International Psychoanalysis

Click Here: for Info on this CMPS Conference

To introduce us to the twenty-first century, the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies has invited five outstanding psychoanalysts who have been closely associated with Hyman Spotnitz and who have participated significantly in the development and evolution of modern psychoanalysis: Arnold Bernstein, Evelyn Liegner,Robert Marshall, Leslie Rosenthal and Murray Sherman. These innovative thinkers have each made many contributions to the field over their long careers, as reflected in their work as educators, training and supervising analysts, in their many published writings, and as lecturers and speakers at conferences and workshops. For this conference they are coming together to exchange thoughts and feelings about their work, their experiences, their philosophy, and their ideas about psychoanalysis in the new century. They will invite us to join in dialogue with them.

Click Here to Read: Eleanor Schuker’s Introduction to the Saturday Morning Panel at the COWAP New York Conference on October 27th, 2007. 

Click here to Read: Rosalba Bueno-Osawa’s Contribution to the COWAP conference: “Who is My Mother, Who is My Father, Who am I” in New York on Saturday October 27th, 2007 

The excellent article by Maggie Jones on “Looking for Their Children’s Birth Mothers” happily coincided with a conference on international adoption this weekend. Both your article and our conference came to the conclusion that cross-racial succeeds best when parents respond to their children’s questions rather than force answers on them. One presenter at our conference told of her own gratitude that she had been included in her adoptive parents’ culture rather than being forced into a necessarily superficial and artificial submersion in the culture of her homeland. Parents, researchers, and therapists agreed that once a person develops an identity as member of the family in which she is raised she can become interested in the culture of her homeland and her birth family. The most important thing the adoptive family can do is to include the their child in what authentically matters to their family, and allow her to be the leader in restoring what interests her as she grows up. Readers interested in the papers given at the conference can find them on http://www.InternationalPsychoanalysis.net

–Arlene Kramer Richards, North American Cochair of the Committee of Women and Psychoanalysis on the International Psychoanalytic Association

 Click Here to Read: The Article by Maggie Jones in the New York Times.

It is a privilege to introduce this op ed piece by Robert Langs whose major volumes on the technique of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with their clear explication of the function of the ‘frame’ in treatment, have guided many clinicians on the journeys they take. In this piece, Lang takes on a different kind of travel using the Bible as a guide.

Jane S. Hall, op editor

[Note: Langs' latest book, Beyond Yahweh and Jesus: Bringing Death’s Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality, and Psychoanalysis, may be ordered through our Book Mart - click here.]

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How Religion—Yes, Religion—Can Save Psychoanalysis
Robert Langs, M.D.

The separation between psychoanalysis and religion has been as wide and as inviolate as that between church and state. As we know, Freud saw the belief in a transcendental God as a reflection of a wish for an omnipotent father and given his inner-need centered theory of the mind, after seeing religion as the quest for an illusion, his study of Moses not withstanding, he was more or less finished with the subject. As a result, despite the prevalence of religious beliefs, he failed to respond to Thomas Hobbes’ long standing 17th century call for the study of ‘man’s religious nature’ and thus did not engage in a thorough psychoanalytic investigation of religious beliefs and the Bible. In contrast, Jung offered psychoanalytic investigations of various aspects of religion, especially the stories of Job and Christ, and he argued that we must turn to the Bible for fresh insights into psychology and contrariwise, that only psychology can freshly illuminate the Bible. (more…)

Click Here to Read: Ben Roth’s Review of the Movie “Schindler’s List.”

Click Here to Read: Jon Mills’s Paper: Rethinking Mind in the Age of the Brain.

Click Here to Read: Paula Shatsky’s Paper, “Ethics and Analytic Space in the Context of War: A Therapist’s Diary of Personal Transformation in the Treatment of the Mother of a Soldier Killed In Iraq”

Click here to Read my review of Bernd Bocian’s book: Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893-1933. Expressionismus-Psychoanalyse-Judentum. Printed with the permission of the Psychologist Psychoanalyst.

Click Here to Read: Jeff Golland’s Review of Leo Rangell’s book, The Road to Unity in Psychoanalytic Theory.  Printed with the permission of the Psychologist Psychoanalyst.  

Title: ART AND PSYCHE The freudian Legacy at CDS Gallery
Category: Exhibition

When: From September 14th to November 24th at regular hours
Where: CDS Gallery, 76 East 79 Street, New York, NY 10075

Details: Featuring works of Nicolas Africano, Jonathan Borofsky, Charles Brown, Julie Cockburn, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Timothy Cummings, Edmund Engelman, Max Ernst, Eric Fischl, Gonzalo Fonseca, Lucian Freud, Arshile Gorky, Marcel Jean, Leon Kelly, Roberto Matta, Charles Matton, Jorge Michel, Odd Nerdrum, Jackson Pollock, Suzanne Scherer and Pavel Ouporov, Kurt Seligmann, Hedda Sterne, Christian Vincent.

Sigmund Freud set the cornerstone of modern psychology when he demonstrated that the unconscious mind is active in organizing conscious experience. He described how forbidden desires are repressed into the unconscious and then relum to consciousness in symbolic form. By the 1930s the Surrealist artists in this exhibition were inspired to depict their dreams and fantasies.

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To The Editor NY Science Times

The thrust of Benedict Carey’s article on dreams is that dreams have to do with memory and cognition, not, as Freud proposed, with emotional motivation. However, the findings presented in this article do not address adequately the fuller context of our knowledge about the nature of dreams, or about their meaning and their use in psychoanalysis. Mark Solms, for example, has assembled a very persuasive body of neuroscientific studies supporting the view that dreaming has to do with motivation and desire as well as cognition. Carey cites Allen Hobson without noting that Hobson, along with most of his research colleagues, has abandoned his original theory that dreams are the product of random neural firings. A hundred years of psychoanalytic research and experience show that much can be learned about people’s mental and emotional lives through dream interpretation and other psychoanalytic methods. Time Magazine had it right. Freud is NOT dead.

Arnold D. Richards

Click Here to Read the New York Science Times Article

Click Here to Read: David Rosenfeld’s Hayman Prize Paper ”September 11 , Military Dictartorship , Psychotic Episode. Year 1973″ at the Berlin Congress on July 26th, 2007.

 THIS PAPER WAS PUBLISHED BY KARNAC BOOKS, LONDON, 2006,  IN ROSENFELD’S BOOK “THE SOUL, THE MIND AND THE PSYCHOANALYST”

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October 17, 2007 10:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time
International Psychoanalytical Association to Address Issues of Children’s Identity Formations in Cross-Racial Adoptions  Three-Day Conference to Explore Race/Identity in the Familial Setting

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–How do people who have been adopted by parents of another race shape their identity? And how does a child’s own mixed heritage play out in his/her formation of identity?

As more and more children from around the world are adopted and raised by parents with racial and/or ethnic backgrounds differing from their own, parents, teachers and mental health professionals need to cultivate more understanding and sensitivity in regards to the role that race/ethnicity plays in identity formation for these children. (more…)

Click Here to Read: Jeanne Wolff Bernstein’s Contribution, “A Plea for History” from the IPA Berlin Congress.

Click Here to Read: Exhibition Review “A Century-Old Court Case That . . .” by Edward Rothstein, October 17, 2007, New York Times.

I have just returned from 21 days in China. I don’t think I have ever worked so hard or eaten so well. If anyone is interested, I will send you a list of the places where I spoke and the people whom I met. A lecture in China usually lasts for 3 hours. Almost every night there was a banquet and often one at lunch too. Most of these arrangements were made by Zhang Haiyan. She is the young psychiatrist who was in analysis with one of our group and who is now in Canada. There, she has just begun her psychoanalytic training at the Toronto Institute. Her professor in China was Richang Zheng, a nationally famous psychologist who seems to know every one in China interested in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. I was passed on from one person to another all issuing invitations for me to speak—so that before I left for China, there were only two free half days in my schedule and these were filled when I got there.

I did a large number of supervisions and also consultations as well as speaking to many heads of departments and programs and individual psychiatrists, psychologists and counselors. This is a very long email so I will put a table on contents here and you can print it out and read it at your leisure or skip the parts that are of no interest. Tomorrow I will try to post a description of what is happening with the two-year training program. (more…)

Click here to view the Flyer 

 Lemberg Children’s Center at Brandeis University, The Mass Chapter of American Academy of Pediatrics, and several others and sponsoring Supporting Children Affected by the Iraqi War: What Responders Need to Know a workshop on Saturday, October 20 in Schwartz Auditorium at Brandeis University. 

 Supporting Children Affected by the Iraqi War: What Responders Need to Know

Betsy McAlister Groves, LICSW
Director, Child Witness to Violence Project, Boston Medical Center, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Boston University School of Medicine.

Major Molinda Chartrand, MD
Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Boston Medical Center, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences
Brandeis University, Schwartz Auditorium

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Click Here to Read:  André Green’s Contribution “Repetition Compulsion and the Pleasure Principle” to the IPA Berlin Congress on July 26, 2007.  

Click Here to Read: Simonetta Diena’s Contribution,  ”Trauma, Memory and Transference: Ordinary People” to the IPA Berlin Congress in July 2007.