International Psychoanalysis

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.

(more…)

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.

Click Here To Read: Henry J. Friedman’s unpublished letter to the editor of the New York Times on Scott Stossel’s review in the New York Times of American Therapy by Jonathan Engel.

Click Here To Read: Still Crazy After All These Years By Scott Stossel, a review of American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States by Jonathan Engel on this website.

Click Here To Read: A Review by Joe Gartner of American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States by Jonathan Engel on this website.

Click Here to Read: Edward Lewin on Jonathan Engle’s book: American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States on this website.

Upublished Letter to the Editor of the New York Times by Henry J. Friedman

To the Editor:

As a practicing psychiatrist who utilizes psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychopharmacology in an effort to relieve the emotional suffering of my patients I feel a distinct need to respond   to Scott Stossel’s review of Jonathan Engel’s book, “American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States”.  Stossel   chooses to attack psychotherapy in general and psychoanalysis specifically despite the fact that Engel’s book, as described by the reviewer, is respectful of treatment and repeatedly cites psychotherapy research that supports the effectiveness of psychotherapy for a large percentage of patients.   I can only wonder   what motivates this reviewer to make unfounded statements, such as, ”If it were to be conclusively demonstrated that therapy doesn’t work, therapists would be put out of business; that’s effectively what’s already happened to Freudian psychoanalysts.”. While it may be common parlance in uneducated circles to announce the death of   Freudian psychoanalysis I would expect a more informed perspective in a review published in the Sunday Times Book Review.  Stossel’s claims are entirely unfounded and appear to emerge from some hostility he   feels about psychoanalysts and psychotherapists earning a living from the work that they perform with a wide variety of patients who are, indeed, helped to live with less anxiety and despair as a result of understanding the influence of their developmental and current life environments. (more…)

Letter to The Editor of the New York Times by Fred M. Sander, published on December 19, 2008. 

To the Editor:

David Brooks summarizes the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “Outliers”: “Exceptionally successful people are not pioneers who created their own success, he argues. They are the lucky beneficiaries of social arrangements.”

Mr. Brooks counters this view with the alternative hypothesis of the power of an individual’s will and capacity to focus imaginatively.

This merely restates an old question of whether leaders create their followers or the reverse. (more…)

Unpublished Letter to the Editor by Fern Traeger:

To the Editor:
Re: “Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain” (Sunday Opinion, October 5th)

Bravo to Frank Rich who has so articulately identified one of the most disturbing aspects of Sarah Palin’s rhetoric: “A consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition.” Rich goes on to describe Charlie Gibson’s interview with Palin during which he asks her about her readiness to join McCain’s ticket, and her response that she didn’t “hesitate” and didn’t “even blink.”

In my professional sphere, this inflated sense of one’s abilities, inconsistent with reality, is known as mania. It is characterized by grandiosity that, in the extreme, might result in an individual jumping off a building believing he is Superman, or another bankrupting himself spending all his savings on luxuries, or someone who, as Rich points out, thinks she can be President because she wants to be President.

In the first two examples, the individual’s recklessness primarily hurts himself; the consequences of the third will be disastrous for all Americans, and will reverberate throughout the world.

Ferne Traeger
New York, October 6th, 2008

Click Here To Read: Letters to the Editor of the New York Times re: Let’s Talk About the Talking Cure on October 5th, 2008.  Sylvia Brody’s is at the bottom of the page.
 
 

Letter to the editor from Fred Griffin which was published in the September 15 issue of The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL).

Letters to the Editor
The Birmingham News
September 15, 2008

 WE MUST FIGHT FOR OUR COUNTRY, BUT NOT ENGAGE IN KNEE-JERK REACTIONS

    In watching the Republican national convention, references to fighting and combat appeared to dominate the rhetoric of the candidates. For example, in a front-page article in the September 5 Birmingham News, Senator McCain is quoted as saying, “Fight with me.  Fight with me. Fight with me.  Fight for our country.”

 I began to wonder just how far our country has been able to process the trauma we experienced on 9/11.  I am reminded about my work with Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder for whom a variety of even non-threatening stimuli trigger reflexive violent reactions.  Neuroscientists tell us that this set of responses is largely because the emotional experience of the overwhelming trauma becomes lodged in the deep structures of the brain and bypasses the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that permits us to truly think about our experience.  Therefore, we react, rather than reflect-a
knee-jerk reaction.

       This country was violently invaded on 9/11.  We may still be stuck in our own post-traumatic reactions to this event.  One might also wonder if McCain is somehow haunted by post-traumatic reactions to his own private ordeal as a prisoner-of-war, which he so courageously
endured.

      Of course we must fight for our country.  I am in no way advocating for passivity.  But we should not engage in knee-jerk reactions that are robbed of thoughtful reflection about additional avenues to create safety for our country and to restore our country’s standing on the world stage.

Fred L. Griffin, M.D.