Click here To read: ”Social status affects the brain: News from the frontier” by Faith Hickman Brynie, an article from Neuron on the Dana Foundation Brainwork Website.
The Struggle Against Mourning by Ilany Kogan, Reviewed by Sheldon Goodman
“You shouldn’t turn away from treatment . Love consists in this that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”
(Rilke, 1904, p.27).
“(A)nd I’m resolved my most inmost being shall share in what’s the lot of all mankind that I shall understand their heights and depths, shall fill my heart with all their joy and grieves” (Goethe,p.46,1808) cited in SAM, p.64 (more…)
Margaret Mahler Alma Halbert Bond
Click Here to Read: The Separation-Individuation of Margaret Mahler by Alma Halbert Bond.
APsaA members are discussing the subject of certification. This editorial by Arlene Kramer Richards gives us one person’s personal experience of the process, along with suggestions for the future. The piece was originally published in États Generaux de la Psychanalyse (2000) and appears here with the requisite permissions. The IP Blog looks forward to many comments so that people can reflect, with open minds, on their positions – whatever they may be.
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DISCUSSION OF THE CERTIFICATION PROCESS AT THE AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYTIC ASSOCIATION
By Arlene Kramer Richards
I became a certified member of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1998. My experience in becoming certified has caused me to think long and searchingly about the purposes and the consequences of this process. The personal pain induced by the process is the spur for my thinking, but the thinking has gone on long after the pain was assuaged by the concern and sympathetic listening of a few close friends and many colleagues. The process began when I decided to attend a meeting at which prospective candidates for certification were invited to discuss the process. The members of the committee who were present at the meeting assured the prospective candidates that the process would be collegial and that they wanted to use it to get to know the candidates and their way of working as analysts. This sounded good to me. They also gave details of how to write up cases for certification and, most importantly for me as someone who had trained long ago and outside the institutes of the American, said that they were willing to accept a selection of cases from senior people rather than demand that we write up all the cases we had ever had. That was reasonable. I wrote the cases as I would for scientific papers. I tried to spotlight the difficulties that arose in the analyses themselves and the thoughts that had occurred to me as I wrote them up now, many years later. Informed that they had been insufficient, I was encouraged to go to Toronto in May 1998 to present my work in person. This time, I was to bring process on current hours. I was shocked to find that the small subcommittee that interviewed me at that time did not believe that I had presented to them well enough to show that I understood the analytic process. After another write up and another interview, I was told that I had now shown that I did understand the analytic process. For a senior analyst who had done many analyses and supervisions and had been the co-chair of an IPA pre-congress on analytic supervision as well as having been a training analyst so long that some of my analysands were now training analysts, this did not feel good. Was the problem me or was it the process? Or was it both? Much of my thinking about this has been in the service of figuring this out. To begin at the beginning, there was the case write ups. (more…)
Click Here to Read: Comments on the Psychoanalytic Curriculum by Jacob Arlow. This paper was presented to the Education Committee of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1990.
Click Here to Read: The Mind as Conflict and Compromise Formation by Charles Brenner’
Click Here to Read: A Review of the movie, “A Dry White Season” by Bertram Rosen.
Click Here to Listen to: Vienna By Billy Joel.
Vienna
Slow down, you crazy child
you’re so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you’re so smart, tell me
Why are you still so afraid? (more…)
by Gershon Reiter From Fathers and Sons in Cinema © 2008 Gershon Reiter by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www. Excerpt from “Fathers and Sons in Cinema,” by Gershon Reiter, coming out this June. The book addresses the father-son relationship in American cinema by re-examining ancient dragon-slaying myths, showing how they apply to movies, or to what the book calls filmmyths, that deal with fathers and sons. (more…)
Dear Colleagues
A very quick update: Things in Sichuan are still awful. People in Chengdu are sleeping out of doors in parks, university playing fields etc because of the aftershocks Some are returning to their homes, but colleagues who live in hi rises are sleeping at the houses of their colleagues in ground floor apartments. I have been speaking with them daily. They are very appreciative of our support.
Adults
I have had requests from many institutions for Disaster Training including: Chinese Academy Of Science Institute of Psychology, Institute Of Mental Health Peking University, Department Of Psychology Peking University, EAP, Shanghai Linzi Counseling Center, Chengdu CAPA group and many other groups and individuals. At this moment training is being scheduled for about 1200 mental health workers. The training (4-5 hour live sessions) will be provided by American Psychiatric Association International Center for Psychosocial Trauma, Disaster Psychiatry Outreach and several individual Disaster specialists. CAPA plans to provide mentoring and consultation for these disaster workers as they go into the field. They will need help for the next year as they deal with late effects of the disaster Volunteers?
The Shanghai Mental Health Center will pay airfare for two experienced disaster people come to Shanghai and the APA will supply them. The group in Chengdu has asked that someone come and Jeff Taxman, a CAPA person, has volunteered to go. He will go in any case but we are trying to raise funds to defray his costs. Please send contributions to
CAPA C/O Barbara Campbell 2621 Spring Grove Drive Brighton MI 48114
Children
I am working closely with the Mercy Corps, an American Foundation, already in China and with Gil Kliman and the Children’s Psychological Health Center. We have found a publisher for the children’s workbook. About 20 publishers have been vying for the opportunity to help and it will be available at cost—or less. Mercy Corps may order 50,000 copies. The Sichuan Red Cross will order another 50,000 and the Education Department of Chengdu will order “hundreds of thousands” of copies. Gil Kliman has rewritten the workbook. Dong Hong, an English professor at Sichuan University and also by Zhang Jingyan an Art professor are translating it and Zhang Jingyan’s students are making new illustrations. Professors at several Chengdu Universities and others will be trained to train teachers, parents and aid workers in the use of the workbook. A group of child psychiatrists from Beijing who will be working in Sichuan have asked for a mentor and ultimately we will need child people to consult with the teachers and aid workers via Skype or email.
I get about 20-40 emails an hour with various requests. If you have skills that you think would be useful, please email me.
Elise Snyder
Click Here to Read: A Tribute to Jacob Arlow by Sheldon Goodman.
Click Here for Audio: Interview with Jacob Arlow by Frank Parcells.
Click Here to Read: Jacob Arlow’s Review of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Film “Blowup.”
Click Here to Read: Jacob Arlow’s Papers.
Click Here for: Audio Interview of Charles Brenner by Frank Parcells.
Click Here for: Charles Brenner Interviewed by Edward Nersessian.
Click Here to Read: Review of Psychoanalysis: Mind and Meaning by Charles Brenner reviewed by Arnold Richards
Click Here to Read: Obituary of Charles Brenner in the New York Times.
Charles Brenner:
A little more than a month ago, on April 8 2008, I had the privilege of introducing my friend Charles Brenner at a Scientific Meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Yesterday I learned that he died. As we all do, I feel a great loss both personally and to psychoanalysis. Here is what I said about Charlie last month:
Click Here to Read: A Review of the Movie “Eyes Wide Shut” by Bertram Rosen.
Dear Colleagues
I have been coordinating some efforts to provide psychological assistance to people in Sichuan Province . I am the President of CAPA (the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance) and we have many contacts in China.
THINGS IN PROCESS
1. Many groups, hospitals, university departments and individuals in China have written to us asking for advice, training (some wanted volunteers to come to China) from Americans who are knowledgeable about psychological aspects of disasters. We have already arranged for one American volunteer to go to Chengdu and work with a group there.
2. We are arranging for rewriting, translation, and publishing in China of “My Earthquake Story” (a children’s’ workbook with well documented successful results in preventing and ameliorating later effects of natural disasters). Gil Kliman the director of The Children’s Psychological Health Center made it available. We are in touch with three interested Chinese publishers.
3. We will be working with at least two US foundations, maybe more, several branches of the Chinese Red Cross, a major counseling company in China, a major medical supply company in China etc etc etc.
WE NEED VOLUNTEERS
Please email me if you can consult with individuals or groups about working with people affected by disasters using email, phone, Skype
Or if you are available to go to China.
Or if you have other knowledge or skills we and they can use.
Give me information about who you are, your experience with disaster work and what you are willing to do.
Many thanks
Elise Snyder
Over the past 3 months, I have published film essays with a particular focus on the Primal Scene. I began with the recent film, The Lives of Others (February), using Arlow’s paper, “The Revenge Motive in the Primal Scene” as my primary text. In the following months, in commentaries on LA Confidental (March) and the two films, The Crying Game and Mona Lisa (April), I have continued to focus on a sense of exclusion and a wish for revenge as an important dynamic in understanding the primal scene as it is represented in those films. This examination of Bertolucci’s The Conformist continues those themes. In doing so, I have ignored other important themes in this complex work in order to focus on a peculiar aspect of the film as I see it.
The Conformist was the first film that I ever “analyzed”, and doing that got me interested in thinking and writing about unconscious fantasy in film. I would like to point the reader to two extraordinary (to me) features of this film: 1. An unprecedented concentration of primal scene imagery; and, 2. A configuration of imagery that allows us to “reconstruct” a very specific, detailed primal scene fantasy. I have written about this in a much more condensed version in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1997: vol. 78:1031-1033). This expanded version was published in Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film (Herbert H. Stein, M.D.; 2002, Ereads).
THE EROTIC TRANSFERENCE:
MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES
THE WILLIAM ALANSON WHITE INSTITUTE
20 WEST 74TH STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10023
SATURDAY, MAY 17TH
10:00 AM to 3:00 PM
This workshop will explore from a variety of perspectives both the
theoretical as well as clinical data on the complexity of the erotic
transference/ countertransference matrix. To ensure a diversity of
perspectives both gay and heterosexual, female and male analysts will
participate in the workshop and present clinical vignettes for discussion.
Some of the issues that will be examined are: How central is the erotic
transference to our work? Are there technical approaches that may
unwittingly inflame or suppress erotic material? How does one’s model of
therapeutic action affect the emergence of sexual feelings? Does the
erotic transference mask other conflicts and desires? How significant is
the analyst’s gender?
THE NEW YORK PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY & INSTITUTE
247 East 82nd St., between 2nd & 3rd
Tuesday, June 10, 2008, 8:15 p.m.
Peter Fonagy, Ph.D. will discuss a paper by Susan Sherkow, M.D. and Lissa Weinstein, Ph.D. on Stock-Still Behavior: A Potential Developmental Marker for the Representation of Self and Other in Toddlers.
Join us for light refreshments from 7:30 to 8 p.m.
For information about our training programs please visit us at: www.psychoanalysis.org
