International Psychoanalysis

Click Here to Read: Brochure for 35th Annual NAAP Conference: On Human Freedom: October 13, 2007.

INSTITUTE FOR PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING AND RESEARCH
 Art, Psychoanalysis, and Society Project
Co- sponsored by the Center for Jewish History and YIVO

Space is limited   Reservations required
Box office:  917 606-8200
Date: November 4, 2007                      
Time: 2 –5 PM

Location:  Center for Jewish History
                  15  West 16th  St.
                  New York City
Sunday 4, 2-5pm

Childhood Trauma In Film: Undzere Kinder (Our Children) Film and Workshop:  This last Yiddish-language film made in Poland features famous Yiddish comedians Szimon Dzigan and Yisroel Szumacher and a cast of Jewish orphans, survivors of the Holocaust. The film will be used as the basis of a workshop on psychological trauma and its representation in film. Introduced and moderated by Dr. Maurice Preter and Dr. Isaac Tylim with the participation of Dr. Harold J. Bursztajn, Harvard Medical School; Professor Shimon Redlich, Ben-Gurion University; Marek Web, YIVO Historian; Dr. Eva Weil, Paris Psychoanalytic Society; Dr. Eva Kantor, Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, NYC.

Click Here to Read: More About the Movie Undzere Kinder.  

Click here to Read: More about Dr. Maurice Preter.

Click here to Read: More about the showing of film sponsored by Instititute for Psychoanlaytic Training and Research, Center for Jewish History, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.    

Click here to Read about the Encyclopedia of American Jewish History

Click Here to Read: Arnold Richards’s article on “Jews in the Development of American Psychoanalysis: The First Fifty Years” from the Encylopedia of American Jewish History

Click Here to Read: Clelia Manfredi de Poderoso’s Contribution ,” Reflexiones  Sobre “Trauma” Y “Repetición” a Partir De La  Clínica Con Pacientes Con Pánico  Y  Estrés Postraumático (Caso Cromañon)” to the IPA Berlin Congress.  This Paper is in Spanish.

 Complete citation for the contribution: Manfredi di Poderosos, C., Julian, H.C., & Linetsky, L., “Reflexiones sobre  “Trauma” Y “Repetición” a Partir De La  Clínica Con Pacientes Con Pánico  Y  Estrés Postraumático (Caso Cromañon)” en Revista Psicoanalista, Vol 29, #1, 165-179, 2007.

Click here to Read: Bettina Meissner’s Contribution ”Zerlegen und Wiederzusammensetzen: visualisiert im Bild A Closer Grand Canyon von David Hockney. Das Spiel mit der Wiederholung” to the IPA Berlin Congress on July 26, 2007.  This paper is in German.

Click Here To See: David Hockney’s A Closer Grand Canyon 

Sheldon Bach, Ph.D. will be consulting on October 4 (NOT the 1st as previously listed!) at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy’s Master Clinician Series.  This will be the 1st of 4 evenings (8-10pm) during which a renowned psychoanalyst will discuss a case presented by an I.C.P. staff member.  Dr. Bach is Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychhohlogy at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the New York Freudian Society.  (more…)

New York Times Magazine, September 23, 2007

Kudos to Prof. Edmundson for a thought-provoking article about Freud and faith. I would like to add this to his reading of “Moses and Monotheism” that, like Moses, Freud saw himself repeatedly misunderstood by his own followers and thus symbolically murdered time and again down the decades. Like the Israelites, forever tempted to go back to worshipping the golden calf, so his followers repeatedly misunderstood his message, as manifested in the “heresies” of Alfred Adler, C.G. Jung, Otto Rank or Sandor Ferenczi. Like Moses breaking the tablets, Freud often reacted with wrath. Unlike Moses, Freud sometimes ended by endorsing “heretical” ideas he first repudiated.

Zvi Lothane, M.D.

Agency and autonomy from the Israelites

NY Times Magazine
Letter to the Editor
September 13, 2007

Dear Editor,

In “Defender of the Faith?” (The Way we live now, September 9), Mark Edmundson writes that Freud stressed that the ability to believe in an internal, invisible God vastly improves people’s capacity forabstraction. Quoting Freud, he says,  “The prohibition against making an image of God – the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see,” he says, meant that in Judaism “a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea – a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.” (more…)

September 23, 2007
The City Section
An Active Approach to Psychic Change
To the Editor:

Re “Patching Up the Frayed Couch” (Sept. 9), about the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute:

Idealization of leaders and institutes, Freud or otherwise, should always be questioned, and has led to institutional and intellectual fossilization. For many years, vital psychoanalytic debate and creativity could only thrive outside of the mainstream Freudian institutes. (more…)

Click Here to Read: Vaia Tsolas’s Contribution, “Transference-love and the Treatment of a Pre-surgical Male Transvestite, ” to the IPA Berlin Congress.  

Click Here to Read: Jose Otavio Fagundes’s Contribution ”Analyst’s Pictogram as a Form of Helping the Working Through: to the IPA Berlin Congress.

Click Here to Read: Angelika Staehle’s Contribution to the Panel: “Psychoanalysis in Phases of Developmental Transition” at the IPA Berlin Congress on July 28, 2007.

Click here to Read: Ralf Zwiebel’s Contribution on “On the Psychic Work of the Analytic Couple: Working-up, Working-through, Re-working” from the IPA Berlin Congress on July 28, 2007.  This Paper is in German. 

The New York Times
September 20, 2007
The Brain, the Mind and Mental Illness
To the Editor:

Sally Satel (“Mind Over Manual,” Op-Ed, Sept. 13) suggests that the diagnostic confusion within psychiatry is due to a lack of “a clear picture of the brain mechanisms underlying … mental illnesses.” She says psychiatry “lacks a firm grasp of the causal underpinnings of mental illness,” suggesting the “staggering complexity of the brain” as one reason.

Her article suffers in its being biased by the current zeitgeist that overemphasizes brain-based mechanisms as causes. While this may, in fact, have explanatory power for some conditions, it is more likely that causal explanations will often include frames of reference that are psychological (including psychodynamic) as well as biological.  (more…)

The New York Times
September 16, 2007
The City

To the Editor:

Re “Patching Up the Frayed Couch” (Sept. 9):

It is not only psychoanalysis, but all intensive psychotherapies that have become less popular in contemporary culture. This is due, in part, to the introduction of alternative therapies like drug therapy and cognitive behavior therapy. But there is also a devaluation of time and an overemphasis on speed and efficiency that discourage many people who are in need from engaging in a deeply introspective process.

(more…)

Click here to Read: A review of Mark C. Baker’s The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar by Michael Holquist.

This book is of particular interest to anyone involved with ‘the talking cure’, because it posits a connection between the way the mind works and the way that language works. A contribution to recent thinking about Universal Grammar, Baker focuses on “parameter theory.” Since this a thorny and highly technical landscape where linguistics contends with both biology and philosophy, we must be grateful that Baker has a gift for lucid exposition. He provides a plausible and clearly articulated account of why grammars from the most diverse languages vary within a surprisingly limited range. Analysts will find this a useful tool in meditating the question of how UG might relate to UC.
Michael Holquist

Click Here to Read: Dominique Scarfone’s Contribution  “Repetition: Between Prescence and Meaning” from the IPA Berlin Congress. 

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complete flyer with
Conference Details
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Click Here to Read: Patrick Mahony’s article on “The Moses of Michelangelo: A Matter of Solutions.”

Click Here to Read: Review of:  From The Eclipse of the Body to the Dawn of Thought By Armando B. Ferrari. London: Free Association Books. 2004. 251 pp. Reviewed by Riccardo Lombardi, MD © Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, UK.