International Psychoanalysis

In August and September, I published articles on this website on the films, Field of Dreams and Contact. I gave them subtitles, “Magical Womb” Part I and II, respectively. With each, I tried to demonstrate a fantasy of a womb with magical properties to overcome death and separation. In each, the central character is reunited with parents long lost in this magical womb.

Part III concerns two films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Hours in which death is not overcome but itself becomes a path to reunion and to the womb. In each, I hope to demonstrate a fantasy of reunion with a loving mother through death and suicide. In The Hours, there are explicit images of a return to the womb. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has images suggestive only of a return to a blissful reunion with a maternal figure. I will deal more briefly with it than with The Hours, perhaps to return to it at another time. (more…)

In New York, perhaps more so than in the rest of the country, turf wars are increasing as the turf itself seems to be shrinking. Waging war is expensive in terms of time and money. Such war waging is costing the art, craft, and science of psychoanalysis precious energy and it is for this reason that I post this editorial written by Arlene Kramer Richards. This short and eloquent piece will be delivered at the December 1 and 2 Conference: The Future of Psychoanalytic Education, an ecumenical meeting with Jurgen Reeder as keynote speaker. (Click here for conference details)
Jane S. Hall, Op-Ed Editor

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Why Do I Want to Include Our Colleagues in Licensing as Psychoanalysts? by Arlene Kramer Richards

Different points of view about psychoanalytic education and theory can be grouped, I think, into two categories. One camp argues that psychoanalysis must be safeguarded from those who would debase it by using the name to include therapies that are scheduled for less than three times per week. The other camp argues that psychoanalysis is, as Freud himself defined it, the use of the concepts of transference and resistance to understand the unconscious and especially unconscious affects, wishes, prohibitions and fears. Who is right?

The question has theoretical and practical aspects. (more…)

Click Here to read  about:  ”Neuropsychoanalysis: How Neuroscience is Validating our Theories” a conference on December 1st from 9 am to 12:30 pm,  in Westport, CT.    Sponsored by the Connecticut Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology and the Psychoanalytic Association of Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

Click Here to Read: Antonino Ferro’s Contribution to The Panel, “Repetir a traves de las generaciones” at the IPA Congress on July 28th, 2007.  This paper was originally in Spanish and has been translated into English.

Click Here to Read: Gertraud Schlesinger-Kipp’s Welcome to the Berlin Congress.  This Contribution is German.

Click Here to Read: Helmut Thomä’s Contribution to the Panel, “Developments and Controversies in Psychoanalysis: Past, Present and Future” at the IPA Berlin Congress on July 25th, 2007.

Click here to Read: Imre Szecödy’s Paper: What can clinicians gain from research in psychoanalysis?

I thought this article from the Guardian would be of particular interest to those who were in Berlin for the IPA Congress and went on the tour of Jewish Berlin which included a visit to the Synagogue before restoration:

Germany’s largest synagogue, an architectural and historical landmark in the centre of Berlin, will reopen today after extensive restoration work.

The red-brick Rykestrasse synagogue is to be reopened in the presence of former members who were forced to flee Nazi Germany. It was set on fire on Kristallnacht on November 9 1938, when synagogues and Jewish businesses were attacked and destroyed on Nazi orders…
Click here to read the article. Click here to see accompanying photos.

This is an audio file taken from a video interview of Charles Brenner conducted by Frank Parcells of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Society in April 1988 as part of his oral history project. (1 hour)

Click button below to play – please allow a few seconds for the file to load:

Click Here to Read: Roberto Losso & Ana Packciarz Losso’s Contribution:  ”Transgenerational Repeating, Transgenerational Working-through, the Shared Family Unconscious Working-through Fantasy” to the IPA Berlin Congress.

Click here to Read: Gerhard Schneider’s Contribution  “Identität und Container-Contained, Identitätswiderstand und katastrophische Veränderung ” at the IPA Berlin Congress in July 2007.  This paper is in German.

Click here to Read: Gerhard Schnieder’s Contribution to the film panel “Good Bye Lenin” at the IPA Berlin Congress on July 26, 2007. 

Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York: Viking, 2007.

Steven Pinker is a figure who probably is already familiar to the International Psychoanalyisis community. He is the author of several books that unite linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory. A good deal of hands-on clinical research, plus wide reading in several fields give his work credibility, even among those who (such as your faithful correspondent) disagree with him on key issues. His scientific credentials are impeccable: he was a math wiz as a kid in Canada, has held appointments at MIT as well as his current post at Harvard. It is nevertheless his gifts as a writer as much as his erudition that have won him a large audience: he has a genius for explaining complex ideas in terms any intelligent reader can grasp, without at the same time feeling he has been fed pap. Much of Pinker’s power as a writer derives from his ability to find telling and memorable examples drawn from life outside the academy. Among the graphs and diagrams in his books, you will find interspersed vignettes from Doonesbury or Dennis the Menace. Pinker is a world-class scholar of epithets, taboo words, and all manner of dirty talk. While there is no doubt a certain prurience in the evident relish with which he dishes up examples from the ghetto, barracks, and bedroom, they are always made to pay their way in illuminating some abstruse point about the nature of the psyche.
This book, his latest, should be of considerable interest to all those who are concerned with human nature, because it is a comprehensive argument about the role language plays in illuminating, abetting, stifling, and shaping our behavior. Pinker is a (critical) adherent of Chomsky’s argument that language is hard wired in human brains. Lacan’s argument that the UC is structured like a language is an intriguing idea that has never fully found a robust presence in clinical practice. Pinker provides a wealth of material to revisit the complex dialog between language, thought, and behavior.

Michael Holquist

Click Here to Read: Review of Steven Pinker’s Book by Douglas Hofstadter.

Click Here to Read: An Article by Steven Pinker on Language from the New Republic.