Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
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100 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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Transformation of Dreams in Analysis: the Research Findings with Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Prof. Dr. Phil. (Frankfurt)
28 juli 2024 · 54 min
"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." Lees meer
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 time…
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Secrets Kept and Secrets Told: the Analyst's Responsibility with Barbara Stimmel, PhD (New York)
14 juli 2024 · 1 uur 3 min
"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." Lees meer
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 psych…
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The Adventure of Immersive Analytic Training with Dr. Eike Hinze (Berlin)
30 juni 2024 · 56 min
"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." Lees meer
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 psycho…
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Adjunctive Psychedelic Medicines during Dynamic Psychotherapy with Charis Cladouhos, MD (Boston)
16 juni 2024 · 1 uur 1 min
"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." Lees meer
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, a…
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The Dying Patient in Treatment with Mark Moore, PhD (Philadelphia) and Peggy Warren, MD (Boston)
2 juni 2024 · 1 uur 7 min
"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 Lees meer
"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…
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Bystanding as Perversion: "We need to forget about what we actually did not even see here." with Jan Borowicz, PhD (Warsaw)
19 mei 2024 · 1 uur 6 min
"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." Lees meer
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 y…
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An Analyst's Hindu-Indian Imagination with Sudhir Kakar (Goa, India)
5 mei 2024 · 1 uur 7 min
My conversation with Sudhir Kakar took place five weeks before his untimely death on April 22nd. Lees meer
"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 Pr…
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'Does it Still Taste like Psychoanalysis'? - University Affiliation in Finland with Jan Johansson (Helsinki)
21 april 2024 · 48 min
"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." Lees meer
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 Ther…
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The Presence of 'Companioning' in Psychoanalysis with Robert Grossmark, PhD (New York)
7 april 2024 · 1 uur 16 min
"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." Lees meer
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 facult…
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The Dynamic Underpinnings of the Eating Disorders with Tom Wooldridge, PsyD (San Francisco)
24 maart 2024 · 57 min
"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." Lees meer
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 r…
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Why Winnicott? - Part II: The Surviving Object Joel Whitebook, Ph.D. (New York), interviews Jan Abram, Ph.D. (London).
10 maart 2024 · 57 min
"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." Lees meer
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 a…
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Female Sexuality in India Today: Through an Analytic Lens with Amrita Narayanan, PsyD (Goa, India)
25 februari 2024 · 1 uur 4 min
"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." Lees meer
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;…
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Infertility and its Unconscious Reverberations with Mali Mann, MD (San Francisco)
11 februari 2024 · 59 min
"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'?" Lees meer
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…
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The Repair of a Frame Gone Awry with Alan Karbelnig, PhD (Pasadena, California)
28 januari 2024 · 1 uur 2 min
"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." Lees meer
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 leader…
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An Analyst's Catholicism with Ginta Remeikis, MD (Rockville, Maryland)
14 januari 2024 · 56 min
"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." Lees meer
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 p…
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Our Oral Tradition and the Aging Analyst with Nancy McWilliams, PhD (Lambertville, New Jersey)
17 december 2023 · 51 min
"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." Lees meer
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 Diagnost…
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The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis with Peter Goldberg, Ph.D., Michael Levin, Psy.D and Adam Blum, Psy.D (San Francisco Bay Area)
3 december 2023 · 1 uur 3 min
"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." Lees meer
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 c…
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IPA Prejudices, Discrimination and Racism Committee with Abel Fainstein, MD (Buenos Aires)
19 november 2023 · 51 min
"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." Lees meer
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 duri…
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Acute Psychoanalytic Care of the Victims of the October 7th Massacre with Merav Roth, Ph.D. and Mira Ehrlich-Ginor, Ph.D. (Tel Aviv)
1 november 2023 · 1 uur 9 min
"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. Lees meer
"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 f…
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Treatment of Child Soldiers: Traditional Healers and their Dynamic Underpinnings with Martha Bragin, PhD MSW (New York)
29 oktober 2023 · 1 uur
"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." Lees meer
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 …
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Why Winnicott? Joel Whitebook, PhD (New York) interviews Jan Abrams, PhD (London)
15 oktober 2023 · 49 min
"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." Lees meer
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 Whiteb…
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From Filmmaking to Psychoanalysis with Karen Dougherty, FIPA (Toronto)
1 oktober 2023 · 49 min
"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." Lees meer
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 Trai…
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The Presence of Religion within the Psychoanalytic Dyad with Nathan Szajnberg, MD (Palo Alto)
17 september 2023 · 53 min
"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." Lees meer
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 He…
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Superego, Conscience and the Narcissism of our Times with Don Carveth, PhD (Toronto)
3 september 2023 · 49 min
"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." Lees meer
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 Instit…
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Are Patients Different Today? with Stefano Bolognini, MD (Bologna)
6 augustus 2023 · 55 min
"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." Lees meer
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…
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From Technology to Psychoanalysis with Nicolle Zapien, PhD (Oakland)
22 juli 2023 · 50 min
"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." Lees meer
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 clo…
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High - Conflict Divorce: Psychoanalytic Perspectives with Arthur Leonoff, Ph.D. (Ottawa)
9 juli 2023 · 59 min
"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." Lees meer
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…
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The Role of Defense Analysis in Child (and Adult) Treatment with Leon Hoffman, MD (New York)
25 juni 2023 · 1 uur 2 min
"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." Lees meer
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 N…
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Freud's Nephew and the Creation of 'Buzz' around Psychoanalysis with Joseph Malherek, Ph.D. (Raleigh, North Carolina)
11 juni 2023 · 41 min
"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." Lees meer
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" abou…
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Technique is Character Rationalized with Lee Grossman, MD (Oakland, Ca.)
28 mei 2023 · 1 uur
"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." Lees meer
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 The…
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One Analyst - Two Continents: Treatment Differences? with Jeanne Wolff- Bernstein, Ph.D. (Vienna)
14 mei 2023 · 1 uur 7 min
"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." Lees meer
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. Prio…
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International Commentaries on the State of our Field with Fred Busch, Ph.D. (Chestnut Hill, Mass.)
30 april 2023 · 47 min
"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." Lees meer
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: Explorat…
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Children Exposed to Pornography: the Erosion of Latency with Franco D'Alberton, Ph.D. & Andrea Scardovi, MD, Ph.D. (Bologna)
16 april 2023 · 54 min
"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." Lees meer
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 memb…
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"Music Sounds the Way Emotion Feels": from the Piano to the Couch with Julie Nagel, PhD (Dexter, Michigan)
2 april 2023 · 50 min
"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." Lees meer
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 …
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'Wearing the Attributes' - 50 years as an Analyst with Judith Chused, MD (Washington, DC)
19 maart 2023 · 58 min
"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." Lees meer
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: Jud…
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From Immunology to Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Primitive Mental States with Shiri Ben Bassat (Tel Aviv)
5 maart 2023 · 45 min
"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." Lees meer
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 g…
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Freud Encounters C.S. Lewis as imagined by Mark St. Germain
19 februari 2023 · 45 min
"[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." Lees meer
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 mention…
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Psychoanalytic Reflections on Evil with Dr. Roger Kennedy (London)
5 februari 2023 · 52 min
"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." Lees meer
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 t…
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Can Psychoanalysis be Identical Everywhere? with Jorge Bruce (Lima)
22 januari 2023 · 1 uur
"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." Lees meer
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 …
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Psychoanalysis and Opera – rejoining the verbal and non-verbal with Steven Goldberg, MD and Lee Rather, Ph.D. (San Francisco)
8 januari 2023 · 1 uur 15 min
"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. Lees meer
"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 st…
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Psychoanalytic Fieldwork: A Woman Psychanalyst (Training Analyst IPA) Working in Eastern Africa with Dr. phil. Barbara Saegesser (Biel/Bienne, Switzerland)
11 december 2022 · 50 min
"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." Lees meer
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: Al…
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Teaching Dynamic Therapy through Storytelling with Anne Adelman, Ph.D. (Chevy Chase, MD) and Kerry Malawista, Ph.D. (Potomac, MD)
27 november 2022 · 54 min
"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 Lees meer
"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 t…
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Analytic Desire, Listening and Letting Go with Mitchell Wilson, MD (Berkeley)
13 november 2022 · 1 uur 7 min
"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." Lees meer
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 Psychoana…
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Polish Psychoanalysis, Ukraine and Intergenerational Trauma with Edyta Biernacka (Krakow)
30 oktober 2022 · 44 min
"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." Lees meer
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…
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Foreignness, the Blues, and Psychoanalysis in Iran with Gohar Homayounpour, PsyD (Tehran)
16 oktober 2022 · 51 min
"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." Lees meer
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 a…
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From Neurology to Psychoanalysis with Iftah Biran, MD (Tel Aviv) and Rachel Gross, MD (Philadelphia)
2 oktober 2022 · 1 uur 2 min
"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 Lees meer
"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 ther…
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Femaleness, Fecundity and their Psychic Reach with Rosemary Balsam, MD
18 september 2022 · 1 uur 7 min
"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." Lees meer
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 …
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From Education to Psychoanalysis with Susana Merlo, MA (Buenos Aires) and Ellen Pinsky, PsyD (Cambridge, Mass)
4 september 2022 · 57 min
"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 Lees meer
"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…
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"Nothing is Unimportant" - Contemporaneous Records of Mass Trauma: The Ringelblum Archive with Samuel Kassow, PhD
21 augustus 2022 · 1 uur 2 min
"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." Lees meer
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 Je…
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Dynamic Psychotherapy of a Tortured Patient: Mentalization, Counter-transference, and Culture with Sverre Varvin, MD, Dr. Philos (Oslo, Norway)
17 juli 2022 · 47 min
"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." Lees meer
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: clin…