed.), The Oedipus complex today: Clinical implications. London: Karnac.

Chailey, J. (1992). The Magic Flute Unveiled: Esoteric symbolism in Mozart’s Masonic Opera. Vermont: Inner Traditions International.

Goldberg, S. (2011). Love, loss, and transformation in Wagner's Die Walkure. Fort Da 17:53-60

Grier, F. (2019). Musicality in the consulting room. International Journal of

Psychoanalysis,100: 827-885.

Frattaroli, E. J. (1987). On the Validity of Treating Shakespeare's Characters as if They Were Real People. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Volume 10(3):407-437.

Freud, S. (1914). The Moses of Michelangelo. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.) The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, (Vol 13 pp. 210-241).

Freud, S. (1928). Dostoevsky and Parricide. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.) The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, (Vol21, pp. 175-198).

Knoblauch, S. (2000). The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue. Hillside, N.J. and London: The Analytic Press.

Nagel, J. (2013). Melodies of the mind: Connections between psychoanalysis and music. New York: Routledge.

Purcell, S. (2019). Psychic Song and Dance: Dissociation and Duets in the analysis of trauma. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 88: 315-34

Rather, L. (2008). Reuniting the psychic couple in analytic training and practice: Theoretical reflections. Psychoanalytic Psychology. Vol 25, Number 1, pp. 99-109.

View Details

"The psychoanalytic frame I have built in myself helps me to find a way to not go too near and not be too distant to a person. It is other than what we learn when we learn to be psychoanalysts. Then we have the opportunity to feel in a room where we are not in danger - it’s more the patient that feels in danger. He is coming and he has fears - but we, knowing our room, our couch, we don’t have many fears. But if you work as I did in an open field, in different houses, in different hospitals, in different orphanages, you are first full of fear and at the same time very curious about what happens and what can happen. It's not the same as if you are in your own practice. One of the most important things I had was my psychoanalytic setting in myself - in myself, not in the room in which I work. I can find a way that doesn’t bring too much fear to the patient and at the same time finds some way to get nearer to him, to his inner problems than if I was just a friend or a religious woman."

Episode Description: We begin by discussing the depth of human pain that Barbara encountered in her work in the poorest areas of Eastern Africa. She describes how essential her psychoanalytic sensibility was to enable her attunement to the closeness/distance space that was so important for mutual safety and understanding. She gives examples of the all-encompassing role of the Koran in those with whom she worked as well as the lack of a subjective self in many of the individuals she encountered. We learn of the effects of genital mutilation and the various reactions she had in seeing such suffering. We close with her sharing with us a bit of her personal story that has led her to this work.

Our Guest: Dr. phil. Barbara Saegesser is a training analyst with the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the IPA. She is president of the commission treating ethical problems in the Swiss Society of Psychoanalysis. Since 2005 she has worked part-time in Eastern Islamic African cities: Alexandria, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Hawassa, Djibouti, Kampala, and Zanzibar. Her work has been in orphanages, with street boys, in baby shelters, psychiatric hospitals, and maternity wards for genitally mutilated women.

View Details

“When I first started teaching it was most often done through theory, and teaching these complicated words with hard-to-understand concepts. It never made sense to me, to be honest, as a student myself. So, when I began teaching, I would tell stories whether they were about my own life or about my children as a way to express the idea of whatever the concept was. I found that the students became so engaged and interested, and it made sense to them. I think it also made it less frightening when they heard these diagnoses and different terms that scared them. Whatever the concept was I wanted to normalize it and let everyone know that these are experiences we all have. I think it works well for teaching and it’s been fun when I run into a student even 25 years later who says: ‘Oh! I remember that story.” – KM

“Students are overwhelmed with how much they are learning; they want to know what to say - looking for a kind of formula for that. I think the stories help to show how many different kinds of situations one can encounter with the work and what is happening in the course of a day and how spontaneous an intervention might be. When you are talking about learning to play a musical instrument rather than the theory, we are also learning to listen to the music. I think the stories offer a way of learning how to listen in the layers that an analyst does.” – AA

Episode Description: We begin by outlining the challenges we face in teaching an affective process while focusing on conceptual abstractions. It's akin to teaching how to play a musical instrument by studying music theory - both are important, but theory won't teach musicality. Kerry and Anne use storytelling as a vehicle to demonstrate the dynamic process as it lives in our everyday lives. We learn from the lessons in the stories as well as from learning to listen to the melodies. They each read their stories and we consider the presence of manifest and latent meanings in what we hear. We are also alerted to the essential role of the therapist's personal responses to the clinical material and with that the childhood memories that are often evoked. We close with their sharing with us something of their backgrounds that have led them to this work as well their involvement in the New Directions in Writing program.

Our Guests: Anne Adelman, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and Training Analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and the Contemporary Freudian Society. She is the co-editor of the JAPA book review section and launched a feature column called 'Why I write’. She is co-chair of the New Directions in Writing program and maintains a private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Her books include Psychoanalytic Reflections on Parenting Teens and Young Adults: Changing Patterns of Modern Love, Loss, and Longing (2018), The Therapist in Mourning: From Faraway Nearby with Kerry Malawista (2013) and Wearing my Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories, with Kerry Malawista and Catherine Anderson (2011), When the Garden Isn’t Eden (2022).

Kerry L. Malawista, Ph.D. is a training and supervising analyst at the Contemporary Freudian Society and a Board Member at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She is co-chair of New Directions in Writing and founder of the recent project The Things They Carry – offering virtual writing workshops for healthcare and frontline workers across the country. She is permanent faculty at the Contemporary Freudian Society and teaches widely. Her essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and The Boston Globe, to name a few. She is the co-author of The Therapist in Mourning: From Faraway Nearby with Kerry Malawista (2013), Wearing my Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories,(2011), When the Garden Isn’t Eden (2022), and Who’s Behind the Couch (2017,). Her first novel Meet the Moon was released in September 2022.

View Details

"It seemed to me in my training, also in my scholarly pursuits, that desire did not have conceptual status in most analytic clinical theory. Most traditions did not have a way of talking about the analyst’s motivations with the exception of the well-worn ideas about the analyst’s ‘blind spots’. But in terms of specific motivations, we just didn’t have a way to think about them. Yet it seemed to me that over and over again, especially around the thorny problem of clinical impasses and iatrogenic resistances caused by the analyst’s activity, that the analyst’s intention and desire was directly at play in those impasses. But we have no way to talk about it."

Episode Description: We begin by discussing Mitchell's notion of the analyst's desire. We consider its relation to wishes and healing which leads us to consider analytic listening. He embraces the metaphor of the innkeeper who asks, “What brings you here?” Mitchell shares his thoughts on reverie and projective identification which he feels are overvalued as dependable sources of information on the inner life of a patient. We discuss the usefulness of behavior change preceding insight and Lacan's notion of dual-relation resistance. We close with his chapter on termination and with his sharing poignant aspects of his childhood that open the book in Chapter One.

Our Guest: Mitchell Wilson, MD is a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, writer, editor and teacher. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Wilson has published fiction, literary criticism, and papers on the history of American psychiatry and the DSM. He has practiced and taught psychoanalysis in the Bay Area since 1990. His psychoanalytic writings have cohered around a theory of ethics, desire, and the psychoanalytic process. His book, The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice, was published in 2020. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He is in private practice and leads study groups in Berkeley, California.

Recommended Readings:

Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond Doer and Done to: an Intersubjective View of Third-ness. Psychoanal. Q., 73:5-46.

Chetrit-Vatine, V. (2014). The Ethical Seduction of the Analytic Situation: The Feminine-Maternal Origins of Responsibility for the Other. London: Karnac.

Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter. New York: Norton.

Lear, J. (2003). The Idea of a Moral Psychology: The Impact of Psychoanalysis on Philosophy in Britain. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84:1351–1361.

Wilson, M. (2020). The Analyst's Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice. Bloomsbury Academic Press.

JAPA Section: Ethical Implications of the Analyst as Person—December 2016

–– Kite, J.V. The Fundamental Ethical Ambiguity of the Analyst as Person.

–– Morris, H. The Analyst’s Offer.

–– Wilson, M. The Ethical Foundation of Analytic Action.

–– Kattlove, S. Acknowledging the ‘Analyst as Person’: a Developmental Achievement.

–– Moss, D. Me Here, You There––Now what? Commentary on Kite, Morris, Wilson, and Kattlove.

View Details

"During the treatment they start to think about their family, they want to understand what really happened to their parents that made them such monsters towards their own children? They start to look for the origins of their family and the history of the family and they found transgenerational traumas from both sides - family members who were victims and family members who were persecutors. This is something on the personal level we have to live with all the time. When you can read the memoirs of different people you can also find both sides - the people who realize that in their family were the secrets connected with the fact that they were Jews and they had to hide their identity and until now they are afraid to speak openly about it. And the part of completely delayed history, like what happened to the properties of the family, how the family got this house after the Second World War."

Episode Description: We begin with a conversation on the current status of the Polish Psychoanalytic Society. Edyta shares with us encouraging information on the recent increase in analytic candidates and the abundance of patients. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she describes the awakening of historical trauma from Poland's history of being invaded. We learn of the arrival of 7 million Ukrainian refugees into Poland with over 3 million staying. She feels that the spirit of reparation for past destructiveness has contributed to the considerable generosity that Poles have shown to those in need despite a history of cruelty between Poland and Ukraine. We discuss the presence in patients' minds of secretive pasts from World War II - that of victims and persecutors. She uses the image of the Dybbuk to characterize a common mysterious experience of being possessed by the ghosts of the dead. We conclude optimistically that perhaps we are seeing for this moment in Polish history an improved trajectory of human decency.

Our Guest: Edyta Biernacka is a psychoanalyst, vice-president of the Polish Psychoanalytical Society, supervisor and training psychotherapist for Polish Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy Society, therapist and supervisor of Personality Disorders’ Treatment Ward in Psychiatric Babinski Clinic in Krakow where she works with adults in private practice.

View Details

"Aren't these daughters of Persia retelling that myth [Shahnameh] as we speak - they put their hair down, Rudabeh put her hair down. This time maybe from this union there will now be a baby girl that will be born. This new epic female hero will transform this land. Something has happened - it’s an event, and whether we like it or not there is going to be a before and after. We observe the best of Rudabeh’s daughter in every single one of these girls. We know in psychoanalysis that these things are not something that can just happen - that the birth of the subject is a process and this birth of Rudabeh’s daughter has been long overdue. It has been a long time in the making, and I am sorry…I get very emotional, but I look forward to her becoming."

Episode Description: We begin by acknowledging the political turmoil currently surrounding and impacting our conversation about psychoanalysis in Iran. We discuss the nature of foreignness both as a geographical entity and an intrapsychic experience. Gohar recognizes the essential subversive spirit of discovering one's authentic voice and challenges efforts to homogenize one's identity in an artificial search for sameness. Tolerating discomfort is for her a hallmark of analytic maturation. We discuss the Blues which contain sorrow and promise -"it lives on the edge of falling into melancholy." We learn that Freud was translated into Farsi as early as 1906 and that Gohar was a founder of the Freudian Group of Tehran. We close with hopes for a future inspired by the courage of the young women of today with conversations freed from concerns about safety.

Our Guest: Gohar Homayounpour, PsyD is a psychoanalyst and author. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Italian Psychoanalytical society, and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. She is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, of which she is also the founder and past president. She is also a member of the scientific board at the Freud Museum in Vienna, and of the IPA group Geographies of Psychoanalysis.

Her first book, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (2012) won the Gradiva award and has been translated into many languages including French, German, Italian, Turkish, and Spanish. Her latest book is titled Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning (2022).

Recommended Readings:

Homayounpour, Gohar. Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,2012).

Dislocated Subject, edited by Preta, Lorena (ed.), Geographies of Psychoanalysis, Mimesis International, 2018

Geographies of Psychoanalysis (Encounters Between Cultures In Tehran), edited by Preta, Lorena (ed.), Mimesis International, 2015.

Busch, Fred. A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique, selected papers on Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 2021.

Bolognini, Stefano. Vital Flows between the Self and Non-Self: The Interpsychic. Routledge, 2022.

View Details

"I started with an analyst right as I was ending residency and starting the fellowship in Behavioral Neurology and Movement Disorders. It was right in this transition time, and over time it transitioned into a psychoanalysis, and I think it served a number of functions. There was something about the way of exploring what was going on, trying to get to the bottom of it, trying to understand it, trying to understand oneself with another person, that I think was closer to what I was trying to get to originally. There was also something about him, my analyst, that seem so…calm… but it’s not quite calm, something related to satisfied that I thought I was missing. What I was doing was good, and we can all work hard and do a lot of things, and there are a lot of things you could do. But somehow the fit wasn’t right - I was forcing a fit of some kind or trying to turn something into something that would be a better fit and working pretty hard at that. There was something about his way that made me feel like ‘maybe I could feel like that in my career.’" — RG

"I went to therapy because I thought I needed help. It was with a psychoanalyst, and we met two sessions a week, so it wasn’t psychoanalysis yet. The thing that I found most exciting with him was that it was a different kind of thinking. I remember sitting in a session and realized that he was thinking totally different from me, and it was so exciting, so overwhelming, a little frightening but something that I actually found an inclination to think like that. I remember that in one of the sessions I had the image of memory as bits on a line, and I understood that he didn’t think like that. For him, memory fragments are a conglomerate of these bits together, like grapes together, it was not linear. I was really amazed and excited by this. During the years when I really started the analysis, I found out that this kind of thinking can really be influential and make a change in my life as a patient and in my life as a therapist." — IB

Episode Description: Iftah and Rachel share their pre-medicine life stories and describe those factors that contributed to their pursuing medicine and neurology. They both trained in Behavioral Neurology in an effort to reach more deeply into the personal experiences of their patients. Informed by their own analytic treatments they concluded that they were seeking something deeper than neurology could offer them. Training in psychoanalysis allowed them to integrate their studies of the mind with their prior work with the brain - an integration that had its limitations as well as insights. We discuss the challenges of having differing perspectives on how to encounter clinical phenomena. We close with their sharing with us how they bring their analytic minds back to neurology in leading Balint-type groups for neurology residents - a lovely application of analysis off the couch.

Our Guests: Iftah Biran, MD, a psychiatrist, and a neurologist with a subspecialty in Behavioral Neurology. He recently finished his training in psychoanalysis and joined the Israeli Psychoanalytic Association as a member. He works part-time in his private practice where he mainly practices analysis. In the last years, he’s been working in the department of Neurology at Tel Aviv Medical Center, a tertiary hospital, as a liaison psychiatrist – neuropsychiatrist, and behavioral neurologist. There Dr. Biran mostly takes care of patients with conversion disorders. He’s the co-editor of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis. Dr. Biran is now completing a bachelor's degree in philosophy and literature at the Open University of Israel.

Rachel Gross, MD. Prior to becoming a psychoanalyst, Dr. Gross began her career as a neurologist. As a member of the neurology faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, she specialized in the care of patients with Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and other neurodegenerative conditions. She also served as co-director of the Penn neurology residency training program. Dr. Gross has a private practice in Philadelphia where she provides psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and medication management. She enjoys teaching, mentoring, and supervising trainees in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy. She also facilitates a group to support the emotional well-being and professional development of neurology residents at the University of Pennsylvania.

View Details

"I feel very often that I can detect when people are doing case presentations, this ubiquitous tendency to not bother about the body. At a very superficial level it is accepted that we run around in bodies. What is actually a slightly deeper idea is that we run around in bodies, but our minds couldn’t have any function at all if our other parts of our functional systems weren’t also working, So the body and the mind of course are deeply interconnected. We do know that too, that’s not news, but it constantly becomes eliminated."

Episode Description: We begin with an overview of Rosemary's longstanding interest in the role of bodies and how they make their presence and meaning known in the clinical encounter. She discusses the analytic scotoma when it comes to the woman's body especially when it involves pregnancy and childbirth. We consider conflicts over being aware of and speaking freely about the analyst's body and what that is like for both parties. She shares her deep pleasure in the writings and person of Hans Loewald and what it has meant to her to be a physician. We consider how the sublimated role of a father's sexual arousal serves as an aid in his child's individuation. We close with Rosemary sharing her view of our field's past and some aspects of her personal journey.

Our Guest: Rosemary H. Balsam F.R.C.Psych (London), M.R. C. P. (Edinboro), (originally from Belfast, N. Ireland), is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in Yale Medical School; staff psychiatrist in the Yale Department of Student Mental Health and Counseling, and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, New Haven, Conn. Her special interests are female gender developments; young adulthoods; the body in psychic life; the work of Hans Loewald. Dr. Balsam is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Quarterly and Imago and is a past co-editor of the Book Review Section of JAPA with her husband, Paul Schwaber. Her most recent book is Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis (2012, Routledge); and her latest book review (2021) At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva by Alice Jardine. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 102:629-634. She is on the executive board of the newly inaugurated “Loewald Center,” a joint organization between IPTAR and the WNEIP. Her honors include 2018, winning the Sigourney Award for excellence in the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (she was the first woman in the USA to receive this prize.)

Recommended Readings:

Balsam, R.M (2012) Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis London, New York Routledge

Balsam, R. H (2013) (Re)membering the Female Body in Psychoanalysis: Childbirth JAPA Volume 61: 3 pp. 446 - 470.

Balsam, R.H. ((2015) The War on Women in Psychoanalytic Theory Building: Past to Present Psychoanal Study Child 69, 83-107. 2015.

Balsam, R.H. (2019) The Natal Body and its Confusing Place in Mental Life: J,Amer.Psyoanal.Assn 67.1 pp.15- 36

Balsam, R.H. (2017) Modern Gender Flexibility: Pronoun Changes and the Body’s Activities. Ch 4 In Vaia Tsolas and C. Anzieu Premmeurer (eds.) A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World: On The Body London, New York Routledge.

Kristeva J. (1980) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez New York: Columbia University Press 1980).

Toronto, E, Ponder, J, Davisson, K, KellyM.(eds) (2017) A Womb of Her Own: Women’s Struggle for Sexual and Reproductive Autonomy, London, New York Routledge.

View Details

"I think that writing also is among the things that help me think this through and get there. When I finished my degree, I was actually very pessimistic - I had no idea that at close to age 55-56 that a psychoanalytic institute would even consider me but I did decide to take the leap and I ended up going to BPSI [Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute] and here I am." — Ellen Pinsky

"The training time was a time of discovering - we read the authors I knew, and what was happening to me also at that moment, what kind of an analyst would I be during and after the training? My background encouraged me to go on - when it was difficult to go on searching for the truth, searching for the knowledge, but the knowledge about myself during the training and it went on in my actual training analysis." —Susana Merlo

Episode Description: We discuss Susana's and Ellen's first careers in education and what led them "to wish to go deeper." They both describe the formative contributions of their own analyses as well as the influence of analytic writers that they valued. We consider the possible advantages and disadvantages of each of the many backgrounds that we bring to our clinical work and share conclusions about the similarities and differences in how we practice. We discuss some of their favorite writers and we conclude with their perspectives on the future of psychoanalysis both in the States and in Argentina.

Our Guests:

Susana Ruth Merlo is a member of APdeBA (Asociación Psicoanalítica de Buenos Aires, Argentina) and holds a position as an Associated Professor at IUSAM of APdeBA (Instituto Universitario de Salud Mental de APdeBA), where she teaches Introduction to the ideas of Melanie Klein and English School. She provided school psychological services in school settings for 15 years. At present provides therapy to children, adolescents, and adults in a private clinic setting. Susana holds two university degrees, School Psychology (1986) and Clinical Psychology (2007).

Ellen Pinsky came to psychoanalysis as a second profession following 25 years as a middle school English teacher. She says her experience in the classroom with 12 and 13-year-olds taught her most of what she needed to know to become a credible clinician. She is the author of Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts. About her book, Thomas Ogden writes: “Mortal Gifts is a necessary book—necessary for analysts and necessary for the analyses they conduct. In it, Ellen addresses a long-neglected issue in the practice of psychoanalysis: the analyst’s failure to include in the very fiber of the analysis the fact of his or her mortality.” In 2014 she was awarded BPSI’s Deutsch Prize for her essay “The Olympian Delusion” (JAPA, 2011)

Recommended Readings:

SM

Bion, W. Learning from experience. Aprendiendo de la Experiencia Paidós, (2009) Bs.As.

Hustvedt, S. The Sorrows of an American. Elegía para un Americano. Anagrama (2009) Barcelona.

Klein, M. Our adult world and its roots in infancy. Nuestro Mundo Adulto y Sus Raíces en la Infancia. En Envidia y Gratitud, OC. Paidós (1991) Bs.As.

Meltzer, D. A Psychoanalytical Model of the Child in the Family in the Community. Familia y Comunidad, Spatia editorial (1990) Bs. As.

Nemas, C. Strangers in Virtual Land. Toronto Psychoanalytic Society – 22nd Annual day in applied psychoanalysis (2021)

EP

  1. Freud, Observations on Transference Love (1915)

Remembering, Repeating and Working-through (1914)

  1. Freud, Fort-Da” from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (1920, 14-15)

Paula Heimann, On Counter-transference (1950)

  1. W. Winnicott, The Use of an Object (1969)

Hans Loewald, On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis (1960)

James Strachey, The Nature of the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis (1934)

Brian Bird, Notes on Transference (1972)

Betty Joseph, Transference: The Total Situation (1985)

Ida Macalpine, The Development of Transference (1950)

Irma Brenman Pick, Working through in the Countertransference (1985);

Selma Fraiberg, Ghosts in the Nursery (1975)

Hans Loewald, Transference and Love (2000 [1988] 549-563)

Ella Freeman Sharpe, The Technique of Psychoanalysis, (on “Qualifying as an analyst,” 1930, 256-257).

View Details

"The Archive begins in 1940. The Germans themselves do not decide they are going to murder all the Jews, they don’t decide on the Final Solution until late 1941. When the archive begins, Ringelblum is creating the archive in order to do what Max Weinreich was doing with the YIVO [Yiddish Scientific Institute] - that was to get people to write about their lives, to get people to describe their experiences so as to use the knowledge gained to help the psychological and the community rebuilding after the war. ‘The war will be over, and we will rebuild our lives, what lessons will this experience have taught us?’ The way to get that information is to get people to write essays, to do interviews."

Episode Description: We begin with the historical background that allowed for the conceptualization and creation of The Ringelblum Archive - the contemporaneous documentation by the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto. The thread of psychoanalytic thinking is identified in this work through the interest in everyday living, “nothing is unimportant,” and through prior contact with Freud and analysts. We discuss the authors’ intent to define themselves through their writings to allow their own voices to be heard as distinct from those of the sadists – as in analysis, to own their own history. We consider the concept of "cultural resistance" and what it means to try “to put a stone under the wheel of history." We close by describing the remarkable story of the uncovering of the hidden archive and the tragic end of Emmanuel Ringelblum. In addition, Sam shares with us aspects of his personal story that has led him to this labor of love.

Our Guest: Samuel Kassow, PhD, Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, is the author of many studies on Russian and Jewish history including Who Will Write Our History: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto, which was translated into eight languages and made into a film, as well as Volume 9 of the Posen Anthology of Jewish Culture, published by Yale in 2019. He was part of the scholarly team that planned the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and is currently engaged in a project organized by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to write a history of the Holocaust in Poland. He has been a visiting professor at several universities including Harvard, Toronto and Dartmouth. Professor Kassow holds a Ph.D from Princeton.

Recommended Readings:

Samuel Kassow Who will write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007)

Israel Gutman, Emanuel Ringelblum: the Man and the Historian (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010)

Natalia Aleksiun, Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021)

Cecile Kuznitz YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge University Press: 2014)

Social Science as a “Weapon of the Weak”: Max Weinreich, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, and the Study of Culture, Personality, and Prejudice

Author(s): Leila ZenderlandSource: Isis , Vol. 104, No. 4 (December 2013), pp. 742-772. Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society

View Details

"I think every encounter with the patient is a potential re-humanizing experience, also for me as a therapist. Because when we are slowly experiencing this kind of positive emotion, especially when it comes to turning points, where the patient realizes that it is possible to trust another human being, that is a really remarkable experience with these patients who have all reasons to not believe that it is possible to trust other people - who have been disappointed, failed and maltreated so many times. So that is a re-humanizing experience that happens between the therapist and the patient - this is the best way to describe the process of a positive outcome of this type of psychoanalytic therapy because they have been dehumanized in so many ways and to such a degree, that for some of them it is a wonder to have normal feeling left."

Episode Description: We begin by appreciating Sverre's work on the torture-induced impingements on intrapsychic meaning-making. We also learn about the role of community and culture in supporting renewed meaning-making - a vital aspect of rehuminazation. We consider the case of Hassan and come to understand the impact on him of the horrific abuses he suffered and what it means to the analyst who comes to hear about and 'experience' such depths of depravity. We discuss survivor guilt, mourning, and disillusionment. Sverre shares with us aspects of his own childhood that have contributed to his interest in this work. We conclude with learning about the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society and its involvement in assisting colleagues in Ukraine.

Our Guest: Sverre Varvin, MD, Dr. Philos is a training analyst at the Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society. He is a professor emeritus at Oslo Metropolitan University. He has had several positions in IPA. Currently, he is chair of the IPA China Committee and a member of the refugee subcommittee of the Humanitarian Field committee. He has been working with traumatized refugees for more than 30 years: clinically, with research, and in the humanitarian field. He has done human rights work as chair of the Norwegian Medical Association’s committee on human rights in the Balkans (former Yugoslavia), Turkey, and China. He has tried to understand the impact of atrocities on individuals and groups and has been specially occupied with dehumanization and re-humanization.

Dr. Varvin will be a keynote speaker at the IPA Congress in Cartegena, Colombia in July 2023.

The Congress website is www.ipa.world/cartagena

Recommended Readings:

JOHANSEN, J. & VARVIN, S. 2019. I tell my mother that … sometimes he didn’t love us— Young adults’ experiences of childhood in refugee families: A qualitative approach. Childhood, 26, 221-235.

VARVIN, S. 2020. Gender, family, and intergenerational transmission of traumatization. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China, 3.

VARVIN, S. 2021. Psychoanalysis in Social and Cultural Settings: Upheavals and Resilience, New York, London, Routledge.

VARVIN, S. & LÆGREID, E. 2020. Traumatized women—organized violence. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China, 3.

VARVIN, S., VLADISAVLJEVIĆ, I., JOVIC, V. & SAGBAKKEN, M. 2022. “I have no capacities that can help me“. Young asylum seekers in Norway and Serbia. Flight as disturbance of developmental processes. Front. Psychol. , 12.

JOVIC, V. 2018. Working with traumatized refugees on the Balkan route. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 15, 187-201.

ROSENBAUM, B., JOVIC, V. & VARVIN, S. 2020. Understanding the refugee-traumatized persons. Semiotic and psychoanalytic perspectives. psychosocial, 43.

View Details

"We are chosen [as children] for the roles of peacekeeper, soother, and possibly entertainer at times, because we temperamentally have been gifted with a certain degree of empathy, sensitivity, and psychological mindedness that was not true of our siblings. There is a reason why we’ve been chosen, and it is because of our innate abilities. Those innate abilities, of course, make for a fit with our chosen occupation. We start out as these empathic sensitive children who truly do not want to see our family members in pain and have a desire to take that pain away."

Episode Description: We begin with the recognition that psychoanalysts share certain character traits that incline us towards the work we do. Often, wishing to heal our patients is mapped onto our early templates of wishing to heal our parents. Karen describes her own relationship with her mother which she feels contributed to her becoming a psychoanalyst. With that as a basis, we discuss therapists' tendencies towards self-sacrifice and its relation to masochism. We consider the ubiquity of analyst gratifications and the excessive cautions around acknowledging them. We discuss the importance of dealing with interpersonal conflicts in the clinical setting and how that is in contradistinction to a treatment model of mother-infant attunement. We conclude with her consideration that enactments are preceded by repressed negative counter-transference, the awareness of which can deepen the therapeutic moment.

Our Guest: Karen J. Maroda, Ph.D., ABBP, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at, the Medical College of Wisconsin and in private practice in Milwaukee, WI. She is board certified in psychoanalysis by the American Board of Professional Psychology, and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis. The author of four books, The Power of Countertransference, Seduction, Surrender and Transformation, Psychodynamic Techniques, and The Analyst’s Vulnerability, as well as numerous journal articles and book reviews. She also sits on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She gives lectures and workshops both nationally and internationally.

View Details

“Everyone was all for inclusion. There wasn't anybody who felt that this movement for inclusion was anything but good. But there were a lot of worries that in our focus on inclusion that we’ve turned away from thinking about the teaching of analysis per se - of what goes on with the analyst and the patient, teaching how we work with people, how we think about people. Countertransference can get lost in this way. Even though there is a focus on the countertransference in terms of discrimination, but that is just one factor. So, there was a lot of concern that we could lose interest in development and interest in intrapsychic life."

Episode Description: We begin by referring to Judy's first podcast (#83) where she reported on her interviews with former analysands about the nature of their termination experience. She has continued to rely on personal conversations to learn about the inner life of individuals in her current project of interviewing analysts over age 70 about their life in psychoanalysis. We discuss their generativity, their resilience, their personal difficulties, and their vision for the future of our field. Common to many respondents is their greater comfort in using themselves in their clinical encounters. We discuss the challenge of understanding long-term patients who maintain ongoing contact with their analysts seemingly without plans for termination. We conclude with Judy sharing with us her personal experiences of termination, loss, and her own resiliency and passion for her work.

Our Guest: Judy L. Kantrowitz, Ph.D. is a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and formerly a Clinical Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, now a corresponding member. She is the author of four books, The Patient's Impact on the Analyst (1996); Writing about Patients: responsibilities, risks, and ramifications (2006), Myths of Termination: What Patients Can Teach Analyst About Endings (2014), and The Role of Patient -Analyst Match in the Process and Outcome of Psychoanalysis (2020). She has served three times on the Editorial of JAPA and won the JAPA paper prize for 2020. She is currently on the board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. She is in private practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Brookline, MA.

Recommended Readings:

Erikson, Erik H: The Life Cycle Completed. New York & London W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.

Junkers, Gabriele, editor and author: The Empty Couch. London & New York. Routledge, 2013.

Valliant, George E.: Aging Well:: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development, New York, Boston, London, Little Brown. 2002.

Valliant, George E. Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study.Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England. The Belknap Press of Harvard university.2012.

View Details

"What you are describing in the process of reading the book is what I am aspiring to which is a kind of deep emotional dialogue both in the book with the reader, but also in my work with the patient. I am more concerned with the experiential nature of our work and what it means to be with someone and the kinds of experiences that follow from a certain way of being with someone, than a focus on transference, and transference interpretation. Not that I think those aspects of our work are unimportant, but I feel like what is foundational in even making transference interpretation is being tuned into the kind of shared emotional space and process.” Episode Description: We begin with my experience of reading Henry’s new book which included my feeling imbalanced by his emphasis on the here-and-now personal characteristics of the analyst with less attention to the meaning that patients idiosyncratically bring to the analytic relationship. That said, I also felt changed by receiving his openness and vulnerability that he described in his clinical encounters. From there we began a conversation on 'authenticity' and 'presence'. We discussed analytic symmetry, intersubjectivity, sincerity, and what it means to 'surrender' to the analytic moment. Henry presented two distinct cases that demonstrate how he brings his authentic self to challenging clinical moments. We close with his sharing with us some of his personal history that has led him to this way of conceptualizing the work.

Our Guest: Henry Markman, MD is a Training & Supervising Analyst, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP), and Co-chair of Dialogues in Contemporary Psychoanalysis at SFCP. In 2021 he published the book, Creative Engagement in Psychoanalytic Practice by Routledge. Recent publications include: “A Pragmatic Approach to Bion’s Late Work. (JAPA 2015) ; "Presence, Mourning, Beauty: Elements of Analytic Process,” (JAPA 2017); The Good, the Bad, The Ugly, and the Dead: A Typology of Analytic Fields,” (fort da 2018); Accompaniment in Jazz and Psychoanalysis,” (Psychoanalytic Dialogues 2020); “Embodied Attunement and Participation" (JAPA 2020), and “One-sided Analysis Is No Longer Possible: The Relevance of “Mutual Analysis” in Our Current World”. (fort da 2021). Henry’s interests include modes of therapeutic action, embodied communication, the relevance of music in psychoanalysis, aesthetic experience, the emotional work of the analyst in the clinical encounter, and the development of a therapist. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Five Uneasy Pieces: Five Psychoanalytic Articles that Changed My Mind. He is in private practice in Berkeley, where he consults and leads study groups.

Recommended Readings:

Berenstein, I. (2001) The Link and the Other. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82: 141-149

Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision. Seminar One. Bion, W., Aguayo, J., Malin, B. Routledge. 2013

Ferenczi, S. The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi. (J. Dupont, ed.) Harvard University Press. 1998

Malloch, S. & Trevarthen, C. (Eds.). (2009). Musicality: Communicating the Vitality and Interests of Life. In Communicative Musicality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nacht. S. (1962) The Curative Factors in Psycho-Analysis. International Journal of Psycho-analysis 43: 206-211

Winnicott, D.W. (1968) Playing: Its Theoretical Status in the Clinical Situation. International Journal of Psycho-analysis 49: 591-599

View Details

"The role that an analyst plays is so important in terms of how people can be wounded, shamed and hurt in a variety of different ways. We need to be very thoughtful about our own residual psychopathology because no analyst is perfectly analyzed. It’s a lifelong stretch that we are going through to try to figure out what is bothering us with a particular patient."

Episode Description: We begin by describing the nature of feeling 'stuck' in a clinical situation. We consider the contributions from both sides of the couch and the role that internal and actual consultants can play in reintroducing an analyzing perspective on an encounter. Glen presents composite examples of colleagues who came to him for consultation especially around difficulties with sexual boundaries with patients. He has noted the hunger for love and loneliness as common themes in these analysts' lives. We discuss changes in our field regarding the focus on symptoms and the use of Zoom and we conclude with a discussion of what he feels is a more nuanced understanding of the termination process.

Our Guest: Glen Gabbard, MD is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and a training and supervising analyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston. He is the author or editor of 29 books, including Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting, Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Boundaries and Boundary Violations, and The Psychology of the Sopranos. He is also the author of 365 scientific papers. He was awarded the Sigourney Award in 2000 and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Sapienza University in Rome in 2021. From 2001-to 2007 he was Joint Editor-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Recommended Readings:

Gabbard GO: The “dragons of primeval days”: Termination and the persistence of the infantile. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 2021

Gabbard GO: The analyst and the virus. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 68, 1089-1099, 2021

2017—Sexual boundary violations in psychoanalysis: a 30-year retrospective. Psychoanalytic Psychology 34: 151-156. (Gabbard GO)

2010—The lure of the symptom in psychoanalytic treatment. JAPA 58:533-544 (Ogden TH & Gabbard GO)

2009—On Becoming a Psychoanalyst. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90:311-327 (Gabbard GO, Ogden TH)

2003- Gabbard GO: Miscarriages of psychoanalytic treatment with suicidal patients. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84:249-261

View Details

"You can do as much about the legacy of the Holocaust - and what I took from my depressed mother who lost all her family in the Holocaust - there is only so much I could do in personal analysis and there was another bit that I could do only in a strange kind of dialogue in the presence of Germans doing their own work. It is: ‘do your own internal work in the presence of an other who is doing his/her internal work’."

Episode Description: We begin by learning about Mira's involvement in the origin of Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities (PCCA) 30 years ago. She shares with us the profound internal changes that occurred in both the Israeli and German analysts who came together and 'did their own work in the presence of the other'. She describes her ongoing consultative work with members of the Ukraine Psychoanalytic Society as they face terrible tragedies and uncertainties regarding their future. She advises humble respect for their need for psychological armor before recommending their encountering colleagues who are identified with the current aggressor. We close with her describing her pride in being Israeli and how it lives in her devotion to healing.

Our Guest: Mira Erlich-Ginor, M.A, is a training and supervising analyst, and faculty of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. She is deeply involved in psychoanalytic education and group relations work as well as serving as European representative for the IPA Board for two terms. Currently, she is Chair of the Steering Committee, IPA in the Community and the World. She has been co-director of the IPS psychotherapy track; chair of the education committee IPS, chair of the EPF (European Psychoanalytic Federation) Working Party on Education, Chair of Sponsoring Committee PSIKE, Turkey. She has also initiated and led several international research projects on psychoanalytic education among them is the End of Training Evaluation Project. She is committed to the application of psychoanalytic understandings to societal issues, co-founding the “Nazareth Project”- Group Relations work on transgenerational transmission of trauma as well as co-Founder, past chair, and member of OFEK – Israeli Group Relation organization. She is also Co-founder and in management of PCCA, Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities, recipient of the Sigourney Award 2019.

Recommended Readings:

Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities

Confronting Personal Trauma in a Group. The Sigourney Award

Beland, H. (2014) Collective Mourning - Who or What frees a Collective to Mourn. About First Step Out of the Most Malign Prejudice. In: Cyril Levitt, (Ed.): Hostile and Malignant Prejudice: Psychoanalytic Approaches. The International Psychoanalytical Association, Psychoanalytical Ideas and Application Series, Routledge, 2014.

Davids, M. F. (2013) “Tears are better than blood; words are better than tears”; can we address current ongoing conflict? In A. Varchevker & E. McGinley (Eds.), Enduring Migration through the Life Cycle (pp. 187–210). London: Karnac.

Erlich, H. S., Erlich-Ginor, M. & Beland, H. Fed with Tears – Poisoned with Milk. The "Nazareth" Group-Relations-Conferences: Germans and Israelis: The Past in the Present. Psychosozial Verlag: Gießen, 2009.

Erlich, H. S., Erlich-Ginor, M. & Beland, H. Gestillt mit Tränen – Vergiftet mit Milch. Die Nazareth-Gruppenkonferenzen: Deutsche und Israelis – Die Vergangenheit ist gegenwärtig. Psychosozial Verlag: Gießen, 2009.

Erlich, H. S., Erlich-Ginor, M. Beland H. (2009) Being in Berlin: A large group experience in the Berlin Congress, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 90.

Erlich-Ginor, M. (2013) Fed with Tears, Poisoned with Milk: The Way Out from Under the Shadows of the Holocaust. In: Varchevker, A. McGinley, E. (ed.): Enduring Migration: External and Internal Migration Through the Life Cycle. London: Karnac.

View Details

“The father carries the separation function which is very important in terms of progressive differentiation from the mother rather than forceful opposition. It rests on something else that I think that we in psychoanalysis don’t take seriously enough - though Peter Blos did when he talked about the isogender attachment. The father also has to be an attracting object to the little boy - not just the separating object, but the attracting object. The little boy wants to desire the father and the love of the father - the whole homoerotic connection with the father, wrestling with the father, touching the father’s beard - all the beautiful sensual aspects of the male to male relationships that are inherent in the early dyadic father - son relationship.”

Episode Description: We begin by distinguishing analytic data from social and cultural theorizing. Michael walks us through the early history of psychoanalytic understandings of masculine development. He describes the ‘third wave’ of conceptualizations to which he contributed. This recognizes the formative aspect of the mother’s relationship with her internalized masculinity and its reverberations towards her son. He discusses the challenge the little boy faces in acknowledging his gender difference from his mother, a task made more manageable by the dependable presence of his dyadically available father. He presents clinical material that demonstrates the power of the homoerotic transference/countertransference to “activate” a secure masculine identification. This grows into the discovery of “a man’s inherent receptivity” which he is careful to distinguish from female receptivity. We close with his sharing with us a bit of his personal history that has led him to be interested in this work.

Our Guest: Michael J. Diamond, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies. His major publications are on psychoanalytic technique and analytic mindedness; masculinity, femininity, and gender theory; fathering and the paternal function; trauma and dissociation; hypnosis and altered states; and group processes and social action. He has written five books including today’s featured book on Masculinity and Its Discontents: The Male Psyche and the Inherent Tensions of Maturing Manhood. His forthcoming book on applied psychoanalysis is Ruptures in the American Psyche: Containing Destructive Populism in Perilous Times. His other major books include My Father Before Me: How Fathers and Sons Influence Each Other Throughout Their Lives My and an edited book on The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action (with Chris Christian). He has a full-time clinical practice in Los Angeles, California where he remains active in teaching, supervising, and writing.

Recommended Readings:

Blos, P. (1985). Son and Father: Before and Beyond the Oedipus Complex. New York: Free Press.

Corbett, K. (2009). Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Diamond, M. J. (2004). The Shaping of Masculinity: Revisioning Boys Turning Away from Their Mothers to Construct Male Gender Identity. Int. J. Psychoanal., 85:359–380.

Diamond, M. J. (2006). Masculinity Unraveled: The Roots of Male Gender Identity and the Shifting of Male Ego Ideals Throughout Life. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 54:1099–1130.

Diamond, M. J. (2007). My Father Before Me: How Fathers and Sons Influence Each Other Throughout Their Lives. New York: Norton.

Diamond, M. J. (2015). The Elusiveness of Masculinity: Primordial Vulnerability, Lack, and the Challenges of Male Development. Psychoanal. Q., 84:47–102.

Diamond, M. J. (2017). The Missing Father Function in Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique: The Analyst’s Internal Couple and Maturing Intimacy. Psychoanal. Q., 86:861–887.

Diamond, M. J. (2020). The Elusiveness of “The Feminine” in the Male Analyst: Living in Yet Not Being of the Binary. Psychoanal. Q.,89:503–526.

Diamond, M. J. (2021). Masculinity and Its Discontents: The Male Psyche and the Inherent Tensions of Maturing Manhood. London: Routledge.

Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S. E., 7:130–243.

Friedman, R. C. & Downey, J. L. (2008). Sexual Differentiation of Behavior: The Foundation of a Developmental Model of Psychosexuality. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 56:147–175.

Glasser, M. (1985). The “Weak Spot”—Some Observations on Male Sexuality. Int. J. Psychoanal., 66:405–414.

Laplanche, J. (1997). The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other. Int. J. Psychoanal., 78:653–666.

Lax, R. F. (1997). Boys’ Envy of Mother and the Consequences of This Narcissistic Mortification. Psychoanal. Study Child, 52:118–139.

Moss, D. (2012). Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Man: Psychoanalysis and Masculinity. London: Routledge.

Stoller, R. J. (1985). Presentations of Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

View Details

"I have some very close friends in Russia and some of them emigrated now and some of them are in Russia. Of course, I can speak with them very personally about my experience. I see how much guilt they feel and how much pressure they feel from both sides, from inside Russia and outside. For example, the first letter that our society received from one of the Russian psychoanalytic organizations was full of apologies. But after that Russian members asked us not to share this letter because they could be persecuted in Russia."

"[re Russian atrocities] it's absolutely a shocking experience that we were not able to expect. This absolutely wild hostility and cruelty from the Russian side. What you see on the internet is only part of it. Of course, if we speak with these people - raped women, injured children, tortured men – it is absolutely unbearable. We are shocked that the Russian army behaves in such a way - it is absolutely dehumanized behavior, bestial cruelty."

"For our country, it’s very important to feel solidarity now. We are very grateful to the States and to Britain who expressed their solidarity. Because several countries fell under Russian propaganda and still in some way hesitated about who is right and who is wrong. They say ‘it is not war it is only an Ukrainian conflict’, ‘there are both sides and all sides have their truths’. It is very painful for us to hear such things. I think resistance to Putin’s propaganda is very important support for us. To say truth about the situation, to say truth about this absolutely inhuman cruelty about this war and to defend people here."

"Unfortunately, I see in many Western intellectual people who are missing an understanding of the situation. It is an absolutely unprovoked war. It is a very long war, because it started 8 years ago. Now it is only an acute stage of this war. But again and again I hear from my European colleagues that probably it is something that the Americans did, probably it is something that NATO did, it’s some political trick, and so on and so on. But these people use a great deal of denial to not see the absolutely cruel aggression of the imperialistic mind and an imperialistic society. These European intellectuals are like Stalin called “useful idiots” who supported Stalinism."

View Details

"One of the things that I find absolutely remarkable about psychedelic medicines is the access one can have into discovering different parts of oneself, different ways in which we’re put together Also, to see how we shape our worlds in a very interesting way, experientially. That has been shocking to me - to see and experience how our psychological frameworks have a coherence. They feel structural in a way that you can experience anxiety being removed and then it coming back and it being held somewhere in your body in a very distinct way. Even to be able to travel into an anxiety held in the body in a distinct way and understand its roots and origins as if it was a structure in and of itself. To say it is mind-blowing would be an understatement."

Episode Description: We begin by discussing the medical aspects of ketamine which includes its long history of use and safety. Gita shares with us her psychoanalytic background and how it has played a central role in her work utilizing psychedelic medicines. We discuss the similarities and differences between the regressions in both treatments and share thoughts about the differing modes of therapeutic action. She describes clinical situations demonstrating the impact that a therapeutically assisted psychedelic experience can have on long-standing character impediments. We close with a reminder of the long-standing interest that psychoanalysts have had in this promising modality.

Our Guest: Gita Vaid, MD is a board-certified psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing ketamine-assisted psychotherapy in New York City. She is a co-founder of the Center for Natural Intelligence, a multidisciplinary laboratory dedicated to psychedelic psychotherapy innovation and clinical practice. Dr. Vaid completed her residency training at NYU Medical Center and psychoanalytic training at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York. She trained as a fellow in clinical psychopharmacology and neurophysiology at New York Medical College and completed a research fellowship at NYU Medical Center. Dr. Vaid serves as the Director of Psychedelic Awareness at The Chopra Foundation and is on Faculty at The Ketamine Training Center.

Linked Episodes:

https://harveyschwartzmd.com/2022/01/28/ep-23-psychedelic-psychotherapy-for-ptsd-new-research-with-ingmar-gorman-phd/

https://harveyschwartzmd.com/2021/02/26/ep-2-psychedelic-medicines-therapeutic-context/

Recommended Readings:

Critical Period Plasticity as a Framework for Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy Lauren Lepow, Hirofumi Morishita and Rachel Yehuda

Frontiers of Neuroscience Sept 2021

Pivotal Mental States Ari Brouwer and Robin Lester Carhart-Harris Journal of Psychopharmacology 1-34 2020

Psychedelic Communitas: Intersubjective Experience During Psychedelic Group Sessions Predicts Enduring Changes in Psychological Wellbeing and Social Connectedness H. Kettner, F. E. Rosas, C. Timmerman, L. Kartner, R.L.Carhart-Harris and L. Roseman

Frontiers of Pharmacology, March 2021

Notes on Memory and Desire, W.R. Bion 1967)

The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. Daniel Stern 2004

Psychedelic Psychotherapy : Building Wholeness Through Connection

Gita Vaid, MD; Barry Walker, M.Ed

View Details

"We understand that we are not alone. It is crucially important to feel like that because we are a large country compared to other European countries - we are the largest country in Europe and have 45 million population. But in comparison to Russia it is very small and actually the Russian army is the second largest army in the world. It was unbearably scary to think about it, and we are very grateful to all the world who protect us with words, who protect us with weapons and with other supplies, so we are incredibly thankful."

"I would like to say that we are not afraid anymore in spite of the fear. We are not afraid and we ask you also not to be afraid. We ask the Russian people not to be afraid and to protest - Belarus people not to be afraid and to protest. We ask European countries not to be afraid and to tell the truth to their people, to their population, to each other because this war is not only in territory but also in mind."

To provide assistance to Ukraine:

Michael Pustovoyt at pmm2109@gmail.com

https://linktr.ee/voiceforukraine?utm_source=linktree_profile_share

View Details

"Patients may be bringing in harmonies that are tough to connect, fragments of life or things that cannot be integrated. And part of the improvisation in a way is to make sense, to create maybe a new improvisation that ties together different affects or maybe clusters of chords that feel unpleasant. Can we work with them musically to make sense of them at least? And maybe represent them not always in a pleasing way but through our improvisation, be able to create a new motif that now can be examined in different ways."

Episode Description: We begin by recognizing the well-known analytic challenge which is to learn the basic scales and then learn to improvise — both being essential tools for creating a dependable and creative analytic space. Rafael shares with us his early familial psychoanalytic influences and his search to find his own voice. We discuss the similarities between analytic free-association and musical improvisation. He demonstrates his clinical observations with three live musical renditions — first the melody and then two riffs off it with increasingly loose connections to the original theme. We discuss how this is similar to the deepening of an analytic process allowing for greater freedom of imagination and self-awareness. We consider the musical versions of countertransference as well as the termination capacity for improvised self-reflection.

Our Guest: Rafael Ornstein, MD is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with a private practice in Brookline Massachusetts. He is a graduate of and on the faculty at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and he supervises psychiatry residents at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Medical School continuing education course on psychodynamic psychotherapy. He enjoys playing piano in the sextet Bluedog Jazz, a band with monthly gigs in local restaurants and clubs. You can find them on Spotify.

Recommended Reading and Listening:

Alev, Simeon, (2021), Jazz and Psychotherapy: Perspectives on the Complexity of Improvisation. Routledge.

Knoblach, Steven, (2000), The Musical Edge of the Therapeutic Dialogue. Routledge.

Lichtenstein, David, (1993), “The Rhetoric of Improvisation: Spontaneous Discourse in Jazz and Psychotherapy”. American Imago. 50:227-252

Markman, Henry, (2020), “Accompaniment in Jazz and Psychoanalysis”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 30 (4), 432-447

Dennyzeitlin.com. Denny Zeitlin, MD is a psychiatrist and a significant figure in Jazz, in both performance and composition. His website has a wealth of information on jazz and its intersections with psychology.

Selected Recordings

Oscar Peterson’s Blues Etude

Fats and Monk: Lulu’s Back In town.

Comparing Fats Waller and Thelonious Monk. Fats improvising on the structure. Monk stretching the structure.

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme

Improvisation and the Spiritual

Bill Evans: Alone

Solo album, Evans creates very strong emotion and a sense of introspection in his approach.

Elaine Elias: Chega De Saudade

Elaine sings it straight and then stretches out with an amazing piano solo, with striking group interactions, coming back to the melody.

Blue Dog Jazz on Spotify

Rafael Ornstein piano tracks 1,2,5,6, and 8.

View Details

"I'm interested in with what mind and what imagination and thoughts and association one person lives her life. That’s the common thread in all three novels and that is of course what interests me as an analyst practicing psychoanalysis, doing psychoanalytic work. It is also what interests me in terms of psychoanalytic theory, what goes on in the mind? That’s an endlessly fascinating question that I have."

Episode Description: We consider three expressions of Cordelia's immersion in the world of psychoanalysis - her novels, her theoretical writings, and her work as chair of the IPA in Culture Committee. She shares with us her interest in the minds of her fictional characters especially as they reveal Oedipal struggles. She reads an excerpt that reflects her attunement to conflicts related to seeing - the wish, the taboo, and the punishment. Her theoretical focus is on fine-tuning Freud's notion of aggression with her emphasis on the more fundamental self and other preservative drives. We discuss her interest in culture and in the enriching experience of linking images with words. We close with her sharing her personal journey having trained in Switzerland and now living in the States.

Our Guest: Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst and on the Faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute as well as of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society. Her area of expertise is metapsychology, in particular drive theory. She has published numerous papers and three books on theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis. Her 2018 publication Driven to Survive was a finalist of the American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize. She has published her first novel in German in 2019, Rousseaus Traum, and in 2020 her second novel Memory’s Eyes, and has just finished her third novel, Memento. Since 2017 she is the chair of the IPA in Culture Committee. She works in private practice in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

Recommended Readings:

Freud, S. (1908). On the Sexual Theories of Children. Standard Edition, 9.

Freud, S. (1940). An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. Standard Edition, 23.

Lispector, C. (2015). The Complete Stories. Translated from the Portuguese by K. Dodson. New York: New Directions.

NDiaye, M. (2013). Three Strong Women. Translated from the French by J. Fletcher. New York: Vintage Books.

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2018) Driven to Survive. Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books.

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2020) Memory's Eyes. A New-York Oedipus Novel. Queens, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books.

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2021) The Analyst as Storyteller / El analista como narrador. Queens, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books.

View Details

"We are all dependent and potentially addicted as well. We regularly use addictive objects whenever we are confronted with a circumstance that brings a lot of pain, emotional pain, more pain than we can bare."

Episode Description: We begin by reviewing how remarkably pervasive pornography is on the internet. Claudia discusses the impact that viewing arousing scenes on a screen can have on one's psychosexual development. She describes its effects on our neurochemistry as well as on one's capacity to develop creative sublimations. The fundamental issue as seen by both guests involves detours from intimacy which Jose describes as involving dehumanization. This intolerance for what he calls “mature dependency” is seen as underlying the turn to "impoverished, desolate and concrete internal scenarios." We close with a conversation on the challenges of treating patients who experience themselves as dehumanized and unknowingly treat their analysts similarly. Despite these difficulties, the analyst's acceptance of such moments contains the seeds for hope and renewal.

Our Guests: Claudia Spadazzi, MD, Full Member Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI) and International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). Clinical psychologist, gynecologist, sexual therapist. Visiting Professor in Psychosomatic Gynecology at Università Politecnica delle Marche. She has been part of the IPA Committees: IPA/IPSO, COWAP, Public Information, CAPSA, and currently is a member of IPA Health Committee. Co-founder of Italian Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Founder of the Freud’s bar, an outreach initiative. Founder of the Section of Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Festival of the Two Worlds, Spoleto.

Jose Zusman, MD President and Training Analyst at Rio de Janeiro’s Psychoanalytic Society, Post Doc at The Institute of Psychiatry of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/ Harvard under the mentorship of Edward Khantzian, Member of IPA Health Committee and Chair of IPA Subcommittee on Addiction

Linked Interviews:

The Mind, Body and Soul Podcast: Ep.9: A Gynecologist/ Psychoanalyst Treats Amenorrhea with Claudia Spadazzi, MD

https://harveyschwartzmd.com/2021/06/04/ep-9-a-gynecologist-psychoanalyst-treats-amenorrhea/

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch Podcast: Ep.8 A Psychoanalyst Encounters Patients with Addictions

http://ipaoffthecouch.org/2019/06/29/episode-8-a-psychoanalyst-encounters-patients-with-addictions/

Recommended Readings:

Applying Psychoanalysis in Medical Care, edited by Harvey Schwartz

Neuroscience of Internet Pornography Addiction: A Review and Update. Behav Sci 5(3): 388–433.

Kahn, M. .M. .R. (1979). Alienation in Perversion, London: Karnac

Doidge N. (2008).The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, London: Penguin

Solms M., Zellner M., Watts D., Panksepp J. (2011) Affective Neuroscientific and Neuropsychoanalytic Approaches to Two Intractable Psychiatric Problems: Why Depression Feels so Bad and What Addicts Really Want Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 2011

Balint, M. (1968/1979). The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression. Tavistock Publication. London.

Dodes, L (2003). The Heart of Addiction: A New Approach to Understanding and Managing Alcoholism and Other Addictive Behaviors, HarperCollins Publishers. New York.

Fairbairn, W: Then and Now (2014). Routledge Publishers. New York.

Khantzian, E.J. -Treating Addiction as a Human Process (1997). Jason Aronson.

New York

McDougall, J (1995). The Many Faces of Eros. W.W. Norton Company, Inc., New York.

View Details

"The acknowledgment of guilt it’s a prerequisite for reparation. There is no reparation without the acknowledgment of guilt and guilt arises when love and hatred come together within the same person. There is no need to feel guilt as long as we idealize a good object - there is no need to feel guilt as long as we have the bad object. When we discover that it is the same object, that our love feelings and our hatred are directed towards the same object, then guilt arises. I think of guilt more as a molecule, not as an atom."

Episode Description: We begin by clarifying the meaning of trauma from its commonplace references all the way to the trauma of parental figures maintaining a malignant view of their child. We discuss the impact of early trauma on development with particular attention to the limitations on the capacity for nuanced affect and symbolization. Heinz describes in detail how this level of concreteness lives in the analytic situation and is shared in the counter-transference. The analyst's ability to imperfectly tolerate the projection of badness into them is demonstrated in his clinical vignette. The patient describes herself, There is something in me which is part of me and not part of me which thinks that I only have a right to live if I feel bad. We learn how that addictive attachment to dependable badness sustains her until she needs it less over the course of her analysis. The deepening capacity to tolerate guilt and for whole object gratitude marks the analysand’s healing.

Our Guest: Heinz Weiss, M.D., is the Head of the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at the Robert Bosch Hospital in Stuttgart. He is also the head of the Medical Division and member of the directorate of the Sigmund-Freud Institute, Frankfurt/Main, and Chair of the Education Section of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Linked Episodes:

https://harveyschwartzmd.com/2021/06/04/ep-9-a-gynecologist-psychoanalyst-treats-amenorrhea/

http://ipaoffthecouch.org/2019/06/29/episode-8-a-psychoanalyst-encounters-patients-with-addictions/

Recommended Readings:

Money-Kyrle, R. (1956), Normal Countertransference and Some of Its Deviations. Int. J. Psychoanalysis 37: 360-366.

Rey, H. (1994), Universals of Psychoanalysis in the Treatment of Psychotic and Borderline States. London: Free Associations Books.

Steiner, J. (1993), Psychic Retreats. Pathological Organizations in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients. London, New York: Routledge.

Steiner, J. (2020), Illusion, Disillusion and Irony in Psychoanalysis. London, New York.

Weiss, H. (2009), Das Labyrinth der Borderline-Kommunikation [The Labyrinth of Borderline-Communication]. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

Weiss, H. (2020), A Brief History of the Super-Ego with an Introduction to Three Papers: Int. J. Psychoanal. 4 (2020), 724-734.

Weiss, H. (2020), A River with Several Different Tributary Streams: Reflections on the Repetition Compulsion. Int. J. Psychoanal. 101, 6: 1172-1187.

Weiss, H.(2021), The Conceptualization of Trauma in Psychoanalysis: An Introduction. Int. J. Psychoanal. 102, 4: 755-764.

View Details

"La gran propuesta que queremos avanzar a la sociedad civil, a la comunidad, es la posibilidad de que el psicoanálisis tenga un lugar para que la gente pueda acudir. Nuestra gran propuesta es fundamentalmente clínica, es la recepción de los quebrantos del sujeto, de los dolores de las mujeres, de la desesperación de los niños, de los familiares y la propuesta es justamente que estas personas puedan tener una escucha psicoanalítica."

["The great proposal that we want to advance to civil society, to the community, is the possibility that psychoanalysis has a place so that people come and be heard. Our proposal is fundamentally clinical - it is the reception of the injuries of the subject, the pain of the women, the despair of the children, of the relatives, and the proposal is precisely that these people can have a psychoanalytic listening."]

Descripción del Episodio: El Dr. Helí Morales comienza la entrevista haciendo referencia a dos instituciones que el ha fundado, la escuela de la Letra Psicoanalítica y la Fundación Social del Psicoanálisis, la primera esta dirigida a la formación de psicoanalistas y la segunda al trabajo de los psicoanalistas en la comunidad , en ciudades como Puebla, Oaxaca , Cuernavaca, Morelia y en Ciudad de México. El trabajo comunitario a través de las “Clínicas de la Escucha” está dirigido principalmente a trabajar con mujeres víctimas de violencia y con familiares de personas que han desaparecido. Desarrolla diferentes conceptos teóricos desde el pensamiento de Freud y Lacan para dar cuenta de la violencia entre lo seres humanos y de la crueldad como satisfacción de poder. Dr. Helí Morales considera fundamental que el psicoanálisis extienda sus fronteras para poder instalar un diálogo con la comunidad que permita abrir los conceptos psicoanalíticos para que nuestra práctica se pueda ver enriquecida.

Episode Description: Dr. Helí Morales begins the interview by referring to two institutions that he has founded- the School of the Psychoanalysis (Letra) and the Social Foundation of Psychoanalysis. The first is aimed at training psychoanalysts and the second to the work of psychoanalysts in the community, in cities such as Puebla, Oaxaca, Cuernavaca, Morelia, and Mexico City. Community work through the "Listening Clinics" is aimed mainly at working with women victims of violence and with relatives of people who have disappeared. Heli develops different theoretical concepts from Freud and Lacan to account for violence between human beings and cruelty as power satisfaction. He considers it essential that psychoanalysis extends its borders in order to establish a dialogue with the community that allows us to open psychoanalytic concepts so that our practice can be enriched.

Nuestro Invitado: Helí Morales Ph.D. fue ganador del Premio Sigourney 2020, otorgado por la Fundación Sigourney Trust en reconocimiento a su trayectoria de más de 10 años promoviendo el psicoanálisis en diferentes ámbitos de la vida social. El Dr. Helí Morales cuenta con una trayectoria reconocida en el campo del psicoanálisis en México y en otros países de América Latina, como así también en España y Francia. Ha creado dispositivos que facilitan la aplicación clínica del psicoanálisis a poblaciones de escasos recursos y situación vulnerable. Desde esta perspectiva, Helí Morales ha sido artífice de la creación de la Fundación Social del Psicoanálisis y de la Escuela Psicoanalítica (Letra).

Helí Morales cuenta con una sólida formación académica, es Doctor en Filosofía y Ciencias Sociales graduado de la Escuela de Altos Estudios en Ciencias Sociales de París. Estudió además la Maestría en Psicoanálisis y Campo Freudiano en la Universidad de París. También realizó la Maestría en Teoría Psicoanalítica en el Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Psicoanalíticos de México.

Our Guest: Helí Morales Ph.D. was the winner of the Sigourney Prize 2020 in recognition of his work of more than 10 years promoting psychoanalysis in different areas of social life. Dr. Helí Morales has a recognized career in the field of psychoanalysis in Mexico and other Latin American countries, as well as in Spain and France. He has created settings that facilitate the clinical application of psychoanalysis to a population with limited resources and a vulnerable situation. From this perspective, Helí Morales has been the creator of the Social Foundation of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic School (Letra)

He has a Doctor of Philosophy and Social Sciences from the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences in Paris. He also has a Master's in Psychoanalysis and Freudian Field at the University of Paris. He also completed a Master's Degree in Psychoanalytic Theory from the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Psicoanalíticos de México.

Recommended Readings:

Ana Petros. Compiladora. Sexualidad y lazos sociales, Buenos Aires, Letra Viva ediciones, 2018.

Andrés Manuel Jiménez. Compilador. La Cultura. Entre la Vida y la Muerte, México, Ed. Escuela de la Letra. 2020.

Helí Morales. Compilador. Psicoanálisis en la Cultura, México, Ed. Intempestivas, 2017.

Jacques Derrida. Estados de Ánimo del Psicoanálisis, Buenos Aires, Ed. Paidós, 2015.

Jacques Lacan. La Angustia, Buenos Aires, Ed. Paidós, 2014.

View Details

"In conflict, especially in war when we have massive conflict, each side believes that truth and right are on their side. It is very difficult to reason with each side because each side believes that right and truth are on their side.”

Episode Description: We begin by describing the current widespread craving for social homogeneity - the 'other' is deemed not only as foreign but foul and dangerous. Violence towards those who are different is tolerated if not valorized as purifying. Psychoanalysis has something to offer those who shout in order to not hear themselves. In addition to speaking with colleagues, we suggest the value of applying aspects of our work 'off the couch' to reach those who don't seek listening but can benefit from it. Ronald's work in Balint groups provides a model of outreach that perhaps can apply to the social/political arena as well. We conclude with welcoming ideas from listeners about how best to apply our skills to the wider world in which we live.

Our Guest: Ronald Doctor, MD is a Consultant Psychiatrist in Medical Psychotherapy and Forensic Psychotherapy, West London NHS Trust, and a Psychoanalyst in private practice. He is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Senior Member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation, Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Chair of the IPA Committee of Psychoanalysis and Law, and Board member of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. He has edited two books: Dangerous Patients: A Psychodynamic Approach to Risk Assessment and Management (2003) and Murder; a Psychotherapeutic Investigation (2008) and published History, murder and the fear of death, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytical Studies (2015) 12.2 152-160.

View Details

“The students are fascinated to see that someone who ordinarily they know behind the couch can be on the stand and try to influence social justice, and influence foster care systems, influence schools, churches and often corporations.”

Episode Description: We begin by recalling Dr. Kliman's 92nd birthday request of inviting trainees to participate in his work with the Harlem Family Institute and the Harlem Psychoanalytic Institute. He presents clinical examples especially around the issue of giving voice to those who suffered trauma. His teaching includes demonstrating how an analyst engages with the legal system in order to seek justice for ignored victims. We also discuss his recent thinking on PTSD and the altruistic communicative aspects of otherwise individually disabling symptoms. We close with his sharing with us his precarious health, the impact of his Holocaust family history, and the usefulness of his current analysis.

Our Guest: Gilbert Kliman, MD. Medical Director, Preventive Psychiatry Associates Medical Group and The Children's Psychological Health Center, Inc. Chairperson, Harlem Family Institute. Recipient 2016 Anna Freud Award, 2020 Humanitarian Award of The American Psychoanalytic Association. 2020 Rieger Award, AACAP. Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, Diplomate of Am. Board of Psychiatry and Neurology; Life Fellow and Diplomate of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; Certified Psychoanalyst for Children, Adolescents, and Adults, American Psychoanalytic Association, Diplomate; Fellow, American College of Psychoanalysts

Recommended Reading:

Schmidt Hellerau, C (2018) Driven to Survive. iP Books, NY NY

www.childrenspsychologicalhealthcenter.org (See especially the pages on “Reflective Network Therapy”, pages on “Results”, “Guided Activity Workbooks”)

www.harlemfamilyinstitute.org

Jeffery, E (2001) The Mortality of Psychoanalysts. J. Am. Psan. Assoc. 49:1.

Kliman, G (2010) Reflective Network Therapy in the Preschool Classroom. University Press of America, Durham MD. (available as hardcopy or Kindle at Amazon.com)

Kliman, G. (2020) Reflective Network Therapy for Childhood Autism and Childhood PTSD. J. Neuropsychoanalysis and Allied Disciplines. Volume 20, 2018 – Issue 2. https://doi.org/10.1080/15294145.2018.1535279

________. (2020). Regularity of IQ Rise With an Interpersonal Preschool Treatment: 81 Treated Preschoolers vs 63 Comparison and Controls. Honors presentation – Rieger Award. 2020 Virtual Meeting, 2020 - aacap.confex.com. For a copy of the data tables, write to gilbertkliman2008@gmail.com

__________ (2021 in preparation) A Unifying New Theory of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Children. Draft available from gilbertkliman2008@gmail.com

Those who wish video recordings of my 2018, 2019 or 2021 seminars on Forensics or on Reflective Network Therapy, write gilbertkliman2008@gmail.com

View Details

"A large group [of analysts] sitting in the circular Tavistock manner talked about their reactions to the state of the world. It wasn’t just about the law about Poland and the Holocaust but also about the populist movements that were gaining ground in many places. The psychoanalysts were saying ” What can we do? What can psychoanalysts do?” I thought to myself “Well, the IPA holds a wealth of expertise, certainly psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic thinking can make a difference in our troubled world."

Episode Description: Dr. Wolfe begins by sharing with us a pivotal moment in her decision to run for office. It was when she encountered political censorship, false facts, and indoctrination that she chose to seek a leadership role in the IPA. She describes her plans to bring our specifically psychoanalytic skills to make a difference in the larger social arena. She shares with us the variety of people and programs that are currently functioning in relation to the wider world. She feels that we can continue the tradition of being involved in our communities that originated in the 1920s and ‘30s in Europe. In sum, Dr. Wolfe asks and challenges, "We have so much to offer why don't we share it with the world."

Our Guest: Harriet Wolfe, M.D., is President of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Past President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Her scholarly interests include clinical applications of psychoanalytic research, organizational processes, female development, and therapeutic action. She has a longstanding commitment to psychoanalytic public health intervention. She has co-authored a number of psychoanalytically informed guided activity workbooks for children, parents, and teachers to help children cope with natural and manmade disasters. She teaches analysts-in-training, psychiatric residents, and junior psychiatric faculty about the psychodynamic understandings of severely ill patients and the value of listening to listening to a la Haydee Faimberg in the clinical setting. She has a private practice of psychoanalysis and individual and couple’s psychoanalytic psychotherapy in San Francisco.

View Details

"I decided I would try to understand things psychologically because it seemed to me that the current wisdom that people were acting as rational actors operating in their own best interests didn’t actually fit the facts. Many people and communities were doing things that were harmful to themselves. I thought, ‘Well, one profession that spends a lot of its time exploring why individuals and indeed communities do things that harm themselves rather than operating in their best interest is psychiatry and indeed psychoanalysis’. So I went into medicine and qualified in medicine and then in psychiatry and later I went into analysis and tried to explore individual psychoanalytic work, but also group analysis, family therapy - any of the approaches that seemed to me would deepen our understanding."

Episode Description: John begins by describing the early family influences on his interest in hearing others’ points of view. He developed this orientation and eventually trained as a psychiatrist and then received training in psychoanalysis which he has brought to the many negotiations in which he has participated. He learned to appreciate the centrality of relationship building in his political work. We discuss the fundamentals of analytic listening as it applies in the political arena which includes the expectation that disruptions inevitably characterize the back and forth of these tense collaborations. He describes his ongoing work in monthly IPA-affiliated meetings that are devoted to considering how a psychoanalytic perspective may ease struggles in the international arena. We close with his explaining the meaning of his title of Lord.

Our Guest: John, Lord Alderdice FRCPsych is a psychiatrist who served as leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland for eleven years. Dr. Alderdice played a significant role in negotiating the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. He then stood down as Party Leader and became the first Speaker of the new Northern Ireland Assembly. As the first Assembly mandate was ending, he was appointed by the British and Irish Governments to be one of four international commissioners appointed to monitor security normalization and close down the illegal paramilitary activities in Ireland. He had been appointed in 1996 to the House of Lords where he chaired the Liberal Democrat caucus during the Liberal/Conservative Coalition Government in the United Kingdom. He was also for many years a psychoanalytical psychiatrist in Belfast where he established the Centre for Psychotherapy and a range of analytically informed trainings. Now retired from clinical work he is a Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, at the University of Oxford, and is the Director of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict.

Recommended Readings:

Alderdice, John, Lord (2010) Off the couch and round the conference table, Chap 1, 15 – 32, in Off the Couch – Contemporary Psychoanalytic Applications, ed Alessandra Lemma and Matthew Patrick, Routledge, London, and New York ISBN: 978-0-415-47615-7

Alderdice, John, Lord, (2017) Fundamentalism, Radicalization and Terrorism Part I: Terrorism as Dissolution in a Complex System, Psychoanal. Psychotherapy

Alderdice, John, Lord, (2017) Fundamentalism, Radicalization and Terrorism Part II: Fundamentalism, Regression and Repair, Psychoanal. Psychotherapy,

Alderdice, John, Lord (2021) On the Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism, Chap 11, 193 - 212, in A Deeper Cut – Further Explorations of the Unconscious in Social and Political Life, ed. David Morgan, Phoenix Publishing House, Bicester, UK ISBN-13: 978-1-912691-19-7

Alderdice, John, Lord (2021) Conflict, Complexity, and Cooperation, New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 33: Iss. 1, Article 9.

View Details

"I jump into a book - we take a book into our hands, and I become everybody, everywhere in every era. I become Emma Bovary - it is a very famous expression by Flaubert saying, “I am Emma Bovary, Emma Bovary c’est moi.” I become someone else in a different place, in a different time, in a different body, sometimes in a different sex. I can even become an alien, a princess, a count. Then I let go of my defenses and I delve into my existential struggles but in this transitional space of literature which is so unique because the story of the characters is our story"

Episode Description: We begin our conversation about the reading experience with Merav sharing with us her story of growing up in a family of writers. We discuss the factors within us that lead us to read and how it shares certain similarities with the clinical encounter. She considers the use we make of literature to help us make the intolerable more playfully bearable. The work of Jorge Semprun is discussed with examples given from his memoir Literature or Life. Merav shares with us her sense that the depressive position informs and allows for a more ethical engagement with the literary experience. We close with her reading the poem Eating Poetry by Mark Strand.

Our Guest: Merav Roth Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society; She is the head of the psychoanalytic psychotherapy program, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University; and a researcher of psychoanalysis and culture (mainly literature and trauma). She is the former chair of the interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in psychoanalysis and the former founder and chair of the post-graduate Klein studies, both at the psychoanalytic psychotherapy program, Sackler School of Medicine. Together with Joshua Durban, Roth edited and wrote the Preface and introductions to the book Melanie Klein – Essential Papers II and also edited Klein's Psychoanalysis of Children and Brenman Pick's Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter. Her book Reading the Reader – a Psychoanalytic Perspective on Literature, was published by Routledge and is translated into Spanish.

Recommended Readings:

Jorge Semprun. Literature or life - Penguin, 1997.

Merav Roth. A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature - Reading the Reader, Routledge, 2020.

Merav Roth. Mutual Witnessing between a Writer and her Readers in Etty Hillesum's Diaries, 1941 -1943 Psychoanalytic Review, 107(6), December 2020

Merav Roth (2018) True Love as the Love of Truth, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 15:2, 186-198.

Merav Roth. Transference in the Days of Corona(IPA web) -

Etti Hillessum's book: An Interrupted Life: Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum [1941-43]

(a tremendously inspiring diary of a young woman during the Holocaust)

View Details

"The frame begins to cry - something gets broken in the analytic session. What do we do then? We interpret just based on early material, what we know about the patient, some kind of reconstruction? Or are we facing a piece of reality that cannot be analyzed, just analyzed. It might be acknowledged that you have to face it in some way or other, and this is the similarity with what might happen when the 4th wall is disrupted."

Episode Description: We begin with an understanding of the 4th wall as it refers to the actor's stage - the removal from reality, immersion in metaphor, and the illusion of not being witnessed. Isaac describes how this informs his sense of the analytic frame which he sees as a "choreography between the internal and external worlds." We discuss the challenge of engaging patients when the dyad together faces external dangers. These moments provide an opportunity for "connectivity" to be followed by a return to metaphor. We close by discussing his personal journey from Argentina to eventually landing in the United States. We consider the similarities and differences between analysis in Buenos Aires and in New York.

Our Guest: Isaac Tylim, PsyD is on the Faculty and Clinical Consultant New York University Postdoctoral Program and is a Fellow and Training Analyst at the Institute For Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is a former Secretary of the IPA committee in the UN, Co-Founder of the Trauma and Disaster Specialization Program at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, and is a past member of the editorial board of JAPA

He played the role of Ferenczi in a theatrical event based on the correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi- (Prague, London, Buenos Aires, New York, Philadelphia. Denver)

Recommended Readings:

The Power of Apologies in Transforming Resentment into Forgiveness, I J of Applied Psychoanal Studies, 2005. 2(3).

*Living with Terror. Working with Trauma, Skyscrapers and Bones. Memorials to Lost Objects in the Culture of Desire.* In D Knaffo,2004, NY: Aronson

Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Space (co-editor) 2003, NY: Pace University

Ethical Notes on Disrupted Frames and Violated Boundaries.

Psychoanalysis in Argentina. A Couch with a View. Psychoanalytic Dialogues.1996 6 (5)

Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis. (Co-editor), 2018 London and New York: Routledge

The Fourth Wall Comes Down. Creative Responses to the Unexpected Room. 2018 NY IPTAR

The Power of Apologies in Transforming Resentment into Forgiveness I J of Applied Psychoanal Studies.2005 2(3).

View Details

“First, when we started to work online, it was exhausting. Now, I cannot say it is exhausting at the same level but it is still exhausting. You feel very tired and you miss the in-person contact. It has been more than one and a half years...I think that we will be able to think about the consequences and the impact of working in this way, and in the upcoming years we will have a lot of material.”

Episode Description: We begin with a review of our first two podcast conversations - the first being the inaugural episode and the second coming one year later at the beginning of the COVID lockdown. Now we are able to look back at what we hope is the worst of the pandemic and its impact on our lives and on analytic practice. The clinical implications for online and in-person contact will be studied for some time ahead. Virginia discusses her views on the politics of the IPA, the meaning of being the first woman president, and the importance of her being a child analyst. We close with an affirmation of her optimism for our field which is seen as more essential than ever.

Our Guest: Virginia Ungar M.D, is a Training Analyst at the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association (APdeBA) where she lives and practices. She specializes in child and adolescent analysis, was the former Chair of the IPA’s Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis Committee (COCAP) and of the Committee for Integrated Training. Dr. Ungar was given the Platinum Konex Award for Psychoanalysis in 2016.

She has just completed her term as the President of the International Psychoanalytic Association, 2017-2021.

View Details

They forced me into this tiny little interrogation room off the big anteroom, a whole mob of policemen shouting and screaming. I thought I would perish there, that I was going to die there and then, which was exactly what they wanted me to think. Their intention was to overwhelm me with terror, and they did. But then Swanepoel’s interrogation partner, a man named Harvey Richter, produced this brick and he held it up in front of me right across my eyes and I thought, looking at its granular surface, that it would abrade my face when he hit me with it. But he didn't, he put it down in front of me and said: Stand on it.

Episode Description: John begins our journey through his past by describing his family life before his arrest and torture at the age of 21 at the hands of the South African Security Police. We learn of his family's longstanding history of opposition to political injustice. He then recounts his methods of survival during his imprisonment which included forming a 'relationship' with the brick he was forced to stand on for days and nights. He also internally relied upon his loving parents, his girlfriend, his Jewish identity, and The Sounds of Silence. He was held in solitary confinement and brutalized until his release to travel to Israel.

After establishing his life in England, John eventually began training as a psychotherapist. He describes having life-changing personal treatments including two analyses and he has become a contributor to the field especially to the world of analytic group therapy. He shares with us vignettes of patients he has worked with and how he has turned 'swords into plowshares' in his efforts at transforming his own scars into the act of healing others.

Our Guest: John Schlapobersky, BA MSc is a psychoanalytic and couple psychotherapist and a group analyst accredited by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. After many years in private practice at the Group Analytic Practice, he established his own Bloomsbury Psychotherapy Practice in 2009. He is also a training analyst and faculty member at the Institute of Group Analysis and an honorary research fellow at the Birkbeck College University of London. He has served as faculty at the London Centre for Psychotherapy, Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (TCCR) and is a founding member of the British Society for Couple Psychotherapists and Counsellors. He teaches internationally on topics that include group studies, psychoanalytic and relational theory, and trauma. His commitments include programs in Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the USA, and elsewhere. He was Program Chair for the Group Analytic Society Symposium in 2011: Cultures, Conflict, and Creativity. John was formerly a Consultant Psychotherapist for the Traumatic Stress Clinic, London, and The Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture which, as a founding trustee, he helped establish in 1985. It is now called Freedom From Torture, a leading human rights charity.

Recommended Readings:

Bernstein, H. (1994) The Rift: The Exile Experience of South Africans. London: Jonathan Cape. Reissued Persephone Books, Bath UK, 2020.

Pines, M. (1998) Circular Reflections: Selected Papers in Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis. Jessica Kingsley, London.

Rosenthal, N. (2014) The Gift of Adversity. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.

Sachs, Albie. (1969) The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. London: Sphere. Reissued Africa Book Centre, London, 1978.

Sachs, Albie (1990) The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. Oakland: University of California Press. Reissued Souvenir Press, 2014.

Schlapobersky, J. (2016) From The Couch To The Circle: Group-Analytic Psychotherapy In Practice. Routledge, London.

Schlapobersky, John R.(2021) When They Came For Me: The Hidden Diary Of An Apartheid Prisoner. Berghan Books, Oxford and New York.

View Details

I observe what many of the French analysts and my supervisees say [about online treatment] - they are absolutely happy by how fantastic the patients talk, they talk much easier than before, they have dreams, and they relate their dreams and even sexual fantasies which they never did before. I understand them of course because they talk to them as easily as they would talk to a taxi driver that they will never see again.

Episode Description: We begin by recalling our first conversation in March 2020 (Episode #43) at the beginning of the lockdown in Paris and the switch from in-person to online analytic treatment. We discuss the impact of the missing bodies in the office and its implications for the freedom that some patients now feel to be more open. Marilia wondered about how analysands will feel when they return to in-person treatment after revealing more online than they would have otherwise tolerated. This forced experiment in technique will hopefully shed light on what is essential in our work in contrast to what are non-essential "rules."

We also discuss her 45 years of practicing analysis, her deepened comforts in aloneness, and her view on the future of our field.

Our Guest: Marilia Aisenstein is a Training and Supervising Analyst in the Hellenic Society and the Paris Society and past president of the Paris Society. She has served as the IPA's Board representative to the Executive Committee and the past president of the International New Groups Committee. She has been the Editor and co-founder of the French Review of Psychosomatics and President of the Paris Institute of Psychosomatics.

Her most recent book translated into English is Desire, Pain, and Thought.

Episode referred to

http://ipaoffthecouch.org/2020/03/31/episode-43-a-report-from-paris-with-marilia-aisenstein/

View Details

A decade ago I started to tell my colleagues that there is something big here in the therapeutic room and if we don’t talk about it in the room and in supervision there’s something we are missing here. We are not talking just about two people who can speak only on the humanistic level - just to be human one to the other or a good object one to the other. We have to talk about what is going on outside and how every one of us in this therapeutic dyad is coming from a threatening group to the other.

Episode Description: We begin by appreciating how ethnic affiliations have a presence in the therapeutic encounter. Whether therapist/patient cultural allegiances are manifestly similar or different, when the therapeutic space allows for exploration internal meaning can be revealed. These possibilities become fraught when the external representations of these ethnicities are at actual war. Dr. Srour describes working through his countertransference struggles which he felt was essential in coming to empathize with the internal experiences of his Jewish patients. He characterizes this as 'political countertransference' and feels that the freedom to speak of outside realities in the treatment dyad is an essential aspect of a deepening psychotherapy.

Our Guest: Dr. Roney Srour, a Palestinian-Israeli clinical and educational psychologist is married and the father of 2 sons who lives in Haifa and works as a clinical psychologist in the Israeli Ministry of Health and in private practice. Dr. Srour teaches and researches “psychodynamic psychotherapy with cultural and political competence” at the University of Haifa and is a lecturer and supervisor in two post-graduate programs of psychotherapy. He is an activist in the field of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Recommended Readings:

Gorkin, M. (1986). Counter-Transference in Cross-Cultural Psychotherapy: The Example of Jewish Therapist and Arab Patient. Psychiatry, 49, 69-79.

Srour, R. (2015) Transference and Countertransference Issues During Times of Violent Political Conflict: The Arab Therapist-Jewish Patient Dyad, Clinical Social Work Journal, 43(1).

Baum, N. (2011). Issues in Psychotherapy with Clients Affiliated with the Opposing Side in a Violent Political Conflict. Clinical Social Work Journal, 39, 91-100.

Altman, N. (2000). Black and White Thinking: A Psychoanalyst Reconsiders Race. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(4), 589-605.

Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun Lynne Rienner Publishers 1999

View Details

"Thousands or millions of people who will never meet each other sharing certain sentiments - these sentiments have historical, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. When I started this, of course, conflicts between large groups have certain realistic aspects as you can imagine: political, personal and legal ones, but underneath those I figured out that everything is in the name of maintaining and protecting one's large group."

Episode Description: Dr. Volkan begins by describing his experience of loss and conflicted mourning as a stimulus for his life-long study of large group phenomena and its application to international diplomacy. We review his concepts of 'chosen trauma' and 'chosen glory' as they function to emotionally collapse time for large groups seeking to intergenerationally transmit a sense of collective entitlement. Dr. Volkan gives examples of how his understanding of large group phenomena has informed and impacted diplomatic negotiations. We conclude with his sharing his view of both the progress that psychoanalysis has made over the past half century and some of his concerns for its future.

Our Guest: Vamık Volkan, MD is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, a former president of the International Society of Political Psychology, the Virginia Psychoanalytic Society, the American College of Psychoanalysts and the Emeritus President of the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI). He applied a growing theoretical and field-proven base of knowledge to issues such as ethnic tension, racism, transgenerational transmissions, leader-follower relationships, and other aspects of national and international conflict. He was a member of the International Negotiation Network (INN) under the directorship of former President Jimmy Carter (1989-2000). He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times with letters of support from 27 countries. Dr. Volkan is the author, co-author, or editor of sixty books.

Recommended Readings:

Volkan, V.D. (2006, 2019). Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts. Durham, NC.: Pitchstone.

Volkan, V. D. (2013). Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace. Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing.

Volkan, V. D. (2015). A Nazi Legacy: A Study of Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation and Remembering Through Action. UK: Karnac.

Volkan, V. D. (2017). Immigrants and Refugees: Trauma, Perennial Mourning, and Border Psychology. UK: Karnac.

Volkan, V. D. (2020). Large-Group Psychology: Racism, Societal Divisions, Narcissistic Leaders and Who We Are Now. UK: Phoenix.

Volkan, V. D. (2021). Sexual Addiction and Hunger for Maternal Care: Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Art of Supervision. UK: Phoenix.

View Details

"I was somebody who all throughout my academic career was very affected by good teachers. In fact, my becoming a psychologist – I took my first psychology undergraduate course as a junior and it had such a profound effect upon me that I stayed in college an extra year to get all the requirements to go on to a Ph.D. program. There have been certain teachers that I’ve had that have really inspired me and changed my life."

Episode Description: We begin by discussing the origins of the book Dear Candidate which consists of 42 letters written by senior analysts from around the world to candidates in training. Notable is the enthusiasm, wisdom, affection, and encouragement that the older generation conveys to the future generation of psychoanalysts. Fred and I each read to each other favorite paragraphs from selected letters that emphasize valuing international input into one's clinical thinking; tolerating uncertainty; recognizing one's place in the social/political arena; addressing the literal and fantasy-driven physicality of the work, and acknowledging all that it means to be an aging analyst. Fred shares with us his own journey of learning and the importance to him of having had teachers who made a difference in his life.

Our Guest: Fred Busch, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Dr. Busch has published over 70 articles in the psychoanalytic literature, and five books, primarily on the method and theory of treatment. His work has been translated into ten languages, and he has been invited to present over 160 papers and clinical workshops nationally and internationally. His last three books were: Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind; The Analyst's Reveries: Explorations in Bion's Enigmatic Concept; and Dear Candidate: Analyst from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education, and the Profession. All published by Routledge.

Recommended Readings:

Busch, F. (2013). Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind: A psychoanalytic method and theory. Routledge: London

Busch, F. (2019). The Analyst's Reveries: Explorations in Bion's Enigmatic Concept. Routledge: London.

Green, A. (1974). Surface Analysis, Deep Analysis (The Role of the Preconscious in Psychoanalytical Technique). Int. Rev. Psycho-Anal., 1:415-423.

Gray, P. (1982). "Developmental Lag" in the Evolution of Technique for Psychoanalysis of Neurotic Conflict. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 30:621-655.

SEARL, M. N. 1936 Some Queries on Principles of Technique Int. J. Psychoanal. 17:471-493

View Details

"She [his mother] felt that his kicking was deliberate evil and she responded with wishes for an abortion. She also stopped breastfeeding because she felt that the sucking was so strong and aggressive that it was destroying her. Without the father as a triangulating object he had no one to contain this - every child needs a container of his aggression."

Episode Description: July 22, 2021 marks the 10-year anniversary of the murder of 77 individuals and the injuring of hundreds more by Anders Behring Breivik - the largest mass murder in Norway since World War II. This was a freely admitted act done under the guise of an extreme right-wing ideology of 'saving Europe.' We discuss the role of psychoanalytic hypothesizing in such cases given that "In psychoanalysis, the validity of an interpretation lies in the dialogue with the patient..." We consider the relative importance of individual psychopathology vs cultural ideology with special attention to what leads such an individual to cross over from imagination to action. On the cultural side, it is noted that we face a challenge in recognizing both the value of opening one's culture to new influences and also honoring the mores and history of one's traditions.

Our Guest: Dr. Philos Siri Erika Gullestad is professor emeritus of clinical psychology, University of Oslo, and Training and Supervising Analyst, IPA. She is former Head of the Department of Psychology and former President of the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Gullestad is the author of many articles and books in psychoanalysis. Her most recent book, with Bjørn Killingmo, is Theory and practice of psychoanalytic therapy. Listening for the subtext. Routledge, 2020. Dr. Gullestad was awarded the Sigourney Prize 2019.

View Details

"In such moments [of shared danger] you work with the present and not the representation.In analysis we work all the time with representation - the transference is a representation, the countertransference is a representation. They are related to our past when such things happened. At these moments it’s not important if the patient goes over theirOedipus or not, if he has a good momma or a bad momma.In this moment I can say to the patient: “Wow, we are going through something both together, try to talk, I will talk and you talk, and we will see what is coming up from that."

Episode Description: The realities of the recent hostilities between Israel and Hamas challenge familiar conditions for analytic work. The threat of imminent physical danger to both parties in the dyad pervades the clinical setting at such times as it has intermittently for decades. Dr. Gampel describes years of experience integrating the facts of external forces into a treatment process that simultaneously honors internal reality as well. We discuss her work with her analytic colleagues in their study group on this topic called A Wall Falls Down as well as her 30 years of work in Gaza with her Palestinian colleagues. We close with her recounting her family's journey from Lithuania to Argentina and then to Israel.

Our Guest: Yolanda Gampel, Ph.D., Training Analyst, and past president (1989–1991) of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society; Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Psychology and Program of Advanced Psychotherapy, Sackler Medical School, Tel-Aviv University; Invited Associate Professor, l’Université de Paris Nanterre de 1985-1987 et à l’Université Lumière II en 2001 Lyon

Dr. Gampel won the Hayman International Prize for Published Work Pertaining to Traumatized Children and Adults, 2001, and the Mary S. Sigourney Award, 2005.

Dr. Gampel's work has focused on social violence and its impact on development and on the therapeutic process. She has worked with Shoah survivors and South American and Israeli victims of trauma. She has also established a training program in dynamic psychotherapy for Palestinian psychologists in Gaza and participated in the training program organized from the summer of 1993 until 2000 through the auspicious of Tel Aviv University.

Recommended Readings:

Yolanda Gampel, The Wounded Passion: The Inner Experience of an Israeli Psychoanalyst bPs 467-477 | Published online: 22 Oct 2020, in INQUIRY: Summary:A Moment of Theoretical Focus on Passion, Faith, and Truth. Silence and Bearing Witness, the Riddle of Survival. The Background of the Unheimlich. Events in Israel and Their Effects on Psychotherapeutic Working Trough.

Yolanda Gampel, The Pain of the Social, Pages 1219-1235 | Published online: 23 Dec 2020 International Journal of Psychoanalysis

Puget, J., and L. Wender. 1982. “Analista y paciente en mundos superpuestos.” [Analyst and Patient in Overlapping Worlds]. Psicoanálisis4: 502–503. [Google Scholar]

Puget, J., and L. Wender. 1987. “Aux Limites de l’analysabilite. Tyrannie Corporelle et Sociale.” [At the Limits of Analysability: Physical and Social Tyranny]. Revue Française de Psychanalyse 51 (3): 869–885

Janine Puget. How Difficult It is to Think About Uncertainty and Perplexity Pages 1236-1247 | Published online: 23 Dec 2020. International Journal of Psychoanalysis

View Details

"A big part of my graduate education at Harvard was critical thinking. The general idea that theories come and go, even the data come and go because it’s modified as new experimental paradigms develop. So the idea of fixity. that “now we now know and it’s set in stone”, was not at all in my thinking by the time I left Graduate School if it ever had been."

Episode Description: Guest host, Dr. Joel Whitebook, interviews another elder from our field, Dr. Fred Pine. A discussion of the history of Dr. Pine's long and rich career is not only fascinating in its own right, but it also raises an important question: what combination of character traits and personal experience allows one to become an independent thinker? Dr. Whitebook also invites Dr. Pine to explain his basic theoretical approach which is both clinical and developmental. When he observes a phenomenon in an adult patient, Dr. Pine asks “what can we hypothesize about the person's development so that it would have produced the phenomenon in question?” And when he observes a developmental phenomenon, he asks the opposite question “what sort of adaptive and pathological phenomena might we expect to result from it in the person's later life?” It was through this use of a clinical/developmental approach that Dr. Pine was able to introduce many important innovations in our field.

Our Guest: Dr. Fred Pine is a Professor Emeritus in psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In 1956, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University's Social Relations Program, where he studied with such eminent scholars as Henry Murray, Gordon Allport, Clyde Kluckhorn, and Talcott Parsons. After working for six years at the NYU Research Center for Mental Health, Dr. Pine did his psychoanalytic training at The New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In addition to his own extensive contributions to the literature, Dr. Pine was also a co-author of a psychoanalytic classic, The Psychological Birth of the Infant.

Recommended Readings:

Pine, F. (1979). On the Pathology of the Separation-Individuation Process as Manifested in Later Clinical Work: An Attempt at Delineation. Int. J. Psychoanal. 60: 226-242.

Pine, F. (1993). A Contribution to the Analysis of the Psychoanalytic Process. PsychoanalQuarterly. 62: 185-205, 1993.

Pine, F. (2004). Mahler's Concepts of "Symbiosis" and "Separation-Individuation": Revisited, Reevaluated, Refined. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 52: 511-533.

Pine, F. (2006). If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Theme and Variations. Psychoanalytic Psychology. 23:1-7.

Pine, F. (2011). Beyond Pluralism: Psychoanalysis and the Workings of Mind. Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 80: 823-856.

Pine, F. (2005). Theories of Motivation in Psychoanalysis. In: A Textbook of Psychoanalysis. Eds. Person, E. S., Cooper, A., and Gabbard, G. Washington, D.C.:American Psychiatric Assoc. Press, pp. 3-19.

Pine, F. (1998) Chapter 5. The ego in the session. In: Diversity and Direction in Psychoanalytic Technique. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press

View Details

"In the group that I co-chair on the Aging Analyst we’ve talked a lot about what difference it makes having practiced a long time. One of the ideas that emerged is not only that this varies from person to person, but that there is a lot more freedom to use some different approaches, less rigid, less specifically theory focused. The role of life experience certainly changes what you hear and how you hear it."

Episode Description: We discuss how practicing analysis for many decades impacts one's approach to the work. Dr. Notman has focused her career on women's psychology, especially as it relates to body image and reproduction. She has also worked at the interface between psychoanalysis and psychiatry. A leitmotif of her analytic thinking is the importance of listening to the patient's felt experience — not theory and not what you think they should be saying. We discuss the impact on one's work of living through history and cultural movements, from anti-Semitism to feminism to racism, and how this informs one's attunement to the experience of otherness that is both universal and particular. We close with some thoughts on the importance of organized psychoanalysis widening its tent while also maintaining what is unique to becoming a psychoanalyst.

Our Guest: Malkah Notman, MD is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (BPSI) and has been practicing for over 50 years. She is a Professor at Harvard Medical School and on the faculty of Cambridge Health Alliance. She is co-chair of the BPSI committee on the Aging Analyst where they have been exploring the impact of age on changes in one's work and also on working with older patients.

Recommended Readings:

Settlage, C. Transcending Old Age. IJP 1996, 77, part 3, pp 549-564

Notman, M. Reflections on Widowhood and its Effects on the Self, Psychodynamic Psychiatry. 2014, vol 42, pp 65-88

Orgel, S.A. Patient Returns. JAPA ,2013:61, pp935-946

View Details

"I started to notice that the very things that I was seeing in patients on the couch were occurringat a much greater macro level in society - the issues of disavowal, of exceptionalism, of abandoning reality if it means that you have to give something up. That is why I got so interested in the subject as an analyst because I thought: We have something to say about what is happening in the world."

Episode Description: We discuss the differing states of mind with which the climate crisis is currently being viewed. One assumption is built on exceptionalism with its characteristic omnipotence of thought, idealization, and denial of separateness. The other is object-related with its recognition of fragility, mourning, and the potential for joy.

We consider the implications of applying insights from the couch to the culture. We appreciate the importance of 'lively entitlement' as contrasted with its narcissistic version and how that liveliness invigorates so many of our passions. We review case material, the recognition of both manifest and latent levels of meaning, and the role of 'therapeutic activism'. We conclude with learning a bit about Sally's early years and its role in her current dedication.

Our Guest: Sally Weintrobe, BScHons, Chartered Clin. Psychol., a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society, and chair of the International Psychoanalytic Association's Climate Committee. Formerly she was a member of senior staff at the Tavistock Clinic, Hon Senior Lecturer at the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London and she Chaired the Scientific Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Society. Her published areas of interest are entitlement attitudes and their relationship to grievance and complaint, prejudice, our relationship to nature and psychoanalytic reflections on the climate crisis. She is one of the 31 Global Commissioners from different disciplines for the (2021) Cambridge Sustainability Report. She edited and contributed to (2012) Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New Library of Psychoanalysis.

Her new book is (2021) Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare, published by Bloomsbury.

Recommended Readings:

Psychoanalytic and Psychosocial Perspectives on the Climate Crisis. Hoggett, P. (2012).

Climate Change in a Perverse Culture. In S. Weintrobe (Ed.), Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: New Library of Psychoanalysis and Routledge.

Orange, D. (2017). Climate Change, Psychoanalysis and Radical Ethics. Oxford: Routledge.

Randall, R. (2012). Great Expectations: The Psychodynamics of Ecological Debt. In S. Weintrobe (Ed.). op cit.

Searles, H. F. (1972). Unconscious Processes in Relation to the Environmental Crisis. Psychoanal. Rev., 59 (3): 361–74.

General Background to the Climate Crisis. Higgins, P. (2015). Eradicating Ecocide. London: Shepheard Walwyn.

Klein, N. (2019). On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. London: Penguin.

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. London: Penguin.

Thunberg, G. (2019). No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. London: Penguin.

Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Penguin.

View Details

"It’s very exhilarating to have shared an in-depth experience with another person the way you do as an analyst. You know the inner workings of people’s struggles, of their strengths, and of the things they overcome. We’re granted such a privilege to be part of someone’s’ world and to be able to help them get more freedom and more pleasure in that world, and when it works well, the patients are really exhilarated in the end."

Episode Description: Dr. Kantrowitz discovered many facets of the analytic process, termination period, and post-analytic time that challenge assumptions under which the field has been operating. She derived these conclusions from detailed interviews with 82 individuals who had completed their analyses. We review the common post analysis intrapsychic processes that former analysands face and recognize that neither certainties nor formulas do justice to the authenticity and variety of their experiences. We discuss the multiplicity of affects that accompany endings and review the delicacy of negotiating the closeness and distance that the two individuals may face in post-analytic contacts. We conclude with Dr. Kantrowitz sharing some of the personal meanings that her interest in termination has had for her.

Our Guest: “Hard to believe; I have been doing psychoanalysis for almost 50 years. I began my training at a time when psychologists were not permitted to analyze patients except for research purposes. If not for this requirement, I wonder whether I would ever have begun a research project since my interest was only in being a clinician — and it is true to this day. Since my early progressive education taught me to question authority, it was always hard for me to just accept what we were taught.

My research has been in investigating issues that made no sense to me: the ability to predict who is analyzable in advance; psychoanalysis as a one-person enterprise; countertransference as inevitably pathology rather than informative; how we preserve confidentiality in writing about patients; there being only one way of terminating a psychoanalysis.

My interest has always been in character. I have always been a reader of novels, wanted to be a writer originally but lacked that imaginative ark. I've been lucky to find a way to integrate my love of character and writing in my professional work. I have written four books: The Patient's Impact on the Analyst (1996); Writing about Patients: responsibilities, risks, and ramifications (2006); Myths of Termination: What patients can teach analyst about endings (2014) and The Role of Patient - Analyst Match in the Process and Outcome of Psychoanalysis (2020) as well as over 40 papers. Over the years my writing has become more and more purely clinical, and I have felt increasingly able to be more personal, hopefully without being inappropriate, in what I write.

I love to supervise, to teach, to mentor and have been fortunate to have ample opportunity to do all of that as a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute as well as working with many other analysts in other states. Psychoanalysis has also provided me with a world of colleagues many of whom have become close friends. My hope is that I have helped to convey and provide for others some of the richness and joy that psychoanalysis has brought to my life.

Recommended Readings:

Kantrowitz, J.L. (2015). Myths of Termination: What Patients Can Teach Psychoanalysts About Endings. Routledge, London

Kantrowitz, J.L. Reflections on Mortality: A Patient Faces Death. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Assn.2017: 65:673-686

Kantrowitz, J.L. A Psychoanalytic Memoir: The Analyst, Enabled and Disabled by What's Persona. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Assn,2020.:68 83-100.

View Details

"The workbook contextualizes the child in his or her network. The idea being that the more the child has a supportive network and that they can use this network, the more they will be able to

face the aspects of COVID-19. So it’s not only the illness and having people in the family who are ill or might have died, but also the other impacts of COVID-19 which is to livelihood."

Episode Description:

We begin by describing the challenges to making mental health resources available to children in a materially impoverished community in South Africa. Ms. Davids organized a team and built upon the work done by Dr. Gilbert Kliman who had created a workbook for American children to aid in processing the difficult emotional circumstances of living under COVID. She and her South African colleagues modified this workbook to meet the cultural characteristics of the local community. We discuss the format and content of the workbook and its success in aiding the children in representing their individual voices as well as their place in the collective chorus. We close with her sharing her family history of community outreach in South Africa.

Our Guest:

Jennifer Davids M.Sc. Clinical Psychology (U.C.T) is a child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst, a member of the teaching staff at BPAS, a supervising analyst for child and adolescent psychoanalysis at the British Psychoanalytical Society in London as well as the Director, Africa Projects, at the Children's Psychological Health Center in San Francisco, California.

Workbook: http://www.sdu.uct.ac.za/sdu/publications/books

Email: kapjen@btinternet.com

Recommended Readings:

Eagle, G. and Kaminer, D. 2013 Continuous traumatic stress: Expanding the Lexicon of Traumatic Stress.Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 19,2,85-99.

Marans, S., Smaller, M., Twemlow, S. and Oppenheim, L. 2014 Round Table: Being A socially Active Psychoanalyst in the 21st Century. Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy 13,4, 283 -297.

Straker, G. & the Sanctuaries Counselling Team. 1987 The Continuous Traumatic Stress Syndrome: The single therapeutic interview Psychology in Society, 8, 48-78.

Holinger, P.C., Spira, N., Barrett, D. and Barrett, T.F. 2020 Psychoanalysis and public health: Potential for integration? International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 17:39-48.

View Details

"What kind of home [institute] have you got to live in? If you design a home, not as a refuge but where there is a place to be able to think, it’s a slightly different concept. I’m not going to hide you in this secondary container, but I am going to help you to think in this secondary container. Then it feels easier to turn to colleagues and be open to them and get help. Whereas if you think that colleagues are going to be making judgments about you in this more paranoid-schizoid way, then it is not a safe place to go. And then you become stuck doing things that otherwise you would not have done."

Description: We discuss the ambiguity between technical and common-sense language as it applies to clinical concepts, i.e. 'resistance' and 'boundaries'. We trace the development of early curiosity through the child's experience of frustration and encouragement. Internal conflict is valued as an intrapsychic capacity as well as that which takes place at the boundary of the analytic encounter. There, unconscious beliefs can be recognized as the internal constructions that they are which then allows for uncertainty, creativity, and curiosity. This has application to our understanding of ethics and collegiality which Philip describes as the 'secondary container' of our work. We close with a conversation about his childhood development that contributed to his current interests.

Our Guest: Philip Stokoe is a Psychoanalyst in private practice in London working with adults and couples, and is an Organisational Consultant, providing consultation to a wide range of organizations. He worked in the Adult Department of the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust between 1994 and 2012 and he was the Clinical Director from 2007.

During his career he developed a model for understanding organizations called the Healthy Organization Model. He also designed the Primary Care Psychotherapy Consultation Service (PCPCS) as well as two Masters’ courses and was the co-designer of the Couple Psychotherapy Training at the Tavistock Clinic. He is a member of the European Psychoanalytic Federation Forum on Institutional Matters, which studies the nature of psychoanalytic institutions.

His book, The Curiosity Drive: Our Need for Inquisitive Thinking, was published by Phoenix Publishing House in November 2020.

Recommended Readings:

Stokoe, P. (2000): Holding the Boundaries, Chapter 4 in S. Brookes & P. Hodson (Eds), The Invisible Matrix, Rebus Press.

Stokoe, P. (2003): Group Thinking, Chapter 6 in K. Kasinski, J. Pooley, A. Ward, & A. Worthington (Eds), Therapeutic Communities for Children & Young People.

Stokoe, P. (2010): The Theory and Practice of the Group Relations Conference, Chapter 9 in The Groups Book, Psychoanalytic Group Therapy: Principles and Practice, C. Garland (Ed), Karnac Books.

Stokoe, P. (2011): The Healthy and the Unhealthy Organisation: how can we help teams to remain effective? Chapter 13 in A. Rubitel & D. Reiss (Ed), Containment in the Community: Frameworks for Thinking about Antisocial Behaviour and Mental Health, Karnac Books.

Stokoe, P. (2013): James Fisher (1937-2012) An Appreciation. In: Couple and Family Psychoanalysis Vol 3 No. 1, pp 120-127.

Stokoe, P. (2013): Review of Richard III at Tobacco Factory, Bristol. In: Couple and Family Psychoanalysis Vol 3 No. 2, pp 263-266.

Morgan, M & Stokoe, P. (2014): Curiosity. In: Couple and Family Psychoanalysis 4(1) 42–55

Stokoe, P. (2015): Ethics and Complaints Procedures for Psychoanalytic Organisations: Some Thoughts About Principles. In: Couple & Family Psychoanalysis 5(2) 188–204

Stokoe, P. (2019): The Unconscious in Social and Political Life, Chapter 1, Where have all the adults gone? in Morgan, D (Ed); Bicester, Phoenix Publishing House

Stokoe, P. (2019): Loss in Organisations, in Akhtar, S (Ed), Loss: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms, Part 2, Chapter 4, Routledge

Stokoe, P. (2020): The Curiosity Drive: Our Need for Inquisitive Thinking, Bicester, Phoenix Publishing House

View Details

"We, as analysts, really need to use our psychoanalytic understanding of the value of the inner life of every individual and of the value of growth and development that occurs in a relationship. We need to use that kind of knowledge to find alternative ways, other than the intensive treatment we offer in our offices, to reach those not only in developing countries but also in our own country."

Episode Description: We begin with a conversation on the nature of altruism and the benefit it offers to the self. We specifically consider the role it plays in repairing "mismatches" that we all have in our pasts. Dr. Harrison describes the many activities of her international organization, Supporting Child Caregivers. She walks us through her early training in infant development and the learning curve she went through when she first brought that knowledge to an orphanage in El Salvador. Her experiences there taught her how to find the care-givers' language which enabled her to help them engage with the children with greater attunement. We consider the presence of trauma in the lives of these families and the help that sensitive caregiving can provide. A clinical vignette from her work in Pakistan demonstrates the power of 'magic moments.'

Our Guest:

Alexandra Murray Harrison, M.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in Adult and Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis, and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Harrison has an adult and child psychoanalytic and psychiatric private practice in Cambridge Massachusetts. She has a particular clinical interest in treating preschool children and consulting with their families and treating children with autistic spectrum disorders. In 2017, Dr. Harrison co-founded a non-profit, Supporting Child Caregivers, that offers training in infant-parent mental health to child caregivers throughout the world.

Dr. Harrison has co-authored a book on autism and published articles on numerous topics, including body image, play therapy, therapeutic change, and volunteer consultation. Dr. Harrison has lectured extensively in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Central and South America.

Recommended Readings:

Supporting Child Caregivers

Harrison AM (2014). The Sandwich Model: The 'Music and Dance' of Therapeutic Action, Internat J of Psychoanal, 95(2):313-340. Harrison AM (2017).

Harrison AM (2017). Altruism as Reparation of Mismatch or Disruption in the Self, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 37(7): 464-473

Harrison A, M Gregory G, Neelgund P, Stieglitz A, (2019). Supporting Child Caregivers in South Indian Orphanages: Identifying 'Ghosts' and Creating 'Angels', Institutionalised Children Explorations and Beyond, 6(2):142-150.

Harrison AM, Beebe B (2018). Rhythms of dialogue in infant research and child analysis: Implicit and explicit forms of therapeutic action, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 35(4):367-381.

View Details

"Persecutory guilt is simply a form of self-attack, it is tormenting and it belongs to the paranoid schizoid position and it is narcissistic. People sometimes don’t fully recognize the narcissism in the paranoid-schizoid position, because it is in that position you are feeling hunted by predators… When we're in the depressive/reparative position other people are real to us, we not only are able to empathize with them we need to go beyond empathy to sympathy in the depressive position where I not only know how you feel, but I care and I wish to relieve your pain."

Description:

We discuss the differences between guilt that reflects concern for the other and alternatively self-abuse that serves narcissistic purposes. The former relates to Klein's depressive/reparative stage, labeled ‘conscience’ by Carveth, and the latter derives from the paranoid/schizoid position, labeled ‘superego’. We review varying technical approaches to each of these clinical presentations and note that the countertransference provides vital guidance in understanding the state of the analysand's mind. We close by considering how the capacity to bear guilt may be a measure of the maturation of a civilization.

Our Guest:

Donald L Carveth, Ph.D., RP, FIPA is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought at York University in Toronto. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, past Director of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, and past Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse. He is the author of The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience (Karnac, 2013) and Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2018). He is in private practice in Toronto.

Many of his publications are available at http://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth.

His video-lectures on psychoanalysis may be found at www.youtube.com/doncarveth.

Recommended Readings:

Sagan, E. (1988). Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil. New York: Basic Books.

Carveth, D. (2013). The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience. London: Karnac.

Carveth, D. (2016). Why we should stop conflating the superego with the conscience. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Vol. 22, 1, 15–32.

View Details

"Each one of these individuals who I interviewed, watched their testimony or read their last words in the desperate letters they wrote to Nazi agencies asking for a little more time to raise a little more money - each one of these individual Jews of Vienna who I came into contact with, brought me closer to my own roots, to my own grandparents who I loved very much and who I never got to ask the questions."

Episode description:

We discuss the political and social context for Freud's years in Vienna starting with Hitler's rise to power in 1933 along with the burning of Freud's books at that time. We learn of the varying optimism and pessimism that were rampant in the Jewish Viennese community culminating in the German invasion in March 1938. We cover the pogrom of March 1938, the role of the witnesses to the atrocities along with the family suicides that became commonplace.

After Freud and most of his family escaped in June 1938 we recognize both the celebration of his reception in London as well as the ongoing calamity that remained in Vienna leading up to Kristallnacht in November 1938.

We also discuss the personal meaning that these events have for Professor Offenberger

Our Guest:

Professor Ilana F. Offenberger is a scholar of history and author of the book, The Jews of Nazi-Vienna, 1938-1945: Rescue and Destruction published by Palgrave Macmillan (2017). Professor Offenberger received a Ph.D. in History from Clark University (Worcester, MA) in May 2010, graduating from the doctoral program in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies. She earned a B.A. in German Studies from Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY) in 2000 and spent a year of undergraduate study in Salzburg, Austria. Her dissertation, The Nazification of Vienna and the Response of the Viennese Jews was selected for the first annual Radomir Luza Prize for an outstanding work in Austrian and/or Czechoslovak history in 2012.

Since 2012, Offenberger teaches in the department of History at University of Massachusetts- Dartmouth. Her many courses include “Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust;” “Germany 1933-Present;” “Europe in the 20th Century;” “From Auschwitz to Israel;” “The Jews of Nazi-Vienna,”

She is currently working on a second book project: Preserving Czech-Jewish Life Under Nazi Occupation, 1939-1945.

Recommended Readings:

Bukey, Evan. Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era 1938-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000) OVERVIEW HISTORY NAZISM AUSTRIA

Clare, George. Last Waltz in Vienna: The Rise and Destruction of a Family: 1842-1942 (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston,1982) CLASSIC MEMOIR of VIENNESE FAMLY

Offenberger, Ilana F. The Jews of Nazi-Vienna: 1938-1945, Rescue and Destruction. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY JEWISH LIFE IN VIENNA

Orgel, Dorris. The Devil in Vienna. (Logan: Perfection Learning Corporation, 2004). A GREAT READ FOR YOUNG ADULTS! FRIENDSHIP, FAMILY, LIFE AFTER ANSCHLUSS

Spitzer, Leo. Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (New York: Hill and Wang,1998) MEMOIR: THEMES OF IDENTITY & DISPLACEMENT AFTER EXILE

Secher, Pierre H. Left Behind in Nazi Vienna: Letters of a Jewish family caught in the Holocaust, 1939-1941 (Jefferson: McFarland & Co, 2004) PRIMARY SOUCE LETTER COLLECTION /A VIENNESE FAMILY DESTROYED BY NAZISM

View Details

"By sitting down with me, they were really, in a way, forced to be more reflective, so I had only reflected back to them some of what they were saying and not paying attention to, but I think sitting with me encouraged them to be a little more reflective themselves. They would have to slow down because they were trying to attune to me as I was trying to attune to them."

Description: Dr. Steven Rolfe welcomes Dr. Kenneth Eisold to today’s episode to talk about leadership, groups, what psychoanalysis brings to consulting, and the differences between psychoanalysis and consulting with organizations.

Kenneth Eisold, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst, who has been consulting on management dilemmas for a number of years. In addition to having a deep understanding of individual behavior, honed through his extensive counseling and coaching practice with executives and leaders, he has a wide understanding of the complexities of system-wide behavior, both overt and covert, affecting the ability of organizations to address their missions.

Dr. Eisold is currently President of the William Alanson White Institute In New York City, he previously served as President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. For several years he directed the A. K. Rice Institute’s National Conference, devoted to the study of leadership, authority, and organizational dynamics. He has also worked on conferences designed to help managers grasp the complex dynamics of systems in New York, Washington, Chicago, Houston, St. Louis, and Seattle.

In 2010, he published What You Don't Know You Know: Our Hidden Motives in Life, Business, and Everything Else, a review of unconscious dynamics in individual, group and organizational settings, as understood in psychoanalytic theory and updated by more recent neuropsychological research. 2017 saw the publication of his collected papers on The Organizational Life of Psychoanalysis (La Psicoanalisi e le sue Instituzioni was published two years earlier in Italy.) Dr. Eisold has worked extensively with professional organizations, hospitals, university schools and departments, law firms, and training institutes. He has coached leaders in the financial industry, public health, law, and higher education.

Key takeaways:

[6:26] Dr. Eisold shares his thoughts about the concept of applied psychoanalysis.

[8:07] Dr. Eisold talks about how he got immersed in consulting.

[11:07] What does Dr. Eisold think now about the interaction between the leader and the group after more than 20 years of conceptualizing the myth of the heroic leader?

[13:01] Dr. Eisold explains the differences between therapy and consulting.

[17:45] What does psychoanalysis bring to consulting?

[19:52] Similarities between supervision and consulting.

[22:38] How can psychoanalysts be further trained to work with organizations?

[25:59] Dr. Eisold shares some examples from his work with organizations.

[33:19] Dr. Eisold and Dr. Rolfe talk about the unconscious needs behind the decision-making process in organizations.

[37:58] Dr. Eisold talks about a case of a trader he used to work with.

[40:11] Dr. Rolfe shares an abstract from one of Dr. Eisold’s papers written in 2004.

[41:50] Dr. Eisold reflects on the paper he wrote in 2004 and how much is still true today.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Eisold, Kenneth, The Organizational Life of Psychoanalysis: Conflicts, Dilemmas and the Future of the Profession, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Eisold, Kenneth. Corporate Greed and the New Class System, Chapter 5 in Greed: Developmental, Cultural and Clinical Realms, Salman Akhtar, ed., pp 87 – 105, London: Karnac, 20015.

Eisold, Kenneth. Psychoanalysis at Work, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol 22: no 5 ( 2012), pp 517-528.

Eisold, Kenneth, What You Don't Know You Know: Our Hidden Motivations in Life, Business, and Everything Else. New York: Other Press, 2010.

View Details

Every individual reaction was specific and idiosyncratic – it was absolutely related to the previous experience. Even the symptoms that were formed could be understood as the reaction to adult trauma but shaped according to a childhood experience.”

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Vladimir Jovic to today’s episode. Dr. Jovic is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Belgrade, Serbia, and since the early 90’s he has been working with refugees, war veterans, and victims of torture in former Yugoslavia.

In 1997, together with other colleagues, he established the Center for Rehabilitation of Torture Victims (CRTV) in Belgrade, where they employed a variety of psychosocial programs that were developed in a framework of rehabilitation of torture victims.

Dr. Jovic was active in the development of independent mechanisms for the prevention of torture in places of detention such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals for the National Preventive Mechanism. Today he works as a consultant for the CRTV and has been newly appointed member of the board of trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture.

In today’s conversation, Drs. Schwartz and Jovic discuss how an analyst can engage with those who have been involved in torture, the importance of psychosocial outreach and the importance of making sure the basic needs of these individuals are met. Dr. Jovic describes visiting the countryside, making contact with people who have been traumatized all of which embodies the work of psychoanalysts off the couch.

Today you will also hear about the role of political cultures facilitating the acting out of individual aggression, the usefulness and limitations of the label of PTSD, and the subject of current trauma and how it relates to childhood vulnerabilities.

Key takeaways:

[7:12] What it takes for someone to make it to a psychoanalyst’s office?

[8:27] How did Dr. Jovic learn to work with those involved in torture?

[12:10] Dr. Jovic shares the interventions he uses to engage with these traumatized patients.

[15:04] Dr. Jovic affirms that the reaction to war trauma is directly shaped by childhood experiences.

[17:30] Dr. Jovic shares an example to describe the importance of paying attention to the current trauma.

[18:55] The clinical value of PTSD.

[21:49] The event has to become traumatic in our psyche in order to notice PTSD symptoms.

[23:05] Dr. Jovic talks about how certain political cultures allow for the acting out of impulses.

[28:45] Dr. Jovic talks about the consequences of torture.

[33:45] Dr. Jovics dives deep into the need to rehumanize the lives of the victims of torture and war survivors.

[35:27] What the narratives of the victims unveil.

[37:05] The question that can help an analyst engage with veterans: “What did you do in war that you wished you hadn’t?”

[39:59] Dr. Jovic talks about the thin line between victims and perpetrators.

[40:35] Dr. Jovic shares how at the beginning veterans use to resist treatment since the analyst was not in war and did not have what takes to understand.

[41:35] Dr. Jovic talks about the circumstances that led him to his field of expertise.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Špirić, Ž., Knežević, G., Jović, V., & Opačić, G. (2004). Torture in War, Consequences and Rehabilitation of Victims: Yugoslav experience. Belgrade: IAN-International Aid Network.

Opačić, G., Jović, V., Radović, B., & Knežević, G. (2006). Redress in action: Consequences of forcible mobilization of refugees in 1995. Belgrade: International Aid Network.

Jović, V. (2017). Kriegstrauma, Migration und ihre Konsequenzen. In M. Leuzinger-Bohleber, U. Bahrke, S. Hau, T. Fischmann, & S. Arnold (Eds.), Flucht, Migration und Trauma: Die Folgen für die nächste Generation (pp. 175–198). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co.

Jovic, V., Varvin, S., Rosenbaum, B., Fischmann, T., Leuzinger-Bohleber, M., & Hau, S. (2018). Sleep Studies in Serbian Victims of Torture: analysis of traumatic dreams. In E. Vermetten, T.

C. Neylan, M. Kramer, & S. R. Pandi-Perumal (Eds.), Sleep and Combat-related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Springer Science.

Jović, V. (2018). Working with Traumatized Refugees on the Balkan Route. Int J Appl Psychoanal Studies, 187 – 201.

Varvin, S., Fischmann, T., Jovic, V., Rosenbaum, B., & Hau, S. (2012). Traumatic dreams: symbolization gone astray. In P. Fonagy, H. Kächele, M. Leuzinger-Bohleber, & D. Taylor (Eds.), The significance of dreams. Bridging Clinical and Extraclinical Research in Psychoanalysis (pp.

182–211). London: Karnac Books.

Jović, V. (in press). Refugees, Torture, and Dehumanization. In D. Bughra (Ed.), Oxford Textbook of Migrant Psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

View Details

"When you think about the analyst's reverie - we are in a session and something is happening, the patient is telling you something and your mind starts to drift - an image comes to your mind that just sticks and it won't let go. It may well be that something is happening to the patient that they cannot tell you because they don’t know. But it is stirring up something in you that is resonating and an image will come out of that - something that allows us to find a register, a meaningful register, in which to speak to the patient,"

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Prof. Marsha Hewitt to today’s episode. Professor Hewitt is a psychoanalyst with a private practice in Toronto, Canada. She is also a Professor of Religion in the Department of the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, Trinity College.

Prof. Hewitt’s books include From Theology to Social Theory: Juan Luis Segundo and the Theology of Liberation, Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis. and Freud on Religion (Key Thinkers in the Study of Religion). Her most recent book is called Legacies of the Occult: Psychoanalysis, Religion and Unconscious Communication. Unconscious communication is precisely the subject that is addressed in today’s episode through a discussion about the early history of psychoanalysis and Freud’s relationship to unconscious communication - what he called ‘thought transference’

Prof. Hewitt dives deep into the meaning of being in relation to an analysand, talking about the moments in which an analyst has the experience of daydreaming about something, experiencing a reverie, and moments later, hearing the same thoughts and images from the patient. Dr. Hewitt also emphasizes the importance for analysts to always maintain an open-minded psychoanalytic curiosity about what the meaning of the phenomena happening in the dyad.

Key takeaways:

[10:33] Dr. Hewitt talks about unconscious communication.

[15:56] What is the meaning of a cult?

[18:38] Telepathy means feeling in the distance.

[20:26] Prof. Hewitt talks about the term bracketing.

[22:04] Prof. Hewitt relates the drift of the unconscious and the job of the analyst.

[24:06] There is an aspect of the transference that cannot be understood.

[27:20] Dr. Schwartz shares a case to exemplify how he experienced reverie with a patient.

[29:30] Prof. Hewitt encourages analysts to keep thinking about what is not understood by sharing a case example.

[32:50] Prof. Hewitt dives deep into the concept of intersubjectivity.

[38:10] Prof. Hewitt continues sharing her efforts in understanding what was not evident.

[39:50] The experience of working with people that have been traumatized.

[43:55] Even in the most flagrant psychosis there is truth.

[45:42] Prof. Hewitt explains where her passion for the unseen and the different forms of subjectivity comes from.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

From Theology to Social Theory: Juan Luis Segundo and the Theology of Liberation, Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis, Marsha Hewitt

Freud on Religion (Key Thinkers in the Study of Religion), Marsha Hewitt

Legacies of the Occult: Psychoanalysis, Religion and Unconscious Communication, Marsha Hewitt

View Details

"My dad also revealed a lot of himself in his writing which made it difficult for me, because I also had the sense that I was looking into a private space that was his own. I wasn´t sure I really wanted to see it because it wasn´t always very nice and it wasn´t always very wholesome - most of the time it was very complicated.” (SM)

I grew up with a very keen interest in my father as a result of the position he held as a writer and as a psychoanalyst, while my mother also was a psychoanalyst. It made me very attentive to learning as much as I could about this very powerful man who had tremendous amounts of influence often without saying anything." (JW)

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Susan Mailer and Dr. Joan Wheelis to today’s episode. They are both psychoanalysts who wrote memoirs which are organized around their relationships with their famous fathers, Susan being the daughter of Norman Mailer and Joan’s father being Allan Wheelis, a well known psychoanalyst and writer.

Susan and Joan speak about the meaning of memory, as they acknowledge that what they have written is a construction of their lives. Both recognize that writing helped as a piece of their self-analysis, to evolve their personal narrative and their internal relationships with their family members.

Susan Mailer was born in 1949 and is Norman Mailer’s firstborn. She grew up between Mexico City and New York, between her mother and her father. She graduated from Barnard College in 1971 and then moved to Santiago with her Chilean husband, where she became a psychoanalyst in the early ’90s. Since then she has been very active in the Chilean Psychoanalytic Organization. She has written on a variety of topics published in Latin American psychoanalytic journals where she teaches, supervises, and has a private practice in Santiago. Her book was published in 2019 and is called In Another Place: With and Without My Father Norman Mailer.

Dr. Joan Wheelis is a psychiatrist and a Training and Supervising psychoanalysts at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. She is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is on the clinical faculty of the combined MGH/McLean Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program. Joan is the founder and the director of an outpatient treatment facility called Two Brattle Center and has a private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her memoir, published in 2019, is called The Known, The Secret, The Forgotten: A Memoir.

Key takeaways:

[8:22] The similarities in Joan’s and Susan’s childhoods.

[9:01] Joan talks about her early years growing with both of her parents being psychoanalysts.

[10:58] Joan confesses not having a keen interest in what her father did while she was young but rather felt resentment.

[13:21] Joan shares how she received a sort of “oppressive” attention from her parents which resulted in her feeling watched all the time.

[14:23] Joan and Susan talk about their fathers’ relationships with fame and public speaking.

[15:00] Susan and Joan talk about their career choice.

[17:09] Joan and Susan share about dealing with the doubts about opening-up while writing their memoirs.

[19:33] The memoirs Joan and Susan wrote are not literally accurate since they don’t know for sure what happened while they were young.

[20:45] Memory is a reconstruction of stories and images.

[22:28] Joan shares her view about what the role of psychoanalysis is.

[23:07] Susan talks about how she struggled writing the memoir since she never considered herself a writer.

[24:23] Susan shares her experience of growing up around writers and artists.

[27:00] Susan discloses the catalyst for her to start writing.

[28:55] Joan talks about the piece she wrote for her father’s memorial.

[30:58] Joan and Susan talk about the reactions of their colleagues.

[33:54] It is not so common for psychoanalysts to share so much about themselves.

[35:02] Did writing a memoir changed their practices?

[36:20] Is writing a self-analysis?

[41:49] Joan talks about the relief of moving away from her parents.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

In Another Place: With and Without My Father Norman Mailer, Susan Mailer

The Known, The Secret, The Forgotten: A Memoir. John Wheelis, MD

View Details

“There is a history of psychoanalysis and its relationship with political thought and even political action. There is clearly quite a strong historical tradition of a sort of rebelliousness on the part of psychoanalysis or at least a challenge to social mores, which I see as beginning right from the start and certainly as early as Freud’s 1908 paper on ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality. He has the words ‘civilized’ in inverted commas because what he’s using psychoanalysis for there is to say something deeply hypocritical about the sexual mores of his day and that this is causing trouble.”

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Professor Stephen Frosh. Stephen Frosh is a Professor in the Department of Psychosocial Studies (which he founded) at Birkbeck, University of London. He was Pro-Vice-Master of Birkbeck from 2003 to 2017, a senior management position in which he was responsible at various times for teaching and learning, research and internationalisation in the university. Stephen’s background is in academic and clinical psychology, and he was a consultant clinical psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Academic Associate at the British Psychoanalytical Society, a founding member of the Association of Psycho-social studies, and an Honorary Member of the Institute of Group Analysis.

As you will hear in today’s conversation Stephen is remarkably well versed in the psychoanalytic literature. We discuss Stephen´s contention that the “unconscious is barbaric,” that Freud’s famous fort-da observation may be meaningfully applied to the place of psychoanalysis in our culture and that Steven Reich’s musical piece “Different Trains” serves as a profound commentary on the witnessing of trauma.

Key takeaways:

[9:15] Stephen explains the meaning of his quote “The unconscious of psychoanalysis is barbaric.”

[12:30] Stephen shares his view on Freud as a democrat.

[15:34] Stephen talks about the political tension that psychoanalysts went through in South America.

[16:45] Stephen comments on the alliance between Blacks and Jews, who were both characterized by the colonials as barbaric.

[19:16] The relationship between psychoanalysis and social movements.

[20:05] Stephen talks about the structure of traditional Freudian psychoanalysis and how powerful it was for its time.

[22:54] Freud’s aspiration was to bring into reason that which was unreasonable and could cause damage, not to destroy it but, on the contrary, to put it to good use.

[24:22] Stephen talks about fort-da as an example of how psychoanalysis works in relation to culture.

[28:02] Stephen discusses how Freud talked about and experienced the human tendency of repeating disturbing and even traumatic events.

[32:37] The repetition compulsion : Even when you think a piece of work is done it finds some way to come back.

[34:20] Stephen talks about the question of witnessing.

[36:05] The history of trauma.

[38:15] Stephen shares the impact of being listened to but not heard on a victim of trauma.

[42:12] Stephen shares his reflections on a particular piece of music as they relate to the meaning of witnessing and trauma that is included in his most recent book: Those who come after.

[48:06] Stephen talks about himself and what brought him to the point where he is today.

[53:55] Where we are today in regards to COVID according to Stephen.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Frosh, S. (2019) Those who come after. London: Palgrave.

Frosh, S. (2020) Psychoanalysis as Decolonial Judaism. Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, 25(2), 174-193.

Frosh, S. (2018) Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Society: What Remains Radical in Psychoanalysis? In R. Gipps and M. Lacewing (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Butler, J. (2020) The Force of Nonviolence. London: Verso.

Khanna, R. (2004) Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Zaretsky, E. (2015) Political Freud. New York: Columbia University Press.

View Details

There is a musicality at the core of our emotional or affective life.It really goes back to early mother-infant communications or innate musicality, or what’s calledcommunicative musicality’ – the to-and-froof the dynamic between mother and baby as really the core, the scaffolding of our emotional life.

Description: Dr.Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Roger Kennedy to today’s episode. Dr. Kennedy is a training and supervising analyst and past President of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is also a child and adolescent psychiatrist and is now the Medical Director of the ChildandFamilyPractice in London, which is a private multidisciplinary clinic where he and his staff work with children, families, and parents, specializing in children with complex needs.

Dr. Kennedy has written 14 books and today the focus is on his latest, which is called ThePowerofMusic: PsychoanalyticExplorations. Dr. Kennedy’s breadth of interests is remarkable. He has written on psychoanalysis and history, on tolerating strangers in intolerant times, short stories based on his work with analysands, and he has also written on psychotherapists as expert witnesses in working with people with a history of childhood abuse.

In today’s conversation, Dr. Kennedy elaborates the similarities and differences in listening to music and listening to analytic material. He provides a clinical example where he enabled a patient to hear the way she sounded which became a vital part of her growing self-awareness and with that, she accessed the freedom to sound different and to tune in to more authentic aspects of herself.

Key takeaways:

[8:34] Dr. Kennedy explains how the musical and the psychoanalytic world inform each other.

[10:45] Is listening to music a narcissistic experience for the listener?

[12:57] Dr. Kennedy dives deep into the meaning of the listening experience.

[14:45] When you hear what the patient has to say, you can hear the rhythms, and what lays between the lines.

[16:37] Sounds bring people together.

[18:14] Dr. Kennedy shares the reason why he often closes his eyes while listening to patients.

[18:52] Dr. Kennedy’s listening style has changed over the years.

[20:01] Dr. Kennedy describes the art of improvisation.

[21:22] Dr. Kennedy shares a clinical example.

[26:09] Dr. Kennedy talks about how he developed a passion for music.

[31:36] The unique experience of treating musicians.

[33:45] The delicate balance between destructiveness and creativeness.

[34:55] Dr. Schwartz shares a paragraph from Dr. Kennedy’s writings.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Graf, M. (1947), FromBeethoventoShostakovich: ThePsychologyoftheComposingProcess New York: Greenwood, 1969.

Kennedy, R. (2014), ThePsychicHome:Psychoanalysis, ConsciousnessandtheHumanSoul London and New York: Routledge.

Lombardi, R. (2008), Time, Music, andReverie. JournaloftheAmericanPsychoanalyticAssociation 56:1191-1211.

Nagel, J. (2013), MelodiesoftheMind: ConnectionsBetweenPsychoanalysisandMusic London and New York: Routledge.

Wigglesworth, M. (2018), TheSilentMusician: WhyConductingMatters London: Faber and Faber.

View Details

“We all have misattunements - but when we are present together, sometimes we can have a misattunement with our words or our tone of voice, but we may not have a misattunement of our bodies, so we’re missing that one element when we are remote.”

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Cindi Palman to the podcast. Dr. Palman completed her medical education at the University of Pennsylvania and her psychiatric residency training at Yale University. She had always maintained the dream of becoming a psychoanalyst. After her residency she moved to the west coast. There, life challenges and sudden tragedy interfered with her professional plans. It was later in life with the encouragement of a mentor that she finally pursued her goal of becoming a psychoanalyst. As we will hear in today’s conversation, her personal growth has enabled her to contribute to her professional community and to her patients.

In today’s episode Dr. Palman discusses the impact of working remotely on her psychoanalytic training and clinical work.

Key takeaways:

[6:58] Dr. Palman shares her current experience as a psychoanalytic candidate.

[9:02] Dr. Palman talks about what losing her office, her classmates, and the whole in-person experience has meant to her.

[11:23] How can psychoanalysts create a therapeutic space without physical presence?

[12:13] Dr. Palman talks about the candidate class she belongs to and how COVID has affected her as well as her classmates.

[15:00] Can you have unconscious communication over the internet?

[16:14] Dr. Palman discusses the pervasive experience of mourning that affects herself and her patients.

[18:31] Dr. Palman shares a clinical example.

[20:36] Dr. Palman shares the difference between the work with her on-going cases and a new case that started remotely during the pandemic.

[24.58] The concern of the analysand about the analyst's wellbeing.

[27:13] In some ways, remote work allows more denial of outside reality.

[28:02] Dr. Palman talks about her professional trajectory.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

"One of Freud’s letters to Ferenczi is a letter dated October 1918, just before the truce that ended World War I. And in this letter, Freud was responding to Ferenczi’s lament over the demise and disintegration of the monarchy, and his advice to Ferenczi went like this: “Withdraw your libido from your fatherland in a timely fashion and shelter it in psychoanalysis or else you will have to feel uncomfortable."

Description: Dr. Steven Rolfe welcomes Dr. Eran Rolnik to today’s podcast. Dr. Rolnik is a training and supervising analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. A psychiatrist and historian, Dr. Rolnik is on the faculty at Tel-Aviv University, faculty of Humanities and Tel-Aviv University School of Post-graduate Training in Psychotherapy at the Faculty of Medicine. He is on the faculty of the Max Eitingon Institute for Psychoanalysis. He has authored, edited, coedited, and translated more than twenty books and has over seventy peer-review journal papers. He recently edited and translated from German a volume of Freud’s letters; a non-fiction best seller in Israel.

In this episode, Dr. Rolnik shares how Freud’s theory achieved its greatest development during times of crisis and suggests how Freud’s teachings and letters can help us analyze our current reality during a pandemic.

Key takeaways:

[4:43] Dr. Eran Rolnik talks about the current situation in Israel.

[9:55] Dr. Rolnik shares his recent publication of Freud’s letters.

[12:20] Psychoanalysis was viewed as an antidote to the discontent with modern political life.

[15:18] We often fail to take notice of the impact of identification regarding our personal analytic thinking and the functioning of our institutions.

[18:45] Dr. Rolnik shares how patients are currently adapting to treatment in Israel.

[20:56] Dr. Rolnik shares an example of the underlying meaning of the pandemic to a patient

[28:20] Does reality ever determine it is time to stop seeing patients?

[32:25] Psychoanalysis is not just a profession, it is a confession.

[34:07] In our currently reality it is tempting to focus on the real and neglect the symbolic.

[35:01] How did Freud handle times of extreme anxiety and fear and how has this affected theory?

[39:48] Freud was concerned with the survival of psychoanalysis rather than with his personal survival.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Rolnik, Eran J. 2020. Epistolary Epiphanies: Freud as a Letter Writer In: Freud, Berggasse 19 The Origin of Psychoanalysis. Pessler, M.& Finzi D. Eds. pp. 242-249 (Hatje Cantz, Berlin)

Rolnik, Eran J. (2019) Sigmund Freud's Letters (Heb.) Modan Publishers.

Rolnik, E.J. (2015). Before Babel: Reflections on Reading and Translating Freud. Psychoanal Q., 84(2):307-330.

Rolnik, Eran, J. (2012). Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (Karnac London).

Rolnik, E.J. (2008). “Why is it that I See Everything Differently?” Reading a 1933 Letter from Paula Heimann to Theodor Reik. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 56(2):409-430.

Rolnik, E.J. (2001). Between Memory and Desire: From History to Psychoanalysis and Back. Psychoanal. Hist., 3(2):129-151

View Details

"There are things that arise in later life that have to do with the conflict of cultures that arises when you’re dealing with someone who either is an immigrant or is the child of immigrants. This is also the case with someone who comes from a family in the U.S. which is deeply conservative and religious and later breaks with that and subscribes to what is called a more cosmopolitan culture. These are things that arise in later life - these are conflicts with their own cultural background and with the people who matter most to them"

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Robert Paul to today’s episode. Dr. Paul is well known for having three careers; he has been Dean at Emory College, he is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory, and is also a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He is also a prolific writer and has served on multiple editorial boards.

In today’s episode, Dr. Paul discusses how these three careers have been integrated for him. As Dean, Dr. Paul saw his analytic patients early in the morning which grounded him. It deepened his ability to bring his analytic mindset to the challenging administrative work that he faced the rest of the day. As an anthropologist, Dr. Paul has been able to bring his study of cultures to his analytic listening and has given him an added capacity to work with people from foreign cultures as they approach the analytic task.

This conversation reveals the power of introducing new experiences for mentees, faculty, students and patients. Dr. Paul describes his mentor and how he introduced him to the opportunity to move forward in his life. In turn, Dr. Paul describes how he mentored others and inspired them to also move forward in their various careers and interests.

Key takeaways:

[7:25] Dr. Schwartz talks about the intersection between anthropology and psychoanalysis.

[9:16] Dr. Paul shares his experience being a dean and a psychoanalyst.

[14:10] Dr. Paul builds bridges between anthropology and psychoanalysis.

[16:10] How does Dr. Paul’s work as an anthropologist interface with his work as an analyst?

[19:38] Dr. Paul talks about the similarities and differences between the Buddhist and the analytic method.

[24:07] How being an anthropologist adds to Dr. Paul’s clinical listening.

[26:00] Dr. Paul dives deep into the conflict of cultures.

[29:28] Dr. Paul shares a clinical example.

[32:18] The difference between not being able to say certain things and believing you cannot think about them.

[33:25] Dr. Paul shares how he integrates his several different passions and the role his mentor had on his career choices.

[39:04] The impact analysts have on the world.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

On 'The Optimal Structure for Psychoanalytic Education': Commentary of Wallerstein. JAPA 55(3): 991 – 997. 2007. Paul, Robert A.

Is the Nature of Psychoanalytic Thinking and Practice (e.g.) in regard to Sexuality Determined by Extra-Analytic, Social and Cultural Development: Sexuality: Biological Fact or Cultural Construction? The View from Dual Inheritance Theory. IJP 97(3): 823 – 837.2016. Paul Robert A.

Anthropology. In Salman Akhtar and Stuart Twemlow, Eds., Textbook of Applied Psychoanalysis, London and New York: Routledge., pp. 3 – 12. 2018. Paul, Robert A.

.

Changing Attitudes About Sex. In Vaia Tsolas and Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, On the Body: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World. London and New York, Routledge, pp. 28 – 41. 2018. Paul, Robert A.

Personal Feeling: Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, and 'Individuology'; Book Review Essay. JAPA 68(4). Currently available on-line, forthcoming soon in print. 2020. Paul, Robert A.

View Details

"The goal is to find magic which is not psychotic, to find a form of magic which isn’t simply the denial of reality. The nonpsychotic form of magic is play. The analyst and the patient have to learn to be able to play together in that transitional realm."

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Joel Whitebook. Dr. Whitebook is a philosopher and a psychoanalyst and is on the faculty of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research where he was the Director of the University’s Psychoanalytic Studies Program. Dr. Whitebook’s research centers on the attempt to integrate psychoanalysis and critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Dr. Whitebook is widely published but is mostly known for his masterwork, Freud: An Intellectual Biography. In this work he brings together his philosophical and psychoanalytic ear and insightfulness to provide an overview and a deep understanding of Freud’s development.

In today’s conversation, Drs. Whitebook and Schwartz speak about magic in the history of psychoanalysis, and as it relates to religion, transference, play, and the healing process in general. Enjoy this simply fascinating talk.

Key takeaways:

[9:44] Dr. Whitebook talks about what he learned about magic.

[10:28] Enlightenment, magic, and disenchantment.

[14:05] Dr. Whitebook talks about the often denied origins of psychoanalysis.

[15:48] Dr. Whitebook explains the way in which psychoanalysis emerged out of hypnosis.

[17:03] Hypnosis is an example of transference.

[18:15] Psychoanalysis was born because of the way it repudiated suggestion.

[19:55] Drs. Whitebook and Schwartz explore the concept of analytic magic/transference/love.

[21:50] Transference and countertransference as vehicles for insight.

[23:05] Enactment as a way of producing the material that then can be analyzed to achieve insight.

[25:01] Dr. Winnicott’s criticism of Freud’s notion of illusion.

[28:09] The two principles of mental functioning.

[29:48] Embracing external reality while respecting the forces of enchantment.

[33:16] The desecularization of the world.

[34:10] Dr. Whitebook talks about how magic is and has been immersed in his work.

[36:20] Dr. Whitebook shares how he tried to untangle Freud’s objections to religions.

[38:25] Freedom of speech occupies a central role in psychoanalysis.

[39:43] Freud, Judaism, and psychoanalysis.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Learn more about Dr. Joel Whitebook

Recommended Readings:

Perversion and Utopia: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Critical Thinking, (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought), Joel Whitebook

Freud: An Intellectual Biography, , Chapters, 8, 9, 11 & 13. Joel Whitebook

Slow Magic: Psychoanalysis and the Disenchantment of the World. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 50, no. 4 (2002): 1197-1217. Joel Whitebook

Jacob's Ambivalent Legacy. .American Imago (2010): 139-155. Joel Whitebook

Freud on Religion, (Acumen, 2104), Chapt, 4. Marsha Alleen Hewitt

Psychoanalysis and Magic: Then and now. American Imago (2009): 471-489. Mikita Brottman

Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Federick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment, (Harper: 2016). James Gaines (This is a marvelous book that explores the fate of Bach's enchanted world of music when it encountered the Enlightenment.)

View Details

“I think that the analyst has to be in touch with his anxiety in order to be able to understand the patient's anxiety. But he has to not be drowned in such anxiety in order to be able to be the helpful object.”

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Ilany Kogan, who is a Training and Supervisory Analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. She is one of the founders of the Psychotherapy Centre for the Child and Adolescent in Bucharest, Romania. She worked as a supervisor of the IPA study work in Istanbul and she currently supervises throughout Germany and in Rumania.

Ilany Kogan worked for many years with Holocaust survivors and she has published extensively in this area. She was awarded the Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide (2005) and the Sigourney Award (2016) for her lifetime work. She is the author of many books, most recently in 2020: Narcissistic Fantasies in Film and Fiction: Masters of the Universe, prior to that Canvas of Change: Analysis Through the Prism of Creativity, The Struggle Against Mourning, Escape from Selfhood: Breaking Boundaries and Craving for Oneness and others.

In today’s episode, you will hear about Ilany´s devotion to her patients and the ways she identifies their life forces. She dives deep into the essence of hope and creativity since many of her patients, as we all do as humans, struggle with locating the good objects inside us. Ilany is devoted to freeing up the positive, hopeful, and creative energies in individuals. This is especially vital when we are limited by neurotic distortions, families that have struggled with the effects of the Holocaust, and for all of us now since we are struggling with terrible uncertainties in the midst of this pandemic.

Key takeaways:

[7:45] Ilany Kogan shares what her clinical and theoretical work has taught her about the vital role of creativity in life and especially in critical times.

[9:35] Resistance is the best way the person knows how to deal with conflicts at a particular moment which deserves respect.

[12:31] What is the meaning for the dyad when both analyst and analysand share the same danger?

[13:55] Analysts have to work through their own anxieties in order to be able to help the patient dealing with his own anxiety.

[15:46] Ilany Kogan talks about the concept of death anxieties.

[18:05] She believes that the creativity of the analyst is dealing with the changes imposed by the pandemic.

[19:32] Interpretation can be difficult to use during a period of stress.

[20:58] Ilany Kogan talks about the challenges that some analysts encounter in metabolizing the anxieties of the patient and returning it to them in tolerable form.

[21:43] Ilany Kogan shares a clinical example.

[29:14] Through analytic work the past can be left in the past.

[29:50] What sustains her during these difficult times?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Narcissistic Fantasies in Film and Fiction: Masters of the Universe, Ilany Kogan

Canvas of Change: Analysis Through the Prism of Creativity, Ilany Kogan

The Struggle Against Mourning, Ilany Kogan

Escape from Selfhood: Breaking Boundaries and Craving for Oneness, Ilany Kogan

View Details

It’s a big job to accept the otherness of the other. This places demands on the psychological processing of each individual to tolerate the otherness of the other. Therefore we often see regressive solutions when the other person’s otherness cannot be endured. Then ideal narcissistic states of purity and homogeneity are longed for.”

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Werner Bohleber who is a Training and Supervising Analyst in Frankfurt, Germany, where he lives and practices. He is a former President of the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPV) and has served as a member of the Board of the IPA, and the chair of several IPA committees. For twenty years, Dr. Bohleber was the editor in chief of the German psychoanalytic Journal, Psyche. In 2007 he received the Sigourney Award for distinguished contributions to the field of psychoanalysis.

In today’s episode, you will hear Dr. Bohleber’s devotion to his clinical, social, and academic work which has been focused in the area of otherness, as it is expressed in hyper nationalism and antisemitism. He has devoted special attention to the Nazi period, the Holocaust, and the impact of the Second World War on the survivors and the generations that followed. Most recently he devoted himself to the study of trauma in. Dr. Bohleber shares the reasons that brought him to this work. He recounts how when he was an adolescent he saw the movie Night and Fog which visually documents the atrocities that took place in Auschwitz. He dedicated his career to studying what happened inside the minds of the individuals involved in this tragic time in history and also what happened inside the culture that led to these kinds of atrocities.

Key takeaways:

[7:51] Dr. Bohleber discusses the otherness the he studies in his work.

[11:55] One of the aims of the psychoanalytic treatment is to help the patient to accept the ambivalence of life.

[13:45] Libidinization is not in contrast with separateness.

[14:30] Dr. Bohleber talks about the interplay between unconscious fantasies and political tensions.

[17:10] Dr. Bohleber talks about what it seems to be a helpless rebellion against the loss of a familiar world and against the changes that go along with it.

[19:10] The idea of an ethnic homogenous nation-state is celebrated not only in Germany but also in other states of Europe.

[21:15] Dr. Bohleber talks about the role of an analyst in a multicultural society that struggles to integrate.

[23:20] Psychoanalysts should not retreat into the comfort of their offices.

[24:46] How does Germany’s Nazi past influence the culture’s thinking when faced with the struggles over otherness?

[29:11] Dr. Bohleber talks about the psychoanalytic studies of antisemitism and how usually antisemitic people do not engage in psychoanalytic treatments.

[30:50] Dr. Bohleber shares what motivated his passion to study antisemitism and fundamentalisms of all sorts.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Bohleber, W.: Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma. The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis. London (Karnac) 2010.

Bohleber, W.: Remembrance, Trauma, and Collective Memory. The Battle for Memory in Psychoanalysis. Int J Psychoanal 2007, 88, 329-352.

Bohleber, W.: Problems in German Remembrance. In: Brenner, I. (Ed.): The handbook of psychoanalytic Holocaust studies. International perspectives. London/New York: Routledge 2020, 129 – 142.

View Details

"I hope that out of these tragedies there is an opportunity not only to express the intensity of our reactions but to get back down to the detailed business of understanding and unpacking the nature and contributions to the problems. We also can revisit and learn new solutions and achieve greater mastery. This is as much about the work that we do in our psychoanalytic consulting rooms as it is about the work that we attempt to do in the community.”

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Steven Marans, a psychoanalyst who has devoted his career to understanding police departments, the community, and the interface between both with a psychoanalytic perspective.

Dr. Marans is a child and adult psychoanalyst and is the Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry and Professor of Psychiatry at the Child Study Center and Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine. He is the director of the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence and the founder of the Child Development-Community Policing Program.

Dr. Marans is also co-developer with Dr. Steve Berkowitz of the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention, a brief, early treatment that has proven effective in reducing post-traumatic disorders in children exposed to traumatic events. Under the auspices of a SAMHSA grant, this intervention is being rolled out nationally through the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

Over the past 20 years, Dr. Marans has worked closely with the White House, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Educations, and members of Congress on issues related to responding to the trauma associated with violence in homes and communities, on terrorism and natural disasters and has served on national advisory groups and commissions regarding these issues.

Dr. Marans also continues to see children, adolescents, and adults for clinical consultations, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis. He teaches and supervises child psychiatry, psychology, and social work fellows in psychodynamic evaluation and treatment.

Key takeaways:

[9:05] Dr. Marans talks about the clinical phenomenon in times of crisis.

[12:05] Dr. Marans shares what goes through his mind when hearing the news about police violence.

[15:52] The police see aspects of our community that civilians don´t see.

[17:55] The challenges of entering the professional role of someone else.

[18:55] Narrowness of thinking prevents us from understanding what it is like to be a community member who is afraid of the police, as well as it obstructs our ability to appreciate what is like to be policemen and women involved in dangerous situations.

[19:50] Our thinking becomes oversimplified when we are most upset.

[21:55] Dr. Marans explores the implications of the idea of “us vs them”.

[25:55] The way in which the community perceives the police has shifted.

[29:31] Dr, Marans explains what happens when reality confirms the negative pre-conceptions of others.

[33:31] Vulnerability, anxiety and stress can narrow the sense of options and responses on both ends.

[36:02] “The best way to begin the job is to meet as many people as you can.”

[40:30] When we are at our most overwhelmed, we have the least amount of resources available to bring the level of distress under control.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Childhood Violent Trauma Center, Yale School of Medicine

Recommended Readings:

Phenomena of Childhood Trauma and Expanding Approaches to Early Intervention. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 10(3): 247-266 (2013)

Listening to Fear: Helping Kids Cope from Nightmares to the Nightly News. NY: Henry Holt and Co. (2005)

Psychoanalysis on the Beat: Children, Police, and Urban trauma. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol 51: 522-541 (1996)

View Details

“They changed my analysis, it went from ‘I’m not actually a patient I’m just a lump here, reporting’, to being a patient. I didn’t understand the work until after that conference at the Tavistock... It’s like I could take advantage of the opportunity I was having to speed along. My analyst wrote a paper with two other analysts about their experience of working with three men of color during the Martin Luther King Funeral.”

Description: Steven Rolfe welcomes Dr. Kathleen Pogue White. She is the Principal of Pogue White Consultancy, LLC, and a psychoanalyst who applies the profession's core knowledge and skills in her multi-sectored work in organizational consulting, executive coaching, and leadership development. Her organizational development work is carried out in teams designed to focus on balancing the dynamics experienced in the workplace with awareness and understanding in order to achieve individual, team, and business objectives. Dr. White’s practice is based in New York.

Recently, Dr. White’s consulting career has focused on executive coaching, particularly executive role transitions in several organizations. In this conversation, Dr. White shares her unique approach to diversity and racism and how she goes back and forth from a psychoanalytic frame to a consulting one in her work with organizations.

Key takeaways:

[4:54] Dr. White talks about how she became interested in psychoanalysis.

[8:58] Dr. White’s introduction to psychoanalysis was by going into treatment.

[9:54] Psychoanalysis as protection.

[10:30] Dr. White shares how she wrote the paper Applying Learning from Experience.

[14:44] The question: “Who do you think you are?” led Dr. White to a major realization on how much privilege she actually had.

[20:03] Dr. White realized she was not making any contribution, but just going along with the flow.

[20:45] Realizing she was a natural for consultation work.

[23:47] Changing from an analytic to a consulting frame and then back to an analytic one.

[27:18] When an analyst sees people at work, a lot more is revealed in comparison to what can be seen on the couch.

[30:02] Dr. White talks about her work Surviving Hating and Being Hated.

[30:58] Dr. White talks about the Black Panthers movement.

[32:56] There is a tendency to support the white status quo.

[35:18] Dr. White talks about her current work in the area of diversity and race.

[38:55] Dr. White engages in conversations with people running organizations and helping them realize the social accountability that exists with regards to how people are treated.

[39:20] Dr. White shares her thoughts about the specific contribution of psychoanalysis to the problem of racism in organizations.

Mentioned in this episode :

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings :

Goldberg et al(1974) "Some Observations on Three Interracial Analyses". International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 55:495-500

——-

White, K.P. (2002). "Surviving Hating and Being Hated": Some Personal Thoughts About Racism from a Psychoanalytic Perspective. Contemp. Psychoanal., 38(3):401-422. [...]

——-

White, K. P. (1997) "Applying Learning from Experience":

The Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Organizational Role Consultation, Gould, LJ, Stapley, LF and Stein, M. (Eds). The Sytems-Psychodynamics of Organizations: Integrating the Group

Relations Approach, Psychoanalytic, and Open Systems Perspectives. London: Karnac.

——-

Winograd, B. (2014). Black Psychoanalysts Speak. PEP Video Grants, 1(1):1. [...]

View Details

"Nuestra propuesta de trabajo a la institución fue la de implementar la puesta en marcha de un espacio de juego y producción individual para los niños y jóvenes llamado Tiempo Especial. Todas las observaciones recogidas por el educador en ese encuadre luego son discutidas en la modalidad de grupo de Discusión de Trabajo, es decir, de aplicación de observaciones en ámbitos institucionales"

"Our proposal to the institution was the implementation of a play space and individual production for children and young people called Special Time. All the observations collected by the educator in that frame are then discussed in the Work Discussion Group modality, that is, the application of observations in institutional settings"

Description: Laura Katz is a psychoanalyst, titular member of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, and Director of the Community and Culture Area of ​​FEPAL. She welcomes Mónica Cardenal to today’s episode. Mónica is a psychoanalyst of the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association (APdeBA) and has an extensive career as a psychoanalyst, writer, editor and educator in the field of child and adolescence psychoanalysis.

In today's interview, Mónica describes how she carries out her work as a supervisor at the JUCONI Foundation (Together with the Children) located in the city of Puebla, Mexico. Mónica supervises the educators who work with street children on a program that bears the name of Special Time. This project was started in 1990 by Gianna Williams, a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society.

The focus of today’s interview will be on different aspects of the program called Special Time, which works with children and adolescents at risk within the JUCONI Foundation. There are two different times - the first one being the observation in “Special Time.” Later, the group work in a discussion space is after the one-on-one time with the children and adolescents. These two different instances allow for the detection of the pain and the defenses that the mind sets in motion in children and adolescents and the effects that these produce in the bonds and in the institution. This is a project where it is possible to realize how psychoanalysis makes its way to the community and, in turn, makes it possible to build responses to contemporary social problems.

Laura Katz, psicoanalista, miembro titular en función didáctica de la Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina, Directora del Área de Comunidad y Cultura de FEPAL, recibe en este episodio a Mónica Cardenal, psicoanalista de la Asociación Psicoanalítica de Buenos Aires (APdeBA) quien tiene una extensa trayectoria como psicoanalista, escritora, editora y educadora en el area del psicoanálisis infanto-juvenil..

En la entrevista de hoy, Mónica describe cómo lleva adelante su tarea como supervisora de la Fundación JUCONI (Junto Con los Niños) localizada en la ciudad de Puebla, México. Mónica supervisa a los educadores que trabajan con niñas y niños de la calle en un dispositivo que lleva el nombre de Tiempo Especial. Este proyecto fue iniciado en el año 1990 por Gianna Williams, miembro de la Sociedad Psicoanalítica Británica.

La entrevista de hoy se centrará en poder ampliar diferentes aspectos del programa Tiempo Especial, en donde se trabaja con niños y adolescentes en situación de riesgo dentro de la Fundación JUCONI. La tarea de observación en el tiempo especial y el trabajo grupal en el espacio de discusión que se realiza posteriormente, permite detectar el dolor y las defensas que la mente pone en marcha en los niños y adolescentes y los efectos que dichas marcas producen en los vínculos y en la institución. Esta es una propuesta en donde se puede dar cuenta de cómo el psicoanálisis, se abre camino a la comunidad y, a su vez, posibilita construir acciones de respuesta a problemáticas sociales contemporáneas.

Key takeaways:

[6:34] Mónica Cardenal comparte su experiencia como supervisora de Tiempo Especial.

[7:42] Breve historia de JUCONI.

[9:11] JUCONI en latinoamérica.

[9:55] Lineamientos principales del Método de Observación de bebés de Esther Bick.

[12:36] Tiempo Especial: un lugar en la intersección entre lo comunitario y el psicoanálisis.

[14:28] ¿Qué significa Tiempo Especial? ¿Cuál es el encuadre?

[16:15] Dos tiempos: El trabajo con el niño y los encuentros grupales.

[17:05] El niño es capaz de tener un registro del tiempo de sus encuentros.

[17:35] El espacio de supervisión de los educadores.

[18:51] Todos aquellos que tienen contacto con los niños forman parte del espacio de supervisión.

[19:25] El foco central es detectar las ansiedades de separación y perdida.

[20:15] La importancia de la transferencia en poner en evidencia el mundo emocional del niño.

[22:30] Cursos teóricos presenciales que transmiten la teoría directamente ligada a la observación.

[23:40] Mónica comparte un ejemplo del trabajo a Tiempo Especial.

[27:56] Mónica habla de la particularidad del tiempo grupal y sus efectos sobre los niños.

[31:28] La relación entre el psicoanálisis y el trabajo comunitario.

[34:57] ¿Podría el psicoanálisis ser una disciplina pertinente para accionar respuestas sociales contemporáneas?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

"Historians have had to learn to explore their own subjectivity in dealing with the past. They can only see what they are prepared to see and they have frequently blocked out, scotomized, what they really don’t want to see. This is part of the current struggle in the history profession"

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Peter Loewenberg, who is a retired professor of History and Political Psychology at UCLA where he received numerous awards including from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations. He is a training and supervising analyst and former Dean of the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He chaired the committee that passed the California Research Psychoanalysis Law in 1977, enabling academics to be trained in and practice psychoanalysis. He Chaired the IPA China Committee, and he served on the IPA Board representing North America. He is the author of many publications, including Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach and Fantasy and Reality in History. He is Editor of 100 Years of the IPA.

In today’s episode, Dr. Loewenberg shares his passion for the academic and psychoanalytic worlds and his ability to relate these two fields to each other. As a historian, Dr. Loewenberg informs psychoanalysis and underlines how vital it is to appreciate and listen for the past, and he brings from psychoanalysis to history the importance of listening to oneself in observing the present and the past.

Key takeaways:

[5:44] Dr. Loewenberg shares how psychoanalysis and history can understand the methods of each other to the advantage of both, and how this informed his discovery and immersion in Psychohistory.

[7:03] Dr. Loewenberg talks about how historians took the contributions of psychoanalysis to history.

[9:45] Trauma experienced by a psychoanalyst influences his practice, giving a three dimensional perspective to his understanding of his patient’s trauma.

[11:12] Dr. Loewenberg talks about psychohistory and how the past impacts the present in meaningful ways.

[13:06] How the Deutsche Mark became one of the strongest currencies in Europe.

[16:24] Dr. Loewenberg shares his beginnings as a psychoanalyst.

[21:59] Dr. Loewenberg talks about how the first cases were like for him.

[27:38] The appreciation of the exchanges between analyst and analysand.

[29:10] Historians’ appreciation for the past is often very subjective.

[31:10] Dr. Loewenberg shares how life is now for him and his family during the pandemic.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

100 Years of the IPA: The Centenary History of the International Psychoanalytical Association 1910 - 2010: Evolution and Change Ed. and introduced (with Nellie L. Thompson); (London: International Psychoanalytical Association, 2011).

Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983); (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996, paperback edition with a new introduction,).

Fantasy and Reality in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Walther Rathenau and Henry Kissinger: The Jew as Modern Statesman in Two Political Cultures (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1980).

"The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort," American Historical Review 76: 5 (December 1971), 1457-1502.

"The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler," American Historical Review 76- 3 (June 1971), pp. 612-641.

View Details

"The schools of thought differed very strongly. The Calcutta school primarily belonged to the classical Freudian school of thought whereas Bombay worked from a very structured Tavistock model which they have been following for a very long time. In Dehli we find the Ericksonian model. These cites developed these models as a result of their connection to different parts of the world."

Description: Dr.Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Jhuma Basak, who is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Indian Psychoanalytic Society in Calcutta where she lives and works. Dr. Basak is an active member of the IPA’s Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis and is a consulting member of the IPA’s humanitarian committee. Her areas of interest in psychoanalysis are culture, women, and gender. Dr. Basak has widely published and has been translated into many languages.

In today’s episode Dr. Basak describes two transformations, one that is cultural and another that is internal - both are related to changing from an authoritative position that uses certainty and morality to deal with conflict, to one that attends to the inner ambiguous life both of the analysand as well as that of the analyst.

Key takeaways:

[4:40] Life before and after COVID in Calcutta.

[8:33] The lockdown in Calcutta is contradictory at times.

[9:58] Dr. Basak talks about psychoanalytic life in Calcutta.

[15:08] Dr. Basak explains how the psychoanalytic field in India shifted from being mostly dominated by men in its origins, to recent times where women have gained interest and expertise in the Indian psychoanalytic community.

[19:26] Clinical work has been shifted gradually to women.

[20:37] A critical and challenging position for female Indian Psychoanalysts.

[21:31] Dr. Basak shares some clinical material.

[26:58] Dr. Basak talks about her perspective regarding countertransference.

[28:00] Dr. Basak shares her experience as a spokesperson and the vulnerability that comes along with this role.

[29:46] “We are too comfortable in authoritarian positions, they give us certainty.”

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

"I don't think you derive technical rules or interpretive strategies from theory. I think that what we do instead is to try to be open-minded, available and resonant with what’s happening in the world of the patient and try to maintain a rich world of associational potentials in the back of our mind"

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Robert Michels to today’s episode. Dr. Michels has been a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York. Dr. Michels was the Dean of Cornell University Medical College, Provost for Medical Affairs of Cornell University and was a long-standing Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Cornell.

Dr. Michels has been a leader in psychoanalysis and psychiatry - he is the past President of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, past President of the American College of Psychiatrists and past President of the American Association of Chairs of Departments of Psychiatrist. In addition to authoring over 350 professional articles, Dr. Michels has also been an active editor - he is a former Deputy Editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry, former Joint Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and he has served on the editorial boards of the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Quarterly among others.

Dr. Michels shares in this episode his exquisite attunement to what takes place in the psychoanalytic dyad, from both the analysand’s and analyst’s perspectives, and how this can be best understood for the benefit and growth of the patient.

Key takeaways:

[5:31] How does psychoanalysis interface with psychiatry and academic medicine?

[11:45] Every discipline has unique characteristics that cannot be understood by other disciplines.

[13:50] Dr. Michels shares his experiences and perspective of the field of psychoanalysis during the past half-century.

[16:45] There is a change in the notion of what we do as psychoanalysts.

[17:35] Dr. Michel talks about not being concerned about being logically inconsistent with a patient.

[19:56] The associative immersion.

[21:01] How to test an intervention.

[22:18] Dr. Michels shares some clinical examples that demonstrate the change in his thinking.

[28:03] Dr.Schwartz shares an example of psychoanalysts working at the beginning of the COVID crisis.

[30:15] Dr. Michels talks about the meaning of a patient’s way to start a session by asking “How are you?” to the therapist in times of pandemic.

[31:36] What is life like for Dr. Michels being at risk in COVID times?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

I went back looking at one of the qualities of leadership we need particularly now during a pandemic, I went back to Thucydides and Athens and I found Pericles’ funeral narration made during the destructive pandemic that hit Athens.”

Description: In times when we are all facing a crisis of unprecedented proportion, we are going change the focus of the podcast: we will now be interviewing psychoanalysts from all corners of the globe to discuss how their local communities are coping with this situation, how their clinical work has been affected by the situation, and how the internal worlds of both the analysts and the patients have been impacted by this virus as it touches both our real and imaginary fears. This is an opportunity to gain great wisdom, empathy, and hope.

Dr. Steven Rolfe welcomes Dr. Michael Maccoby. Dr Maccoby is a psychoanalyst and anthropologist and is globally recognized as an expert on leadership for his research, writing, and work to improve organizations and the workplace environment. He has authored or co-authored fourteen books and consulted to companies, governments, the World Bank, unions, research and development centers and laboratories, universities, and orphanages, and taught in 36 countries. Dr. Maccoby has taught leadership at Oxford and directed the Program on Technology, Public Policy, and Human Development at the Kennedy School from 1970-90. He worked consulting on leadership for 13 years at the State Department. In 2008 he received the Swedish honor of Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star for his work in Sweden and, in 2017, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Washington School of Psychiatry.

Key takeaways:

[4:21] Dr. Maccoby talks about how he first became interested in psychoanalysis.

[9:21] Dr. Maccoby was in analysis with Eric Fromm for 8 years while working with him.

[10:56] Dr. Maccoby talks about his work with organizations from early times in his career.

[11:55] Humanizing the workplace.

[14:10] The beginning of Dr. Maccobi’s studies in leadership.

[14:33] Dr. Maccobi shares how Eric Fromm influenced his career.

[17:43] Dr. Maccobi talks about his book. Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails. and the reaction it caused in Donald Trump.

[18:03] The productive and destructive aspects of narcissism.

[20:22] Dr. Maccobi updated Fromm’s personality types with her own set of ideas.

[23:48] Dr. Maccobi talks about Donald Trumps’ personality type as a Marketing Personality.

[25:50] Dr. Maccobi shares what motivated him to write Psychoanalytic and Historical Perspectives on the Leadership of Donald Trump: Narcissism and Marketing in an Age of Anxiety and Distrust.

[27:56] The kind of president the USA needs: Pericles’ principles for a leader applied to America’s greatest presidents.

[31:03] The role of aggression in the marketing personality type.

[33:45] The transition between the clinical work and the consulting one in the organizational field.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Maccoby, Michael. The Gamesman: The New Corporate Leaders. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.

Maccoby, Michael. Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007.

Maccoby, Michael. The Leaders We Need: And What Makes Us Follow. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007.

Maccoby, Michael and Clifford L. Norman, Jane Norman, and Richard Margolies. Transforming Health Care Leadership: A Systems Guide to Improve Patient Care, Decrease Costs, and Improve Population Health. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 2013.

Maccoby, Michael. Strategic Intelligence: Conceptual Tools for Leading Change. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Maccoby Michael and Ken Fuchsman, editors. Psychoanalytic and Historical Perspectives on the Leadership of Donald Trump: Narcissism and Marketing in an Age of Anxiety and Distrust. Routledge, 2020.

View Details

Once we put things together and express them to somebody, something happens. We become more alive - because we are expressing what we are expressing in terms of what is real and what is real is not static. What is real is continuously moving and what is real is the experience of everything moving and everything changing from minute to minute.”

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Melvin Bornstein, who is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. He is also the editor of the journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Dr. Bornstein is one of the elders in psychoanalysis. In today´s episode, he describes with passionate detail his experiences over the past many decades of practice. He also shares with us what this current period of uncertainty is like for him and he expresses the leitmotif of his work and his life in what he calls the “love of life”.

Key takeaways:

[5:10] What this period of life has been like for Dr. Bornstein?

[8:27] Dr. Bornstein discuses Albert Camus’ The Plague.

[10:41] The power of talking to one another and sharing each one’s suffering, pain, and fear.

[12:53] The psychoanalytic process allows us to do something about what is happening that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.

[14:01] Dr. Bornstein shares his experience free-associating every morning while exercising on his stationary bike.

[17:00] Dr. Bornstein talks about his path and where he comes from.

[18:56] What is real is not static, is continuously moving.

[20:33] Dr. Bornstein describes the most difficult experience from his childhood.

[22:58] Dr. Bornstein shares an early clinical situation.

[29:32] The immersion of Dr. Bornstein in the psychoanalytic work.

[31:52] The driving element is the love of life.

[35:33] The difficulty of some patients in owning their love.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

"Some patients are quite happy being in their internal world - maybe the government is too, they’re in one world and people can be in the other. The patients live in one world and what is happening outside doesn’t bother them very much. It is about the avoidance of contact, the avoidance of the other "

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Lola Komarova, who is a psychoanalyst in Moscow and served as the President of the Moscow Group of Psychoanalysts, where she currently is the Director of Training. In addition to her private practice in Moscow, Dr. Komarova teaches applied psychoanalysis for psychology students.

In this episode Dr. Komarova shares her vision of history, with the embedded notion that the past lives in the present. This refers not only to the childhood experiences that live in the present for all of us but also about how the political and historical pasts show themselves in our present circumstances.

Key takeaways:

[5:31] Dr. Komarova talks about life in Moscow right now.

[9:28] The smallpox epidemic in Moscow.

[9:57] The relation between the community and the government during the current epidemic.

[14:40] People realized they had to survive by themselves.

[15:42] Dr. Komarova talks about the history of psychoanalysis in Moscow.

[21:40] How do the multiple theoretical points of view come together in Dr. Komarova’s practice?

[25:07] The pandemic and its impact on some patients who became disturbed and paranoid and, on the contrary, some other patients who managed to ignore the pandemic.

[27:58] A specific form of denial.

[31:15] People show no interest in reality but become immersed in their internal world.

[32:07] Dr. Komarova shares how she is sustaining herself during this crisis.

[36:05] Dealing with an unpredictable future.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

In Western countries there was a certain reduction in the importance of the father. I think there is a confusion here between the importance of the father or at least the father function with the authoritarian father, the patriarchal father, that figure that arouses so much suspicion and reactions against.”

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Claudio Laks Eizirik who is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Porto Alegre Psychoanalytic Society in Brazil. He is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, former president of the IPA and the recipient of The Sigourney Award in 2011. Currently, he is chair of the IPA’s International New Groups Committee. His main areas of interest are psychoanalytic training and practice, the process of aging, and the relation of psychoanalysis and culture.

In today’s episode, Dr. Eizirik dives deep into the meaning of the fathering function, which exists in our minds and later emerges in our analysis, and also exists in the political sphere, both in our national politics and in the capacity of our leaders. Dr. Eizirik evidences a life built upon the richness of this fathering function.

Key takeaways:

[6:14] Dr. Eizirik talks about the health and the political health currently in Brazil.

[9:05] The reaction of the psychoanalytic community in Brazil to the pandemic and the current political situation.

[10:56] Psychoanalysis is seen as a living force in the Brazilian current scene.

[12:29] The fathering function in the office and how it applies politically.

[15:24] The role of the father has been neglected by psychoanalysis due to the emphasis in the relationship between mother and baby.

[16:15] The confusion between the father principle with the authoritarian father.

[18:25] Winnicott’s meaning for the word “democracy”.

[19:40] We are seeing in many countries the presence of leaders who don´t understand the role of a father, someone who inspires, leads, shows empathy and compassion, and instead take an authoritarian stance.

[21:44] How does the father function live in the minds of daughters and sons?

[24:26] Dr. Eizirik shares disguised clinical material.

[29:55] How is Dr.Eizirik sustains himself during this crisis.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Eizirik, CL ( 2020) Uma vez mais, ‘ O OVO da Serpente” ? ( Once again, “The serpent`s egg “?) Observatório Psicanalítico, Federação Brasileira de Psicanálise.

Eizirik, CL, Foresti, G. ( 2019) Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry: Partners and Competitors in the Mental Health Field,IPA/ Routledge, London and New York

Eizirik, CL ( 2018) Contemporary developments and challenges of analytic training and practice. In Tylim, I and Harris, A ( editors) Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis, Routledge, London and New York

Eizirik, CL, Falcão, L. and Libermann, Z. ( 2018 )The death drive and the work of the negative in André Green´s work: metapsychology, clinical practice, and culture. In Reed, G. and Levine, H. André Green Revisited.IPA/ Routledge, London and New York.

Eizirik, CL ( 2015) The Father, the Father Function, the Father Principle: Some Contemporary Psychoanalytic Developments, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, volume LXXXIV, n 2:335-350

View Details

One can actually teach development using literature by Dr. Seuss, Beverly Cleary, Maurice Sendak, Margaret Wise Brown - all of these great authors of children’s literature. What I have done is created a course where these are paired with case reports from the child psychoanalytic literature, so one hears directly the experience, the words, the play of children of every age and their proximate developmental sequence.

Description: Dr. Steven Rolfe welcomes Dr. Lawrence Blum who is a teacher and supervisor at the Anthropology and Psychiatry departments of the University of Pennsylvania where he is co-director of the undergraduate minor in Psychoanalytic Studies. He’s received many teaching awards including the Edith Sabshin Award of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Blum has written articles on the application of psychoanalytic ideas to a variety of topics in psychiatry, society, and culture, where psychoanalytic ideas are useful and have been underutilized. In addition to publications in professional journals, Dr. Blum’s articles use psychoanalytic ideas to explore social and cultural phenomena such as guns and violence, voter behavior and even the federal budget. They have appeared in Clinical Psychiatry News, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Psychiatric Times. His most recent work is centered on his teaching Freud and Psychoanalysis to college students and to professionals which is the subject of today’s podcast.

Key takeaways:

[5:05] Dr. Blum shares how his passion for teaching developed.

[6:55] Differences between teaching candidates and undergraduates.

[11:50] Dr. Blum talks about how he developed the program at the University of Pennsylvania.

[15:50] How are different developmental phases experienced in other parts of the world?

[18:28] Changing the focus of psychoanalytic teaching.

[20:46] The advantages of using children’s literature and paired it with case reports from the child’s psychoanalytic literature.

[22:55] Dr. Blum talks about the blog: Psyche on Campus.

[24:10] Dr. Blum explains how he introduces Freud to the undergraduates.

[28:50] Dr. Blum talks about his publications in American Imago.

[30:33] How do students react in general to Freud, psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytic ideas and how they handle the idea of introspection.

[34:23] How has COVID-19 affected the teaching-learning experience?

[37:11] DSM can be used to teach psychoanalytic ideas.

[39:11] Why kids like dinosaurs can only be answered using psychoanalytic ideas.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Teaching Freud, Teaching Psychoanalysis: From College Students to Professionals (2018). American Imago, Vol. 75, No. 2.

DSM Fantasies, Psychiatric Times, XXX, No. 4, April 2013. Also available here:

Physicians' Goodness and Guilt – Emotional Challenges of Medical Practice. JAMA Internal Medicine, 179:5, 2019. Published online April 8, 2019. DOI:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0428

Doctors and Guilt, Psychology Today, Lawrence D. Blum M.D.

See also http://www.psycheoncampus.org/ a blog about teaching psychoanalysis to college students

Addresses to Dr. Blum's blog and web site, which have a number of articles oriented to presenting psychoanalytic ideas to non-analyst, are here: http://lawrenceblum.com/publications.html and here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-freud.

View Details

After I had been practicing analysis for 50 years, I asked myself: What was the most important thing I learned in those 50 years? It took me a lot of time to learn the obvious: the patient is somebody else.

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Warren Poland, who is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington DC. Dr. Poland is a former editor of the JAPA Review of Books and he has been on the Board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly for over 40 years. Dr. Poland was awarded the Sigourney Prize in 2009 and the JAPA Journal Prize in 2002. In addition to many articles, Dr. Poland has written two books, Melting the Darkness: The Dyad and Principles of Clinical Practice and his most recent work: Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis.

During this episode, Dr. Poland shares what it means to him to be vulnerable in this time as well as his sense of responsibility to others. He describes how the centrality of the recognition of the other gives rise to the recognition of aspects of responsiveness and separateness between people. His goal is to appreciate the patient as an other as well as for the patient to recognize his separateness.

Key takeaways:

[7:02] Dr. Poland shares his perspective with regard to the current crisis.

[9:33] Life can be terrifying for our species; all we can do is hope and work for the future.

[10:45] The future needs us.

[10:58] Dr. Poland talks about his analytic journey.

[12:58] What is like to be somebody else?

[16:33] ´There is a real person in there´.

[17:50] Dr. Poland talks about the obstacles that prevent truly engaging with a patient.

[18:40] Psychoanalysis is the discipline that studies the matters that the patient does not want to confront.

[20:30] The patient reads the analyst even better than the analyst does.

[21:50] Nobody lives outside the fabric of the human interchange.

[23:55] Dr. Poland shares a moment that describes his sensitive eye for people’s self-aggrandizing tendencies.

[27:07] Dr. Poland talks about how he deals with his patients that are struggling with financial situations.

[28:25] It is important that a patient is able to fire a doctor.

[30:35] If you want your patients to come back, tell them something they could use, and then they will want to come back for more.

[32:55] Dr. Poland dives deep into the fullness of conversation.

[35:46] What is human and humane is regard for the other.

[36:44] Dr. Poland talks about the intimacy about what is true without the fear of showing vulnerability.

[39:56] The core of conversation and vulnerability is the realization of reciprocity.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Melting the Darkness: The Dyad and Principles of Clinical Practice, Dr. Warren Poland

Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis, Dr. Warren Poland

View Details

Transformation is a kind of buzz word and it’s not just some economic and sociopolitical transformation. Indeed, it is about transforming the inner self as well and psychoanalysis is well placed to face these challenges.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Armien Abrahams who is a Training Analyst at the South African Psychoanalytic Association. He is in private practice in Cape Town, South Africa. He has a special interest in the internal-external dynamics specifically regarding the legacy of Apartheid. He works in many areas, one of them is on setting up and providing affordable psychoanalytic services. He is the chairman of the Low Fee clinic structure which is part of the Psychoanalytic Institute. Armien is also very heavily involved in education and training.

In today’s conversation, Armien Abrahams shows his deep passion for his work, more specifically about that pivot point between the internal and the external worlds. He speaks of the power and the importance of meeting both at the same time - there is a great need for focus on the external disadvantages, burdens and challenges without losing awareness of the importance of the internal struggles that we all simultaneously face.

Key takeaways:

[4:35] How is South Africa managing the current crisis?

[10:50] The prohibition of buying cigarettes has triggered a black market.

[12:33] Psychoanalysis in South Africa.

[15:27] Psychoanalysis in South Africa consists of two different organizations SAPI and SAPA.

[17:20] Armien Abrahams talks about the switch to online sessions.

[20:15] Psychoanalysis provides the possibility of an inner journey.

[21:30] Armien Abrahams shares some clinical examples to illustrate how the transition to online sessions has been like with patients.

[25:10] The showing vs the wish to show.

[28:22] Armien Abrahams shares the challenges SAPI and SAPA are facing which do not outshine his passion for psychoanalysis.

.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

South African Psychoanalytic Association

View Details

It's the people of the institute that are with us whenever we are doing our work, silently humming in the background. We are constituted by our colleagues.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. David Frank, who is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY) which is affiliated with the NYU School of Medicine. He is also currently serving as the Director and President of the Board at PANY, which is one of a number of IPA affiliated institutes in New York City. Dr. Frank is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the NYU Langone Health Center, and he is also the Chair of the Medical Center Liaison between PANY and the NYU, Langone Health Center. In addition, he serves on the board of directors of the American Association for Psychoanalytic Education (AAPE) and is also a fellow of the American Board for Psychoanalysis.

All these activities describe only one aspect of Dr. Frank’s life as a psychoanalyst. Listening to today’s interview enables us to discover additional sides to him. Dr. Frank is an improvising musician - an aptitude that he exercises as the Director of the Institute orienting himself to new circumstances, to new tunes, tensions, and dissonances. Dr. Frank privileges the sense of psychoanalytic community which is the core of his success as a leader.

Key takeaways:

[5:40] Dr. Frank resides in New York and he shares his view about the current situation there.

[9:27] Dr. Frank, as Director of the Institute, shares his experience turning it into an online training program.

[13:05] The current moment became the subject of each of the classes.

[14:10] The challenge of keeping the value of the metaphor when there is a real and physical danger.

[15:31] COVID offers an opportunity to re-work all traumas.

[16:10] Candidates are using their own personalities and instincts to be supportive of their patients.

[18:08] The role of supervisors during the pandemic.

[20:01] The support and warmth of belonging to the psychoanalytic community.

[22:53] Psychoanalysis is a discipline and a practice that requires a community.

[23:10] Dr. Frank shares the shifts in his practice.

[25:28] Dr. Frank talks about a case example.

[28:45] Every analysis is different, the relationship between an analyst and an analysand is unique.

[30:09] What sustains Dr. Frank during these difficult times?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

"I think people are feeling intimate in a way, strangers are feeling intimate, about what is important in life and what is important about what we leave behind. It is a very precious thing to be feeling and something we should hold on to."

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Linda Emanuel for the second time to this podcast. On the first episode published in October 2019, Dr. Linda Emanuel shared that she began her career as an internist. She then trained as a psychoanalyst at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and then continued working with dying patients in palliative care. She shares with the audience again in this episode her central notion of existential maturity. Her insights on this matter have never been so valuable than now when we are all living in uncertainty and facing death. Dr. Emanuel’s perspective as a palliative care psychoanalyst will shed light on the challenges we are facing.

Key takeaways:

[5:50] Dr. Emanuel talks about the meaning of existential maturity: a capacity that human beings have to come to terms with mortality.

[9:45] Existential maturity can come at any age and moment in life.

[11:42] How is to be an analyst among internal medicine doctors in palliative care?

[16:17] Dr. Emanuel gives her perspective about the current times during the COVID-19 crisis.

[20:18] The isolation of dying with COVID-19.

[22:18] Some people are coming into a new relationship with their internal objects while not having their external objects available.

[24:05] Dr. Emanuel shares clinical material.

[30:05] The present and the past coming together.

[32:31] Dr. Emanuel talks about how she is experiencing these times.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

The importance of inner ideas, fantasies, develop from the unconscious. Reality is important but not conclusive. We perceive and conceptualize reality with our unconscious. So let’s give the unconscious more than ever during this crisis its place, and keep the intention to listen to the unconscious with our patients.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Cristina Escudero to today’s episode. Dr. Escudero is a psychologist and a graduate of the Madrid Psychoanalytic Association. She also has a Masters in Family Therapy and Group Dynamics, and works with adults, teenagers, and children. Dr. Escudero is a supervisor of therapists, teaches courses on psychoanalytic technique and also supervises therapists who work with foster children as part of the Basque Country therapeutic program.

Dr. Cristina shares her exquisite focus on what she calls “the intention to listen to the unconscious” which is her guiding principle in the face of trauma. It is not that she does not honor the current objective reality, but rather that in addition, she keeps her attention on listening to the unconscious before, during, and after sessions.

Key takeaways:

[4:30] Dr. Escudero talks about the common concern patients have regarding the economic situation in times of Covid-19.

[6:46] Our psychic structure is not complete.

[7:22] The importance of investigating the origins of the crisis.

[8:00] The human psyche is in crisis.

[9:01] The renunciation to omnipotence is part of the Oedipus Complex resolution.

[13:00] How the crisis intervenes in Dr. Escudero’s clinical work?

[13:34] Dr. Escudero talks about the intention to listen to the unconscious.

[15:39] The intention before and during the sessions.

[18:30] Libido is not in virtual sessions since many sensorial faculties are missing.

[20:05] Dr. Escudero shares clinical examples.

[28:37] Dr. Escudero talks about the resources that have been helping her cope with this crisis.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

In this period with the Coronavirus and even during the wars, I don’t think that the relationship between me and the patient is symmetric even if we have to face the same external dangers. The relationship continues to be asymmetric - I manage the treatment, I decide the setting, I continue to be the analyst.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Yael Samuel who is a Training Analyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society. Dr. Samuel works full time in private practice as an analyst in Tel Aviv and is a member of the training committee in charge of the new candidates, programs, and teaching. Dr. Samuel is also the Co-Founder and Manager of the nonprofit organization called Lechol Nefesh, “For Every Soul,” which is a program designed to bring psychoanalytic psychotherapy to a larger population of often psychotic patients. As part of this program for the past seven years Dr. Samuel has been managing a treatment unit in a psychiatric hospital. Dr. Yael Samuel is the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society representative to the Congress of French Psychoanalytic Speakers and works along with Harvey Schwartz on the IPA in Health Committee.

In today’s conversation, Dr. Samuel shares her unique Israeli perspective on facing this crisis, as Israeli analysts have faced many crises before as a consequence of the wars they have been through. She shares some dramatic examples of the prior trauma they had to deal with as analysts in the analyst-patient dyad.

Key takeaways:

[7:45] Dr. Yael Samuel talks about what life is currently like in Israel.

[9:12] Israeli people are used to obeying when it is time to protect themselves.

[11:25] Israeli people have an app that shows if you have been in contact with someone infected by COVID-19.

[13:07] The response of the analytic community in Israel to the COVID-19 outbreak.

[15:28] There are a lot of groups and forums organized by psychoanalysts.

[16:05] Dr. Yael shares how the transition was to working with patients in an online modality.

[17:19] Dr. Yael talks about a difficult moment she experienced in her practice with one of her patients.

[20:01] Struggles that may arise in phone sessions with different patients.

[22:18] Real vs metaphoric.

[23:20] Dr. Yael talks about her work on a unit designed for psychotic patients.

[25:50] Dr. Yael talks about the asymmetry in the relationship with the patient.

[27:50] Dr. Yael confesses to being less frightened by the COVID-19 infection than by the war.

[30:08] What sustains Dr. Yael during this current crisis?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

The feeling of strangeness because of the emptiness and the weight of the silence, the immobilization of everything. This immobilization is one of the signs of the traumatic situation in the psychic life - we can think of the dream of the Wolf Man.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Bernard Chervet who is a psychiatrist and a Full Member and Training Psychoanalyst of the Paris Society of Psychoanalysis where he has served as President. Dr. Chervet has also served as a scientific secretary of the Congress of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts. He is a member of the European Group for the IPA Encyclopedic Dictionary, a member of the task force ‘IPA Constituent Organizations’, and a member of the Freudian Legacy Task Force. Dr. Chervet has devoted his life not only to institutional analysis but also to deep clinical analysis. Dr. Chervet has won many awards and published more than 240 articles, chapters, papers and books with a special focus on metapsychology.

In today’s episode, Dr. Chervet demonstrates his commitment to understanding the mind of his analysands and he does it in his French way, by bringing together theory with a deep understanding of the present and the past and how they relate to each other. Dr. Chervet shares his perspective on the concept of latency in the mind of the analysand when one is overwhelmed by trauma, and the role of the analyst as a facilitator, creating the capacity to pause, reflect and gain perspective.

Key takeaways:

[7:35] How Dr. Chervet listens to patients when both current and past trauma are present.

[10:43] The current context in France after 4 weeks of social isolation.

[13:38] The deprivation of freedom.

[13:55] Social and political context in France.

[15:07] The denial of the pandemic.

[18:06] People’s insecurity is increasing as a result of the high level of information they are receiving which is mostly not congruent.

[18:55] Traumatic neurosis and the importance of latency.

[22:05] The role of the analyst in creating the possibility of latency for the patient.

[25:55] Dr. Chervet shares a demonstrative case example.

[34:01] The analyst is the guardian of latency.

[37:45] The transition to online sessions is not a choice.

[38:40] The new setting: what has been lost and what has been won.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

When you have analytic training, the analytic attitude is internalized and you need to fit and keep it as well as being aware of when you lose it. As a result of this loss you will be receiving a sign from the countertransference. This is the motivation and passion for psychoanalysis.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Virginia Ungar, who is a training analyst at the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association where she lives and practices. Dr. Ungar specializes in child and adolescent analysis and is the former chair of the IPA’s Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis committee and of the Committee for Integrative Training. In 2016 she was awarded the Platinum Konex Award for Psychoanalysis. She currently serves as the President of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

In today’s episode, Dr. Virginia Ungar shares how it is for psychoanalysts to move from an in-person to an online experience. She describes her personal experience of these changes, her clinical work and most importantly her leadership role in helping the international psychoanalytic community weather this difficult time.

Key takeaways:

[5:55] Dr. Virginia Ungar talks about the current situation in Buenos Aires.

[9:53] The transition in Buenos Aires from in-person to online sessions.

[13:42] All the psychoanalytic associations in Argentina started offering online services.

[15:19] Scientific meetings are held every week by Zoom.

[16:40] Dr. Virginia Ungar prefers to work on Zoom.

[17:36] The age as a factor for the adaptation to the virtual sessions.

[19:15] The challenge of the visual aspect.

[21:03] The absence of the physical presence of the patient is draining.

[23:15] All our inner lives are under threat.

[25:11] How does it feel to hold up the IPA?

[26:40] The IPA website is offering a section called “Stay connected COVID-19”.

[29:50] What sustains Dr. Ungar during these times of crisis?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

IPA Stay Connected

Recommended Readings:

Analista y Paciente en Mundos Superpuestos, Pudget Janine

View Details

There is not just one pandemic right now, there are really two concurrent pandemics. The first one is the pandemic of the virus, but the second one that is closely tied to the first is a pandemic of anxiety. I want to be really clear that I am not just using that as a figure of speech, I am actually quite serious about that, I think anxiety is reaching epidemic proportions and I think it has major consequences for how all of us and certainly how leaders of organizations of any size lead.”

Description: In times when we are all facing a crisis of unprecedented proportion, we are going change the focus of the podcast: we will now be interviewing psychoanalysts from all corners of the globe to discuss how their local communities are coping with this situation, how their clinical work has been affected by the situation, and how the internal worlds of both the analysts and the patients have been impacted by this virus as it touches both our real and imaginary fears. This is an opportunity to gain great wisdom, empathy, and hope.

Steven Rolfe welcomes Kerry Sulkowicz to today’s episode. Dr. Sulkowicz is the President-elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is founder and Managing Principal of the Boswell Group LLC, a management consultancy based in New York since 1998. Kerry serves as a trusted advisor on people and culture to some of the world’s most well-known and respected CEOs and corporate boards. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Texas Medical Branch and is now a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, where he received the Distinguished Teacher Award. He also received the Edith Sabshin Teaching Award from the American Psychoanalytic Association. A passionate advocate for human rights, Dr. Sulkowicz is the past Chair of the board of Physicians for Human Rights, a global human rights organization that has shared in the Nobel Peace Prize, and serves on the Advisory Council of Acumen.

Key takeaways:

[5:21] Kerry Sulkowicz talks about the challenges the American Psychoanalytic Association and private practitioners currently face.

[9:08] The transition to virtual work has been exhausting for many practitioners.

[10:28] Kerry Sulkowicz talks about the current crisis in New York.

[11:57] It is a critical time for Physicians for Human Rights.

[13:30] Human rights violations have not stopped with the pandemic.

[15:16] Kerry Sulkowicz shares his long term vision for the American Psychoanalytic Association.

[16:40] Psychoanalysts share unique basic values.

[19:06] The effects of the absence of human touch.

[20:08] It is a golden time for psychoanalysis.

[20:55] Kerry’s approach for leaders of organizations.

[24:15] The denial of anxiety is on one extreme while panicking is on the other.

[25:13] The right amount of anxiety is actually highly adaptive.

[26:05] Leaders need to lead with their values.

[27:03] A quote on 1918 Spanish flu.

[29:18] The role of leaders is to give hope that is embedded in reality.

[31:05] How leaders can help their organizations.

[34:07] Leaders need to model the importance of maintaining social ties.

[36:50] Kerry Sulkowicz talks about the effects of anxiety on all of us.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

There is not just one pandemic right now, there are really two concurrent pandemics. The first one is the pandemic of the virus, but the second one that is closely tied to the first is a pandemic of anxiety. I want to be really clear that I am not just using that as a figure of speech, I am actually quite serious about that, I think anxiety is reaching epidemic proportions and I think it has major consequences for how all of us and certainly how leaders of organizations of any size lead.”

Description: In times when we are all facing a crisis of unprecedented proportion, we are going change the focus of the podcast: we will now be interviewing psychoanalysts from all corners of the globe to discuss how their local communities are coping with this situation, how their clinical work has been affected by the situation, and how the internal worlds of both the analysts and the patients have been impacted by this virus as it touches both our real and imaginary fears. This is an opportunity to gain great wisdom, empathy, and hope.

Steven Rolfe welcomes Kerry Sulkowicz to today’s episode. Dr. Sulkowicz is the President-elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is founder and Managing Principal of the Boswell Group LLC, a management consultancy based in New York since 1998. Kerry serves as a trusted advisor on people and culture to some of the world’s most well-known and respected CEOs and corporate boards. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Texas Medical Branch and is now a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, where he received the Distinguished Teacher Award. He also received the Edith Sabshin Teaching Award from the American Psychoanalytic Association. A passionate advocate for human rights, Dr. Sulkowicz is the past Chair of the board of Physicians for Human Rights, a global human rights organization that has shared in the Nobel Peace Prize, and serves on the Advisory Council of Acumen.

Key takeaways:

[5:21] Kerry Sulkowicz talks about the challenges the American Psychoanalytic Association and private practitioners currently face.

[9:08] The transition to virtual work has been exhausting for many practitioners.

[10:28] Kerry Sulkowicz talks about the current crisis in New York.

[11:57] It is a critical time for Physicians for Human Rights.

[13:30] Human rights violations have not stopped with the pandemic.

[15:16] Kerry Sulkowicz shares his long term vision for the American Psychoanalytic Association.

[16:40] Psychoanalysts share unique basic values.

[19:06] The effects of the absence of human touch.

[20:08] It is a golden time for psychoanalysis.

[20:55] Kerry’s approach for leaders of organizations.

[24:15] The denial of anxiety is on one extreme while panicking is on the other.

[25:13] The right amount of anxiety is actually highly adaptive.

[26:05] Leaders need to lead with their values.

[27:03] A quote on 1918 Spanish flu.

[29:18] The role of leaders is to give hope that is embedded in reality.

[31:05] How leaders can help their organizations.

[34:07] Leaders need to model the importance of maintaining social ties.

[36:50] Kerry Sulkowicz talks about the effects of anxiety on all of us.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

Our very specific analytic listening can be used to understand how this external terrible situation is reactivating their internal anxieties and for that we try to confine the suffering to the here and now of the phone call.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Ana Catarina Duarte Silva to this episode. Dr. Duarte Silva is a psychoanalyst and a full member of the Portuguese Psychoanalytic Society and of the IPA. She is also past secretary of the Portuguese Institute of Psychoanalysis, where she gives seminars especially in the work of Winnicott. Dr. Duarte Silva also published in the journal of the Portuguese Psychoanalytic Society where she is chair of the working team. She lives in Lisbon, where she has a private practice since 1995.

In this conversation, you will hear about how countertransference is often limited by the pressing reality that we are all working under. In contrast, Dr. Duarte Silva shares a very rich case example where the patient having ‘no body’ in the office reverberates with his recognizing his childhood experience of feeling like a ‘nobody.’

Key takeaways:

[4:08] Dr. Duarte Silva talks about how Portugal is encountering this crisis.

[6:58] Dr. Duarte Silva shares the current state of the analytic community in Lisbon.

[8:50] In Portugal there is an open telephone line for people to call when they need to talk to an analyst.

[9:25] The relation between social isolation, loneliness, and fear.

[11:50] Dr. Duarte Silva talks about the transition from in-person to online sessions.

[15:25] The matter of soft community denial.

[17:20] Hypochondria

[17;52] Fear of loss and helplessness.

[18:15] The lack of the body and its interference in the analytic process via online.

[21:25] Dr. Duarte Silva shares clinical material.

[26:56] What keeps Dr. Duarte Silva going through these uncertain times?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq

View Details

I think that it is even creating more intimacy because they see that you are afraid too and if you are not afraid to say that you are afraid, and you are not too afraid to talk about it, and that is a good opportunity to talk about many fears.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Shahrzad Hashemi to this episode. She is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and an advance candidate for the Comprehensive Program for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at HamAva Institute in Tehran. Shahrzad is also the editorial assistant of the open access journal Psychoanalytic Discourse. In addition to her private practice, Shahrzad has been involved in many psychoanalytically informed activities in hospitals and schools.

In today’s conversation, we reflect on the changes the world is going through, what life is like in Tehran and how Shahrzad’s clinical work has been affected by the pandemic.

Key takeaways:

[4:27] Tehran is currently going through the 7th week of quarantine, Shahrzad shares how it feels to be isolated for so long.

[7:28] Finding another routine to survive.

[8:10] The transition from in-person sessions to the virtual modality

[9:40] Shahrzad talks about the impact this crisis has been having on patients as well as on analysts.

[11:10] It is normal to be afraid.

[13:30] This is an opportunity to redefine metaphor and symbolization

[15:10] Shahrzad talks about the resistance of some patients to the virtual modality.

[18:35] Shahrzad shares a case example

[21:50] The challenges of being a psychotherapist at these times.

[22:08] What have Shahrzad found helpful to sustain herself and her community during the pandemic?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

When the patient is in danger because he is physically ill, or the analyst is in danger because he is physically ill, like with the current situation, the analytic work needs a community of denial.”

Description:

Harvey Schwartz welcomes Marilia Aisenstein to this episode. Marilia Aisenstein is a training analyst at the Paris Psychoanalytical Society and of the Hellenic Psychoanalytical Society. She is a past president of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, past President of l'Institut de Psychosomatique de Paris, former European representative to the Board, and former Chair of International Psychoanalytical Association International New Groups. Marilia is the author of many papers and publications about psychosomatics and received the Bouvet Award in 1992.

She is currently in private practice in Paris and she gives seminars to both the Hellenic and the Paris Society. Marilia’s latest book in English is titled An Analytic Journey: From the Art of Archery to the Art of Psychoanalysis.

In today’s conversation, Marilia shares her rich and nuanced grasp on the clinical encounter, engaging these changing, challenging, and difficult times that we are all struggling with.

Key takeaways:

[4:55] Marilia Aisenstein talks about the current situation in Paris.

[8:28] Marilia shares how the French psychoanalytic community has been reacting to the Covid-19 crisis.

[11:20] The interesting reactions of patients to online sessions.

[13:44] Marilia shares how she is coping with the questions regarding the online modality.

[16:24] What we thought was a “sin” in a psychoanalytical frame, it is now being challenged by times that force us to adapt.

[17:35] The IPA rules for distant psychoanalysis.

[18:17] Marilia shares clinical examples.

[19:58] Marilia assesses the matter of denial.

[21:30] The concept of a soft community of denial.

[21:57] What is sustaining Marilia through these tough times?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

View Details

"I feel terribly isolated not seeing my patients face to face, not seeing them in my consulting room. Also, you know,the work with students in all these internet platforms is possible but it is pretty difficult."

Description: In times when we are all facing a crisis of unprecedented proportion, we are going change the focus of the podcast: we will now be interviewing psychoanalysts from all corners of the globe to discuss how their local communities are coping with this situation, how their clinical work has been affected by the situation, and how the internal worlds of both the analysts and the patients have been impacted by this virus as it touches both our real and imaginary fears. This is an opportunity to gain great wisdom, empathy, and hope.

Harvey Schwartz welcomes Wojtek Hanbowski, who is a training and child analyst at the Polish Psychoanalytical Society and the co-founder of the Hanna Segal Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies in Warszawa. Between 1993 and 1997, he worked at the Cassel Hospital in London and he had his analyst and his training in child analysis at the Institute for Psychoanalysis.

In today’s episode, Wojtek shares the struggles presented by the current situation dealing with the COVID 19, forcing sessions to be virtual, exposing a tension between the literal and the metaphoric, and the impact it has on analysts and on patients as well.

Key takeaways:

[3:55] Wojtek talks about the current situation in Eastern Europe regarding COVID 19.

[6:50] Wojtek shares how the psychoanalytic community in Poland is reacting to the pandemic.

[8:45] The British colleagues started remote analysis later than the rest of European countries.

[9:35] The feeling of isolation as an analyst who can’t receive patients in the consulting room.

[12:16] Wojtek shares clinical examples about how different fantasies operate in a new setting.

[16:22] Harvey analyses the tension between the literal and the metaphoric.

[17:36] It is the first time in human history where the scientists share openly the results of their researches.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

We don’t know when it is going to end, it’s an endless story, and this is the worry… Will everything come back to normality? In the beginning, we thought it would, but now we think nothing will ever be the same.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes you to the 41st episode of Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch In these times when we are all facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions we are going to be changing the focus of our podcast. Now we are going to be interviewing psychoanalysts from all corners of the globe to discuss how their local communities are coping with this situation; how their clinical work has been affected by this situation; and also how the internal worlds of both the analysts and the patient have been impacted by this virus as it reaches both our real and imaginary fears.

Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Simonetta Diena to this episode. She is a psychiatrist and a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Italian Psychoanalytic Association and she is also a Fellow of the Research Training Program of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Diena’s interests are wide, she has published and spoken on eating disorders, on art, films, and trauma. Dr. Diena’s latest book published in English is named Psychoanalysis Listening to Love: Passion and Bonds.

In today’s episode, the conversation is on the pressing crisis, Dr. Diena lives and works in Milan, and she shares how she finds herself doing “things she never has done before.” This is a reality for us all, we will find ourselves doing things we have never done before. The challenge is to being able to integrate a focus on metaphor and analytic reality during this times of global crisis.

Key takeaways:

[4:38] Dr. Diena talks about the current situation in Milan, Italy.

[5:30] Dr. Diena shares how the psychoanalytic community has been affected by the Covid-19 crisis.

[9:50] The role of intuition.

[10:55] The differences now in the clinical setting.

[13:30] The problem of the worries.

[15:45] This time the worry is shared by both the patient and the analyst.

[18:32] We will be doing things we have never done before.

[19:20] Dr. Diena shares some clinical examples.

[23:08] Being alone in a different way.

[25:31] Dr. Diena shares how the feeling of belonging to a community is sustaining her in this process.

[28:25] Celebrating holidays in a different way.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

View Details

The experience that we are all feeling of ‘Are we or are we not subject to or have we been in contact with someone who might have Corona that eventually might result in our developing an infection?´ is very much the same as a cancer patient who has gone for investigation of some kind of lesion which is yet unknown and to be further diagnosed and brought to some sort of resolution.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Norman Straker who is an analyst on the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Cornell College in Medicine and is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

Dr. Straker is one of the original faculty members of the first psycho-oncology program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and he pioneered the development of the mentioned specialty. Within that field, he has created two films that illustrate the psychological issues facing doctors, patients, and family members who confront cancer. Dr. Straker chairs the discussion group at the American Psychoanalytic Association entitled Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy of Patients with Cancer.

Dr. Straker edited a book named Facing Cancer and The Fear Of Death: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Treatment and has two articles in press for the Journal of Psychodynamic Psychiatry, one about the treatment for cancer patients who survive and the other on the treatment of patients who died.

In this episode, you will hear Dr. Straker talking about his work in psycho-oncology. He will also share his perspective about the Covid -19 crises that we are all involved with. He discusses the similarity we are all facing with those patients who are nervously waiting for some clarity about their cancer diagnosis.

Key takeaways:

[5:10] Dr. Straker shares the similarities he has found between cancer patients and either potential or actual patients struggling with Covid-19.

[8:17] We are all at risk and dealing with uncertainty.

[9:44] Dr. Straker shares a case example of a patient that has recently been diagnosed with Covid-19.

[12:43] The effects of the confrontation with mortality.

[13:13] Dr. Straker talks about the crucial importance of tolerating uncertainty.

[18:36] The patient’s acknowledgment of a having a short life term, makes therapy move very quickly.

[21:40] Dr. Straker explains the usual defenses for death anxiety.

[23:08] What is death anxiety?

[24:41] Dr. Straker shares how he got involved in psycho-oncology.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Straker, N. Psychodynamic Psychodynamic Psychiatry for Patients with Cancer: Survivorship Journal of Psychodynamic Psychiatry 47(4)403-324 2019. The American Academy of Psychodynamic Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis.

Straker, N. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: The Treatment of Cancer Patients Who Die, Journal of Psychodynamic Psychiatry, March 2020 in the publication The American Academy of Psychodynamic Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis.

Facing Cancer and The Fear Of Death, A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Treatment, Rowman & Littlefield

View Details

“Reflective network therapy is literally an application of child analysis in the real-life setting of a preschool.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Gilbert Kliman a child and adult psychoanalyst who has focused his career on providing measurable outcomes from his clinical work, which he discusses in this episode.

Dr. Kliman has a Distinguished Life Fellow status in the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent in Psychiatry and the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is a graduate of the Interdisciplinary Fellowship in Science and Psychiatry and Albert Einstein Medical College in New York. Dr. Kliman is the recipient of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s 2020 Humanitarian Award, the Anna Freud Award for Child and Research in 2016, the Dean Brockman Award in 2014 and the French Psychoanalytic Society Award in 2014.

Dr. Kliman has been a major contributor to the field of child analysis, child therapy and essentially to the wellbeing of the people whose lives he touches. He has discovered and created a new method of intervening in children’s lives called The Reflective Network Therapy.

Key takeaways:

[3:45] Dr. Kliman talks about his evidence-based findings of the effects of child analysis and RNT in the cognition of preschoolers.

[6:13] Dr. Kliman talks about Reflective Network Therapy, the treatment program that has made radical changes in the lives of many preschoolers.

[9:33] There is no privacy in the progress of the sessions.

[11:30] At the end of the session, there is a debriefing, where the child and the analyst try to explain to the teacher and other students what they have been doing.

[13:55] The teachers receive training to follow the guidelines of Reflective Network Therapy.

[17:10] Dr. Kliman shares a case example.

[21:53] Care and tenderness have been the key to the success of the treatment.

[25:42] Reflective Network Therapy is tuned analytic work in a classroom.

[27:18] The observing children in the classroom become incredibly altruistic as a result of participating in the therapeutic process.

[28:07] Dr. Kliman shares the example of a preschool in San Mateo.

[31:17] Dr. Kliman talks about personal experiences and professional trajectory which motivated his passion for psychoanalysis.

[36:28] Hard measures in psychoanalysis

[39:55] Dr. Kliman talks about the liveliness of working in a preschool

[41:40] Children learn to learn in small networks, not in dyads.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Visit ChildrenPsychologicalHealthCenter for publicly viewable videos. Write to gilbertkliman2008@gmail.com for confidentiality agreements and instructional videos, or donate through Network For Good

Recommended Readings:

Garber, Howard L. (1988) TheMilwaukeeProject: PreventingMentalRetardationinChildrenAtRisk. NationalInst. ofHandicappedResearch (ED), Washington, DC. ISBN-0-940898-16-0 88.

Heinecke, C.M. (1966) FrequencyofPsychotherapeuticSessionasaFactorAffectingtheChild'sDevelopmentalStatus. Psychoanalysis. Stud. Child 20, 42-98.

Heinecke, C.M. and Ramsey-Klee, DM. (1986) OutcomeofChildPsychotherapyasaFunctionofFrequencyofSession. J. A.A.C.P. 25(2), 247-253.

Jeffery, E. (2001) J Am Psychoanal Assoc vol. 49 no. 1 103-111

Kliman, G. (2011) ReflectiveNetworkTherapyinthePreschoolClassroom. U. Press of America. Lanham, MD.

Kliman, G (2014) A unifying new theory of posttraumatic stress disorder. Am. Coll. Psychoanalysts. Joint meeting with Am. Acad. Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry. Paris.

Kliman, G. (2015) Meta-analysis of IQ change data from eight sources, control and comparison studies.

Kliman, G. (2018)ReflectiveNetworkTherapyforPreschoolerswithAutismorPosttraumaticStressDisorder. Neuropsychoanalysis. August 2018.

Skeels, H.M. and Dye, H.A. (1939)Astudyoftheeffectsofdifferentialstimulationinmentallyretardedchildren. Proc. Am. Assoc. Mental Deficiency. 44, 114-136.

Spitz, R.A. (1945). Hospitalism—AnInquiryIntotheGenesisofPsychiatricConditionsinEarlyChildhood. PsychoanalyticStudyoftheChild, 1, 53-74.

Zelman, A. Samuels, S. & Abrams, D. (1985) IQ changes of young children following intensive long-term psychotherapy. Am. J. Psychotherapy 39(2), 215-217.

Zelman, A. and Samuels, S (1996) Children's IQ changes and long-term psychotherapy: A follow up study. In Zelman, A. Early intervention with high-risk children. Northvale, NJ Jason Aronson

View Details

Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Leon Hoffman, who is a Training Analyst, and a child, adolescent and adult Psychoanalyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and he is also the Co-Director of the Pacella Research Center. Dr. Hoffman is the Chief Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst at the West End Day School in New York City and he is the Co-Developer of the ongoing clinician research seminar at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and institute.

The focus of today’s conversation is on Dr. Hoffman’s role as the Co-Investigator of the Evaluation of Regulation Focused Psychotherapy for Children, which is a key part of his life’s work. As you will hear in this episode, Dr. Hoffman brings his warmth, enthusiasm, and his deep feeling for understanding the inner lives of children, even when they make that very difficult, even when their disruptive behavior leads them to be not listened to by many, Dr. Hoffman is committed not only to listen to them but to train others to learn how to listen to them.

Key takeaways:

[3:55] Dr. Hoffman shares his own thoughts about the advantages and disadvantages of a manualized approach and the clinical challenges he and his team have faced after creating the manual.

[9:20] Dr. Hoffman talks about his work taking key aspects of child analytic work and bringing them to a broader community, in terms of clinicians and patients.

[9:51] Children with behavioral problems are experts in bringing up the weak spots of the therapist.

[10:40] Dr. Hoffman and his team developed a manual meant to help analysts with her or his countertransference.

[13:31] Dr. Hoffman explains children tell a story in a disguised way through play.

[14:00] Dr. Hoffman shares a case example where defense was addressed from the start.

[19:05] The pros and cons of a short term treatment.

[21:58] Positive transference is not interpreted, only disruptions and countertransference.

[26:04] Dr. Hoffman details how the therapist addresses in the play the patient’s response to her scary feelings.

[27:35] The triangle of defense.

[29:53] Listening and understanding the emotions behind the child’s behaviors lead to great improvements in a short period of time.

[31:43] Stop, look and listen.

[32:15] What brought Dr. Hoffman to child analysis?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Hoffman, L., Rice, T. R., with Prout, T. A. (2016).Manualofregulation-focusedpsychotherapyforchildren (RFP-C) withexternalizingbehaviors: Apsychodynamicapproach. New York, NY: Routledge.

Berta Bornstein's Frankie: TheContemporaryRelevanceofaClassictotheTreatmentofChildrenwithDisruptiveSymptoms. ThePsychoanalyticStudyoftheChild 68:152-176

Rice, TR, and Hoffman, L. (2014). DefenseMechanismsandImplicitEmotionRegulation: AComparisonofaPsychodynamicConstructwithOnefromContemporaryNeuroscience. J Am Psychoanal Assoc 62: 693-708.

Prout, T. A., Bernstein, M., Gaines, E., Aizin, S., Sessler, D., Racine, E., Spigelman, A., Rice, T., & Hoffman, L. (2020). RegulationFocusedPsychotherapyforChildreninclinicalpractice: Casevignettesfrompsychotherapyoutcomestudies. International Journal of Play Therapy, 29(1), 43–53

Prout, T. A., Rice, T., Murphy, S., Gaines, E., Aizin, S., Sessler, D., ... & Hoffman, L. (2019). WhyIsItEasiertoGetMadThanItIstoFeelSad? Pilot Study of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children. American journal of psychotherapy, 72(1), 2-8.

RegulationFocusedPsychotherapyforChildren

View Details

The guiding principle in using psychopharmacology within psychoanalytic treatment is to see under which circumstances and how far the patient’s autonomy and the patient’s feeling of agency is well preserved. Or you might speak of the degrees of freedom enabled or being hindered by the use of pharmacology.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Joachim Küchenhoff, who is a psychoanalyst and a member of the IPA and of the Swiss and German Psychoanalytic Societies. He is also a specialist in psychiatric psychotherapy, specifically in psychosomatic medicine. Dr. Küchenhoff was the medical director of the department of the adult psychiatry in the canton Basel-Stadt in Switzerland from 2007 to 2018 and he is the editor in chief of the Swiss Archives of Neurology, Psychiatry, and Psychotherapy. Dr. Küchenhoff has written 16 academic books and edited 22 academic volumes. He is especially interested in psychoanalytic transdisciplinary research and has collaborated intensively with philosophical, cultural and literary scholars. His latest publication in English is a monograph called Understanding Psychosis: A Psychoanalytic Approach. His scientific work centers on the psychoanalytic approach to severe psychic disorders in psychiatry and especially in psychosomatic medicine, and on the subjective body experience.

In today’s conversation, Dr. Küchenhoff dives deep into helpful use, as well as not so helpful use, of psychotropic medications in patients during psychotherapy and analysis, emphasizing the relationship this has with the patient’s autonomy.

Key takeaways:

[7:01] Dr. Küchenhoff shares his perspective on the role of psychotropics in psychotherapy.

[10:05] The importance of treating severely ill patients psychoanalytically who are using drugs or need them.

[11:04] The role of the patient’s autonomy.

[12:54] Dr. Küchenhoff presents a case example.

[17:56] Dr. Küchenhoff shares a case example where it was unnecessary to prescribe drugs to the patient.

[22:30] The issue of split treatment.

[25:35] Dr. Küchenhoff talks about countertransference and its relationship with the prescription of psychotropics.

[26:50] Treating the roots of depression.

[30:55] Dr. Küchenhoff explains why he considers himself a psychoanalyst in the first place.

[34:50] Psychoanalysis can be successfully applied to many diverse fields of medicine.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Understanding Psychosis: A Psychoanalytic Approach. Routledge London, Joachim Küchenhoff 2018.

Intercorporeity and body language: The semiotics of mental suffering expressed through the body.Joachim Küchenhoff, IJPA 100 (4) 769 – 791, 2019

Proving the impact of psychoanalysis on daily psychiatric practice. In: Eizirik C, Forrest G (ed.) Psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Partners and competitors in the mental health field. P.243-255. Routledge London, 2019.

Psychoanalyse und Psychopharmakologie [Psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology; book in German]. Kohlhammer Stuttgart (ed.), 2016.

View Details

“I have inner permission to write the memoir and to work through the contradictions and the difficulties that I might have, and not have a Greek chorus in my head telling me: You can't do this.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Susan Mailer to today’s episode. Susan is an American born psychoanalyst who grew up in Mexico and has lived in Chile for more than 30 years. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, she trained in Chile at the Psychoanalytic Institute, where she became a full member a few years later as well as an active faculty member there. She has published in Latin American psychoanalytic journals and in Psychoanalytic Dialogues and she has participated in many Psychoanalytic panels worldwide, including the Winnicott Congress, IPA Congress and congress associated with FEPAL (Psychoanalytic Federation of Latin America). Susan teaches, supervises and has a private practice in Santiago and recently co-founded the new IPA affiliated to Psychoanalytic Institute of Santiago de Chile, and its working on the development of its Institute.

The focus of this episode is Susan’s memoir, titled In Another Place: With or Without My Father Norman Mailer which was recently published in 2019. This conversation is wide ranging and you will hear about the meaning of ‘celebrity’, as well as the impact it had on herself and on others. Harvey and Susan talk about how being famous and writing a memoir impacts the clinical setting, what psychoanalysis has been like under dictatorship, and her own personal journey to becoming a psychoanalyst.

Key takeaways:

[5:02] The contradiction evident in a psychoanalyst writing a memoir.

[6:46] Susan Mailer shares her personal journey writing her memoir.

[11:08] Susan contemplates how writing her memoir can affect her patients.

[14:20] Susan presents the case of a patient who read her memoir.

[15:30] Susan shares how it was to grow up with a father who cherished his fame.

[16:40] Harvey explores the meanings of abstinence and neutrality.

[19:42] Susan talks about being inspired by one of Winnicott’s phrases: “Therapy is a sophisticated game of hide and seek, in which it is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found”.

[21:48] Susan shares her experience with people who did not know who her father was.

[24:17] Susan’s developments as an analyst and later on as a writer.

[27:32] Susan talks about how both of her parents were a great influence in her life and profession.

[28:58] Susan talks about the experience of living during a dictatorship in Chile and becoming a psychoanalyst during those times.

[34:58] Susan shares how in 1990 a democratic government changed the atmosphere in Chile.

[36:10] People were afraid of challenging beliefs as a result of the years of dictatorship.

[37:58] Chile’s current situation with the ‘social explosion’.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Memoirs written by Psychoanalysts.

Sophia Richman PhD. A Wolf in the Closet.The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust.

Margaret Little, Psychotic Anxieties and Containment. A history of my Analysis with Winnicott

Susan Mailer: In Another Place, With and Without my Father Norman Mailer.

Memoirs written by children of famous authors:

Kaylie Jones: Lies my Mother Never Told me.

Gregory Bellow: Saul Bellow's Heart

Janna Malamud Smith: My Father is a Book

View Details

"Through the process of mentalization and empathic resonance sharing the child really begins to experience the process of learning, to trust which is absolutely foundational, and begins to count on being valued, begins to count on being listened to, held in mind, reflected back to and ultimately really cared about and loved."

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Kathryn McCormick. Kathryn is an Advanced Psychoanalytic Candidate in both child and adult psychoanalysis at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She holds a master's in psychology, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, a child mental health specialist and an ethnic minority mental health specialist in the state of Washington for American-Indian and Alaskan Natives. Kathryn has worked for over 20 years on the Tulalip's Tribe reservation in the state of Washington as a clinician and also for the past 10 years as the Administrative Clinical Supervisor of the Child, Youth and Family Mental Wellness Program. For the past three and a half years, she has been the Administrative Clinical Supervisor of the Betty J. Early Learning Academy which is the tribe's birth-to-five center for behavioral health and recovery. In addition to all these activities, Kathryn is also the president of IPSO, the International Psychoanalytic Studies Organization, which has over 2000 members worldwide in over 42 countries.

As you will hear in today's conversation, Kathryn is deeply devoted to the well being of the Tulalip Tribe members and she is deeply involved in Reflective Network Therapy which is a psychoanalytically informed treatment approach developed by Dr. Gilbert Kliman, that is especially well suited Kathryn work at this community.

Key takeaways:

[4:32] Kathryn McCornick talks about the population that she has been working with the community and their clinical challenges.

[7:20] Kathryn talks about starting to use Reflective Network Therapy and the positive reaction of the community.

[10:35] How does the RNT method work?

[13:25] Parents and caregivers also get involved with the teacher and the therapist.

[14:15] RNT is a relationship process and is dynamic.

[15:51] Kathryn McCornick shares a case example.

[18:50] RNT is proving to be a financially stable approach.

[21:17] What brought Kathryn McCornick into this work?

[26:18] Kathryn McCornick talks about her role as the president of IPSO.

[30:05] Mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body: working on the gap between body and mind.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

IPSOWorld

IPSOonFacebook

Recommended Readings:

Kliman, G. (1970) Experimentalapplicationofchildanalysisinatherapeuticnursery. Psan. Stud. Ch. Vol: 30, New York, NY: The New York Times Press.

Kliman, G. (2018)ReflectiveNetworkTherapyforPreschoolerswithAutismorPosttraumaticStressdisorder. Neuropsychoanalysis August 2018.

Videos:

ReflectiveNetworkTherapyWithinBettyJ. TaylorEarlyLearningAcademy

ReflectiveNetworkTherapyatBJTELA

View Details

Attachment theory is a psychoanalytic theory that extended its field to the neurosciences, to clinical trials, and to behavioral observations such as going to the schools and seeing teachers and children together. We can observe children's' behavior and use psychoanalytic theory to understand them allowing us to detect problems even in infancy.”

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Humberto Persano. Dr. Persano is a psychiatrist and an adult and child psychoanalyst at the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association where he is a training and supervising analyst. In addition, Dr. Persano has been appointed the Director of Mental Health Services for the City of Buenos Aires. Dr. Persano is a full professor in Psychology and Nutrition in the School of Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. He is as well the author of The Importance of Psychodynamic Diagnoses in Patients with Severe Mental Illness, and he was also a collaborator on the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, second edition. Drs. Persano and Schwartz have worked together on the IPA in Health Committee. Dr. Persano shares in today’s interview how his roles as both a psychoanalyst and as a mental health administrator interact with each other and how he applies his psychoanalytic thoughts and knowledge on a large scale

Key takeaways:

[4:44]What does being the Mental Health Director of the city of Buenos Aires entail?

[9:04] Dr. Persano talks about his mentors.

[9:54] Dr. Persano describes Buenos Aires’ main features (population, geography, hospitals)

[11:07] Buenos Aires counts with four public psychiatric hospitals and seven psychiatric units in general hospitals.

[12:13] There is a need in Buenos Aires to create more mental health units in general hospitals in order not to stigmatize people suffering from mental disorders.

[15:10] Dr. Persano talks about his professional background.

[17:14] The relationship between psychoanalysis and psychiatry.

[20:55] Dr. Persano talks about the attachment behavior in the transference process.

[25:35] Dr. Persano shares an example on attachment of his work in the early 90's.

[30:40] Dr. Persano talks about a research that was conducted in Sweden about the role of a psychotherapist in the long term psychic organization of the patient.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Beutel, M. E., Rasting, M., Stuhr, U., Rüger, B., & Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2004). Assessing the impact of psychoanalysis and long-term psychoanalytic therapies on health care utilization and costs. Psychotherapy Research, 14(2), 146-160.

Fonagy, P. (2018). Attachment theory and psychoanalysis. Routledge.

Lingiardi, V., & McWilliams, N. (Eds.). (2017). Psychodynamic diagnostic manual: PDM-2. Guilford Publications.

Persano, H. L. El mundo de la Salud Mental en la Práctica Clínica. Editorial Akadia, Buenos Aires, 2018.

Sandell, R., Blomberg, J., Lazar, A., Carlsson, J., Broberg, J., & Schubert, J. (2000).Varieties of Long-Term Outcome Among Patients in Psychoanalysis and Long-Term Psychotherapy: A Review of Findings in the Stockholm Outcome of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Project International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 81(5), 921-942.

View Details

“My intent behind that was to startle people into thinking about how normal so many of the underpinning psychological elements of fraud and the relationship between deceiver and deceived is, and to uncover people’s misunderstanding of people who commit fraud as necessarily some radical other.”

Description: Steven S. Rolfe welcomes Alexander Stein, PhD who is a psychoanalyst and Principal in the Boswell Group, serving as a confidential advisor to CEOs and senior management teams. He is the founder of Dolus Advisors, a consultancy specializing in detecting, mitigating and resolving challenging human factor disturbances, including fraud, corruption, executive misconduct and the human element in cybersecurity. Dr. Stein is widely published and cited in the business press and varied industry publications including Financier Worldwide, the Journal of International Banking Law and Regulation, Asset Recovery Watch, FraudNet Report, and the Wall Street Journal, and he is currently a regular contributor to Forbes writing on the psychology of leadership and misbehavior in business. He is a frequent speaker and panelist at conferences focused on fraud, corporate ethics and compliance, and cybersecurity and technology. He has also published many essays and book reviews in psychoanalytic journals including the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Key takeaways:

[3:45] Dr. Alexander Stein talks about some of his significant career transitions.

[9:31] How can a psychoanalyst leave the office to have an impact on institutions, their leaders, the decisions they make and the effect they have?

[10:58] Dr. Stein educated himself about how institutions function and malfunction.

[13:02] Dr. Stein talks about how he wrote his first article about the psychology of leadership.

[15:30] Overcoming the simplification of complex issues by addressing the root causes.

[17:40] Dr. Stein addresses the conflicts leaders were facing in his earliest interventions with small business owners.

[20:56] The resistance encountered when identifying as an analyst and going into the business world.

[22:14] Confronting the misunderstandings regarding who a psychoanalyst is and what a psychoanalyst can do.

[23:25] Dr. Stein talks about the beginning of his work in fraud and asset recovery.

[27:34] Why is everyone a fraudster?

[29:06] Dr. Stein shares a case example of his work with fraud in large enterprises.

[33:40] Understanding of the fraudster and the victim.

[34:48] The particularities of economic crime.

[36:35] Having empathy for the victim.

[40:27] Dr. Stein shares his work as a psychoanalyst in the area of cybersecurity.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

A Few minutes with Alexander Stein [interview]

Elon Musk's Fateful Tweet: A Lesson About Impulses and Paying Attention

How, then, do we stop the fraudsters among us? by Martin Kenney

What Corporate Boards Really Need to Consider When Looking for a Replacement CEO

Reparation and Redress: Ethical Solutions to Graceless Governance

Often, The Best Compliance Presentations Are After The Compliance Presentation

View Details

“What makes the human being need to be in relationships and how can one affect these relationships to allow growth? I am encompassing something which is moving from the sciences to relationships.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Yehudah Fraenkel, who is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst and a member of the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society. Dr. Fraenkel has spent most of his professional career working at the intersection of medical care, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. He has devoted his career to teaching medical students and residents, and also working for many years with family physicians. He has run a Balint Group for family physicians since 1995, as well as run courses in psychotherapy and consulting for a large group of family physicians since 1993. Enjoy today’s interview with Dr. Yehudah Fraenkel.

Key takeaways:

[3:20] The mind-body interface and somatization.

[6:09] Dr. Yehudah Fraenkel talks about how he understands the concept of the mind-body interface.

[7:45] Somatization. When the body manifests feelings or unconscious conflicts that cannot be felt or spoken.

[8:40] Psychosomatics deal with panic.

[10:45] The support system for people that are being discharged from the hospital is a great predictor of how their health is going to progress.

[11:40] How depression is related to death from cardiac disease.

[12:13] Dr.Schwartz talks about broken heart syndrome.

[15:36] Dr. Fraenkel shares his experience working with family physicians.

[18:38] Dr. Fraenkel presents a case of pelvic pain syndrome.

[20:17] The value of teaching splitting to physicians

[21:43] Teaching doctors to deal with passive-aggressive patients.

[22:15] Balint groups as a useful tool for doctors to share and reflect their feelings.

[26:27] Transference is much stronger when the doctor puts his hands on you.

[27:44] Dr. Fraenkel talks about his personal and professional background.

[30:20] How the general medical community receives Dr. Fraenkel’s work.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Depression Following Myocardial Infarction Impact on 6-Month Survival, Nancy Frasure-Smith, PhD; François Lespérance, MD; Mario Talajic, MD JAMA. 1993;270(15):1819-1825.

The Doctor, His Patient and the Illness, Michael Balint Elsevier - Health Sciences Division 2000

Mind and Its Relation to the Psychosoma. In: through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis. Winnicott D.W. Karnac, London1987

View Details

“There is nothing faith-based in the least about the Buddhist approach to spirituality. It is also direct and personal, there is no intermediary needed to access, to experience and to investigate the spiritual path in Buddhism”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Kathleen A. Lyon, who is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York. Dr. Lyon has been practicing privately in New York City for almost 30 years. She has taught many courses in the psychoanalytic program at PANY and is currently teaching an advanced theory course on transference. She is also the former chair of the Education Committee and the Admissions Committee. Dr. Lyon has been a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism for over 20 years and has developed a course called Resilience Through Compassion Training which provides a structure for compassion-based practices.

As you will hear, Dr. Lyon starts from a Buddhist foundation for inner-thinking which allows her to engage patients who otherwise might be disinclined to seek treatment from a psychoanalyst. She also introduces the idea of Spiritual Bypassing, which is an appreciation of how spirituality can be used for defensive purposes. She demonstrates the skill with which she addresses those defenses for the benefit of the patient.

Key takeaways:

[4:09] Dr. Lyon talks about the differentiation between Buddhism, meditation and mindfulness.

[9:54] The Buddhist practice is the practice of meditation.

[10:40] Meditation is divided into two main categories: the concentrative and mindfulness practices.

[13:22] Where does the sense of self reside?

[16:05] The more experience a person has in meditative practice, the greater increase in one’s confidence in their ability to tolerate states that had been perceived as intolerable.

[17:47] The sense of self includes the sense of others and relationships.

[18:50] Dr. Lyon shares the concept of spiritual bypassing.

[22:45] Dr. Lyon presents examples of spiritual bypassing.

[33:04] Dr. Lyon shares how she became interested in spirituality and Buddhist practices.

[35:56] Dr. Lyon runs programs based on compassion based practices and meditation.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Spiritual Bypassing in the Contemporary Mindfulness Movement. Carla Sherrell and Judith Simmer-Brown, Naropa University. Initiative for Contemplative Inquiry and Action, Vol. 1, No. 1, July 2017, a special project of Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.

Psychotherapy Without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective, Mark Epstein, Chapters 1-3. Yale University Press, 2008

What Makes You Not a Buddhist, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse. Shambhala Publications 2007

View Details

“We sat down in a meeting and I talked about adolescent sexual development and what I found was a tremendous resistance even in the community to hear about the issues of sexuality.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Monisha Nayar-Akhtar, PhD, who did her adult and child psychoanalytic training at Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia as well as at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Founder of the journal Institutional Children: Explorations and Beyond, she is also on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Dr. Nayar-Akhtar is the author of two books: Play and Playfulness: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Aspects and Identities in Transition: The Growth and Development of a Multicultural Therapist. She is also the director of the Indian American Psychoanalytic Alliance. Today, we will learn about her work offering psychoanalytic consultations to an orphanage in India and the profound impact her work has had there.

Key takeaways:

[4:15] Dr.Nayar-Akhtar shares her sense of what psychoanalytic thinking can contribute to an orphanage.

[6:33] Most of the children in the orphanage in India had severe cases of trauma.

[7:38] Dr.Nayar-Akhtar talks about the series of workshops that were developed at the orphanage in Delhi directed to the social workers.

[9:54] The outcome of the first year of working at the orphanage: the development of a journal.

[12:30] The aim was to create a journal that addresses the needs of the population, has International recognition and brings forth analytic ideas.

[13:01] Dr. Nayar-Akhtar shares the clinical example of adolescents that leave the program when they turn 18 years old and the psychological implications in these young adults.

[17:22] Assisting the caregivers for them to feel heard.

[19:57] An example of the work with young girls who were becoming sexually active.

[25:04] What lead Dr. Nayar-Akhtar to this work.

[28:55] Dr. Nayar-Akhtar talks about her goal of communicating about the impact of institutionalization.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Journal Institutionalized Children: Explorations and Beyond

Recommended Readings:

Nayar-Akhtar, M.C.: On the seashore of sunshine homes: psychoanalytic perspective on working with institutionalized children in India: Children in Need: Analysts in Alternative Settings. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, (in press).

Akhtar, M and Ariely, Sumedha. G.: Attachment and Context:Evolving Perspective in a Clinical Realm. In Essays from Cradle to Couch, In Honor of the Psychoanalytic Developmental psychology of Sylvia Brody, 2017, pp. 137-171, IPBooks, Astoria, NY 11102

Heidi Keller: Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology originally published online 27 December 2012

View Details

“In Jacques Cousteau’s book there’s this turning point moment when he looked into the water and it was a completely different world and then he looked back up and he saw people going around, with no idea what was under the surface...There are people who can dive into topics that are kind of unbearable, I mean beyond comprehension, and have the ability to put them into words we can understand.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. A. Chris Heath, who is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Dallas, Texas. Dr. Heath has dedicated himself to helping people understand their unconscious mind and he’s done this through his remarkable YouTube channel called HeathMD where he features entertaining videos about how the mind works and it has more than 45,000 views. Dr. Heath is a member of the social media and board of the International Psychoanalytical Association as well as a member of the Committee for Public Information of the American Psychoanalytic Association. As you will hear in the interview, there is an aliveness and vibrancy to Dr. Heath - he shows all of us his love of the work, his enjoyment in explaining it and the gift he has of taking nuanced concepts and presenting them in a very user-friendly fashion.

Key takeaways:

[3:17] Video from Dr. Heath called “How does psychotherapy work?”

[5:06] Dr. Heath talks about how he started his YouTube Channel and what is the feedback he receives from the audience.

[7:15] The contrast between the privacy of the psychoanalytic process and how psychoanalysis outreaches to the community as a tool to achieve profound life changes.

[7:44] Psychoanalysis in times of “quick fix” approaches.

[8:40] People tend to be afraid of psychoanalysis, perceiving it as a “swallowing hole”.

[10:20] Dr. Heath talks about the style he uses in his videos.

[13:07] Dr. Heath ́s YouTube Channel audience is people in the range from 25 to 35 years old.

[16:25] The ability to put into accessible words abstract concepts for everyone to comprehend.

[18:15] The biggest source of anxiety is irrational.

[20:54] The audience who actually view Dr. Heath’s YouTube channel was not the one he was aiming for.

[22:05] Dr. Heath talks about the feedback from the viewers while interacting with the comments section on his YouTube Channel.

[25:10] Dr. Heath shares how his work on YouTube relates to his own personal life and professional career.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Dr. Heath YouTube Channel: HeathMD

Recommended Readings:

Bill Nye (2015). Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World. St Martin's Press

Jaques-Yves Cousteau (2004). The Silent World. The National Geographic Society

Heath, AC (2018). Will a Video-Based Psychoanalytic Outreach Effort Engage a Young Audience? The Freudalicious Mind Project. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 66(4): NP1- NP6

Obaid FP (2014). The Incidence of Freudian Self-Analysis in the Construction of the Psychoanalytic Theory of Anxiety. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 95(1): 15-41

View Details

“We live inside architectural structures, for instance, our own, but at the same time they live inside our minds, in dreams, for example, we can build architectural structures, modify them or destroy them.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Cosimo Schinaia. Dr. Schinaia is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and a full member of the International Psychoanalytic Association. He has been a psychiatrist who has worked as a director of the Mental Health Department of central Genoa for many years where he now works in private practice. Dr. Schinaia is widely published - a number of his papers in English are: On Preservation and Destruction in the Unconscious: Freud and Bion which was published in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2018; Respect for the Environment Psychoanalytic: Consideration on the Ecological Crisis, which was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2019; and The Feelings of Those Who Have Been Expelled: Notes of a Psychoanalyst Forced to Leave Genoa because of Racial Laws in 1938, published in Trauma and Memory also in 2019.

He has written two books that have been widely translated, the first in On Pedophilia originally published in Italian and translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, French and German, and his most recent work which is the subject of today’s conversation, Psychoanalysis and Architecture, the Inside and the Outside, published by Karnac originally in Italian and translated into English and Spanish.

As you will hear in today’s interview Cosimo shares his Italian point of view on the role of the environment in reflecting our intrapsychic life and also influencing our intrapsychic life.

Key takeaways:

[4:32] Dr. Schinaia shares why he has a special interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis and architecture.

[6:20] The symbolism of a house in dreams.

[9:35] The difference between the European consulting rooms in comparison to the Americans and their implications in the psychoanalytic process.

[12:00] The case of a patient whispering sexual material and forcing the analyst to get closer to her.

[15:20] Different generations of psychoanalysts and the settings of the consulting offices.

[16:40] Dr. Schinaia talks about the excess of intersubjectivity in self-disclosure.

[18:05] The particularities of Kleinian offices.

[21:49] Clinical example where attention to the architectural space has played a part in deepening the work with the patient: the influence of the light in a consulting room.

[27:11] Dr. Schinaia shares his motivation to study the relationship between architecture and psychoanalysis.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

On Preservation and Destruction in the Unconscious: Freud and Bion, Dr. Cosimo Schinaia

Respect for the Environment Psychoanalytic: Consideration on the Ecological Crisis, Dr. Cosimo Schinaia

The Feelings of Those Who Have Been Expelled: Notes of a Psychoanalyst Forced to Leave Genova because of Racial Laws in 1938. Dr Cosimo Schinaia

On Paedophilia, Dr Cosimo Schinaia

Psychoanalysis and Architecture, the Inside and the Outside, Dr Cosimo Schinaia

View Details

“The idea was that what we called ‘phantastic objects’ get created sometimes in the mind of investors, which promise much more than just money; it is of course money, but they are ‘phantastic objects’ in the sense that Melanie Klein or someone like that might mean them, things that if you possess are like magic…”

Description: Dr. Steven Rolfe welcomes David Tuckett from London. David is a fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis as well as a Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty at UCL in the Faculty of Brain Sciences. As an undergraduate, he studied economics, politics, and sociology at the University of Cambridge. During this time he became very interested in psychoanalysis and went on to train as an analyst a few years after graduating. He qualified with the British Psychoanalytic Society in 1977. Throughout his career Professor, Tuckett has worked part-time in private clinical practice while also conducting research in the fields of psychology, medicine, the social sciences, and more recently economics. . He is a former President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation, Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Principal of the Health Education Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge. In 2007, Professor Tuckett won the Sigourney Award for distinguished contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. In 2011, he published his book Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability and his current book ( in press) is The Role of Conviction and Narrative in Decision-Making Under Radical Uncertainty.

In this conversation, David Tuckett engages in a conversation about his work; his pluralistic approach to analysis, his commitment to identifying the core ideas of psychoanalysis, and his application of a psychoanalytic perspective to behavioral finance and decision making.

Key takeaways:

[4:51] David Tuckett talks about his work focused on pluralism.

[11:02] David Tuckett’s work in providing a method to really see what different analysts do.

[13:48] When the focus is on the analyst rather than the patient.

[14:28] What are the core ideas about what an analyst is?

[16:09] The effort for formalizing pluralism.

[17:15] The importance of holding a scientific debate to make judgments in the psychoanalytic field.

[19:58] David Tuckett shares his thoughts about the core ideas of psychoanalysis.

[25:15] The use of psychoanalytic core ideas in economics.

[31:54] David Tuckett presents the concept of emotional finances.

[34:45] Examples of consulting with organizations and institutions.

[39:45] How developing a conviction narrative is applied to the investing field.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Rickard Nyman, Sujit Kapadia, David Tuckett, David Gregory, Paul Ormerod and Robert Smith (2018) News and narratives in financial systems: Exploiting big data for systemic risk assessment. Bank of England Staff Working Paper No. 704

David Tuckett & Milena Nikolic, M (2017) The Role of Conviction and Narrative in Decision Making under Radical Uncertainty. Theory and Psychology. 27 issue: 4, page(s): 501-523

Kimberly Chong & David Tuckett (2015). Constructing conviction through action and narrative: how money managers manage uncertainty and the consequence for financial market functioning. Socio-Economic Review, 13 (2), 309-330. doi:10.1093/ser/mwu020

David Tuckett (2011) Inside and Outside the Window: Some fundamental elements in the theory of psychoanalytic technique. Int. J. Psychoanal. Dec; 92(6):1367-90

David Tuckett (2011) Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan

David Tuckett and Richard J Taffler (2008) Phantastic Objects and the financial market’s sense of reality: A psychoanalytic contribution to the understanding of stock market instability. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 89 (2), 389-412

David Tuckett, Roberto Basile, Dana Birksted Breen, Tomas Bohm, Paul Denis, Antonino Ferro, Helmut Hinz, Arne Jemstedt, Paola Mariotti, and Johan Schubert (2008) Psychoanalysis Comparable and Incomparable The evolution of a method to describe and compare psychoanalytic approaches. New Library of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge.

David Tuckett (2005) Does Anything Go? Towards a framework for the more transparent assessment of psychoanalytic competence. Joint winner IPA Training Today Award, 2003. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis: 86: 31-49.

View Details

“The experience and feeling that another person who is close to you is really curious about you and who really wonders who this person is - someone who is interested in asking the question: ‘Who are you?’ I think it is through that type of curiosity and the relationship which stems from that, that we develop a lot of our sense of self and who we are.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. David Clinton from Stockholm, Sweden. He is originally from Scotland but is now based in Sweden where he has been working in the eating disorders field for over 30 years. He is a member of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Association and an associate member of medical psychology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the Director of Research at the Institute for Eating Disorders in Oslo. David is involved with research and training in eating disorders professionals at the Karolinska Institute and has a private practice in psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychotherapy, and clinical supervision, working in both English and Swedish. For 10 years, Dr. Clinton has worked closely with the eating disorders advocacy group called Healthy and Free which is part of the National Association against Eating Disorders. Together with this group, he has been actively exploring new ways of stimulating closer collaboration between clinicians, researchers, patients, and families. Outside of the eating disorder field, Dr. Clinton has been engaged in psychotherapeutic work at the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education which runs a public-funded clinic for psychosexual health. He has worked with eating disorder patients who struggled with pervasive problems linked to sexual self-destructiveness and trauma.

As you will hear in my conversation with David, he has taken up the challenge that a patient posed him many years ago, when he was working just with symptom alleviation - the patient said: “You helped me to survive, but now you have to help me learn to live.”

Key takeaways:

[4:44] The interference of eating disorders with intimacy.

[5:39] The morbidity of eating disorders.

[7:09] Going beyond the symptoms.

[7:37] The role of trauma in patients with eating disorders.

[9:34] The trauma caused by not being seen.

[10:56] The feeling of lack of presence in the other person’s mind.

[12:09] The curiosity of the patient regarding the therapist.

[15:30] From the concrete to the metaphorical.

[15:47] Dr. Clinton shares a case example.

[20:36] Patients working to be seen and loved for who they are.

[22:25] When the patient becomes aware that the therapist does not think about them as an object but as a subject.

[23:35] Discovering a new inner self.

[24:15] Dr. Clinton talks about his work with the patient advocacy group.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Bruch, H. (1973). Eating disorders: Obesity, anorexia nervosa and the person within. New York: Basic Books.

Clinton, D. (2006). Affect regulation, object relations and the central symptoms of eating disorders. European Eating Disorders Review, 14: 203-211.

Forsén Mantilla, E., Clinton, D. & Birgegård, A. (2018). The unsafe haven: Eating disorders as attachment relationships. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 92: 379-393.

Robinson, P., Skårderud, F., Sommerfeldt, B. (2019). Hunger: Mentalization-based treatments for eating disorders. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

View Details

“Interpreting experience in role, is in relation to the mission of the organization, is an extraordinarily useful way of beginning to develop a shared understanding of organizational dynamics.”

Description: Steven Rolfe welcomes Dr. Edward Shapiro, who is a training and supervising analyst at the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute. He is a former Medical Director and CEO of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He is a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine and has been an organizational consultant for over 35 years. Dr. Shapiro has consulted with hospitals, mental health clinics, law firms and family businesses focusing on organizational transition, mergers, organizational structure and dilemmas of authority, management and delegation. He has coached executives in health care, law , education and business. He is the author of Finding a Place to Stand: Developing Self Reflecting Institutions, Leaders and Citizens, and co-author of Lost in Familiar Places: Creating New Connections Between the Individual and Society. Dr. Shapiro received the Felix and Helene Deutsch Scientific Award from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, the Research Prize from the Society for Family Therapy and Research, and the Philip Isenberg Teaching Award from McLean Hospital.

Key takeaways:

[4:05] What stimulated Dr. Shapiro to write a book on citizenship?

[5:06] Interpreting society as an enormous challenge.

[6:14] Unconscious forces drive groups and organizations.

[8:38] Dr. Shapiro talks about his training as an analyst and consultant.

[12:03] Projective identification as crucial in the understanding of families and groups.

[14:05] Running the program at McLean Hospital.

[15:44] Austen Riggs.

[20:33] Transition from McLean to Austen Riggs.

[21:25] Organizations and society are interdependent.

[23:15] Working with limited resources .

[24:25] Patients as citizens of the Riggs community.

[25:48] The political aspect.

[27:10] Telling stories to make ideas accessible to people.

[32:50] Transference and the role of the analyst.

[34:07] Dr. Shapiro talks about his most recent book.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Shapiro, ER. (2020) Finding a Place to Stand: Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders and Citizens. London: Phoenix.

Shapiro ER. (2012) Management versus interpretation: teaching residents to listen. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 2012, 200 (3): 204-207.

Shapiro ER. (2011) Psychoanalytic institutions and treatment resistance: Commentary on Kafka: Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2011, 51: 71-79.

Shapiro E.R. editor (1997). The Inner World in the Outer World: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Shapiro, E.R. and Carr, A.W. (1991) Lost in Familiar Places: Creating New connections between the Individual and Society. New Haven:Yale University Press.

View Details

“I think the psychoanalytic training that we’ve had really helped us in this work to know how to slow down, to know how to listen, to know how to wait and process material under conditions that can feel and really are very urgent - cases when there is a baby in great danger or a mother in great danger.“

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Sally Moskowitz and Rita Reiswig. Dr. Moscowitz received a doctorate in clinical psychology from the City University of New York where she first met and worked with Anni Bergman. Dr. Moscowitz is a graduate both of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research where she is now a fellow and training analyst. She is also a graduate of the Anni Bergman Parent-Infant program, which she now co-directs and is also a member of the Contemporary Freudian Society. Since 2002 she has been part of the team of therapists working with Beatrice Beebe, on the mothers, infants and young children of September 11th, 2001 Project. Dr. Moskowitz has a private practice in New York City, working with adults in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and with infants, parents, and children in psychotherapy. She codirects the Anni Bergman Program home visiting project, as well as providing direct services as one of its therapists.

Rita Reiswig began her psychoanalytic training at the Contemporary Freudian Society in New York in 1985, becoming a training and supervising psychoanalyst in both the child and adult programs and on the faculty of the child program. In 1995 a group of analysts of the Freudian Society met as a group to focus on infant development and parent-infant treatment. In 2006 this infant program was renamed The Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Program and became a joint venture between the Contemporary Freudian Society and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. In 2014, the home visiting project for mothers and infants was added to the offering of the infant program, which she also codirects as well as provides direct services as one of the therapists. She too, since 2002, has been part of a team of therapists working with Beatrice Beebe on the Mothers, Infants and Young Children of September 11th, 2001 Project. She authored the paper “What is transmitted from the mother to the child about the father lost in 9/11” in the Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy in 2011.

As you will hear in today’s interview, these are two very generous psychoanalysts - they are generous with their time, with their spirit and with their interest in working with patients who ordinarily would never see the inside of a psychoanalyst’ office. They are also generous in sharing with us their lives, backgrounds, and passion for this work.

Key takeaways:

[4::40] The psychoanalytic frame as a state of mind.

[5:25] Sally Moskowitz talks about the psychoanalytic frame.

[8:05] Rita Reiswig talks about the acquired psychoanalytic frame.

[10:48] Receiving referrals of the most difficult cases.

[12:22] Slow things down in the face of urgency.

[13:18] Open-ended treatments.

[14:24] History of psychologists working with the community.

[16:21] Treating people with kindness.

[17:22] Seeing extreme poverty.

[18:23] The patient’s reactions.

[20:18] Intergenerational aspects of having a baby.

[21:01] First clinical example.

[27:48] Second clinical example.

[32:55] They talk about their backgrounds which brought them into work with children.

[36:32] The experience with Anni Bergman.

[37:31] Growing a family of colleagues.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

  1. Bergman, A. (1999). Ours, Yours, Mine: Mutuality and the Emergence of the Separate Self. NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc.

  2. Moskowitz, S., Reiswig, R., Demby, G. (2014). From Infant Observation to Parent-Infant Treatment: The Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Training Program. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 13:1, 1-8.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15289168.2014.888228

  1. Reiswig, R. (2011). Creating Space for Mourning a Lost Father and Husband After September 11: A Therapist’s Reflections. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 10:2-3, 238-241.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15289168.2011.600128

  1. Moskowitz, S. (2011). Primary Maternal Preoccupation Disrupted by Trauma and Loss: Early Years of the Project. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 10:2-3, 229-237.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15289168.2011.600117

Information about the Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Program Home-Visiting Project can be found athttp://www.abpip.net/home-visiting-project.html

View Details

“I feel that I bring analytic love and receive love from my clients in abundance and that is very much a part of the necessary frame for the work that we do, and by frame I do mean analytic frame as well as a frame of relatedness.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Linda Emanuel. Dr. Emanuel began her professional career as an internist working with patients who were dying in the early field of palliative medicine. She then did her training at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis and became a psychoanalyst who continues to provide psychodynamic therapy and analysis for dying patients and their families.

In her work, she discovered a concept that we will discuss today called “existential maturity”. Most of us have experienced death with those we were close to. We can only hope that the people who cared for our loved ones and will care for us eventually will have the existential maturity that we will learn about in today’s interview.

Key takeaways:

[4:45] Dr. Linda Emanuel explains the concept of existential maturity.

[9:49] People die as they lived.

[11:01] Working with the families of dying patients.

[12:20] How early attachments continue to impact later life.

[13:48] The subject of love and death.

[15:35] Analytic love.

[18:19] Love experienced by the person who is dying and by the one who is about to lose someone.

[18:43] Love as a sense of continuity.

[19:05] Love can make staring at mortality bearable.

[19:43] Dr. Linda Emanuel talks about her transition from being an internist to a psychoanalyst.

[23:23] Differences between working as an internist to working as an analyst.

[25:17] When a person is dealing with mortality they go through the phases of termination.

[25:50] People are not afraid of death, they are afraid of dying.

[29:15] Dr. Linda Emanuel presents two cases.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Ernest Becker (1973) The Denial of Death Free Press

Yalom Irvin (1980) Existential Psychotherapy Basic Books (1980)

Sheldon Solomon S, Greenberg J, Pyszczynki T. (2015) The Worm at the Core. Random House

Emanuel L, Reddy N, Hauser J, Sonnenfeld S. And yet it was a blessing: the case for existential

maturity. J Pall Med 2017 20 (4): 318-327.

View Details

“Psychoanalysis has so much to offer a particular patient population that really doesn't have sufficient access to our psychoanalytic work and applications. It is a terrible pity because so many of them really benefit from it directly and there is so much benefit for society in general.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Carine Minne who is a Psychoanalyst at the British Society and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She trained as a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist, bringing these specialties together in her posting as Consultant Psychiatrist at the Portman Clinic, (Tavistock & Portman NHS F Trust) and Broadmoor Hospital (West London NHS Trust). She is President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy and chairs the IPA community committee on Violence. Her focus for the last 25 years has been mainly on providing psychoanalytic treatments for patients who have acted violently or are troubled by sexual perversions. Many of her patients are in secure settings, psychiatric hospitals or prisons where psychoanalytically informed supervisions are provided to staff, given the strength of the reactions such patients or prisoners can provoke in those caring for them. Long term in-depth work is an important part of the overall treatment for such multiply traumatized people, given their background histories, the offenses they commit, and their discovery during treatment of being mentally disordered. Strong resistance to this work is regularly encountered, particularly by the general public that can mistake understanding with condoning. However, providing psychoanalytic approaches within relevant mental health and criminal justice organizations is often appreciated.

Key takeaways:

[4:00] Allowing primitive states of mind to emerge while benefiting patients who have committed crimes.

[5:53] Terms that contribute to dehumanizing mentally disordered offenders (MDO).

[6:26] What these patients have in common.

[8:40] The setting of these psychoanalytic interventions.

[8:17] The treatment should fit the crime, not punishment.

[10:35] Dealing with the therapist’s repugnancy towards the crimes that were committed.

[13:36] Being a woman treating male and female MDOs.

[14:45] Being an Irish woman in English psychiatric prisons.

[16:20] Dr. Minne talks about the feeling that “her mind was taken over” by her patients.

[16:56] The case of the man who killed his mother.

[21:15] Long term work, a form of psycho-dialysis which is very cost-effective.

[23:25] Why have these patients acted out the murder as opposed to imagining it?

[25:16] Biology's role in MDO.

[26:38] You can treat patients but can't cure them.

[27:05] The use of medication.

[28:03] What brought Dr. Minne to this work.

[32:15] Psychoanalytic training enriching Dr. Minne’s psychiatric background.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Sohn, L. (1995) UnprovokedAssaults - Makingsenseofapparentlyrandomviolence. Int. J. Psycho-Anal 76 565-575

Hyatt-Williams, Arthur (1998) Cruelty, Violence and Murder. P. Williams (Ed) London Karnac Books

Winnicott, D. W. (1956) The Antisocial Tendency. In D. W. Winnicott's Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. London: Tavistock Publications, 1958. Reprinted 1991, London, Karnac Books

Limentani, A. (1984) Towardsaunifiedconceptionoftheoriginsofsexualandsocialdevianceinyoungpersons. Int. J. Psycho-Anal 10 383-409

View Details

“This idea of freeing the patient up to think as they please; to speak without selecting, without direction is the heart of the method that he devised. There is an idea of freedom, but it is differentiated from compulsion from the start.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Daniel Pick who is a psychoanalyst and a fellow of the British Psychoanalysis Society. He read English literature and completed a Ph.D. in history in Cambridge before moving to London University, and undertaking his psychoanalytic training. He has worked for many years in private practice in London and has written widely on cultural history the history of the human sciences, and psychoanalysis. He is also a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and over the last six years has been the Senior Investigator on the Wellcome Trust Funded project, 'Hidden Persuaders': Brainwashing, Culture, Clinical Knowledge and the Cold War Human Sciences, c. 1950-1990’, which explores the history of the human sciences and 'psy' professions, and mind-control fears, during the Cold War. Professor Pick has presented and contributed to a variety of radio and television programs, including for Radio 3, 'Brainwash Culture'.

As you will hear in today’s interview, Dr. Pick’s training both as a psychoanalyst and a historian allows him to go back and forth between historical influences and the psychoanalytic dyad to learn about how the mind works in relation to our own histories and to the culture we live in.

Key takeaways:

[3:15] Connection between Psychoanalysis and brainwashing.

[3:50] Dr. Pick talks about the history of brainwashing.

[5:07] Freud reflection on his methods.

[6:57] Exploring the resistances to free association.

[7:53] The question of influence.

[9:13] The ideals of freedom.

[11:08] Dr. Pick’s research on hypnosis.

[12:01] The anxieties from the patients about the analysts.

[13:23] Cultural anxieties.

[17:11] How Dr. Pick’s studies on brainwashing has entered his clinical work.

[21:28] Feeling, as an analyst, being brainwashed by the patient.

[26:05] Trauma in transference.

[26:55] Our cultures influence on our reactions.

[27:43] The line between survival brainwashing and malignant brainwashing.

[30:15] Questioning the ideals about the freedom to think.

[31:18] How brainwashing became a term in the 50 ́s

[33:35] How the brainwashing enters the consultation room.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Hidden Persuaders

Recommended Readings:

Pick, Daniel (2016). (ed. with Matt Ffytche), Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism, The New Library of Psychoanalysis, 'Beyond the Couch' Series (Abingdon: Routledge).

Pick, Daniel (2015) . Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Pick, Daniel (2012). The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Pick, Daniel (2000). Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (London: Yale University Press)

View Details

“What we bring is really a deeper understanding of out of awareness behavior. Why don’t people do what is so logical, so rational? Why do they sabotage themselves? Why are executives self-destructive? Why do they suffer from hubris? Why do most executive teams not work very well? What are the dynamics going on in the group?”

Description: Dr. Steven Rolfe welcomes Manfred Kets de Vries, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change and the Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chaired Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus, at INSEAD. Bringing to bear his knowledge and experience of economics, management, and psychoanalysis, he scrutinizes the interface between international management, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and dynamic psychiatry. Manfred is the founder of The Challenge of Leadership executive program at INSEAD and founder of INSEAD’s Global Leadership Centre. The Financial Times, Le Capital and The Economist rated Manfred Kets de Vries as one of the world’s top fifty leading management thinkers, as well as one of the most influential contributors to human resource management. He is the author, co-author or editor of forty-nine books and has published over 400 papers as articles or chapters in books. His books and articles have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Key takeaways:

[3:17] Manfred Kets de Vries talks about his background.

[6:05] Manfred Kets de Vries talks about his initial interest in psychoanalysis and how it affected his interest in leadership.

[11:15] Choosing the first supervisor.

[12:28] Manfred Kets de Vries first patient was an entrepreneur.

[14:21] Teaching psychology and management

[15:21] Starting a seminar for senior executives.

[16:23] Manfred Kets de Vries wonders what can he do to create best places to work.

[17:24] Getting involved in psychoanalysis.

[20:15] Calling on psychoanalysts to pay attention to the world of work.

[20:47] The focus often is on structures and systems because people are unpredictable.

[22:20] The clinical paradigm.

[25:45] The shadow side of leadership; when leaders become destructive and abusive.

[29:05] How easily the darker side of leadership emerges.

[30:36] Political expediency in the Trump administration.

[33:42] What the psychoanalyst brings to the understanding of leaders and organizations.

[35:45] Helping people to become reflective leaders.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership: Leadership Pathology in Everyday Life, Manfred Kets de Vries

Recommended Readings:

Kets de Vries (2019) Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership, Palgrave Macmillan

Kets de Vries and Carlock (2007) Family Business on the Couch, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd

Kets de Vries (2006)The Leader on the Couch, Jossey-Bass

Kets de Vries (2001) Struggling with the Demon, Psychosocial Press, IUP.

Kets de Vries and Miller (1984) The Neurotic Organization, Jossey-Bass

View Details

“We learned that the secure attachment was predicted by the warmth of your childhood - that people who had warmer relationships with parents were more likely to have warmer and more securely attached relationships with their spouses in their eighties. Now that is no surprise to us psychoanalysts, but to demonstrate that empirically over the span of 60 years is kind of extraordinary.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Director of the Center for Psychodynamic Therapy at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest study on adult life ever conducted and this is the subject of our conversation today. His publications include many papers on the early life predictors of adult health and wellbeing.

Dr. Waldinger is a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and he teaches psychodynamic psychotherapy to psychiatry residents and he is also in private practice in Massachusetts. Dr. Waldinger is also a Zen priest and teaches Zen throughout New England. His Ted Talk about the Harvard study has more than 28 million views and is one of the most-watched Ted Talks of all time.

As you will hear in our conversation today, the findings that Dr. Waldinger and his team have learned over the past 80 years, reaffirm many familiar psychoanalytic principles, but what they add most remarkably is the empirical data to support them.

Key takeaways:

[3:45] Lifelong follow up.

[4:12] Dr. Waldinger talks about the history of the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

[7:13] The program now.

[9:13] Internal and external information.

[10:30] What has Dr. Waldinger found out?

[11:09] The quality of people’s relationships as a predictor how well they grow old.

[12:48] Measuring marital satisfaction and meaningful connections.

[13:40] Adult attachment interview.

[15:46] Maturation of defense mechanisms.

[16:44] People get happier as they get older.

[19:07] How did Dr. Waldinger become a different analyst through working in the program?

[21:14] The impact on the participants of the program.

[24:55] Having more data than can ever be analyzed.

[25:18] What lead Dr. Waldinger to run this program?

[26:45] Becoming a Zen priest.

[28:00] The skill of close observation.

[29:12] Beginning to write a book about the outcomes of Harvard Study of Adult Development.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Waldinger RJ, Schulz MS. Facing the music or burying our heads in the sand?: Adaptive emotion regulation in mid- and late-life. Research in Human Development, 2010.

Waldinger RJ, Cohen S, Schulz MS, Crowell JA. Security of attachment to spouses in late life: Concurrent and prospective links with cognitive and emotional wellbeing. Clinical Psychological Science, 2014.

Waldinger RJ, Schulz MS. The long reach of nurturing family environments: Links with midlife emotion-regulatory styles and late-life security in intimate relationships. Psychological Science, 2016.

Robert Waldinger TED talk

View Details

“In this kind of unconscious process particularly I think what happens is that the groups use unconscious defense mechanisms, such as denial, splitting, idealization or repression, and we need to help the manager and the group tolerate the anxiety and face the facts.”

Description: Steven Rolfe welcomes Dr. Anna Krantz. Anna is a psychoanalyst and a psychologist in private practice in Stockholm Sweden. She began her work consulting to organizations in the late 1990s and early 2000s when, after working to improve selection and hiring processes in organizations, she introduced employee assistance programs and critical incident management to the Swedish market. Her more recent experience, which we will hear more about presently, is in conjunction with Saint Luke’s in Stockholm where her interest is in helping leaders and teams function more productively and effectively. She advocates paying close attention to unacknowledged and unconscious dynamic factors in groups that interfere with the groups’ optimal functioning.

Key takeaways:

[3:13] Anna talks about her practice.

[4:41] How Anna became interested in organizational work.

[7:04] The story of Saint Luke’s non-profit organization.

[8:19] The organization’s profile.

[9:35] The kinds of organizations that Dr. Anna Krantz works with and how she does it.

[10:49] The importance of working along with a coworker.

[11:47] The nuances of working together with non-analyst consultants and with an organization.

[12:29] How groups work on an unconscious level.

[14:21] Different unconscious processes in groups.

[15:37] Including the feedback from someone outside the process.

[17:49] Getting to the core of the problems in an organization.

[18:30] Case example.

[23:41] The importance of psychological safety in workgroups.

[26:24] Groups perform better under psychological safety.

[27:57] Future trends for consulting work from an analytic perspective: Neuro-Psychoanalysis.

[30:19] Becoming engaged in the biological reality.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Bion, Wilfred. R. 1961. Experiences in groups, Tavistock Publications Limited

Edmondson, Amy C. 2018. The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation and growth,

Feldman Barrett, Lisa. 2017. How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain, Houghton Mifflin

Gabriel, Yannis. 2016.Organizations in Depth, Sage Publications, Ltd.

Parker Follett, Mary. 2013. Freedom and Co-ordination: Lectures in Business Organization (1926-1933), Routledge

Solms, Mark 2015. The feeling brain: Selected papers on Neuropsychoanalysis< Karnac Books, Ltd.

View Details

“Psychoanalytic ideas deserve to have continuous days in the sun.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Tracy Morgan and Anna Fishzon. Trace Morgan is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC and works with individuals, couples, and groups. She is the founder, editor, and host of the award-winning podcast New Books in Psychoanalysis and serves on the faculty of the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. Anna Fishzon is a licensed psychoanalyst. She practices in New York and is an advanced candidate at the Institute of Psychoanalytic Training and Research. For ten years she taught interdisciplinary courses on a broad range of topics, including Russian History, Psychoanalysis, literature and gender, and sexuality at Williams College, Columbia University and Duke University. She is the author of Fandom,Authenticity,and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia. Anna is co-editing The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass. She is the co-host of the podcast New Books in Psychoanalysis and co-editor of The Candidate Journal, Psychoanalytic Currents.

As you will hear in today’s interview, these are two thoughtful analysts who are intrigued by the subject of analysis, each from somewhat different perspectives. They deeply engage the authors that they interview on the podcast New Books in Psychoanalysis.

Key takeaways:

[4:45] Letting the community know what analysts do.

[5:18] How New Books in Psychoanalysis communicates with the community.

[10:03] Becoming more clinically focused.

[11:04] The theory vs the application.

[13:15] Psychoanalytic theory as a teaching of how to live.

[13:50] Listening with respect.

[14:55] How being an analyst impacts the work of interviewing authors.

[18:43] Different versions of transference.

[19:33] The mechanics of the podcast

[20:52] How Tracy and Anna would like to see the podcast grow in the near future

[23:27] Harvey’s opinion about the practical and theoretical balance in New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast.

[25:02] Practicing psychoanalysis in isolated areas.

[26:44] Tracy and Anna talk about their background that led them into psychoanalysis.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

https://www.amazon.com/Fandom-Authenticity-Opera-Fin-Si%C3%A8cle-ebook/dp/B00FJYJX5A/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1565983485&sr=8-2

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1668-there-can-be-no-crisis-of-psychoanalysis-jacques-lacan-interviewed-in-1974

https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/science-technology/psychoanalysis/

http://www.bgsp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Liegner-E-The-First-Interview-In-Modern Psychoanalysis.pdftra

View Details

“The background for this is actually seeing psychoanalytic principles as a basic science in thinking about how do we help people. For me, this combination of curiosity, justice, equality and alleviating suffering came together in a very powerful way around this work.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Steven Marans, who is a child and adult psychoanalyst at the Yale School of Medicine. He is the Harris Professor of Child Psychoanalysis, Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Childhood Violent Trauma Center at the Yale Child Study Center.

Dr. Marans has devoted much of his career to developing and implementing psychoanalytically informed responses to children, families and communities traumatized by violent and catastrophic events including mass casualty school shootings and natural disasters. He has developed model approaches to enhance developmentally informed police practices and police mental health collaborative approaches to those impacted by traumatic events. He is the co-developer of an early brief evidence-based treatment that has been demonstrated to interrupt and prevent the development of PTSD. This intervention model continues to be widely implemented in the United States and abroad. Additionally, Dr. Marans has consulted extensively with local state and federal leaders as well as news media regarding policy and practices to best address child trauma.

As you will hear in today’s interview, Dr. Marans has immersed himself in the developmental processes that are affected by trauma and he has developed these interventions that can be life-changing for affected children, families and communities.

Key takeaways:

[4:35] Dr. Marans talk about his program’s vision.

[8:23] Working with the police department.

[12:01] Child development Policing Program.

[13:16] Dr. Marans shares an example of his team’s intervention along with the police.

[20:04] Playing a part in both the family system and the individual psychology of a child.

[20:35] Helping families to find the source of their distress.

[21:10] Child and parent speaking the same language.

[21:55] Increasing the self-observing capacity is one of the keys to recovery.

[22:41] Child and parent learning to help each other.

[23:35] Assessment tool.

[25:11] The importance of the role of the parent as a mediator.

[25:52] When an entire community is impacted by a catastrophic event.

[30:13] What brought Dr. Steven Marans to this field.

[33:38] When you feel helpless the natural response is to turn away.

[34:38] The critical role of cops: a benign, gentle and listening authority.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Marans, S (2013). Phenomena of childhood trauma and expanding approaches to early intervention.International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 10(3): 247-266

Marans. S. (2005). Listening to fear: From nightmares to the nightly news.

NY: Henry Holt and Co.

Marans, S. (1996). Psychoanalysis on the beat: Children, police and urban trauma.

Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol 51: 522-541

https://medicine.yale.edu/childstudy/communitypartnerships/cvtc/

View Details

“Especially now in business, what’s valued in leadership are the soft skills, not the dictatorial, top-down command and control. This is a time when analysts can be extremely valuable in the business world”

Description: Dr. Steven Rolfe welcomes Dr. Lisa Rosof from the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. Dr. Rosof is a board-certified psychiatrist and fellow of the American Board of Psychoanalysis. She was a practicing attorney and member of the California Bar before attending medical school at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. She completed her psychoanalytic training at Emory. She is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Atlanta and an adjunct assistant professor at Emory University Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Rosof has provided executive coaching to MBA students at the Goizueta Business School through the leadership coaching fellows program. Most recently she contributed as a faculty member in the Emory Diploma Program in Executive Coaching. Dr. Rosof is a faculty member of the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute where she has taught analytic writing, technique, and dreams. She is an inactive member of the California Bar.

During this episode, Dr. Lisa Rosof talks about the analytically oriented program in executive coaching that has been developed at Emory. This is believed to be the first psychoanalytically oriented executive coaching program developed by an analytic institute in conjunction with a business school.

Key takeaways:

[3:05] Dr. Lisa Rosof talks about the Emory Institute and the analytically oriented program and executive coaching.

[5:04] Initial connection with Goizueta.

[7:49] The idea of teaching future business leaders about Emotional Intelligence.

[8:19] Two different programs.

[9:18] Teaching critical coaching skills.

[10:47] Example of how they work with 2nd year MBA students.

[12:02] Funding sources.

[13:17] The Emory Diploma Program in Executive Coaching.

[14:57] The structure of the program is both didactic and experiential.

[16:25] A multidisciplinary approach.

[18:46] Making analytic thinking come alive in a business school.

[22:21] Reactions from the students that participated in the program.

[23:39] The profile of participants in the program.

[24:31] The future of the program.

[27:25] Advice to others considering developing this kind of program for their institutes.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Balint, M. (1968) The Doctor, his Patient and the Illness. 2nd Edition. London: Pitman Paperbacks.

Sandler, C. (2011). Executive Coaching A Psychodynamic Approach. Berkshire: Open University Press.

Zaleznik, A. (2009) Executive's Guide to Understanding People, Palgrave Macmillan

View Details

“I thought I should be sensitive, accessible and alive, in order to enable the baby to wake up and to start moving something inside that will bring up her potentials and start to BE.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Hamutal Raz Shiloach clinical psychologist and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society. She is a founder and director of the Multicultural Center for Parent-Infant Psychotherapy in Yafo, Israel, which will be the focus for our conversation today. She teaches widely in Israel. This is not surprising because after listening to today’s episode you will hear a master clinician describing her involvement with a very challenging situation with a mother and a young daughter. They are an affectively frozen mother and a frozen daughter, and Hamutal brings not only deep emotional connection to the work with this couple but also deeply thought out cognitive thinking about it as well. It isn’t often that you ́ll find the two combined. There are clinicians who feel very strongly about the work and there are those who think very deeply about the work. It is special when you find someone who does both.

Key takeaways:

[3:27] The challenges of running a multicultural daycare center.

[6:13] Full day program for children at risk who are taken care by welfare authorities.

[7:20] The language and cultural challenge.

[9:02] The particularities about the mother-baby early bond in the African cultural.

[11:46] The presence over the word.

[14:10] Kinds of problems seen at the daycare center.

[15:59] Working with the Arab population in Israel with Arab clinicians.

[17:40] Clinical example.

[30:20] The psychoanalytic intervention through listening and actions.

[33:13] The importance of body language and primitive features in the work with babies.

[33:45] Hamutal Raz Shiloach talks about her career journey and how she started working in this project.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Interview Bibliography

Dalley, T. (2010) Containment of trauma: Working in the community. In: T. Baradon (Eds.), Relational Trauma in Infancy. London: Routlege.

Fraiberg, S. (1982) Pathological Defenses in Infancy. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 51:612-635.

Salomonsson, B. (2007) 'Talk to me Baby, Tell me What's the Matter Now' Semiotic and Developmental Perspectives on Communication in Psychoanalytic Infant Treatment. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 88(1):127-146.

Stern, D. (1995) The Motherhood Constellation, London: Karnac.

Winnicott, D. W. (1969) The Mother-Infant Experience of Mutuality. In: C . Winnicott., R. Shepherd & M. Davis (Eds.) Psychanalytic Exploration. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

View Details

“We begin introducing children to emotions, how they felt, their functions and how to deal with their intra and interpersonal feelings, like anger, shame, fear and envy and we did this through storytelling, paintings and plays.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Shahrzad Hashemi and Rosa Famini. Shahrzad Hashemi is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and an advanced candidate at the comprehensive program for psychoanalytic psychotherapy at HamAva Institute in Tehran. She is also the editorial assistant of the open-access journal Psychoanalytic Discourse. In addition to her private practice, Shahrzad has been involved in many psychoanalytically informed activities in hospitals and schools, which we will hear more about in today’s interview. Rosa Famini is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and an advanced candidate at the comprehensive program for psychoanalytic psychotherapy at HamAva Institute in Tehran. She is also a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology in Tehran University and she heads the Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy training courses being held in collaboration with the Dutch Psychoanalytic Institute and Society in Tehran.

The work we are going to hear about today in the schools is being supervised by Dr. Nahaleh Moshtagh who is an American trained psychoanalytic candidate and is also the Director of the HamAva Institute. As we will hear in today’s interview, the passion for understanding, touching and freeing people’s minds from painful limitations is an interest that is shared by clinicians worldwide.

Key takeaways:

[4:05] The principles of the school project.

[7:06] School principal who was interested in psychoanalytic training for the students.

[9:10] Pupils, teachers and parents.

[9:26] Improving children’s self reflection skills.

[9:51] Example of the psychoanalytic listening implemented in a school setting.

[13:11] A project that attempts to change perspectives about school.

[15:21] Reflecting on group dynamics.

[17:50] Psychodynamic psychotherapy in Iran.

[19:21] The challenges that Shahrzad Hashemi and Rosa Famini encounter.

[20:36] Psychoanalytic training in Iran.

[23:16] Psychoanalytic private practice in Iran.

[24:25] Future goals for Shahrzad Hashemi and Rosa Famini.

[25:18] Continuing growth in a career as a psychoanalyst.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Britzman, D. P. (2009). Very Thought of Education, The: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions. Suny Press.

Britzman, D. P. (2012). After-education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and psychoanalytic histories of learning. SUNY Press.

Britzman, D. P. (2015). A psychoanalyst in the classroom: On the human condition in education. Suny Press.

Henry, G., Osborne, E., & Salzberger-Wittenberg, I. (2003). The emotional experience of learning and teaching. Routledge.

Sapountzis, I. (2018). Revisiting Bion’s “Notes on thinking”: Implications for school psychologists. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 17(3), 187-197.

View Details

“I listen with my psychoanalytic ear, for the unconscious, for defense mechanisms, affect, ego strengths and relationship between us, but at the UN I specifically want to focus on my work using a psychoanalytic lens”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Vivian B. Pender, who is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is a trustee of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Pender is also the main representative to the UN of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Her edited book The Status of Women was published by Routledge in 2016.

In our talk today Dr. Pender will describe her long-standing and devoted work at the United Nations and some of the successes that she’s had, bringing her psychoanalytic mindset to that vital work.

Key takeaways:

[3:25] Interventions in sex trafficking and forced marriages.

[7:33] Violence towards women and girls.

[8:23] Commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls.

[8:53] Child marriage is permitted in 48 states in the US.

[9:44] The case of an 8 year old girl about to be married to a 60 year old man.

[10:24] How to report to the UN?

[14:24] The experience of “on the ground workers”.

[18:13] Dr. Pender talks about working for the UN.

[20:01] What brought Dr. Pender into this work?

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

World Health Organization Mental Health Action Plan

Recommended Readings:

Bion, W. (1961). Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock Publications.

Pender VB (2007). Approaches to prevention of intergenerational transmission of hate, war and violence. International Journal of Psychoanalysis;88:507-14.

Pender VB (2019). The International Psychoanalytical Association at the United Nations in Harris, A & Montagna, P, Eds., Psychoanalysis, Law and Society. London: Routledge.

View Details

Pero nosotros mantenemos el enfoque psicoanalítico para comenzar desde nuestra manera de escuchar, la manera de escuchar aquello que se nos transmite con la convicción de que los contenidos sociales y culturales son absolutamente susceptibles de ser entendidos y darles sentido desde nuestra escucha.

But we maintain the psychoanalytic approach to start from our way of listening, the way of listening to what is transmitted to us with the conviction that social and cultural contents are absolutely susceptible to be understood and given meaning from our listening.

Description/ Descripción : Laura Katz, psicoanalista de la Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina y actual Directora de Comunidad y Cultura de la Federación de Psicoanálisis de Latinoamérica (FEPAL), recibe en este episodio a Maria Pia Costa presidenta de la Sociedad Peruana de Psicoanálisis, dicha sociedad lleva adelante el programa comunitario Psicólogos Contigo, que ha sido ganador del Premio IPA en la Comunidad, este es un premio creado por la actual directiva de la IPA con la intención de fomentar el trabajo de los psicoanalistas en sus comunidades. El premio será recibido por Maria Pia Costa en el congreso de la IPA en Londres el próximo julio. Maria Pia Costa es psicoanalista didacta y actual presidenta de la Sociedad Peruana de Psicoanálisis, ocupó también anteriormente el puesto de vicepresidenta y tesorera, realizó estudios de doctorado de estado en psicología clínica, psicopatología y psicoanálisis y obtuvo el diploma de estudios avanzados de psicología clínica, psicopatología y psicoanálisis, ambos en la Universidad de Nanterre, París. Ha trabajado temas como la femineidad y homoparentalidad, durante algunos años su interés se ha centrado en temas de violencia política y sus repercusiones emocionales. Ha publicado el libro Frente al Espejo Vacío: Un acercamiento psicoterapéutico a la violencia política. También ha publicado artículos en la revista Calibán, revista de la federación de psicoanálisis de américa latina y también artículos sobre sexualidad femenina y homoparentalidades en la revista de la Sociedad Peruana de Psicoanálisis. Ha publicado otros artículos en la revista Andares y en la Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse.

La entrevista de hoy se centrará en poder ampliar diferentes aspectos del programa comunitario Psicólogos Contigo. Los espacios comunitarios son espacios en donde los vínculos que se generan en su interior tienen un efecto directo en la producción de la subjetividad. Hoy reciben las consecuencias que arrojan los procesos de fragmentacion y exclusion social. El trabajo de escucha, posición que se encuentra en los fundamentos del psicoanálisis, habilita en dichos espacios comunitarios, el lugar de la palabra y de esta manera poder darle al sujeto la posibilidad de armar lazo social a través del soporte que le proporcionan sus otros.

Key takeaways/ Claves:

[4:45] Laura Katz le da la bienvenida a Maria Pia Costa al podcast.

[5:05] Premio IPA en la Comunidad.

[5:34] Objetivos iniciales del Programa Psicólogos Contigo.

[8:23] Tres proyectos dentro del programa: Atencion de Campo, Cuaderno: Historia de las lluvias e inundaciones en Perú, y Prevención de Violencia contra Niños y Niñas.

[9:44] Demanda de espacios individuales de diálogo.

[10:50] Atención a la población infantil.

[15:01] VIolencia como una emergencia nacional.

[16:38] Soporte del estado en programas comunitarios.

[18:31] Efectos traumáticos de la violencia de las catástrofes naturales e intrafamiliar.

[19:32] La catástrofe es humana y es social.

[20:58] Las consecuencias de las situaciones de violencia no atendidas.

[21:42] Cuidando generaciones futuras.

[23:33] No hay por qué disociar lo terapéutico de lo comunitario.

[25:48] Psicoanálisis como disciplina pertinente para responder a problemáticas sociales contemporáneas.

[27:34] La escucha psicoanalítica en el espacio comunitario.

[29:15] ¿Por qué Psicologos Contigo y no Psicoanalisis Contigo?

[30:31] Jornadas sobre trabajo comunitario.

[32:26] Salir del diván para alcanzar a la comunidad.

Mentioned in this episode/ Mencionado en este episodio:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings/ Lecturas recomendadas:

Marcelo Viñar. Experiencias psicoanalíticas en la actualidad sociocultural. Noveduc. Buenos Aires, 2018.

Mordechai Benyakar. Lo disruptivo. Amenazas individuales y colectivas: el psiquismo ante guerras, terrorismos y catástrofes sociales. Biblos. Buenos Aires, 2003.

Frente al espejo vacío: un acercamiento psicoterapéutico a la violencia política. Equipo de psicoterapeutas de la Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos. Lima 1998.

César Rodríguez Rabanal. Las cicatrices de la pobreza. Un estudio psicoanalítico. Nueva Sociedad. Lima 1992.

View Details

“I have never needed the psychoanalytic professionalism as much as in these very unconventional situations. It took the woman out of the shock of her freezing psychic state. In the acute situation just to meet a human being who dared to try to stand the horror of what she’s gone through - I think it was essential for her.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber. She is a training analyst at the German Psychoanalytic Association and a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society. She’s a recipient of the Sigourney Award in 2016 and the Haskell Norman Price for Excellence in Psychoanalysis in 2017. From 2001 to 2016 she was the director in charge of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. From 2001 to 2009 she was chair of the IPA research subcommittee for conceptual research. Her areas of interest include psychoanalytic developmental research, prevention studies, interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and literature, educational sciences and the neurosciences.

In today’s interview, we will learn about what Dr. Leuzinger-Bohleber considers her “psychoanalytic spirit” which she brings to all of her clinical encounters. This reveals itself to include warm empathic humanity and a wise clinical ear.

Key takeaways:

[4:25] Social and clinical situation of refugees in Germany.

[5:50] An overwhelming welcome culture.

[7:25] Split in society regarding refugees.

[8:12] Developing of antisemitism.

[10:00] Trying to break the intergenerational transmission of the trauma.

[10:30] Step by Step program to bring psychoanalytic sensitivity to large groups of people.

[14:55] Trying not to deny trauma but rather educate people about it.

[16:08] Principles developed for refugees.

[16:51] Traumatized people shouldn’t get into a passive situation.

[17:25] Refugees participating in activities and also giving back to contribute to the village.

[19:37] Recognizing sadistic impulses and nonverbal gestures.

[20:20] Addressing cultural distances.

[21:11] Crisis intervention.

[22:28] Homosexuality.

[23:35] A clinical case.

[30:14] Being grateful for psychoanalysis

[31:22] What Dr. Leuzinger-Bohleber learned from the empirical research.

[32:09] Trying to symbolize the trauma.

[33:30] Impact of psychoanalytic interventions with refugees.

[34:48] Chronic depression and early trauma.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Short film by Rose Palmer about STEP-BY-STEP project

Recommended Readings:

Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2015): Finding the Body in the Mind – Embodied Memories, Trauma, and Depression. International Psychoanalytical Association, London: Karnac

Bohleber, W. & Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2016): The Special Problem of Interpretation in the Treatment of Traumatized Patients. In: Psychoanalytic Inquiry 36: 60-76, 2016

Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. , Rickmeyer C, Lebiger-Vogel J, Busse A, Fritzemeyer K, Burkhardt- Mußmann C, (2015): Early Motherhood in Migration: A First Report from FIRST STEPS- An Integration Project for Infants with an Immigrant Background. J Preg Child Health 2:147. doi: 10.4172/2376-127X.1000147

Leuzinger-Bohleber, M., Rickmeyer, C.,Tahiri, M.,Hettich, N. (2016a): Special Communication. What can psychoanalysis contribute to the current refugee crisis? Preliminary reports from STEP-BY-STEP: A psychoanalytic pilot project for supporting refugees in a „first reception camp“ and crisis interventions with traumatized refugees. Int Journal of Psychoanal, 97 (4): 1077-93.. doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12542. Epub 2016 Aug 11

Leuzinger‐Bohleber, M. (2016). From free speech to IS–pathological regression of some traumatized adolescents from a migrant background in Germany. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 13(3), 213-223.

View Details

“There were so many opportunities to ponder what’s going on with different characters, what’s going on with tensions between generations, what’s going on with family relations. It’s as if psychoanalysis shed a new light on literature and it’s as if literature, its persuasiveness and accomplishment of great literature, seemed to confirm psychoanalytic understanding of how human beings internally are put together.”

Description: Steven S. Rolfe welcomes Dr. Paul Schwaber who is Professor of Letters Emeritus of Wesleyan University and a practicing psychoanalyst. For many years he was Director of the College of Letters Wesleyan Undergraduate Major in Western literature, philosophy and history. He’s published extensively on the relationship between imaginative literature and psychoanalysis. He coedited Poetry and Power: Poems Occasioned by the Presidency and the Death of John F. Kennedy basic books, and he is the author of The Cast of Characters: A Reading of Ulysses. In 1993, he was given the Robert S. Liebert Award in applied psychoanalysis, by the Columbia Center of Psychoanalysis and the Association of Psychoanalytic Medicine and in 2014, the Edith Sabshin Teaching Award, by the American Psychoanalytic Association. A graduate of the Western New England Institute he was Chair of its faculty and served as its President. He has served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and on the board of the James Joyce Quarterly Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, Psychoanalytic Quarterly and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He and his wife Rosemary Balsam have edited the book review section of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Key takeaways:

[3:58] Paul Schwaber’s interest in two “impossible professions”.

[7:57] Starting his own psychoanalysis.

[9:18] Realizing the need for analytic experience.

[11:50] Pursuing training without any previous clinical experience.

[13:10] Teaching and training at the same time.

[14:15] Literature and psychoanalysis confirming each other.

[18:02] The idea of including literature into the psychoanalytic curricula.

[19:15] Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare.

[22:00] A lifelong interest in Ulysses.

[24:34] Joyce and Freud’s fascination for the human mind.

[26:18] Paul Schwaber gives an example in regards to the intersection between literature and the psychoanalytic world.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

The Cast of Characters: A Reading of Ulysses Yale University Press (1999).

Of Poetry and Power: Poems Occasioned by the Presidency and by the Death of John F. Kennedy Basic Books (1964)

"Women and Freud's Imagination," The American Scholar, XLI (Spring, 1972), 224-37

"Scientific Art: The Interpretation of Dreams," The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, XXXI (1976), 515-33.

“Freud and the Twenties," The Massachusetts Review, XXII (Spring, 1981), 133-51.

"The Patriarchal Tradition: Creation and Fathering in Genesis" in Father and Child: Developmental and Clinical Perspectives, ed. Stanley Cath, M.D., Alan Gurwitt, M.D. and John M. Ross, Ph.D. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 383-97.

View Details

“Both analyst and patient will have to share a bitter taste of abandonment, of boredom, of antagonism and they have to remain together, because together they will be able to construct something to get out of it.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Jose Zusman who is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst in Rio de Janeiro. He is a training analyst and a professor at the Psychoanalytic Society of Rio de Janeiro and he is a professor and supervisor in psychoanalytic oriented psychotherapy for the Psychiatry Residents at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, where he holds a Master in Psychiatry and also a PhD in Psychoanalysis. As you will hear in today’s interview, Dr. Zusman shares with us a sensitive understanding of the trauma and lack of resonances that one can find in the early lives of patients who later become addicted. He also describes how one, as a depth psychotherapist and analyst, can listen and ameliorate some of the pain in the patient’s inner lives that lead them to turn to addictive substances.

Key takeaways:

[3:19] What is vital about a psychoanalytic approach in working with addicted patients?

[5:01] Addiction is a symptom.

[5:58] The environment is fundamental.

[6:40] Object seeking.

[7:13] Distortion of the reality.

[8:09] The addicted patient can't find what they need.

[8:44] Human beings are a dependent species.

[11:44] How do you treat a patient who has not been recognized?

[12:39] The addicted clings to any element that makes them feel alive.

[13:18] Patients turn to sensations instead of affects.

[14:27] A clinical case.

[22:57] “I am seeing you”

[23:20] How do you apply a psychoanalytic intervention with patients that are financially impaired?

[24:05] Do not forget the patient.

[25:50] Current situation in Brazil regarding psychoanalytic assistance.

[27:30] We don’t treat symptoms, we deal with the origins.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Balint, M. (1968/1979).The Basic Fault. Tavistock Publication. London.

Dodes, L (2003). The Heart of Addiction. HarperCollins Publishers. New York.

Fairbairn, W: (2014). Then and Now Routledge Publishers. New York.

Khantzian, E.J. (1997). Treating Addiction as a Human Process

Jason Aronson. New York

McDougall, J (1995). The Many Faces of Eros. W.W. Norton Company, Inc.  New York.

View Details

“Physical illness begins a very serious journey where there is a disconnect between one’s sense of embeddedness in one’s own body, to all of a sudden being contained within a persecutory object.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Dr. Gavril Hercz to the podcast. Dr Hercz is both a practicing nephrologist and a practicing psychoanalyst. His nephrology practice is at the Humber River Hospital in Toronto, Canada and he is a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. This combination of skills is of course unusual and will form the basis of our conversation today. Dr. Hercz is also an associate professor in the University of Toronto and he is the founder of psychonephrology.com. Dr. Hercz will describe how he had brought his psychoanalytic sensitivities to his work in nephrology and in dialysis units. Through his writings and lecturing worldwide he has had an important influence on how dialysis is understood and carried out, not only in Canada but around the world.

Key takeaways:

[2:45] Dr. Gavril Hercz winner of the IPA and Health Committee award.

[5:15] Listening to the inner life while attending the physical health.

[6:06] It is not only the individual but the family that becomes ill.

[8:44] Bringing psychoanalysis to dialysis units.

[9:37] Cognitive dissonance.

[10:28] Chronic physical illness begins a journey of disconnection within the body.

[11:25] The changes in the relationship with one’s body.

[13:50] Group and one on one interventions.

[15:12] The challenges of the frame.

[17:48] Integration as a physician and psychoanalyst.

[20:03] Generating quantifiable data about quality of life.

[22:00] Psico-social model of care.

[25:45] Asking nurses to write down conversations with the patients.

[26:26] Patients having the experience of being known.

[28:50] The foundations of Psychonephrology.com.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Psychonephrology.com

Recommended Readings:

Hercz G. The trauma of dialysis Initiation. J Am Soc Nephrol 28: 2835-2837, 2017

Garland C. External disasters and the internal world : An approach to psychotherapeutic understanding of survivors. In: Textbook of Psychotherapy in Psychiatric Practice, edited by Holmes J, London, Churchill Livingstone. 1991, pp 507-532

Aisenstein M. The indissociable unity of psyche and soma: A view from the Paris Psychosomatic School. Int J Psychoanal 87:667-680, 2006

Winkley L. Living with chronic illness: Consultation to a children's renal dialysis unit. J Child Psychother 16:49-62, 1990

View Details

The early parental caregiving is inscribed in the body of the baby and contributes to the structure of his mind. All the primary inscriptions program and shape, not only the brain of the newborn, but also are going to reemerge when this baby will become a parent.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Meropi Michaleli who is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Athens, Greece. Dr. Michaleli’s practice focuses on the psychoanalytic approach to pregnancy, the perinatal period, infertility and parent-infant therapy. She studied psychosomatics in Paris; she trained in brief mother-infant psychotherapy in Geneva and she has become a teacher of teachers, especially for health personnel involved in the perinatal and neonatal period especially those faced with infants and families under high psychosocial risk.

As you will hear in today’s interview, she has a deep appreciation of the importance of early intervention with parents and infants in order to forestall later pathologies, especially the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

Key takeaways:

[3:55] Dr. Michaleli’s program and her skills as an analyst applied to the perinatal period.

[5:20] How psychoanalytic thinking can contribute to healthcare.

[5:45] The transition to parenthood is a co-creation involving parents , the newborn, the fetus and the perinatal team.

[7:00] Four theoretical references for the perinatal period.

[7:54] The neuroscience research

[9:30] Importance of primary intervention.

[10:01] Interrupting intergenerational trauma by introducing a new way of relating.

[11:27] Enabling healthcare personnel to work using psychoanalytic resources.

[14:08] Decreasing of fragmentation and confusion in perinatal care.

[16:05] Psychoanalysis provides a holistic understanding for healthcare professionals.

[17:14] Group cohesiveness for professionals.

[17:30] Clinical case.

[21:10] Dr. Michaleli’s personal motivation to work in this area.

[23:50] From theory to real time interventions.

[24:28] The manifestation of the unknown.

[26:38] Interrupting intergenerational transmission of trauma through psychoanalytic intervention in the medical care system in Greece.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

MANCIA M. (1981) On the beginning of mental life in the foetus. International .Journal of Psychoanalysis, 62:351-357

RAPHAEL-LEFF J. (1993) Pregnancy -The inside story. London, Karnac

ROUSSILLON R. (2009) Associativity and Non-Verbal Language, https://reneroussillon.com/r-roussillon-en-anglais-in-english/associativity-and-non-verbal-language/

SALOMONSSON B. (2018) Psychodynamic interventions in pregnancy and Infancy Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives. London, NY, Routledge  

WINNICOTT D. W. (1967): Mirror-role of mother and family in child development. In Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 1999.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szQD3bQopik--

http://www.waimhgreece.org.gr/?lang=en

View Details

“Most primary care family physicians you talk to will say that about half of their patient visits, in any given week, are emotional, situational, and relational problems.”

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Randall Paulsen who is a psychiatrist, a training and supervising psychoanalyst and past president of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society Institute. He is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and currently supervises and consults at Brigham Women’s Hospital. Dr. Paulsen’s career has been focused on applied psychoanalysis, he directed inpatient and day hospitals at Tufts Medical Center, he developed Primary Care psychiatry as a component of Healthcare Associates and facilitated a long term Balint group for physicians which is the subject of today’s interview. He was the Consulting Psychiatrist at Osher Institute, Harvard Medical School, where he also lead mindfulness-based stress reduction courses. He views psychoanalysis as a subjective science in healthcare, human development and relationships, both individual, group and institutional. Currently, he has a private practice of psychoanalysis in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Key takeaways:

[4:15] The history of Balint groups.

[9:31] A new model for physicians.

[9:58] Three crisis in the history of psychoanalysis.

[11.45] Balint groups in the past and nowadays.

[17:27] How Balint groups work.

[18:35] Sample case of a Balint group.

[23:05] Mindfulness with physicians and patients.

[27:15] Psychoanalysts’ skills applied to the work in Balint groups.

[28:59] The Hungarian model.

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

Recommended Readings:

Balint, M. (1966). Psycho-Analysis and Medical Practice. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 47:54-62. PEP

Balint, M. The doctor, his Patient, and the Illness 1st ed of the book (Int. Univ. Press, 1957).

The 2nd addition, with an intro by John A. Balint, was published by Churchill Livingstone in 2000.

Laurel Milberg, PhD. "The Evolution of Balint Leader Training and Credentialing in the American Balint Society"

http://balintinternational.com/