International Psychoanalysis

Click Here to Read: Letters: When the Elderly Become Delusional in the New York Times on June 25, 2010.

Click Here to Read: Letters: The Value of Zoning Out by Leon Hoffman in the New York Times on July 5, 2010.

Click Here To Read: Letters: Should Schools Police Cyberbullying?, including a letter by Mark Smaller,  in the New York Times on July 2, 2010.

Read Bonnie E. Litowitz’s Letter To The Editor, here.

Unpublished Letter to the Editor of the New York Times Book Review by Zvi Lothane:

Eric Ormsby praises Jonathan Philips, the author of “Holy Warriors A Modern History of the Crusades,” for the “cool, almost documentary power [of] his narrative,” which inspires Ormsby to romanticize the Crusaders: “In fact, their faith was as pure as their savagery.” But were they so pure? Ormsby makes no reference to Phillips’ perfunctory descriptions of “pogroms” and massacres during the first Crusade, while Phillips studiously avoids mentioning “anti-Semitism or the role played by Church-sponsored hatred of the Jews in fueling the fervor of the Crusades. As noted by Paul Johnson in “A History of the Jews,” “the anti-Semitic ideology and folklore which helped to detonate the first crusader riots proved to be simply the plinth on which a vast superstructure of hostile rumour was built” (p. 208). Similarly, Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, in his 1901 “Anti-Semitism throughout the Ages” (published in English in 1953 but cited by Sigmund Freud in his 1938 “Comment on anti-Semitism,” after he fled from Nazi Austria to London), noted the following: “with the Crusades began a time of the most terrible persecution of the Jews. Hosts of Crusaders, many of the the scum of French, English, Lothringian and Flemish countries, started, as Graetz says, their work of murdering and plundering with the Jews for want of Mohammedans. (more…)

Click Here To Read: Head Case: Can psychiatry be a science? by Louis Menand in the New Yorker on March 1, 2010.

Click Here To Read: Letter by Leo Rangell in response to Louis Menand’s New Yorker article.

Letter from Henry J. Friedman to the Wall Street Journal on March 5, 2010 in response to Edward Shorter’s article: “Why Psychiatry Needs Therapy,” in the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 27, 2010.

As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has worked with a wide range of patients since 1963, I believe it is important to refute Prof. Shorter’s brutal attack on contemporary psychiatry. His views are idiosyncratic, to say the least, reflecting as they do his individual appraisal of the diagnostic manual and current treatments. (more…)

Click here to Read:  Letter to the Editor: Narcissism’s Discontents By Henry J. Friedman and a letter By Gregory Rabassa  in the New York Times on February 19, 2010.

Click Here to Read: Patients and Text Messaging: A Boundary Issue: A Letter to The Editor by Geoff Neimark.

This article originally appeared as: Neimark, Geoff (November 2009). Patients and Text Messaging: A Boundary Issue: American  Journal of Psychiatry 166:1298-1299 and appears here with all requisite rights and permissions.

Click Here To Read:  For Children of the Recession, the Economy Hits Home, Letter to the Editor by Mark Smaller in the New York Times on November 18, 2009. 

Mark D. Smaller

Click Here To Read:  Letters: Worrying About the Safety of Beef by Howard Rudominer to the New York Times on October 5, 2009.

Click Here To Read: The biopsychosocial concept: relic or reality? Letter to the Editor by Zvi Lothane, on July 29, 2009,  in response to  S. Nassir Ghaemi’s editorial: The rise and fall of the biopsychosocial model in The British Journal of Psychiatry 2009; 195:3-4.

Click Here To Read: Freud, Like Columbus, Opened a Whole New World by Henry (Zvi) Lothane, M.D. Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal in response to Daniel Akst’s “One Hundred Years of Freud in America” (Taste, Aug. 7). on August 14th, 2009.

Christopher Columbus

Click Here to Read: Letter to the Editor: Repressed Oversharers by J. David Miller in the New York Times on July 22, 2009.

Click Here To Read: Careless Love, Letter to the Editor by Henry J. Friedman in the New York Times Book Review on July 8, 2009.

Hoffman, L. (2009). Treating Childhood Anxiety. N Engl J Med 360:2475, June 4, 2009 Correspondence

To the Editor: In the editorial accompanying the report by Walkup et al., Emslie1 states, in support of randomized, controlled trials, “It appears unlikely that the majority of children with severe and persistent anxiety disorders are receiving optimal evidence-based care in the community.” I do not believe that the results reported by Walkup et al. can be generalized, in that 84% of potential subjects were excluded (3066 screened, and 488 randomly assigned to a study group), making the external validity2 of the findings doubtful.

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Click Here To Read: Chapter 10 from Freud as an Entrepreneur: Implications for Contemporary Psychoanalytic Institutes by Harry Levinson.  The book Freud as Entrepreneur: Implications for Contemporary Psychoanalytic Institutes has yet to be published.

Harry Levinson

Click Here to Read:  Medicating your grief won’t help you heal By Claudia Meininger Gold on the Boston Globe website on April 27, 2009.

Click Here To Read: Letters to the Editors of the New York Times on The Hearts and Minds of Soldiers on January 27, 2009.

Click Here To Read: A Series of Letters to the Editors of the New York Times about Scott Stossel’s review in the New York Times of of American Therapy by Jonathan Engel on January 11th, 2009.