International Psychoanalysis

Trying to Fathom the Human Condition, Letter by Alan Eisnitz to the New York Times on July 17th, 2008.

To the Editor:

David Brooks writes how scientists view human behavior, motivation and feelings as influenced by genetics, brain mechanisms and interactions over time with a complex environment and the people in it. This is precisely the area in which psychoanalysis works.

Psychoanalysis today aims to understand and eliminate negative forces in a person’s “transference” — the emotions and predispositions, both conscious and unconscious, from that person’s present and past experiences as they come to life as motivational forces in the present, and in particular in the treatment and toward others in the patient’s life.

I believe that much could be learned if shifts in the transference could, if possible, be studied as they occur, by methods of brain study now available, and as they develop, and their findings correlated with the psychoanalytic findings. Read the rest of this entry »

To the Editor, 
                      Your article on psychiatry and the rich (July 7th, 2008: Age of Riches/ Therapists to the Elite) is deeply offensive to every person, rich and poor alike. It demeans the daring of poor people who seek help and rich people who seek help. It even demeans the daring of psychoanalysis as it reaches out to help human minds, rich and poor, to recover the self esteem neurosis ran off with. In my experience as a psychoanalyst the human mind transcends poverty and wealth. The conflicts of the poor are the conflicts of the rich, depth psychology , which began transplacental without a cent to its name on its complex journey toward the grave, being what it is. Any psychiatrist who does not know this basic existential truth should hang up his shingle!  One expects more from journalism than this caricature of the human mind and all its complexities. This article is a perverse literary achievement that manages to demean doctors and patients, wealthy citizens and poor citizens in one fell satirical swoop. Shame on you New York Times!
                                            Sincerely,
 
                                        Eugene J. Mahon MD

The following is an unpublished letter to the editor of the New York Times by Leon Hoffman 

To the Editor,
 
Thank you very much for the story on Charles Brenner.
 
I thought your felicitous phrasing of conflict and compromise formation theory has no peer. 

“that the engine of human motivation was more like a psychological calculator, continuously computing ratios of pleasure versus pain: the gratification that would come from a love affair, for instance, versus the risk of discovery and abiding ache of guilt.
In analytic therapy, patients could reach a compromise between incompatible wishes that resolved some of the distress and was useful, Dr. Brenner argued.”
I will certainly quote you as I write about this further. In fact, in your phrasing you highlight the power of this theory and its consistency with our information age as we understand more and more about the power of computation. What is very interesting about the history of psychoanalysis is the tension between structural theories and functional theories. Read the rest of this entry »

The following is an unpublished letter to the editor of the New York Times  by Stephen Rittenberg and Herbert Wyman

To The Editor:

As psychoanalytic colleagues of the late Charles Brenner, and as founding Editors of the Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis, we applaud the accuracy with which the obituary described Dr. Brenner’s work and the impact it had on our field. At the same time we must observe that the obituary was grotesquely inaccurate in its descriptions of Charlie Brenner as a “ruthless”  “relentless”  “dismissive” “intransigent purist.” We speak both from personal experience of Charlie’s warmth and generosity, and from our professional experience of the way he welcomed reasoned criticism. The statement which we found especially wrongheaded was that there was “a limit to the extent to which his thinking evolved” and that this limitation contributed to the decline of psychoanalysis. The opposite is true. The only “limitation” to Charlie’s thinking was his unwillingness to abandon scientific thinking in favor of fashionable cant. Charlie’s thinking evolved continuously throughout his long life: Just one month before his death he presented a paper in which he further developed the new ideas which have in fact revivified psychoanalysis and will contribute to its evolution throughout the 21st century.

                                                                  Sincerely,

                                                                 Stephen M Rittenberg MD
                                                                  Herbert M Wyman MD

Unpublished Letter to the Sun by Leon Hoffman

Sex Sells

Why are we so the fascinated with the sexual lives of public figures
(”Albany starts to wonder at Patterson,” March 21-23, 2008)? We as a public
are both fascinated and outraged as we read story after story of sexual
misdemeanors.

Certainly many men in power and women too become involved in sexual
liaisons which too often lead them into severe difficulties. And, of
course, these sexual liaisons may lead to political corruption. However, as
Sigmund Freud noted over a century ago, a variety of sexual and aggressive
fantasies persist in everyone’s unconscious and conscious life.
Fortunately, most of us are able to limit our actions in order to live
cooperatively with our fellow humans. Read the rest of this entry »

 Governor Spitzer is not a hypocrite although his contradictory behavior is surely hypocritical.  Rather he is probably representative of a large group of psychological disorders characterized by an internal struggle often illustrated by that of a fight between virtue and sin.  We call these cases personality disorders exhibiting a vertical split in which an otherwise honorable individual periodically engages in behavior which is abhorrent to them.  These behaviors range from lying to thievery, from excessive shopping to substance abuse.  All of these individuals are suffering from what in psychoanalysis is termed a narcissistic disorder and most of these individuals are treatable by psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically-informed psychotherapy. Read the rest of this entry »

Click Here to Read:  Taking Play Seriously by  Robin Marantz Henig on February 17th in the New York Times Magazine

Letter to Editor
NYT Magazine

Your February 17, 2008 article, “Taking Play Seriously,” is a very comprehensive discussion of the importance of play in human development. One area, however, was missing: The importance of recognizing that for children play has meaning. Read the rest of this entry »

Click Here to Read:  “Daring to Think Differently about Schizophrenia”  by Alex Berenson in the Business section of the New York Times, February 4th, 2008.

The following is a letter by Susan Jaffe responding to this article in The Business section of the New York Times on March 2nd, 2008. 

On Schizophrenia
To the Editor:

Re “Daring to Think Differently About Schizophrenia” (Feb. 24), which described new possible medication in battling the disorder:

As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, I know that there is no magic bullet for the treatment of schizophrenia, or for any mental illness, for that matter. But a focus on serotonin has been a boon financially, but more important medically, in treating some kinds of depression. Hopefully, the research on glutamate will do the same to lessen the worst symptoms of schizophrenia. Let’s hope for the people who suffer from this terrible illness that we can find a medication that will stay its most debilitating and sometimes tragic effects.

Susan Jaffe, M.D.
Manhattan, Feb. 24

The writer is chairwoman of the committee on public information of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Letter to the Editor by Jane S.  Hall  article in The Science Times on Tuesday February 26th

Richard Freidman, M.D. raises an important question in his article re. the psychiatrist’s own psychotherapy. The public needs to be made aware that as psychiatrists become less interested in delivering psychotherapy, replacing talk therapy with drugs, there is a wide network of psychologists and social workers, licensed, qualified, and with advanced degrees in psychotherapy. These practitioners have graduated from institutes (usually 4 years of training) which includes their own psychotherapy as a requirement for graduation.

Jane S. Hall, LCSW, FIPA
A founder of the New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
 212-675-7364
 49 West 12th St.
 NYC, NY 10011

 Click Here to Read:  Have You Ever Been in Psychotherapy, Doctor? by Richard Friedman in the Science Times, February 19th, 2008.   

Mike Jolkovski’s alert regarding a misguided article about dreams in the Washington Post resulted in my writing the following letter that was printed yesterday.

Much Ado About Dreams

The article’s discussion of the dream process was tilted toward sources representing only one side of an ongoing scientific controversy: reports mainly from non-clinicians who don’t deal with dreams on a daily basis.

While dream interpretation is no longer the centerpiece of psychoanalysis as it was during Freud’s time, it is still useful in understanding the human psyche. For example, revisiting the writer’s Ang Lee dream you might discover the hidden meaning by employing the procedure Freud used to decode his own dreams.
 
After writing down your dream, start at the beginning and, word by word, associate freely (without judging anything as silly or without potential meaning) and note whatever images and thoughts come to mind. Eventually,with practice and willingness to accept unpleasant and surprising thoughts about yourself, you can discover a dream’s meaning.

Myron S. Lazar, PhD
Clinical Professor
Departments of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology
University of Texas Southwestern Medical
Center

Myron S. Lazar, Ph.D.
Training & Supervising Analyst
Dallas Psychoanalytic Center
8215 Westchester Dr.
Suite 316
Dallas, Texas 75225
214-691-1153

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.

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

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.” Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.  Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

To the Editor:
I would like to add to the article Patching Up the Frayed Couch recognition of the contribution to psychoanalytic scholarship made by members on the New York Psychoanalytic Society The editors of two of the most important journals in psychoanalysis the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly were for decades members of NYPSI.

Just as the venerable New York Times has been reinventing it self the article points out for me the need for NYPSI and psychoanalysis to reinvent ourself for a new time.

Arnold Richards

Member NYPSA
Former Editor JAPA

Click here for Link to the New York Times Article: Patching-up the Frayed Couch

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/nyregion/thecity/09anal.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=thecity

To the Editor:

Ah, Mr. Brooks, you have been hoisted on your own petard. Your very emotional response (August 26, 2007 “Stop Making Sense”) to Dr. Westen’s book only proves his point. I assume you wanted to present a rational argument, but it doesn’t sound anything but prejudiced, sarcastic and, well, argumentative.

People respond to their own emotional needs. For instance, John Kerry may have appealed to widespread emotional needs for maturity, fatherly protectiveness, quiet leadership and reserve. When he didn’t fight back after the Swift Boat attacks, he was a disappointment. Emotions all.

If reason could always trump emotional bias, members of the Supreme Court, all Constitutional scholars, would always agree. But they, like the rest of us, are human and make choices colored by their emotions. Isn’t that a reasonable conclusion Mr.Brooks ?

Leslie Schweitzer-Miller, M.D.

Click to read of David Brooks’ review of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation” by Drew Westen appeared in The New York Times.

My Letter to the Editor appeared in today’s New York Times, as follows:

To the Editor:

Re “About That Mean Streak of Yours: Psychiatry Can Do Only So Much” (Feb. 6): The examples Dr. Richard A. Friedman uses to promote his view that some people “can be mean or bad just like anyone else” give psychiatry a bad name.

Psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, in my experience, can help a person understand the roots of meanness, and only with such understanding is there hope for modulated change. I would ask Dr. Friedman what he means when he says that one patient had “all the benefits of an upper-middle-class upbringing?” And how did the psychotic patient happen to have the home phone number of a female resident? The vignettes do not substantiate his thesis.

Jane S. Hall
New York

The writer is the founder of the New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

These types of arguments and articles unfortunately reflect poorly not only on psychiatry but on all mental health workers. As a psychoanalyst with a social work background I have treated many people whose so called “mean streaks” are wrecking their lives. Psychoanalytically-oriented work provides a deeper, broader look at why people react in “mean” ways. This off-putting attitude is a symptom of anxiety about closeness and intimacy that has become characterological and though adaptive in one way, also extremely injurious. We must speak up in support of our field and to educate the public.