International Psychoanalysis

Click Here To Read: Mind-altering drugs and the problem child  By Claudia Meininger Gold in the Boston Globe on June 30, 2008.

Click Here to Read: Medication can’t fix a broken childhood By Claudia Meininger Gold in the Boston Globe on January 26, 2009.

Click Here to Read:  Backed into a treatment corner By Claudia Gold in the Boston Globe on March 30, 2009

Click Here To Read:  In autism, medication is only a partial answer by  Claudia M. Gold in the Boston Globe on December 14, 2009.

Click Here to Read: A dose of common sense:  U.S.-style health care involves a lot of costly procedures, but not enough thought by Lawrence D. Blum,  OpEd in the Philadelphia Inquirer, on September 30, 2009.

 Click Here ro Read: Freud’s Adirondack Vacation by Leon Hoffman, OpEd Contributor, in the New York Times on August 29, 2009.

Click Here To Read: Putnam Camp : Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology By George Prochnik, Reviewed By Arnold Richards.  

Click Here To Read: Adirondack Couch by Peter D. Kramer in the New York Times on December 24, 2006.

Leon Hoffman

Click Here To Read: Obama’s Style Problem as Procedural Memory by Norman Holland on the his is Your Brain on Culture Blog ont the Psychology Today website on August 27, 2009.

Barack Obama

Click Here To Read:  Reframing the Relationship of Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience, an OpEd Article by Elio Frattaroli.

Elio Frattaroli

Click Here To Read: Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs by Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker on April 27, 2009.

Click Here To Read: Leon Hoffman’s Letter to the editor about Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.

Every era has its defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for our efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture.

Click Here to Read: Dinosaur at the Gate By Maureen Dowd in the New York Times on April 14, 2009.

Click Here to Read: The Debate Over Online News: It’s the Consumer, Stupid by Arianna Huffington on the Huffington Post website on April 10, 2009.

Maureen Dowd

Click Here To Read: How Words Could End a War, OpEd piece by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges in New York Times on January 24, 2009.

Click Here To Read: Counting the Walking Wounded By Lawrence M. Wein in the New York Times on January 25, 2009.

by Jane S. Hall

Measuring each other is, more often than not, a fruitless exercise and breeds strife where there should be encouragement, ill will where there should be generativity, falsification of material due to perceived requirements, and mistrust where there should be trust.

If we can agree that the practice of psychoanalysis includes intensive work with patients who suffer from both pre oedipal and oedipal conflicts, object hunger, developmental lags, mood disorders, character problems, anxiety inappropriate to the occasion, using the psychoanalytic techniques that include recognizing and using transference, counter transference, and projective identification to inform; action and enactment to explain; awareness and modification of resistance to proceed; and listening for fantasy that clouds wished for functioning; in a safe and consistent atmosphere, we should be able to know and explain just exactly what psychoanalytic work is. (more…)

The following editorial on the crisis in pediatric psychiatry (e.g., there has been at least a 40 fold increase in diagnosing pediatric bipolar disorder in this country, unlike other countries such as Puerto Rico) was published in a recent issue of Nature Neuroscience (a basic science journal relevant for anyone interested in what neuroscience has to offer psychoanalysts). Fairly recently, the Hastings Center (a bioethics think tank) held a conference on child psychiatry and psychopharmacology with Steve Hyman (former NIMH Director and Provost at Harvard) as one of the speakers. Hyman, a representative of what became known as the molecular biological approach to psychiatric neuroscience, gave an excellent review of the problems in the field. Parenthetically, Hyman underscores a nonreductionistic approach which includes the value of psychotherapy in mental illness. The Hastings Center’s website has interesting information on children and psychopharmacology.

Brian  Koehler

Click Here To Read:  Credibility crisis in pediatric psychiatry, an editorial from Nature Neuroscience 11, 983 (2008).

The Well is Running Dry
by Jane S. Hall

Barrier busting is a business term recently used by Amory Lovins, an energy wizard and CEO of the Rocky Mt. Institute. He was referring to the need for all those concerned with oil consumption and alternative energy to work together towards finding solutions. Psychoanalysis needs to bust barriers too.

Since my essay on Barrier Busting (link) www.internationalpsychoanalysis.net I have been thinking about an equally and related serious problem that must involve all post-graduate psychoanalytic institutes: universities and colleges are no longer teaching psychodynamic theory. Medical schools, psychology departments, and social work schools (both masters level and doctoral level) have turned almost completely away from Freud’s ideas to the point that a recent graduate might not have read one paper by him or by anyone interested in the human psyche in terms of the unconscious. It looks like a generation will have been skipped and that the next one will be mesmerized and inspired to study the brain and genetics, completely ignorant of psychoanalytic theory, let alone psychoanalysis.

It is as though we psychoanalytic thinkers and clinicians have broken off the polar ice cap and are both drifting and melting away. (more…)

I think this short opinion piece in the New York Times has relevance for all psychoanalysts, in our consulting rooms, in our societies, and in the world in general. We are trained to listen and there is so much that we don’t hear for one reason or another. (click here to read Two Silences)
Jane S. Hall
op-ed editor

The IP Blog is pleased to bring to your attention an important article on fighting cancer, a problem that touches us all. Click here to read David Servan-Schreiber’s opinion piece, “We can stop the cancer epidemic” published in the Herald Tribune, September 19, 2008. Thank you, David, for letting us know about it.

Jane S. Hall
op-ed editor

In this lastest op ed piece, Jurgen Reeder, author of Hate and Love in Psychoanalytic Institututions the dilemma of the profession, gives us his thoughts about the three models of training sanctioned by the IPA and makes a good argument for less rigidity and more flexibility. Psychoanalytic education is not thriving, as we all know, and I am grateful that Dr. Reeder is keeping this important topic in the forefront of our minds.

–Jane S. Hall, Website OpEd Editor

Click Here to Read: The Potenial Repressive Power of Defining Models of Education, An Op-Ed Piece by Jurgen Reeder.

Barrier busting is a business term recently used by Amory Lovins*, an energy wizard and CEO of the Rocky Mt. Institute. He is referring to the need for all those concerned with oil consumption and alternative energy to work together towards a solution. I applaud this concept as it relates to psychoanalysis as well. Psychoanalysis needs to bust barriers too.

The richness of this profession is due to the mix of psychoanalysts, some with doctorates and many without. Exclusionary practices are damaging this profession. Case in point: Today I received an invitation to a meeting

NEW PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES ON PREJUDICE
Making a Difference in Society
A Conference for the Application of Psychoanalysis to Problems in Society
Co Sponsored by the Harry Stack Sullivan Society,
William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society, and
Contemporary Psychoanalysis

A conference on prejudice that clearly excludes clinical social workers on its program and on its planning committee – people who have earned the right to practice psychoanalysis, and who have made major contributions to this profession – is misguided and divisive.

My hope, in this short essay, is first of all to educate those who are prejudiced against masters level social work psychoanalysts and lay analysts, and secondly, along the same lines, to make a plea that we respect and listen to diverse points of view from different disciplines.

Anyone who embraces psychoanalytic work knows how difficult and rewarding it can be. Putting energy into turf wars is draining and takes away the chance to learn from each other. Discrimination persists now because of status issues, as the world of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy becomes increasingly stratified under economic pressure. But now is a time to join together as we have much to share. (more…)

 
 
 
Click Here To Read: The Certification Debate as a Manifestation of Our Unacknowledged Ambivalences by Leon Hoffman.
 
Click here to Read: For the historical background of this debate, Paul Mosher and Arnold Richards’s paper “The History of Membership/Certification in the APsaA: Old Demons, New Debates.”
  
 
 
 
  

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…)

Many thanks to Jane Hall for bringing the recent Papal visit to the attention of the psychoanalytic community. (Click here to read Jane S. Hall’s editorial.) An international event of this importance has the potential to elicit deeply held emotions in individuals that rise to the surface and reverberate in our society at large. Having attended the Papal Mass at the Washington Nationals Stadium, I witnessed both the hushed attentiveness of over forty thousand faithful in the stands as well as several placard-carrying protestors shouting outside the front gates. Not unexpectedly, people expressed strong feelings around this event. As a psychoanalyst as well as a practicing Roman Catholic, the Papal visit and the reactions to it were of great interest to me.I would now like to share some psychoanalytic thoughts about a particular incident that occurred during this time. My intent is to show that the effects of clerical sexual abuse might be evident in one victim’s encounter with the Pope. (more…)

The International Psychoanalytic website is pleased to present an important op ed piece by Marian Tolpin. This eminent analyst from Chicago explains clearly, articulately, and persuasively why the training analyst title should be retired. The Executive Board of the International Psychoanalytic Association would not permit its publication. The International Psychoanalytic Blog stands for freedom of expression and welcomes comments on this important and timely article.

Jane S. Hall
Op Ed Editor

Thoughts on the Group Self of psychoanalysis,
in light of the controversy over Training Analysis status

Marian Tolpin, M.D.

There is currently a great deal of debate taking place in psychoanalytic training centers, around the world and here in the United States, concerning whether there should be a separate category of graduate psychoanalysts designated as specially qualified to analyze future psychoanalysts. Among those who do believe that there needs to be such a category, further debate has raged on what that special qualification might entail and on the particulars of how (when, by whom) it should be established and evaluated.

In what follows below I reflect on my own experiences in regard to this category and on the lengthy history of the Training Analysis question as a disruptive force in institutional psychoanalysis. As I consider why this fractious issue, which has caused so much dissension in our profession, remains perpetually unresolved, I conclude that the Training Analysis serves a Group Self cohesive function. As such, it joins a list of other myths that have served that function in the past; myths that were clung to but ultimately had to be relinquished in the face of contradictory evidence. (more…)