Episoder
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“I feel so strongly about this [collective commemorative ritual]. I think that early psychoanalytic writing overemphasized the value of separation-individuation and pathologized the opposite. It's been through personal experience that I have come to see that in a different way with regard to Jewish commemorative ritual which takes place a couple of times a year. But also some experiences that I have had outside the realm of religion. The one that pops to mind was what President Biden did about a year after the first onslaught of the Covid epidemic. He had candles put all around the reflecting pool in Washington, one candle for every number of people who had died, and this was broadcast on television. I sat there and I wept over thousands of deaths, and then I began to think about the power of the experience of mourning with others. Despite the fact that we didn't all lose the same person, we had all lost somebody to this virus that was not as yet being managed. There was something incredibly powerful about that - in the same way for those who lost someone on 9/11 who go down to the Twin Towers and read the list of names every year. But we analysts have not theorized this stuff and I think it's time that we did.”
Episode Description: We begin with Joyce sharing with us her evolution from being a young analyst who was essentially ever available to her struggling patients to now being "more aware of the problematic edge to a kind of responsiveness that once felt simply necessary." We discuss what she calls analyst's 'secret delinquencies' - when the clinician intentionally withdraws from the patient into personal matters "so that the analyst becomes the single subject in the room." We consider post-treatment friendships between analyst and analysand and the nature of the evolution of the transference. Joyce shares with us her reflections on growing older and the mixed blessings it provides in terms of greater experience and clinical wisdom as well as a tempting "disengagement from an earlier sense of therapeutic discipline." We close with her suggestion that we consider the "dynamic function of commemorative ritual" not as a mere enactment but as a fulsome experience for "reworking old connections."
Our Guest:Joyce Slochower Ph.D., ABPP, is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Hunter College & the Graduate Center, CUNY; faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Steven Mitchell Center, National Training Program of NIP, Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies & and PINC in San Francisco. She is the author of Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (1996; & 2014) and Psychoanalytic Collisions (2006 & 2014), and co-Editor, with Lew Aron and Sue Grand, of “De-idealizing relational theory: a Critique from Within” and “Decentering Relational Theory: a Comparative Critique” (2018). Her new book, Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken, was released by Routledge in June 2024. She is in private practice in New York City.
Recommended Readings:
2024 Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken. NY, London: Routledge.
2024 Factions are Back. Journal of the American Psychoanal. Assn., 72(4): 561-582.
2018 Deidealizing Relational Theory: A Critique from Within. L. Aron, S. Grand, & J. Slochower, Eds. London: Routledge.
2017 Don’t tell anyone. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 34: 195-200.
2014 Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (2nd Edition). New York: Routledge.
2014 Psychoanalytic Collisions: (2nd Edition), New York: Routledge.
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"What Freud may have missed here is that the investment in the lost object is a much more reconstructive and integrative process. It’s one where we remember all the stories that we have heard from the lost object - the repetitive stories about the childhood of the person or how they met significant others and all these stories are within us and revived, and we have questions. We think: ‘Too bad I never asked about this or that’ and in activating these memories we also experience joy and we have a slow process of integration which is not necessarily about loss but about how continuous this person lives in our mind and that is a little bit the focus of this novel. It's in that sense a portrait of the mind and the process of mourning."
Episode Description: We begin with recognizing Cordelia's contributions to clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis in addition to her fiction writing. Her latest novel, Memento, has been described as "a journey through the labyrinth of the dream world" and invites the reader into the experiences of ambiguity, timelessness, and the absurd. On a theoretical level, Cordelia introduces the usefulness of the term lethe - the river in the underworld of Hades that causes people to forget their past when they drink from it. We discuss the distinction between libido and lethe and how they manifest themselves in the analytic setting. She emphasizes the importance of understanding aggression not as a stand-alone but as a container of further meaning. We close with her sharing her childhood story of wanting to please her father with her detailed knowledge - a sublimation that she continues to gain pleasure from to this day.
Our Guest: Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst and on the Faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute as well as of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society. Her area of expertise is metapsychology, in particular drive theory and its clinical applications. An updated version of her monograph of Freud's metapsychology, Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe, is just being published by International Psychoanalytic Books. Her psychoanalytic books and articles have been published in many languages. She has also published three novels and edited a Freud Reader, an Essay Book, and three collections of Short Stories. She is the Chair of the IPA in Culture Committee and works in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Recommended Readings:
Freud, S (1917) Morning and Melancholia. In Freud, S. Standard Edition, Vol IVX, 239 258
Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2018) Driven to Survive. Selected Papers Psychoanalysis. New York: International, Psychoanalytic Books.
Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2020) Memory’s Eyes. A New-York Oedipus Novel. Queens, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books.
Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2023) Memento. A Novel in Dreams, Thoughts, and Images. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books.
Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2024) Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe. A clear road through Freud's metapsychology leading to helpful findings and new concepts. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books.
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"A number of art schools in the early 60s said: “Clearly, it is the relationship of the painter to the medium that is the essence of painting - the painter must be emotionally present, and this is what we should instill in our students.” So they started to take away traditional training in art schools of representational drawing, of color theory, of figurative drawing, and what they ended up with was a generation of artists who were passionately throwing paint at canvases but unable to make art. The relationship between the fundamentals and intuition is very complicated. Nobody seemed to make the point that the great abstract expressionists were all trained for decades in traditional art schools. That’s what they came out of, and we see this in our analytic colleagues. Many of them are writing wonderfully at the moment, but they were trained as Kleinians or trained as ego psychologists, and they have that in their bone marrow. The kind of representational work with Apple [painting of his dog] that I am talking about when I say: I draw and I draw and I draw until I can put that aside, in analytic work I go to something basic in my training. For me it happens to be something that's close to Paul Gray, it's not where I'm going to stop, but I can use Paul Gray because that's what I was trained in - I will look for transference, I'll look for defense, I'll look for resistance and I'll go back and look for the derivatives of certain affects that are enacted in the relationship. I go over it and over it until I can relinquish it like I did with the painting of Apple, and then the intuitive comes in, but the intuitive is the reward at the end of decades of hard work."
Episode Description: We begin with Jon's mother's encouragement to paint by finding the bird's vitality through "becoming the bird." This leads us to consider the relationship between intuitive seeing and the "images which I might desire to produce." We discuss his notion of the aesthetic matrix which applies both to the analytic encounter as it does to the painter's relationship to his creative process. Jon shares with us his conviction that basic technique, whether artistic or analytic, must first become part of one's inner make-up before intuition can enlighten an obscure moment. He walks us through his creative process in the face of a blank canvas on the wall in front of him. He discusses the different uses of watercolor and oil paint and how their unique properties parallel his spontaneous engagement at various periods of an analysis. He presents a clinical encounter and how he was able to unpack a countertransference impasse through working on a painting. He closes with sharing an experience he had in his native South Africa which leads him to feel that "it's a blessing to be able to work in America."
Linked Paper and Websites:
The Aesthetic Matrix: A Conversation Between a Painter and a Psychoanalyst
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"The Holocaust seems to me to be the paradigmatic case of the acting out of unconscious fears, fantasies and projections onto another group that has ever occurred. It is the place therefore for psychoanalytic concepts in understanding anti-Semitism and racism more generally. Particularly in this context and thinking about Nazism and Nazi perpetrators is crucial, especially given what for me is so interesting about this is not just thinking as a historian and how can I borrow psychoanalytic ideas to enrich the thing I am interested in explaining. Also, because the history of psychoanalysis is bound up with this history. It’s why I cited Fenichel and Loewenstein - the idea of psychoanalysis as this ‘Jewish science’, of the emigrates all persecuted by Nazism and how they restarted their lives in the US or elsewhere, the grappling with the German psychoanalysts after the war, the conflicts in the International Psychoanalytic Association after the war - these are all part of the history of the Holocaust. For me, this combination of the history of psychoanalysis as an endeavor, plus the usefulness of psychoanalytic concepts in trying to explain this phenomenon in the first place is a hugely enriching conversation.”
Episode Description: We begin with outlining the tension within the 'complemental series' where external events and intrapsychic registration of those events are both contributors to psychic difficulties. This applies to early as well as later life traumas. Dan's book invites us to additionally consider the conflicting psychoanalytic contributions to the question of what enables survival. All research points to the essential dimension of luck in enabling survival in concentration camps. As a historian he fleshes out the contrasting viewpoints of analysts Eddy de Wind and Viktor Frankl as they each describe what they felt were the essential psychological qualities that contributed to survival. De Wind and others point to a state of stupor, also characterized as estrangement or dissociation, as an essential state of mind to facilitate surviving in overwhelming circumstances. He shares with us why he as a historian feels that an analytic way of thinking is essential as "history without psychoanalysis cannot access aspects of the human experience that elude rational thought - and there are sadly many."
Our Guest: Dan Stone, PhD, is Professor of Modern History and director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has taught since 1999. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including, most recently: The Holocaust: An Unfinished History; Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust; and Psychoanalysis, Historiography and the Nazi Camps: Accounting for Survival. He is also the co-editor, with Mark Roseman, of volume I of the Cambridge History of the Holocaust. Dan chaired the academic advisory committee for the Imperial War Museum London’s redesigned Holocaust Galleries (opened in 2021) and is a member of the UK’s Advisory Group on Spoliation Matters.
Recommended Readings:
Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy (eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)
Werner Bohleber, Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2018)
Matt Ffytche and Daniel Pick (eds.), Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism (London: Routledge, 2016)
Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Emily A. Kuriloff, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2014)
Dori Laub and Andreas Hamburger (eds.), Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony: Unwanted Memories of Social Trauma (London: Routledge, 2017)
Steven A. Luel and Paul Marcus (eds.), Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays (New York: Ktav, 1984)
Dan Stone, Psychologists in Auschwitz: Accounting for Survival (lecture at the German Historical Institute,( London, 11 July 2024):
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“The historian [of the vineyard] gave us regular feedback on what she was finding, and she also brought in oral historians to take our own life histories. There's also a psychoanalytical point to be made here - you can take refuge in this scholarly exercise, going into archives and finding out things that happened hundreds of years ago, you can all too easily remove yourself from that: ‘This is what happened long, long ago’. But all of us on this farm, we had all lived through Apartheid. The oral historians who wanted to participate, we met over many sessions in my living room and the oral historians asked each of us who volunteered to participate to tell our stories of our lives and it was a real revelation to me. Despite my abstract awareness, the actual concrete listening to people who I was getting to know as individuals, to hear one after another account of the grinding poverty of what it actually is like to be a poor black farm worker in South Africa under Apartheid."
Episode Description: Mark shares with us his original intent to make a "citizen-sized contribution to the reconstruction" of South Africa through redressing the inequalities that formed a basis of his family's vineyard. He describes going through a painful process of enlightenment where good intentions themselves were insufficient to honor the historical processes that lived inside the owner and the tenant farmers who have been on the land for generations. Psychoanalytically informed, he consulted a historian and archeologist to, along with the farmers, dig into both the land and the lives of all involved. This led to a rebalancing of the pride/shame dynamic that had existed in the owner/workers. When faced with the inevitable question, "Must I give the farm back?" Mark discusses what he felt was the difference between ‘self-interest’ and ‘selfish-interest’. He shares with us the efforts he took to enable the workers to become landowners, to become educated and also to become discoverers and messengers of their historically rich cuisine and music. He also details the ‘not so happy ending; of these efforts as his farm has struggled financially under the burden of these considerable costs and government corruption. Things have turned around of late and there is reason to be optimistic for the long-term flourishing of his vineyard and his “citizen sized” contribution to the well-being of those with whom he works.
Our Guest: Mark Solms, PhD is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the American and South African Psychoanalytic Associations. He is Director of Neuropsychology at the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Sigourney Prize. He has published 350 scientific papers, and eight books, the latest being The Hidden Spring (Norton, 2021). He is the authorized editor and translator of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 volumes) and the forthcoming Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud (4 volumes).
Recommended Reading:
Solms, M. (2015) Psychoanalysis in Pursuit of Truth and Reconciliation on a South African Farm: Commentary on Gobodo-Madikizela. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 63:1147-1158
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"I think it is very interesting to open a debate and talk about this impact of the culture, this epoch, in the subjectivity and never losing the internal work within psychoanalysis, within our consulting room. So when I quote the Lacanian way of saying the ‘declination of the father's name’, I am talking about these times, this epoch, in which the reference and the subjectivity fails in respecting what we can call ‘the authority’. But ‘the authority’ means not authoritarian systems - it is the law, it is the possibility of symbolization, and it's the way of being free too, because without some limits you cannot be creative, you cannot be open to symbolization. We are talking about how the ‘other’ is working in this new social environment and how this evanescence of the father’s name is part of a situation that leaves open to the death drive."
Episode Description: We begin with recognizing the aspects of chaos that surround us in the real-world. Gabriela takes us from there into the chaos that often lives internally. She then addresses the clinical space which allows for its emergence through the dyad. She speaks of the evanescence of the father's name, authority vs authoritarianism, the 'halo of metaphors' and the nature of the analyst's 'open form' of clinical engagement. Gabriela describes analytic cure as "step by step, so that love and not revenge for pain predominate." She shares with us her early life involving her child analysis, her study of architecture and her now working as an analyst and a painter.
Linked Website: Gabriela Goldstein
Our Guest: Gabriela Goldstein, Ph.D. Past President of APA (2020-2023). Training analyst of Argentina Psychoanalytical Association (APA), and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and FEPAL. Doctor Ph.D in Psychology (Universidad del Salvador). Books include The Aesthetic Experience, Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, and Art in Psychoanalysis. Co-author, among others, of the APA book Dreams and Perception APA Editorial and the book Dear Candidate Fred Busch edit. She has won the Mom-Baranger prize for best monograph in Psychoanalysis with The Aesthetics of Memory, Freud at the Acropolis and won the A. Storni prize for conceptual contributions in Psychoanalysis with Transience, or the Time of Beauty. She has served on many IPA and APA committees including the IPA and Culture Committee since 2007.
In addition, Gabriela is both an architect and a painter. Since 1985 she has taken part in solo painting exhibitions in Argentina as well as collective exhibitions in museums, art galleries, and cultural centers in Italy, France and Germany. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Recommended Readings:
Baranger, W. y M. (2012). La situación analítica como campo dinámico. Revista de Psicoanálisis. 69(23), pp. 311-352
Bush, F. (editor) (2021) Dear Candidate: Analysts from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education and the Profession. Routledge. London and New York.
Freud, S. (1919) “The Uncanny” The Standard Edition of complete psychological works of S. Freud, V 17
Goldstein, G (2013) Art in Psychoanalysis, A Contemporary Approach to Creativity and Analytic Practice, Karnak-IPA
Goldstein G. (2022): “La no respuesta del Otro: algunas cuestiones sobre la cura” Revista de Psicoanálisis de la Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina, LXXIX-3-4
Goldstein, G (2022): “Los misterios de la creación: Entre cuerpo y cultura”, Revista Uruguaya de Psicoanálisis ( on -line 135)
Mc Dougall, Andre, J., De M´Uzan, Et all,(2010) El artista y el Psicoanalista Ed. Nueva Vision
Winnicott, D.W. (1978). Winnicott, D.W., Green. A, Mannoni, O, Pontalis; J-B y otros
Winnicott, D. W. (1974): “Fear of breakdown” Int. Rev. of Psychoanalysis. (1974) l, 103
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“I was very interested in the unspoken thoughts and feelings of the patient because I think one of the things about free association is that in the beginning most of what's going on with the patient is unsaid. As the analysis evolves more and more of the unspoken becomes spoken and more of it becomes at the center of the analytic space. I wanted to show the evolution of the unsaid. At the beginning of the book, the unsaid is more than the said, and then it evolves as the analysis goes on.”
Episode Description: We begin discussing Roberta’s first career as a sociologist which she described as an effort to disengage from her self-focused ruminations. She pursued psychoanalytic training after receiving her PhD in sociology. She also continued as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Both genres represented her personal as well as other-oriented reflections. Her book Our Time is Up is likewise a combined memoir and novel – she both is and isn’t the young woman 'Rose' whose analysis with ‘Joan’ forms the essence of this work. She reads sections from the book that describe her first meeting with her analyst as well as when the analyst’s illness is introduced into their treatment. The book concludes with 'Rose' saying, “Frida Kahlo said about Diego Rivera, ‘He took me shattered and returned me in one piece, whole.’ I could say the same thing about Joan.”
Our Guest: Roberta Satow is a practicing psychoanalyst in Washington, CT; a senior member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and Professor Emerita of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In addition to her non-fiction books Gender and Social Life and Doing the Right Thing: Taking Care of Your Elderly Parents Even if They Didn’t Take Care of You, she has written two novels, Two Sisters of Coyoacan and Our Time is Up. Dr. Satow also writes blogs on Psychology Today and psychology.net.
Recommended Readings:
Roberta Satow, Our Time is Up, IPBooks, 2024.
Roberta Satow, Two Sisters of Coyoacan, 2017.
Roberta Satow, Doing the Right Thing: Taking Care of Your Elderly Parents Even if They Didn’t Take Care of You (Tarcher/Penguin 2006).
Roberta Satow, Psychology Today Blog.
Roberta Satow, Psychotherapy Blog
Roberta Satow, A Case of Severe Penis Envy: The Convergence of Cultural and Individual Intra-Psychic Factors, Journal of the American Acad. of Psychoan. October 1983. -
“There was a lot of dilemma, and I wasn't able to definitely deal with the sudden knowledge of my cancer and to be able to impart that information in a more containing and structured manner so that my patients can be held even in that situation. But the consciousness was there about how to go about it. Whenever I was asked by the patient directly, or if the necessity arose where the hospital needed to impart the information, I did agree later that they can let them know about the cancer situation, and the patient can connect to me directly. When I was in a better stage, I knew how to deal with it, but that was months later. I found that the honest submission was more helpful for me and for the patient because when certain larger than life events happen, it probably connects us in a more humble way to the community - that the analyst as healer is not supreme above all of this, and who can also be affected with such aspects of life."
Episode Description: We begin with honoring the clinical difference between fantasies of physical vulnerability from real life mortal danger. Jhuma shares with us her medical journey that entailed suddenly receiving a diagnosis of cancer. She was immediately hospitalized and faced with, among other challenges, the question of how to inform her patients. She describes her fragility and uncertainty and the various engagements she was able to arrange. We discuss the meanings of "honest submission," patient's curiosity, and their aggression and tenderness towards her. She elaborates on the presence of the Hindu notion of an afterlife and her post-hospital awareness that “the clinical becomes vast" - this refers to the importance of bringing analytic sensibilities to the many venues that are 'off the couch'. We close with her sharing clinical vignettes demonstrating how even real-life current trauma can meaningfully awaken a patient's awareness of their forgotten painful past.
Our Guest: Jhuma Basak is a Training & Supervising Psychoanalyst of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society and member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. She has specific interest in culture & gender in psychoanalysis. She has publications in Japanese, Italian, French and Spanish. Over the past 20 years, she has presented at various IPA Congresses, along with the Keynote for the 53rd IPA Congress in Cartagena in 2023. Other presentations were at the Washington Baltimore Centre for Psychoanalysis, Hakuoh University, and Kyushu University. She is the co-editor of the book Psychoanalytic & Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Women in India and editor of Sculpting Psychoanalysis in India – Sudhir Kakar. Jhuma has been the past Co-Chair of the Asia Committee on Women & Psychoanalysis and continues to be its consultant.
Reading List:
Bernstein, Stephen (2024): The Making of the IPA Podcast: Psychoanalysis On & Off the Couch. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Vol.44. No.2, 166-177.
Fajardo, B (2001): Life-Threatening Illness in the Analyst. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 49:569-586.
Feinsilver, David (1998): The Therapist as a Person Facing Death: The Hardest of External Realities and Therapeutic Action. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79: 1131-1150
Fieldsteel, N. D. (1989): Analysts' expressed attitudes toward dealing with death and illness. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 25 (3): 427-432 o
Halpert, Eugene (1982): When the Analyst is Chronically Ill or Dying. Psychoanal. Q., (51):372-389.
Kitayama, O. (1998) Transience: Its Beauty and Danger. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 79:937-942.
Masur, Corinne (ed) (2018): Flirting with Death: Psychoanalysts Consider Mortality. Routledge.
Rosner, Stanley (1986): The Seriously Ill or Dying Analyst & the Limits of Neutrality. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 5(4), 357-371
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"In my own two analyses, I had observed such transformations for me in a very impressive way. I started my own analysis after the traumatic death of my sister when I was 22 years old. At that time, I had a breakdown, and I suffered from severe depressive and psychosomatic symptoms and sleep disorders but also from terrible nightmares that haunted me almost every night. Fortunately, my two analyses did change my depressive and psychosomatic symptoms, but what was at least as important for me, subjectively, was the change in my dreams, including the manifest dream content. The nightmares became less frequent; I was hardly in the position of an observer anymore but actively involved in the dream event. I was less alone in the dream but accompanied by people close to me and was more often able to solve the problems and conflicts which arose in the dream. In addition, the dreams were no longer predominantly characterized by fear and death anxiety but a whole range of emotions emerged. Towards the end of my second analysis, I will never forget that I had the only dream of my life from which I woke up because I was laughing out loud."
Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the ambivalence that many analysts have towards research. It is seen as distant from the sharing of subjectivities that draw many to our field. Marianne honors the unique transference reliving and then remembering that is central to the analytic encounter and from that position suggests ways that it can be researched. She presents a patient whose manifest dreams were studied over the course of treatment along with his sleep laboratory data. She notes how the stability of the analyst's presence is essential but not sufficient to maximize therapeutic benefit. We discuss the role of theory, the controversy over approaching the veridical past and the seductions of simplified treatments. Marianne closes by sharing her deep respect for the unconscious and how psychoanalysts are living in "rich times of pluralism."
Linked Episode:
https://ipaoffthecouch.org/2019/07/13/episode-10-refugees-germany-psychoanalysis/
Our Guest: Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Prof. Dr. phil, director of the Sigmund-Freud-Institut in Frankfurt Germany (2001-2016), professor for psychoanalysis at the University of Kassel, Senior Research Fellow at the University Medicine in Mainz. She is a training analyst of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV) and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). She has served as the Chair of the Research Subcommittees for Clinical, Conceptual, Epistemological and Historical Research of the IPA (2001-2009), Vice Chair for Europe of the Research Board der IPA (2010-2021); Chair of the IPA Subcommittee for Migration and Refugees 2018/19 and since then member of the committee. She received the Mary Sigourney Award 2016, the Haskell Norman Prize for Excellence in Psychoanalysis 2017, the Robert S. Wallerstein Fellowship (2022-2027) and the IPA’s Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award, 2023. Her research fields are clinical and extra-clinical research in psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic developmental research, prevention studies, interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and literature, educational sciences and the neurosciences.
Recommended Readings:
Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2008): Biographical truths and their clinical consequences: Understanding ‚embodied memories‘ in a third psychoanalysis with a traumatized patient recovered from serve poliomyelitis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89: 1165-1187.
Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2015): Working with severely traumatized, chronically depressed analysands. In: The International Journal of Psychoanalysis Volume 96, Issue 3, June 2015, Pages: 611-636.
Bohleber, W., Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2016): The Special Problem of Interpretation in the Treatment of Traumatized Patients. In: Psychoanalytic Inquiry 36: 60-76, 2016.
Fischmann, T., Ambresin, G., Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2021): Manifest dreams in psychoanalytic treatment. A psychoanalytic outcome measure. Frontiers in Psychology, doi: 10,3389/fpsyg, 2021.678440.
Leuzinger-Bohleber, M., Donié, M., Wichelmann, J., Ambresin, G., & Fischmann, T. (2023). Changes in dreams - the development of a dream-transformation scale in psychoanalysis with chronically depressed, early traumatized patients. The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 46:1-2, 82-93. doi:10.1080/01062301.2023.2297116
Fischmann, T., and Leuzinger-Bohleber, M.: Dreams, Memories, and Trauma—A search for transformations in psychoanalysis (in press).
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"I don't know what to do about this because we do have to use clinical material. It's the best tried and true method in which to inculcate analytic thinking in our students and supervises. On the other hand, we are so indebted to our patients and their trust in us and our responsibilities as ethical practitioners not to divulge their privacy. Principles are what we're trying to teach, we're not trying to teach people, we are not trying to teach that person, the case is not what we are teaching, but the principles in the case."
Episode Description: We begin by acknowledging the tension between our commitment to patient confidentiality and our need to learn, teach and advance our field through the sharing of intimate information. We discuss the difference between using clinical examples to reveal particular individuals as opposed to illustrating principles in psychoanalysis. Barbara describes the well-known case of a famous author whose analyst revealed identifiable details of his analysis in a publication. She shares why she feels that co-writing with one's analyst about one's treatment is problematic - "it stretches the concept of co-construction to a clinical breaking point." We consider how presenting a patient publicly impacts the analyst's interiority and lives on in the treatment. We close with recognizing the challenge of confidentiality and appreciating "the insuperable predicament posed by the mutually exclusive imperatives of protecting patient privacy and educating the next generation, as well as ourselves. Remembering that ego ideals are only approximations is our most effective balm."
Our Guest: Barbara Stimmel, PhD, is an adult and child psychoanalyst in New York city where she has practiced for the past several decades. She teaches and supervises widely and has contributed to psychoanalytic journals as well as editing and contributing chapters in several books. She has also presented papers, discussion groups and workshops in the wide world of psychoanalysis. She has held offices in psychoanalytic institutions on the local, national, and international level. Barbara is involved at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York, where she sits on committees, has taught residents, and serves on the Palliative Care team. She is on the President’s Council of Sanctuary for Families, an organization devoted to women and families surviving domestic violence and trafficking. She also sits on the Shakespeare Council of The Public Theatre in New York. This diversity of interests is reflected in the variety of topics within psychoanalysis and psychotherapy about which she has written, presented, and taught. In some sense, confidentiality is part and parcel of any clinical topic, regardless of theory and patient population.
Recommended Readings:
Crastnopol, M. (1999). The analyst's professional self as a third influence on the dyad: When the analyst writes about the treatment. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 9, 445-470.
Gabbard, G. O. (1997). Case histories and ««confidentiality»». International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78, 820-821.
Gabbard, G. O. (2000). Disguise or consent? Problems and recommendations concerning the publication and presentation of clinical material. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81, 1071-1086.
Kantrowitz, J. L. (2004a). Writing about patients: I. Ways of protecting ««confidentiality»» and analysts' conflicts over choice of method. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 52, 69-99.
Kanwal, G. (2024) To Reveal or not to Reveal, That is the Wrong Question: Thoughts about Clinical Writing in Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 93:135-156.
Stein, M. H. (1988b). Writing about psychoanalysis: II. Analysts who write, patients who read. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 36, 393-408.
Stimmel, B. (2013). The Conundrum of Confidentiality. Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis,21(1):84-106
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"During the whole course of your [psychoanalytic] training, you are laying on the couch and have your personal analysis and beforehand you don't know where it will lead you. You start to discover corners of your unconscious psyche which you don't want, which you are not so eager to explore. This accompanies you during the whole course of training, always confronted with your own psyche and with not-yet-discovered areas of your internal world - this is really an adventurous journey. And you do the same with your patients. It is not that you treat diseases with certain symptoms, but you delve deeply into their souls and this is a shared enterprise. Doing psychoanalysis you are confronted with your own psyche, you are confronted with the psyche of the patient too. This confronts you with surprises, sometimes deep anxieties and terrors that you’ve never known beforehand. So I think the comparison of psychoanalytic training of starting a journey with a sailing ship into the vast areas of the ocean, it’s a good example, you will never know exactly what will be the next day or what you will be confronted with."
Episode Description: We begin with recognizing two aspects of psychoanalytic training - the adventurous and the immersive. These aspects, in addition to the many challenges in the training, can offer the unique opportunity to come to know the depths of the human experience. We discuss the various theoretical models currently available and how they can both enrich and distract from the core competencies that allow for a depth treatment. We consider whether different types of patients need different types of interventions, the centrality of neutrality, and the value and impossibility of free association. Eike addresses the unfortunate conflation of abstinence and unfriendliness, and we consider the clinical moment of receiving a gift from a patient. We close with his sharing his psychoanalytic journey that began in mathematics and then to medicine and then to psychoanalysis.
Our Guest:
Dr. Eike Hinze is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Berlin. He did his psychoanalytic training at the Berlin Karl-Abraham-Institute and works in his private practice. At present he is chair of training in the institute. One of his main areas of interest is the psychoanalytic treatment of elderly patients. For decades he has been active in the training of future psychoanalysts. For more than 15 years, he has been working in the Board of the Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe the objective of which was the development and furthering of psychoanalysis in Eastern Europe. He is co-author of a recently published book studying commonalities and differences between different styles of performing psychoanalysis.
Recommended Readings:
Ch. Brenner (1982) The Mind in Conflict. International Universities Press. New York.
F. Bush (editor) (2021) Dear Candidate: Analysts from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education and the Profession. Routledge. London and New York.
Ferro (2002) In the Analyst’s Consulting Room. Taylor & Francis. New York.
E. Hinze (2015) What do we learn in psychoanalytic training? Int J Psychoanal 96:755-771.
J.-M. Quinodoz (1993) The Taming of Solitude. Routledge, London and New York.
J.-M. Quinodoz (2004) Reading Freud. A Chronological Exploration of Freud’s Writings. Routledge. London and New York.
D. Tuckett, E. Allison, O. Bonard, G. Bruns, A. Christopoulos, M. Diercks. E. Hinze, M. Linardos, M. Sebek (2024) Knowing What Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know. Rowman & Littlefield. Lanham. Boulder. New York. London.
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“I would love for the psychoanalytic world to re-embrace some of these adjunctive treatments that get to non-ordinary states of consciousness in order to enhance psychoanalytic treatment, and that includes psychedelics. The other thing I'd like to see is, I think psychoanalysts are extremely well suited to use psychedelic-assisted therapy in a non-harmful way. I really believe that without an ongoing treatment relationship that these medicines are not going to be quick fixes. There’s an article in the Substack blog, Ecstatic Integration, about an Israeli man who had an MDMA treatment for chronic post-traumatic stress disorder and it's a very interesting read, and it really does speak to the crucial aspect of having an ongoing therapy relationship while we use these medicines. I want people who are in the analytic field who are trained right out of the box to provide these containers to be more involved in the psychedelic field. For the psychedelic field I think sometimes I wish they would be a little more humble, a little less zealous about the efficacy, and a little more concerned about what could happen that's harmful. I also think the psychedelic field, for some reason, has not embraced psychoanalysis as a major tool to enhance the medicine."
Episode Description: Charis begins by discussing her inspiration, attributed to Maimonides, for always seeking new understandings to enhance her care of patients. We also begin with a caution - any time we introduce a frame change in clinical work, we must carefully attend to our countertransference to determine the factors that are contributing to our actions. That said, we should be careful to not use our carefulness to rationalize inhibitions to thinking and acting creatively. Charis describes her thinking underlying her decision to introduce ketamine with a particular patient as well as the process of the ongoing psychotherapy. We discuss the practical aspects of this procedure, the risks, the changes in the patient, and the importance of an ongoing psychotherapy to serve as a productive holding and processing space for this work. She concludes with her recommendation to the analytic world to be more open to such adjunctive approaches to therapy and to the psychedelic world to be more modest in their assumptions of its healing ability.
Linked Webinar and Article:
/g/Communications/Ees4tjM0U1lEtzEkVrUmDjgBmH9Vd6wgap_-Z-7BJVXNDw?e=h8Afay&referrer=Outlook.Win32&referrerScenario=email-linkwithembed">https://ipaworld.sharepoint.com//g/Communications/Ees4tjM0U1lEtzEkVrUmDjgBmH9Vd6wgap_-Z-7BJVXNDw?e=h8Afay&referrer=Outlook.Win32&referrerScenario=email-linkwithembed
https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/successfully-treating-c-ptsd-with?utm…
Our Guest: Dr. Cladouhos is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing in Boston, Massachusetts. She is on the faculty at the Tufts University School of Medicine and in the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute's adult and child analytic training programs. She is the course director of an experiential elective for first-year medical students at Tufts called The Healer's Art: Rekindling the Heart and Soul of Medicine and established a pilot retreat program (First Aid for Physicians) through Tufts Medical Center to address physician burnout. She is trained in EMDR and Deep Brain Reorienting, has completed the first phase of MDMA training through MAPS, and has a certificate in Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy from the Fluence Center for Psychedelic Training in New York. She is a member of the International Society for the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation's Special Interest Group on psychoanalytic contributions to the treatment of trauma and dissociation.
Recommended Readings:
Jeffrey Guss (2022) A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Psychedelic Experience, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 32:5, 452-468, DOI: 10.1080/10481885.2022.2106140
Fischman, Lawrence G. Knowing and being known: Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and the sense of authenticity. 09/20/22. Frontiers in Psychiatry. pp.1-36
Lawrence G. Fischman (2019) Seeing without self: Discovering new meaning with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, Neuropsychoanalysis, 21:2, 53-78, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2019.1689528
Dahlberg, Charles Clay. LSD Facilitation of Psychoanalytic Treatment: A Case Study in Depth
Aaron D. Cherniak, Joel Gruneau Brulin, Mario Mikulincer, Sebastian Östlind, Robin Carhart-Harris & Pehr Granqvist (2023) Psychedelic Science of Spirituality and Religion: An Attachment-Informed Agenda Proposal, The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 33:4, 259-276, DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2022.2148061
Orbach, S. There Is No Such Thing As A Body. John Bowlby Memorial Lecture: British Journal of Psychotherapy. 20 (1) 3-15 2003
Orbach, S. Body Part 2: Psychoanalysis’ Discomfort with Touch. British Journal of Psychotherapy. 20 (1) 17-26.2003.
Essentials of informed consent:
Power Trip: Cover Story New York Magazine. Lily K Ross and David Nickels
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“What is it like to be a clinician with a patient who either comes because they're going to be dying or it happens in the treatment - what is it like for the clinician? It's lonely in a way because there is a lot of parallel with what the patient is going through. To me, and as a field, I would like to think we could talk about this and write about it. My peer group at the time was terribly important to me - colleagues, people that basically would be with me in this. But in the end I was the one that went alone to the service at the funeral home and I went to my patient's luncheon, not to have the lunch but to talk to the family, and then I left - I didn't stay for the lunch, I thought that might be a little intrusive. There's nothing really to read about, talk about, pick somebody's brain about how do they experience this in their work or I don't really understand why we've been so quiet about this in our work.” PW
“You mentioned about being alone in it, and there is a way in which it's very true. I think a large part is that not many of our colleagues have had this experience. But on the flip side, maybe because I’ve worked with so many patients and I’m beginning to notice a certain consistency, but I've also had such an experience of close intimacy with these patients. There's a closeness that is to be had particularly in analytic work and work over time - but it happens quite quickly in the work with dying patients, and in that regard, I felt less alone in my work. In some ways in the rest of our work, because we maintain a careful distance in a way, a boundary with the patient, a frame - I feel with the dying patients, I feel like both of us are more in the room together.” MM
Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the tension that exists between the literal and metaphoric aspects of the analytic relationship and how that is highlighted in the face of physical illness in either party. We focus on patients' illnesses both as they present upon initial consultation and when they develop in the course of treatment. Mark describes his years of work with cancer patients, and Peggy shares her experience with an analysand who, in the 6th year of her treatment, developed a terminal illness. We consider the emotional challenges associated with making home visits, the meaning of 'boundaries', feelings associated with fees, and the shared experience of love between patient and analyst. We consider the ways that the analyst’s affective intensity may also be associated with earlier and feared illnesses in their own life. We close with considering the difficulties that our field has in honestly communicating this aspect of the heart and soul of psychoanalysis.
Linked Episodes:
Episode 23: A Psychoanalyst Encounters the Dying – Discovering ‘Existential Maturity’
Episode 40: How Psycho-Oncology Informs an Approach to the Covid-19 Crises with Norman Straker, MD
Our Guests:
Mark Moore, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who works in private practice in Philadelphia. He was the Director of Psychological Services at the Abramson Cancer Center at Pennsylvania Hospital from 2004-2014 where he supervised psychology interns and post-doctoral fellows during their psycho-oncology rotation and provided psychological services to cancer patients and their families. He is also currently a co-leader for a weekly doctoring group for neurology residents at Penn Medicine. He was the Director of the Psychotherapy Training Program from 2014-2020 at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, where he currently teaches courses on Writing, Assessment, Core Concepts, and a comparative course on Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He was a recipient of the 2020 Edith Sabshin Teaching Award from the American Psychoanalytic Association, and he runs a monthly teaching forum for faculty at his institute. Dr. Moore’s clinical work focuses on health issues, notably chronic illness, losses, and life transitions associated with cancer, and the fear of dying. He has written several book chapters on topics including the concept of harmony in Japan, cultural perspectives on lying, conducting therapy outside the office, the experience of bodily betrayal in illness and aging, the experience of shame across the adult lifespan, and more recently about friendship.
Peggy Warren, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Boston. Originally from Chicago, she danced professionally with Giordano Dance Chicago from ages 15 to 21, which created a lifelong interest in the effects of creativity and mentoring on human development. Fascinated by cell biology, she received a master’s degree in microbiology from Chicago Medical School and then an MD from Rush University. In medical school, she was chosen to be an Osler Honor Fellow in Pathology/Oncology, where she was first exposed to dying patients. Awarded the Nathan Freer prize for excellence in a medical student at graduation, she used the prize money to buy the Complete Works of Freud and began to learn about the power of the unconscious. After completing residency training in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, she pursued analytic training and graduated from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She was on the teaching and supervising faculty of the MGH/McLean psychiatry residency program for 30 years, the Boston Psychoanalytic faculty for 20 years, and won the teaching award from the Harvard Medical School MGH/McLean residency program in 2010. She has given talks on “Vaslav Nijinski: Creativity and Madness,” was a discussant with Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln and depression, lectured on the effect of twinships on siblings, was a discussant in the “Off the Couch Film Series,” (Boston Coolidge Corner theater), a case presenter “On the Dying Patient” at the 2017 American Psychoanalytic meetings, and is a faculty member of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual Workshop on Psychoanalytic Writing. She has been in private practice in Boston as a psychoanalyst for 38 years.
Recommended Readings:
Bergner, S. (2011). Seductive Symbolism: Psychoanalysis in the Context of Oncology. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 28,267-292.
Emanuel, L. (2021). Psychodynamic contributions to palliative care patients and their family members. In H. Schwartz (Ed.), Applying Psychoanalysis to Medical Care. New York: Routledge.
Hitchen, C. (2012). Mortality. New York: Hatchette Book Group.
Minerbo, V. (1998). The patient without a couch: An analysis of a patient with terminal cancer. Int. J. Psych-Anal., 79,83-93.
Norton, J. (1963). Treatment of a Dying Patient. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 18, 541-560
Didion, Joan: The Year of Magical Thinking. Vintage/Random House, 2007
Jaouad, Suleika: Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted;
Random House, 2022.
Bloom, Amy: In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss;Random House, 2023.
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"From such accounts [of Polish atrocities] we can see how incredibly emotional and how incredibly pleasurable it could be on the social level, not only for the people involved, but for the whole group, and we can really see how violence on others becomes the core of social identity, of the national identity. We tend to think about committing violence as anti-social, and that Eros is the only force that brings us together. We can’t see here how eroticized violence or sexualized violence might do it as well. After so many years of research, we don't really have to ask the question: how is it that people can do such things, or how can people become murderers on a social level, on a group level? I'd say that the more interesting question we may ask is how did the murderers stay people and stay citizens? How could after committing such crimes in plain sight of the whole group, how could that group remain a stable group? How could a community of murderers and bystanders to the violence - what is the social glue that brings them all together? I would say that eroticized violence is one of the main aspects, one of the main elements of creating a closed identity based on denial of humanity of the other.”
Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the phenomena of bystanding in the presence of extreme violence. The slaughter of neighbors by neighbors notoriously occurred in the Rwandan genocide and in the Polish Holocaust, which is the focus of Jan's research. He posits that the psychoanalytic concept of perversion best captures the denial and split-off excitement that characterizes bystanding - 'one eye open, one eye closed'. He challenges the possibility of observer's indifference, documents the ever-present knowledge that neighbors have of the history of their neighbors, and discusses the experience of 'ghosts' inhabiting the homes of forgotten/remembered neighbors. We distinguish between being a bystander and a witness, and the state of mind “We will not forgive you for what we did to you.” We close with our sharing the difficulty of listening to this material and how he managed this over the years of his research.
Our Guest: Jan Borowicz, PhD, is a certified psychotherapist and candidate in psychoanalytic training in Polish Psychoanalytic Society (IPA). He is a Member of Holocaust Remembrance Research Group in the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Poland. He is interested in cultural memory, psychoanalytic theory, and Holocaust studies. He published two books in Polish on history and memory of the Holocaust. Recently, he published his first book in English, Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders (2024), in which he explores the deep implications of witnessing mass violence and extermination.
Recommended Readings:
Jessica Benjamin, "A relational psychoanalysis perspective on the necessity of acknowledging failure in order to restore the facilitating and containing features of the intersubjective relationship (the shared third)", International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 9, iss. 3, 2009.
Jan Borowicz, Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders, trans. Mikołaj Golubiewski, Routledge: London and New York, 2024.
Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.
Samuel Gerson, "When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning, and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust", International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 9, iss. 6, 2009.
Grzegorz Niziołek, Polish Theatre of the Holocaust, trans. Ursula Phillips, London: Bloomsbury Publishing and Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego, 2021.
Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, eds. Christina Morina, Krijn Thijs, New York: Berghan Books, 2019.
Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996.
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My conversation with Sudhir Kakar took place five weeks before his untimely death on April 22nd.
“Freud obviously is very brave and courageous to accept that the world is inadequate and that my desires will never be sufficiently fulfilled. My question - is this in fact the case? I think that everyone has had some kind of spiritual experience, some more than others and in many different contexts, not just religious ones. Spiritual experiences contradict Freud’s notion of common unhappiness and the idea of the world as inadequate. What reason do we have to assume that all such common experiences are simply false, that they are based on some kind of false consciousness? Rather, I believe that the inadequacy lies in our own awareness rather than with the world. The world allows for many experiences that would be highly adequate yet we block them - what we call the mundane world is much more enchanted than we think it is."
Episode Description: We begin by considering the embodiment of one's cultural imagination - "one's mental representation of culture" - into one's unconscious mind. Sudhir describes different early child-rearing practices and invites the question about their influence on our later inner lives. He shares with us his early idealization of Freudian/Western ways of thinking and his later development, which returned to the enchanting aspects of his Hindu youth. We discuss the similarities and differences between a Judeo-Christian-based psychoanalysis and one founded on a Hindu imagination. We consider the different notions of God, ritual, and illusion. He distinguishes an 'autonomous person' from a 'communitarian person' and describes the pleasures and burdens of each. We close with his sharing his lovely psychoanalytic origin story connected to his meeting Erik Erikson and discovering "I want to be like him."
Our Guest: Sudhir Kakar was a psychoanalyst, scholar, and writer. He had been a Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Chicago, McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii, and Vienna, Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study, Princeton, Berlin, and Cologne, and was on the board of Freud Archives. He had received the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, Tagore-Merck Award, McArthur Research Fellowship, and Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. `As ‘the psychoanalyst of civilizations’, the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur listed Kakar in 2005 as one of the world’s 25 major thinkers. Sudhir was the author/editor of 20 books of non-fiction and six novels. His books have been translated into 22 languages.
Recommended Readings:
Kakar, Sudhir -
The Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations, Karnac. June 2024
The Capacious Freud, in F. Busch and N. Delgado eds.The Ego and the
Id 100 years Later. London: Routledge 2023
Re-reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion in Hindu India, in O'neill & S.Akhtar.eds.On Freud's the Future of an Illusion. London: Routledge, 2018
The Analyst and the Mystic Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992
Psychoanalysis and Eastern Spiritual Healing Traditions, J. of
Analytical Psychology,48(5).
Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological inquiry into India
and its Healing Traditions. New York: A. Knopf, 1982.
Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World. Chicago: U. of
Chicago Press, 2009
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"Psychoanalysis landed in Finland in the 50s; before the Second World War there were one or two persons familiar with psychoanalysis. In the 50s, psychoanalysis got a lot of interest in Finland but then there was no possibility of training in Finland. The pioneers went abroad, some to Sweden and some to Switzerland. They picked up the theoretical preferences in the new countries and new institutes - the IPA Associations mainly were from people studying in Sweden and coming back to Finland and creating the IPA association. The Therapeia Institute consisted mainly of people studying in Switzerland and got a lot of influence from existential psychoanalysis and Jungian psychoanalysis… I tend to side with Lee Grossman [link below]; I guess the theoretical theories reflect more the character - when you listen to a case presentation of course people present them differently depending on their theoretical background, but in the consulting room I am not sure there is that much difference."
Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the value of meeting and learning from analyst colleagues from around the world. We discover both similarities and differences in both the challenges and pleasures of this work. In Finland there was a government-mandated change in the structure of training in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis starting in 2012. The anticipatory anxieties were considerable. There was input from the university on issues of curricula, research opportunities, and improved pedagogy. The fears of loss of meaningful autonomy proved to be mostly fears - not realized. We also discuss the origins and current state of psychoanalysis in Finland. We close with a few words of the pervasive role of sauna in Finnish life and the ways it manifests in analyses.
Linked Episode:
Episode 135: Technique is Character Rationalized with Lee Grossman, MD (Oakland, Ca.) – IPA Off the Couch
Our Guest: Jan Johansson is a psychologist and a training and supervising analyst at the Therapeia Institute in Helsinki, Finland. Currently, he’s working as a psychoanalyst in private practice in Helsinki. In addition, he supervises psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. He has been interested in issues concerning psychoanalytic training for the last decade and a half. Currently he is the chair of the board of the Institute, while also being a member of board of the Therapeia Society. He also was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies 2014 - 2022. He is interested in promoting the multitude of psychoanalytic voices; while being trained within an object-relational frame, he doesn’t identify exclusively with any particular theoretical frame of reference.
He lives in Espoo, a neighbor city of Helsinki with his wife. After languishing in the darkness of the Finnish winter from October to mid-March, in the summer they enjoy the light and the white nights at their summer-house at the seaside, heating their sauna everyday and swimming in the Finnish Gulf.
Linked Episode:
Episode 135: Technique is Character Rationalized with Lee Grossman, MD (Oakland, Ca.)
Recommended Readings:
Grossman, L. (2023): The psychoanalytic encounter and the misuse of theory. New York: Routledge.
Kernberg, O.F. (2016). Psychoanalytic education at the crossroads: Reformation, change and the future of psychoanalytic training. New York: Routledge
Reeder, J. (2004). Hate and love in psychoanalytic institutions: The dilemmas of a profession. New York: Other Press.
Tuckett, D. (2005). Does anything go? Towards a framework for the more transparent assessment of psychoanalytic competence. Int J Psychoanal. 86: 31–49.
Tuckett, D., Amati Mehler, J., Collins, S., Diercks, M., Flynn, D., Franck, C., Millar, C., Skale, E., Wagtmann, A-M. (2020): Psychoanalytic education in the Eitingon model and its controversies: A way forward. Int J Psychoanal. 101: 1106 – 1135.
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“My interest is to rather than continue with the psychoanalytic tilt which has tended to try to find the words - to find the areas of the analyst that has words to engage with these states and then help the patient transform these states into something thinkable and communicable. [In contrast] my interest has been to take the patient where they are; it’s kind of a radical way of saying ‘meeting the patient where they are’, and find our way and lend ourselves to engaging with them in their own idiom, using Bollas’s term, in their own way of being and to find ways to be with them that don’t necessarily rely on talking about things and making things known.”
Episode Description: We begin by considering patient's non-represented mental states and their manifestation in somatic and motoric registers. Robert describes his understanding and approach to clinically engage those who "barely experience continuity of the self or subjectivity in themselves or others." He recommends 'companioning' with them. This entails not trying to "move the patient out of these regressed areas into greater relatedness ...but to welcome these other dimensions and their full expression within the analytic space." We consider the role of enactive engagements, the non-verbal vs the pre-verbal and 'radical neutrality'. He presents a case where the patient and analyst shared music, food and not discussed emotional intimacy between them that he felt was vital to enable the patient to emerge as a 'real person'. We close with speaking of Robert's professional history of working early on with psychotic individuals and finding that his approach enabled them, often to their surprise, to feel heard. He also describes his attunement to the experience of being an 'other' that emerged from his growing up as an 'other' - a Jew in London.
Our Guest:
Robert Grossmark, Ph.D., ABPP, is a psychoanalyst in New York City. He works with individuals, groups, and couples. He is on the teaching and supervising faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, The National Institute for the Psychotherapies Program in Adult Psychoanalysis, The National Training Program in Psychoanalysis, National Faculty Member, the Florida Psychoanalytic Center and lectures at other psychoanalytic institutes and clinical psychology training programs nationally and internationally. He is an Associate Editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is the author of The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning and co-edited The One and the Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy and Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory.
Recommended Readings:
Grossmark, R. (2024) The Untelling, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. In press.
Grossmark, R. (2019) The anguish of fatherhood, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 16 (3), 316-325.
Grossmark, R. (2023) A child is being murdered: A contemporary psychoanalytic treatment of a compulsion to child pornography, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 40: 25-30
Bach, S. (2011) Chimeras: Immunity, interpenetration and t he true self. Psychoanalytic Review, 98(1): 39-56
Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Fear of breakdown. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1(1-2), 103–107.
Bollas, C. (2011) Character and interformality. In C. Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader (p. 238-248)
Ogden, T.O. (2017) Dreaming the analytic session: A clinical essay. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 86: 1-20.
Stern, D.B. (2022) On coming into possession of oneself: Witnessing and the formulation of experience. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91: 639-667
Symington, N. (2012) The Essence of psychoanalysis as opposed to what is secondary. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 22, 4, 395-409
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"The first line treatment for adolescents with anorexia now is family-based therapy typically, which involves helping the parents facilitate the refeeding of the adolescent. So, I was working with the patient in that way and found it to be helpful and useful, but was consistently struck by the neglect of the patient’s inner life, and found, at least based on my experience with many patients, that while you could get some symptomatic relief, if you didn't, in some way, address the deeper dynamics, the aspects of the patient's personality organization that drove the disorder, that were implicated at the disorder, there was a way that the patient would snap back to their old behaviors over time, that deeper change and a deeper understanding of what was going on was really necessary; and so that's been kind of evolution from my work over the past ten years from my first book, which was about anorexia in males, and tried to present a kind of Integrative understanding of that phenomena, increasingly over time I've become more and more interested in the deeper kind of analytic thinking that we can bring to bear on this kind of suffering.”
Episode Description:
We begin with a description of the common contertransferential pull to intervene behaviorally in the face of repetitive self-destructive eating disorder symptoms. This intention can inform but not compel the clinical decision as to the indicated treatment of choice for someone at any particular moment. Behavioral and pharmacologic treatments can be important in softening the pressure of eating disorder symptoms. They do not, however, give an individual access to their interoceptive life, from which these disturbing self-preoccupations emerge. We discuss the challenges of working with those who have limited capacities for mentalisation and as a result, live out their inner lives somatically and motorically. Immersive treatment leads the clinician to experience these proto-affects in one's own body and in one's own ruminations. Tom discusses alexithymia, typical family structures, and the presence of the 'abject' experience in the lives of these patients. He presents a disguised case of a patient who was able to work through both the early struggles and later neurotic aspects of these conflicts analytically. We close with his sharing with us his vision for the future which includes more integration between the dynamic and adynamic approaches to these challenging patients.
Our Guest: Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, is Chair in the Department of Psychology at Golden Gate University as well as a psychoanalyst and board-certified, licensed psychologist. His first book, Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males, was published in 2016. His second book, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak, an edited volume in the Relational Perspectives Book Series, was published in 2018. His third book, Eating Disorders (New Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis), was released in 2022. His fourth book, co-edited with Burke, Michaels, and Muhr, is entitled Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation: Rehumanizing Mental Health Policy and Practice. He has also written a novel about the process of psychotherapy, Ghosts of the Unremembered Past, additionally released as an audiobook. He is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute for Northern California and a Training Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He is on the Scientific Advisory Council of the National Eating Disorders Association, Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP), the William Alanson White Institute’s Eating Disorders, Compulsions, and Addictions program, and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and has a private practice in Berkeley, CA.
Recommended Readings:
Williams, G. (1997). Reflections On Some Dynamics Of Eating Disorders: ‘No Entry’ Defences and Foreign Bodies. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis., 78, 927-941.
Brady, M.T. (2011). Invisibility and insubstantiality in an anorexic adolescent: phenomenology and dynamics. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 37(1), 3 – 15.
Bromberg, P.M. (2001). Treating patients with symptoms – and symptoms with patients: Reflections on shame, dissociation, and eating disorders. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 11(6), 891 – 912.
Petrucelli, J. (2015). ‘My body is a cage’: Interfacing interpersonal neurobiology, attachment, affect regulation, self-regulation, and the regulation of relatedness in treatment with patients with eating disorders. In J. Petrucelli (Ed.). Body-states: Interpersonal and relational perspectives on the treatment of eating disorders. (Psychoanalysis in a New Key). New York: Routledge.
Sands, S. (2003). The subjugation of the body in eating disorders: A Particularly female solution. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 20(1), 103 – 116.
Wooldridge, T. (2021). Anorexia nervosa and the paternal function. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 69(1), 7-32.Wooldridge, T. (2018). The entropic body: Primitive anxieties and secondary skin formation in anorexia nervosa. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 28(2), 189 – 202.
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"The ability to play means we can indulge in a kind of illusion, not delusion, and make a distinction. It always amazes me that when the patient arrives, they like the routine of an analysis; nobody breaks that, it's an illusion; it is a piece of theater every time. We open the door to our patients and they lie on the couch, and yet there is something enormously gratifying as the patient works out their sense of reality from that illusory field. I think it is exactly what the mother is able to bring to the infant - this capacity to play and this capacity to continue to evolve beyond the analysis as an internalization of that experience of being listened to and being with someone. The details of that is related to an intrapsychic surviving and non- surviving object in the analyst who continues to think and feel and be with the patient in the consulting room.”
Episode Description: Joel begins his conversation with Jan around Winnicott's conceptualization of aggression in development and in the analytic encounter. She noted that he had a very sophisticated developmental theory of aggression which culminated with the role that the destruction of the object plays in constituting reality. Jan explains that she has elaborated Winnicott’s late theory of aggression with her notion of the ‘surviving object'. She distinguishes the 'surviving object' from the 'good object', especially as it stands apart from a moralizing position. She considers its internalization as an essential condition for healthy development. They discussed the role that insight continued to play for Winnicott after he emphasized the importance of the patient’s experience in the analytic process. They also consider the ‘fear of woman’ as a root of misogyny. After discussing the uniqueness of the analytic setting to facilitate play, fantasy, and “magic which is not psychosis,” Jan concludes by emphasizing the importance of in-person treatment in order to have an in vivo experience of the non-retaliatory analyst.
Linked Episode:
Episode 144: Why Winnicott? Joel Whitebook, PhD
Our Interviewer and Guest:
Joel Whitebook, PhD is a philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is on the Faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and was the founding Director of the University’s Psychoanalytic Studies Program. In addition to many articles on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and critical theory, Dr. Whitebook is also the author of Perversion and Utopia (MIT) and Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge).
Jan Abram, PhD is a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and in private practice in London. She is a Visiting Professor of the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London and is currently Vice President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation for the Annual Conferences. She is President-Elect for the EPF to start her term in March 2024. She is a Visiting Lecturer and supervisor at the Tavistock Clinic in London. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Kyoto, Japan, where she resided for a writing sabbatical. Jan Abram has published several books and articles notably The Language of Winnicott, Donald Winnicott Today (2013), The Clinical Paradigms of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott: Comparisons and Dialogues (co-authored with R.D. Hinshelwood 2018); The Surviving Object: psychoanalytic clinical essays on psychic survival-of-the-object (2022) and her second book with R.D. Hinshelwood: The Clinical Paradigms of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion: Comparisons and Dialogues (2023).
Recommended Readings:
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Abram, J. (2022) The Surviving Object: Psychoanalytic Clinical Essays on Psychic survival-of-the-object New Library of Psychoanalysis Routledge
Abram, J. (2023) Holding and Containing: on the specificity of Winnicott's object relations theory Holding und Containing: Zur spezifischen Natur der Objektbeziehungen bei Winnicott. Psyche - Z Psychoanal 77 (9), 768-796 DOI 10.21706/ps-77-9-768
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“I was speaking to the tendency of the popular media to perceive narratives of Indian women's sexuality via the lens of oppression. Now, of course, sexual violence against women is an important concern in India, as it is worldwide. But telling the story of violence against women misses the story of how women desire, which is what I wanted to highlight. What struck me from reading the responses from these psychoanalytic interviews that I did was just how much women adapted their Eros to their circumstances. Particularly the older women that were interviewed, those who were older than 35, didn’t feel very oppressed, even as they narrated experiences and circumstances that sounded oppressive to me. Of course, if these were patients instead of the psychoanalytic interviewees that they were, one might wait for a kind of realization of oppression, but I wanted to see how psychoanalysis could be useful in mapping how Eros leaks within a framework where oppression is internalized, as it was for many of my interviewees. What I found very interesting was some of the imaginative ways that women found to satisfy their sexual desires while still maintaining community belonging. Viewed from the outside, this can look like oppressive forms of hypocrisy or enactments. But within the frame of these women's lives, it seems like they had found some creative ways of making Eros central and also of having Eros and breathing it at the same time in order to move forward."
Episode Description: Amrita focuses our attention on the presence of women's active sexual desire which often gets obscured by society's tendency to see women as simply victims of violence and oppression. In her book, Women's Sexuality and Modern India - In a Rapture of Distress, she shares with us the results of in-depth interviews as well as latent clinical data from educated and financially comfortable Indian women. We discuss the erotic aspects of modesty; the differences between Indian and International feminisms; the role of the protective parent to foster girlish excitement, i.e. to offer a helping hand to their daughter; and the importance of the involved father to enable an identification for comfortable aggression. We close with a description of an unusual culturally imbued sexual practice that invites Amrita's deep attunement to multiple levels of meaning.
Our Guest: Amrita Narayanan, PsyD, is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst and the author of Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress. She has a longstanding interest in how a civilization's culture shapes its sexuality and its psychoanalysis. She is an essayist in The Parrots of Desire: 3000 Years of Erotica in India and in Pha(bu)llus: a cultural history of the Phallus. She also writes a monthly column, Sexual Politics, for a newspaper, The Deccan Herald, Bengaluru. Aside from her clinical practice, Amrita is a Visiting Professor of English at Ashoka University, New Delhi, where she teaches psychoanalysis at the undergraduate and Masters level.
Recommended Readings:
Narayanan, A. (2023) Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Kakar, S. (1990) Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. Penguin Books: New Delhi.
Menon, M. (2019). Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India. Speaking Tiger Books: New Delhi.
Narayanan, A and Kakar, S. (2023) The Capacious Freud In Busch, F and Delgado, N. The Ego and Id: 100 Years Later. Contemporary Freud, Turning Points and Critical Issues Series. Routledge: UK.
Narayanan, A. (2018). When the Enthralled Mother Dreams: a clinical and cultural composition. IN Kumar, M. Mishra, A., and Dhar, A. (Eds). Psychoanalysis in the Indian Terroir: Emerging Themes in Culture, Family and Childhood. Lexington Books: USA.
Narayanan. A. (2013). Ambivalent Subjects: Psychoanalysis, Women’s Sexuality in India and the writings of Sudhir Kakar. Psychodynamic Practice. 20-3. 213-227
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