"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

“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.

"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.

“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

"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.

"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:

ben

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

“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 

"The genetic asymmetry [with sperm donorship] will create issues and complications -  it puts a strain on the relationship, i.e. who is excluded; who has more rights to this product? In other words, if the sperm donor is from a stranger,  the father feels ‘am I really adequately or sufficiently related that I could claim fatherhood’?”

Episode Description: We begin by acknowledging the erroneous assumption that  unconscious conflicts over becoming a parent are etiologic for what had been called 'psychogenic infertility.' Correlation is not causality. We review the widespread use of assisted reproductive technologies, with up to 750,000 babies born per year through these methods. Mali presents a composite case of a 48-year-old woman who went through many arduous IVF cycles before appreciating the degree of omnipotence and denial that characterized her approach to this problem, as it had toward many other issues in her life. She shares with us the common experience of infertility representing a sense of defectiveness and guilt. We consider the many challenges of sperm and egg donorship, including who one chooses as a donor as well as when one should tell children of their biological origins. We close with Mali sharing with us her recommendations to rejuvenate the field of child analysis.

Our Guest:

Mali Mann, M.D, is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst and Child Supervisor at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. She is a clinical professor Adjunct at Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science.  Some of her published papers include, "Immigrant Parents and their Emigrant Adolescents: The Tension of Inner and Outer Worlds;" "Shame Veiled and Unveiled," "Aggression in Children: Origins, Manifestation, and Management through Play," Adolescent Psychoanalysis book chapter. "The Formation and Development of Ethnic Identity." Her edited book, Psychoanalytic Aspects of Assisted Reproductive Technology, won three awards: 1) Pinnacle Book Award, 2) International Book Awards in Family and "Parenting and Family" category in 2016, 3) Finalist for Book Vana Award in 2016. She has published two books of poetry: Whisper, Forget Me Not, and A Path with No Name. Her latest book, My Pony, Keran, is a semi-autobiographical children's book. She has been a member of Flying Doctors for nearly three decades (Los Medicos Voladores). She and her late husband, Dr. William James Stover, traveled to the Orphanages in  South America and Mexico to offer medical help to children and their families. In her spare time, she paints abstract expressionism and figurative; her art has been exhibited in US galleries and won several awards. 

Recommended Readings:

Allison. G. H. (1997). Motherhood, motherliness, and psychogenic infertility. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 66: 1-17

Ludden, J. (2011) A. F. (1961). A new openness for donor kids about their biology. NPR:

Making Babies: 21st Century Families.(17 September).

Bibring, G. L.’ Dwyer, T. F., Huntington, D.S., & Valenstein, A. F. (1961). A Study of Psychological Process in pregnancy and the earliest mother and child relationship. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 16: 9-72

Ehrensaft, D. (2008), When baby makes three or four or more, Psychanal. Study Child, 63:3-23.

Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating, and working through. (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II.) S.E., 12.

Inderbitzin, L. B & Levy, S. (1998). Repetition Compulsion revisited: Implication for Technique, Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 67:32-53

Lester, E. P. & Notman, M. (1986). Pregnancy, developmental crisis, and object relations: Psychoanalytic considerations. Int. J. Psychoanal., 62: 357-366

Notman, M. & Lester, E. P. (1988). Pregnancy: theoretical considerations. Psychoanl. Inq., 8: 139-160

Pines, D. (1982). Relevance of early development to pregnancy and abortion. Int. J. Psychoanal., 61: 311-318

Zallusky, S. (1999). Infertility in The Age of Technology, Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 48: 1541-1562

"As I elaborate in the book, there was no physical contact or romantic engagement. The reason why I chose the ‘lover’ as the [psychoanalytic] analogy is, in the real world outside of psychoanalytic practice, where else do you have an interpersonal encounter that is so intensely engaging, attentive, respectful, and caring? That would be in the first six weeks or six months of a romantic relationship. If we eliminate the romantic/sexual part and just stay with ‘wow, this other party is paying such attention to me’ -  reminds me of Lacan's idea that what we really seek in the other is their desire for us, which by the way, I don't completely agree with because I think it goes both ways - I would say that that is the analogy from the world of lovers that I would map onto psychoanalytic work at least on the part of the psychoanalyst - he or she ideally pays that kind of intense attention, care, respect and attunement, that you would find between lovers.”

Episode Description: We begin with discussing the various ways that we can shape our psychoanalytic frame to enable a deepening of the clinical encounter. This is in contrast to frames that have gone awry. In his book Lover - Exorcist - Critic Alan describes a composite patient where he became over-involved to the detriment of the work that was eventually repaired. We reference a problematic frame in his earlier training analysis that perhaps set the stage for this difficulty. He shares with us his concept that "by enlightening subjectivity, by raising consciousness, depth psychotherapy liberates." We discuss in some detail the forces in him, his patient, and their relationship that led him to greater enactments than were useful. He shares with us the challenges he faced in remedying his emotional imbalance with her and the intense rage it awakened in her, deriving from various periods in her life. We both emphasized the vital role of the consultant at such times. We close with Alan describing his co-founding and leadership in the Rose City Center - a low fee clinic providing dynamic psychotherapy to individuals who would never otherwise see the inside of an analyst's office.

Our Guest: Alan Michael Karbelnig, PhD is a psychoanalyst, writer, teacher, and forensic psychologist and practices in Pasadena, California. He is a supervising and training psychoanalyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He lectures nationally and internationally, including in China, India, Thailand, and Israel. He writes a weekly Substack newsletter titled Journeys to the Unconscious Mind. Alan has published 20 scholarly articles and five book chapters in addition to his book Lover, Exorcist, and Critic. He considers his 2004 founding of Rose City Center—a nonprofit clinic providing psychoanalytic psychotherapy for economically disadvantaged persons throughout California—his proudest professional accomplishment. 

Recommended Readings:

Bellow, H. (1962). Herzog. New York: Viking.

Bromberg, P. (1996). The multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship. Standing in the spaces: Essays on clinical process, trauma & dissociation. London: The Analytic Press.

Greenberg, J. and Mitchell, S. (1983) Object relations in psychoanalytic theory. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.

Karbelnig, A. M. (2022). Chasing Infinity: Why clinical psychoanalysis’ future lies in pluralism. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 103(1):5-25.

McEwan, I. (2019). Machines Like Me. New York: Anchor.

Strenger, C. (1989). The classic and romantic visions in psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 70:593-610

"What's the spiritual room? For me, it does tend to be a connection to something greater than just me; it is a contemplative space; it is getting to the core of who I am, allowing in some ways for the best of me to come to the fore; to have space for grace. I am humbled by what people bring to tell me. I take what I'm doing in the office very seriously because it is really like sacred work in terms of people being able to work, love, and play. I mean that is for them to find their real callings rather than the false selves that they may experience; it's a similar call for finding one's true self, and that is really important work." 

Episode Description: We begin by considering the presence of religion as part of the cultural heritage which patients bring to the clinical encounter.  Ginta shares with us her upbringing in the Lithuanian Catholic church and its presence in her life, in her journey to medical school and to her psychiatric and analytic training. She speaks of the relationship between her sense of spirituality and God, the importance of Jesus' human/divine amalgam, and how prayer provides her access to her interiority.  We consider the similarities and differences between speaking freely to God and speaking freely to one's analyst. We discuss the narthex, the church antechamber, and its association with the analytic waiting room and how the structure of the Mass has similarities with the structure of the analytic session. We also consider her reflections on abortion - including a quote from Freud on the topic. Ginta closes by sharing with us her sense of the sacredness of our work.  

Our Guest: Ginta Remeikis, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing in Rockville, MD. Having graduated from Northwestern University Medical School, she completed her psychiatric residency at Georgetown and Chestnut Lodge Hospital, where she then served on the medical staff and psychoanalytic training at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. Most recently, she has presented at meetings of the APCS (Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society) and AABS (Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies) on intergenerational transmission of trauma; diaspora experiences; the psychic role of language, especially bilingualism; the use of literature for processing trauma; and psychodynamics around disability. In 2003 she organized the New Directions weekend conference, “The Future of Religion in the Psychoanalytic World: Revisiting the Mind/Soul Dilemma” and for several years presented on issues of psychiatry and religion to Georgetown’s psychiatry residents. Besides enjoying reading, she has published poetry in Lithuanian in several collections and journals.

Recommended Readings:

Corcoran, Paul, “Seamus Heaney lost his Catholic faith.  But his poetry still sought transcendence.” in America; The Jesuit Review, Sept. 15, 2023.

Epstein, Mark, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, Basic Books, 1995.

Greeley, Andrew M., The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1990.

Merton, Thomas, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, NY, 1961.

Rizzuto, Ana-Maria, Why did Freud Reject God?: A Psychodynamic Interpretation, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.

Smith, Joseph H. and Susan A Handelman, editors, Psychoanalysis and Religion, Psychiatry and the Humanities, vol. 11, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1990.

Trinkūnas, Jonas, editor, Of Gods & Holidays; The Baltic Heritage, Tvermė, 1999.

"My analysis not only allowed me to grieve [my mother], with my analyst patiently pushing me in the direction of my feelings, but it radically transformed my life. I wouldn't have had kids if I hadn't had my analysis because I thought ‘I'm an ambitious person, I want a career, you can't do everything’. I didn't know any models of women who had a career and enjoyed motherhood. In my analysis I learned just through analyzing my own dreams and free associations, that this was all a rationalization. I was a very maternal person and I had the unconscious belief that if you become a mother you die. Once that was conscious, I talked to my husband who was excited about the idea about having kids. We had our two daughters, and so my life is in very concrete ways radically enriched by my psychoanalysis. So I went into the field with a deep conviction of how therapeutic this process is and it's been kind of a straight line from there." 

Episode Description: We begin by describing the arc of learning that characterizes our psychoanalytic life journey. The oral tradition starts with our first supervisors and extends from there to study groups and to becoming a supervisor oneself. Nancy shares with us her professional trajectory from being an eager college student first encountering Freud to becoming a best-selling psychoanalytic author. She relates the transformative experience of her own analysis, the steps of maturation in her clinical work, and how she has faced the traumas of older age. We discuss the role that students have in relating to their more experienced colleagues and we close with her sharing her hope for our field's future.

Our Guest: Nancy McWilliams, PhD is Visiting Professor Emerita at Rutgers Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology and has a private practice in Lambertville, NJ. She is author of four textbooks (on psychoanalytic diagnosis, case formulation, therapy, and supervision) and is co-editor of both editions of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual. A former president of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy of the American Psychological Association, she is a member of the Austen Riggs Center Board of Trustees. Her books are available in 20 languages and she has taught in 30 countries. 

Recommended Readings:

McWilliams, N. (2022). Credo: Psychoanalysis as a wisdom tradition. In J. Salberg (Ed.), Psychoanalytic credos: Personal and professional journeys of psychoanalysts (pp. 70-77). New York: Routledge.

McWilliams, N. (2021). Psychoanalytic supervision. New York: Guilford Press. 

Lingiardi, V., & McWilliams, N. (Eds.) (2019) Special Issue: The PDM-2 and clinical and research Issues in psychoanalytic diagnosis. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 35.

McWilliams, N. (2017). Psychoanalytic reflections on mortality: Aging, dying, generativity, and renewal. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 34, 50-57. Also in C. Masur (2018), Flirting with death: Psychoanalysts consider mortality (pp. 25-40). New York: Routledge.

McWilliams, N. (2011). Psychoanalytic diagnosis: Understanding personality in the clinical process, rev. ed. New York: Guilford Press

McWilliams, N. (2004). Psychoanalytic psychotherapy: A practitioner’s guide. New York: Guilford Press. 

"The fact that music is so important for our constitution - that music is almost how we move in the world, that our own bodies are played through by musical forms, that the way we relate to our own way of being in the world is sort of mediated by music - this is powerful stuff. But it's not always very fitting to us. We hear a lot of music in our lives, we don't always choose what we hear. We don’t choose our analyst’s musicality, we don’t first check what kind of musicality an analyst has. We are bombarded by music; music can be imposed upon us, it can make us feel within ourselves in a way that doesn't feel right to us. There is a lot of complexity here as we think about this matter of music being so central to us. But we can find the music that works for us, but we don’t create the music. It belongs to the realm of collective cultural life. There is a lot of struggle in music, and in the analytic setting there is a lot of struggle - because for many patients a lot of the work rests on whether there can be any shared sensory experience or not.”

Episode Description: We begin with recognizing that the process of human musicalization begins in utero and forms the basis of much of psycho-somatic-social life. Peter, Michael and Adam’s written collaboration, Here I'm Alive - The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis is intended to be a musical book about psychoanalysis - a representation of how music binds us to the individual and cultural domains of life. We discuss rhythmizing consciousness, atavistic vs enhancing music, and the blues as a companion soundtrack for loss and tribulation. We take up the relationship between Freud's dream book and his joke book, how present analytic melodies contain aspects of the past, and how dissociation requires a remusicalization of the psychoanalytic situation. We close with Adam reading a paragraph which includes "The capacity of the sexual drive to propel the body back into musical movement and transmute the seizure of trauma into conducted energy to ground the current."

Our Guests:

Peter Goldberg, Ph.D., is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Chair of Faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and on the faculty of the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He has presented widely and written on a range of clinical and theoretical topics, including the evolution of clinical theory in psychoanalysis, sensory experience in analysis, the concept of the analytic frame, the theory and treatment of dissociative states, non-representational states; and the impact of social trauma on individual psychology. He is in private practice in Albany, CA.

Michael Levin, Psy.D. is a Training Analyst and Faculty Member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He has taught and presented on topics including the work of Laplanche, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, and the place of psychoanalysis in cultural and intellectual history. He is in private practice in San Francisco.

Adam Blum, Psy.D. is an Adjunct Faculty Member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He has written and presented on psychoanalysis and the music of Björk, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Stephen Sondheim, Aretha Franklin, and Michael Jackson. He is in private practice in San Francisco.

Recommended Readings and Videos:

Nicholas Spice, “Winnicott and Music” (2001), in The Elusive Child, ed. Lesley Caldwell (London: Karnac, 2002). 

Peter Sloterdijk, “Where Are We When We Hear Music?” (2014), in The Aesthetic Imperative: Writings on Art (London: Polity, 2018).

Francis Grier, “Musicality in the Consulting Room,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 100:827–51. 

Sondheim Teaches "My Friends" from Sweeney Todd (video) . 

Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (London: Wiley, 2017).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962)

The Late Late Show with James Corden, “Paul McCartney Carpool Karaoke” (video).

Harmut Rosa, Resonance (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). 

Meshell Ndegeocello, The Omnichord Real Book (2023) (album), Blue Note Records.

“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

“Discrimination is something that is needed for the child to create himself as a person. You need to be discriminated from the other, and the other is useful for you, as Freud said, as a model, as a rival, as an enemy. There are different kinds of relationships with the other - you need the other, and we are persons connected with the other. If you discriminate you from the other, this is benign. But if you are doing it from a power position, saying: ‘These people are not like me’ - this is malignant othering. It is malignant because when you are marking these people as different, as the Nazis did with the Jewish people, then it is very easy for these people to become the target for any kind of attack when there will be social or economic problems. Malignant  because you are doing it from a position of power and because these people that you are discriminating from you may become targets for possible attacks for different reasons in the community."

Episode Description: We begin with Abel reading a statement from the Prejudices, Discrimination and Racism Committee which is included below. He shares with us his personal and family story that led him to be interested in racism and to chair this committee. We discuss the differences between benign otherness and malignant othering. He emphasizes the presence of negation in all of us, tempting us to ignore the dangers from discrimination. He speaks of the future of psychoanalysis and how he feels it depends upon its application in settings off the couch. We consider the risks of dilution of the training experience and also the great benefit to the many who will receive treatment from analytically oriented care. He warns us of the dangers of making the perfect the enemy of the good. 

Statement from the IPA Prejudices, Discrimination, Racism Committee:

The rise of antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas barbaric attack

We strongly condemn the murder, maiming, and abduction of hundreds of Israeli civilians and soldiers during an unprovoked attack by Hamas terrorists. The scale of this terrorist attack is unprecedented in recent history. It can only be viewed as a pogrom, and we express our deep solidarity with the victims. Hamas is a terrorist organization, and Palestinians are also their victims. We feel sorrow for all civilians who are killed or suffering in this war, including so many in Gaza.

In its founding document, the Hamas Charter, Hamas states that it is committed to waging Jihad, or holy war, in order “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine”. Its stated goal is to eliminate the Jewish state and kill Jews. It must be made clear that the terror against Israel is not motivated by economic, geographic, or political conflicts: all of Israel is considered a holy land that must not be defiled by the presence of "infidels", whether Christians or Jews. The statement of freeing Palestine from occupation, “From the River to the Sea”, reveals a clear intent to eliminate the State of Israel. A fight against Hamas is a fight of light against darkness, of liberalism against the forces of oppression.

We, as psychoanalysts, can identify the dehumanization of the Jewish population that was displayed by the horrific massacre on the 7th of October. In addition to the suffering of Israel´s population, antisemitic manifestations and attacks have increased exponentially all over the world. As the Prejudices Discrimination and Racism Committee we are alert to antisemitism and the dangerous consequences of its negation. We hope that in due course, it will be possible to find strong leaders who will have the courage to meet and negotiate peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Abel Fainstein (Chair) Argentine Psychoanalytical Association (APA)

Paula Kliger.  Michigan Psychoanalytic Society (MPS) 

Rosine Perelberg. British Psychoanalytical Society ( BPS)

Leonie Sullivan. Australian Psychoanalytical Society  (AP

Raya Zonana. Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis of Sao Paulo. (SBPSP)

Mira Erlich-Ginor (Ex officio)  Israel Psychoanalytic Society (IPS)

Our Guest: Abel Fainstein, MD is a Psychiatrist, Master in Psychoanalysis,

Full Member and former President of the Argentine Psychoanalytical Association (APA) and the Psychoanalytic Federation of Latin America (FEPAL). He is a former member of the IPA Board and Ex Com ,Current Chair of the Prejudice, Discrimination, Racism Committee of the IPA, current advisor of the IRED Interregional Encyclopedic Dictionary in Psychoanalysis by the IPA, and of the Revista Uruguaya de Psicoanálisis by APU. He is a judge for the first IPA Tyresias Award on Sexual and Gender Diversity, 2021. He was awarded the KONEX Award in Psychoanalysis, 2016.  

Recommended Readings:

Busch, F. ( 2023) Psychoanalysis at the Crossroad. An international perspective. Routledge. NY. 

Cabral. A.C ; Fainstein A.M (   2019  ) On training analysis .Debates. APAEditorial. Buenos Aires

Sandler,P. ; Pacheco Costa G. (2019 ) On Freud's "The Question of Lay Analysis.” Turning Points and Critical Issues (The International Psychoanalytical Association ... Turning Points and Critical Issues Series) Routledge. London. 

Powell, J.A, Menendian, S. (2016) The Problem of Othering. Othering and Belonging. Expanding the Circle of Human Concern. 

Othering & Belonging is published by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

Winer,R;  Malawista,K (2017 ) Who is behind the couch. Karnac. London

“The situation was that I went with my husband Danny, who is also a clinical psychologist, and we were  on the team that came and told people when family members were identified and that they had been murdered. There was one time when we went to two kids, telling them that their parents were murdered. We were with them in the room with an aunt and another family member. All of a sudden, I said, “Danny’s father and my father were in the Holocaust, and they also lost their parents. And you know they became happy people and good fathers for us.  And here we are with you now.”  It was like my telling a lullaby - I knew that they hear us and they don't hear us, but I believed that the unconscious can hear me. That's how my personal transgenerational story helped me to help them to believe that a life can become after this disaster.”  M.R.

“And the music in your saying whatever you said was part of what worked there, both the liveliness and something that has a real connection to experiences one can survive from. This is a very unusual kind of intervention for psychoanalysts, and also that it may not fit everyone. There is a match between how can one make use of oneself and go out of one’s skin and one’s routines, i.e. the way I always do whatever I do. Instead,to do something different that is echoing the needs of the person with whom you are in contact.” M.E-G.

Episode Description: We begin by tracing the recent history of those organizations that are dedicated to the premeditated butchery of civilians. Both Merav and Mira share with us their experiences when the sirens went off on Saturday morning October 7th. We follow them as they attend to those who physically survived the mutilation, murder and kidnapping of their family members. Merav, building from her personal family Holocaust history, created a series of guidelines with which to engage those who were overwhelmed. It became a sort of proactive psychoanalytic manual to give structure to and help regain the alpha function of those who are suffering while also recognizing the presence of past traumas in their lives. They share with us their personal experiences, the crucial importance of President Biden's speech and visit, and the vital assistance that all the Israeli psychoanalytic organizations are providing. Central to their personal and professional message is We have survived traumas in the past, and we will survive again this time.

Our Guests: Merav Roth, Ph.D. and Mira Erlich-Ginor, Ph.D., are both members of the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society.

Linked Episodes: 

Episode 110: PCCA (Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities) and Working with Ukrainian Current Atrocities with Mira Erlich-Ginor

Episode 96: Why Do We Read Books? Literature and Psychoanalysis with Merav Roth, Ph.D.

For Donations: First Line Med 

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IPAOfftheCouch.org

"The gift of the [traditional] healer that he shares with those of us who do psychoanalytic work is that we are given an idea of the human mind as being always in a process of mediating the real world and the drives of sex and aggression - which if not moderated can lead to terrible things. We're in there, and that's what our training helps us to do.” 

Episode Description: We begin with Martha describing her social work background and how it informed her approach to working with overwhelmed children in New York. She recounts her efforts in El Salvador and her understanding that children who were violent were actually children who were over-exposed to violence. She also functioned as one who accompanied those clinicians who themselves were at risk of being overwhelmed by the violence in their work. We take up her engagement in Angola and their cultural model of the individual as "the self that exists for the purpose of social participation." We consider the case of a child soldier who was treated by traditional healers for multiple symptoms related to his involvement in atrocities. We note the similarity with Bion's Knowing and Love as it is lived between the individual, the healer and the community. We close with recognizing the importance of the 'moral third' and the centrality of reparation in both African and American cultures.

Our Guest: Martha Bragin, Ph.D., is jointly appointed Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the Ph.D. Program in Social Welfare at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She joined the faculty after 30 years of experience supporting United Nations agencies, governments, nongovernmental and people’s organizations to address the effects of violence and disaster on children, youth, families, and the communities in which we live. Dr Bragin is a Fellow of the Research Training Program of the IPA and the editorial board of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. She serves as a member of Inter-Agency Standing Committee (UN-IFRC-NGO) Reference Group on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings, a globally representative body that sets and monitors standards for psychosocial interventions in emergencies. Dr Bragin is recipient of the International Psychoanalytic Association’s Tyson Prize as well as the Hayman Prize for published work on traumatized children and adults in 2011 and 2021. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed publications and is in private practice in New York City.

Recommended Readings:

Bragin, M. (2003). The effect of extreme violence on the capacity for symbol formation: Case studies from Afghanistan and New York. In J. Cancelmo, J. Hoffenberg, & H. 

Myers (Eds.), Terror and the psychoanalytic space: International perspectives from Ground Zero (pp. 59–67). New York, NY: Pace University.

Bragin, M. (2004). The uses of aggression: Healing the wounds of war and violence in a

community context. In B. Sklarew, S. Twemlow, & S. Wilkinson (Eds.), Analysts in the trenches: Streets, schools and war zones (pp. 169–194). Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

Bragin, M. (2005). Pedrito: The blood of the ancestors. Journal of Infant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 4(1), 1–20.

Bragin, M. (2007). Knowing terrible things: Engaging survivors of extreme violence in treatment. Clinical Social Work Journal, 35(4), 229 – 236.

Bragin, M. (2010). Can anyone here know who I am? Creating meaningful narratives among returning combat veterans, their families, and the communities in which we all live. Clinical Social Work Journal, 38(3), 316–326.

Bragin, M., & Bragin, G. (2010). Making meaning together: Helping survivors of violence and loss to learn at school. Journal of Infant Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy, 9(2), 47-67.

Bragin, M. (2012). So that our dreams will not escape us: Learning to think together in time of war. Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, 32 (2), 115–135.

Bragin, M. (2019) Pour a libation for us: Restoring the sense of a moral universe to children affected by violence. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy 18 (3), 201- 2011.

"Instead of the analyst being in a position where they know something about the patient, they are with the patient. As Winnicott says in his late work, if you are a philosopher in your armchair, you have to come out of your armchair and be on the floor with the child playing. I don’t think that one should act that out with an adult patient- however  it is that approach to actually being with the patient, listening to the patient’s words, listening to their state of mind without preconceived ideas. That’s almost impossible, but  Winnicott says that psychoanalysis is an objective study, an objective way of looking at things without preconceived ideas, without preconceived notions. It links with what you said about ‘normative’ - if we go into the consulting room feeling that our patients need to be as we are or need to fit in some kind of norm, then I don’t think this is psychoanalytic. I think it is against the whole aim of psychoanalysis.”

Episode Description: Jan begins her conversation with Joel by sharing her background in theater and the steps she took to train as an analyst. She describes what drew her to Winnicott and how she sees him as broadening, not replacing, Freudian thinking. She distinguishes her understanding of Winnicott from others who believe that, by speaking of the importance of the environment, he minimized constitutional factors and the unconscious. She interprets what he meant by the environment in terms of the ‘psyche-body’ and the mother’s unconscious. Jan discusses a paradox in Winnicott in that he offers a positive theory of health while also being uniquely non-judgmental and non-pathologizing. She concludes with a controversial observation that a five times weekly in person training analysis is essential to achieve a deep regression that will familiarize analysts with the primitive parts of their personalities so they will be able to accept and deal with those parts of their patients' personalities.

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 Visiting Professor of the Psychoanalysis Unit, 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 for 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).

Learn more about Jan Abram 

Recommended Readings:

Abram, J. (2007) The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of

Winnicott’s use of terms Routledge

Abram, J. (ed) (2016) André Green at the Squiggle Foundation Routledge

Abram, J. (2008) Donald Woods Winnicott (1896 – 1971): A brief introduction Education Section Int J of Psychoanal 99: 1189 - 1217

Abram, J. (2021) On Winnicott’s Concept of Trauma Int J of Psychoanal 102: 4 10

"I made a film for PepWeb on the research of Beatrice Beebe. I made the video for her picture book, The Mother-Infant Interaction Picture Book, and various other short films. These are deep dives into mother-infant dyads that reveal something, i.e. rupture and repair, various kinds of dyadic interchanges. These are available for free on YouTube. That's another way that I use my analytic self and my documentary maker self together. I'm much happier with the YouTube films  even though they're less produced because they reach a wide audience - they are for parents, not clinicians. I want to get the story of this way of thinking or various ways of working, or psychoanalysis itself out to the greater public because I’m such an evangelizer for it. It changed my life in so many ways, and I think it's a very different animal than what the wider world (if they've heard of it at all) thinks that it is - it’s so alive these days, so integrative, and so worthy of letting people know.” 

Episode Description: We began with Karen sharing with us her journey from documentary filmmaker to psychoanalyst. She discusses her immersion in the world of cinema verité - "a camera capturing life" - as the pathway that brought her to train in psychoanalysis. We consider the similarities and differences between these ways of thinking and how she feels that for her, they are additive in deepening her listening abilities. She describes her films of Beatrice Beebe's work, how she serves as a consultant to filmmakers, and how she often treats those in the field, especially in regard to their (over)involvement with trauma. We close with Karen's recommendations for using YouTube to let the wider community know about psychoanalysis.

Our Guest:

Karen Dougherty is a Psychoanalyst (FIPA) and documentary filmmaker. She has an MA in English Literature (McGill) and an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies (University of Sheffield). She is a clinical supervisor and course instructor at the FPP and the Advanced Training Program in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, with a particular focus on attachment, relationship issues, and trauma. In addition to her private practice in rural Amaranth, Ontario, Karen is the host of the podcast for the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, Conversations in Psychoanalysis. Since 2022, she has been a member of the IPA Think Tank on the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, for which she produces a YouTube Channel. The recipient of a PEPweb video grant, she has made several films on the research of Dr. Beatrice Beebe for clinicians and parents. She continues to collaborate on documentary projects as a researcher and story consultant (recent films include Toxic Beauty; Category: Woman, both directed by Phyllis Ellis). Bridging these two careers, Karen is both a communications consultant for psychoanalytic organizations and a mental health consultant for film and television.

Linked Episode:

Episode 97: Off the Couch and into the Political Arena with John, Lord Alderdice FRCPsych – IPA Off the Couch

Recommended Links:

Karen Dougherty 

The CPS podcast will be accessed through the CPS website.

The PEPweb citation for the documentary for clinicians:

Dougherty, K., Beebe, B., Margolis, A., Altstein, R., Berman, J. & Mathieson, G. (2016) Mother-Infant Communication: The Research of Dr. Beatrice Beebe. PEP Video Grants 1:11.

Beebe, Dr. Beatrice, prod., Dougherty, K., dir. “Joining Your Baby’s Distress Moments: A Story of One Mother and Infant”:

“Decoding Mother-Infant Interaction: A Story of One Mother and Infant,” the first two of a series of short films for parents showcasing the research of Dr. Beatrice Beebe:

Allan King, The Criterion Collection

Allan King, Queens University Film and Media Collection

Allan King’s Warrendale, a “direct cinema” documentary about a home for emotionally disturbed children in Toronto:

"We know as analysts there’s a long literature on mourning and its connection to creativity from the time of Freud’s work to George Pollock's work and others - but that's too intellectual; let me make it more personal, and then I'll talk about Freud and Maimonides. My father and my mother lost a combination of 10 siblings and a granddaughter murdered by the Nazis, plus their parents and aunts and uncles. I've heard stories about their siblings and I think: ‘Look what they would have done, what they would have created not just families but ideas’, and I realized in my analysis that for years I have been trying to make up, by writing books, what would have been done by the aunts, uncles, and cousins that I never knew because they were murdered. So creativity can have a reparative, never enough perhaps, but a reparative quality.”

Episode Description: I introduce the topic of the not fully acknowledged role of religion in the lives of analysts and analysands, which will be explored in future conversations. Nathan begins by sharing his personal connection with his religion, which he feels does not involve a belief in a God. He describes how his relation to his Judaism, like his essence as an analyst, entails an attunement to an inner life, a commitment to proper behavior, and a search for hidden meanings. He describes his family of origin and their almost complete annihilation in the Holocaust. We discuss the similarities he feels exists between Maimonides and Freud, the importance of mourning in their creative processes, and the great attention to 'the word' that both worldviews exhibit. We also take up whether 'belief' is an appropriate term to characterize one's psychoanalytic clinical work. We close with his sharing clinical examples where religion played an important role in the treatment.

Linked Episode: https://harveyschwartzmd.com/2021/04/23/ep-6-how-to-raise-loving-and-creative-30-year-old/

Our Guest:

Nathan Szajnberg, MD, is Retired Freud Professor, the Hebrew University and former Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis. Born in Germany, he attended the University of Chicago College and Medical School. His most recent books are Psychic Mimesis from Bible and Homer to the Present (Lexington) and The Secret Symmetry of Maimonides and Freud (Routledge). His third novel is A Windmill, A Knight, A Jerusalem.

Recommended Readings:

1. Freud, Future of an Illusion (1928) Hogarth Press.

2. Meissner, W. W. (1985) Psychoanalysis: The Dilemma of Science and Humanism. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 5:471-498

3.Szajnberg, N. (2019) Jacob and Joseph, Judaism’s Architects and Birth of the Ego Ideal. Cambridge Scholars Publishing

4. Wallerstein, R. S. (1998) Erikson's Concept of Ego Identity Reconsidered. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 46:229-247

5. Wallerstein, R. S. (2000) The Analysis of the Hysterical Patient: Limitations?. Forty-Two Lives in Treatment: A Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy 56:293-321

6. Wallerstein, R. S. (2014) Erik Erikson and His Problematic Identity. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 62:657-675

"Conscience represents ethics that are not socially constructed and not socially learned but built-in. In fact, the whole of psychoanalysis is grounded in such an ethic - we all as analysts value life over death, we value truth over lies, we value love over hate, kindness over cruelty. Like those little three-month-old infants that Bloom studied at Yale, these values are grounded in our biology. They are part of what Winnicott would call our true self and they are quite distinct from the very different moral notions that wind up in our superego. After all, our superego contains our racism, it contains our sexism, it contains our heterosexism and those values are very distinct from our core values: love over hate, life over death. We all know on a fundamental level what’s right and what’s wrong on that very basic level, and that is the voice of conscience; we don’t need God for this; it is built in biologically.”

Episode Description: Don begins by describing the difference between the narcissistically based superego from the object-oriented conscience. He sees the former as culturally derived and the latter as biologically given. We discuss how in the clinical situation persecutory guilt, i.e., superego, may often be emphasized to defend against the vulnerabilities associated with loving and being loved. We consider the use and overuse of the concept of trauma in contrast to intrapsychic conflict, and he distinguishes between empathy and sympathy. He shares his view that the edges of our political parties are imbued with the self-certainty born from the paranoid position. Ultimately, he concludes, "I’m not afraid that analysis will disappear - people who have problems with their soul will seek out soul doctors."

Our Guest: Don Carveth, Ph.D., is an emeritus professor of sociology and social and political thought at York University in Toronto. He is a training and supervising analyst in the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, a past Director of the Toronto Institute, and past editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience, Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice, and Guilt: A Contemporary Introduction. Many of his publications are available on his York website (yorku.ca/dcarveth) and his current website (doncarveth.com); his video lectures are available on his YouTube channel (YouTube.com/doncarveth). He is in private psychoanalytic practice in Toronto.

Recommended Readings:

Carveth, D. (2016). Why we should stop conflating the superego with the conscience. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society(2017) 22, 15-32.

Carveth, D.(2023). Guilt: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Carveth, D. (2006).  Self-Punishment as Guilt Evasion: Theoretical Issues." Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse 14, 2 (Fall2006): 172-96.

"One of the changes that analysis provided me with was an awareness about how similar we all are, of course with a few differences. For me, an analyst is before all a person who had the opportunity to realize how we all human beings are very similar. We can familiarize with ourselves and with others thanks to these similarities and continuities. I would say like all my colleagues I asked for analysis when I was a young doctor in order to be helped. This is what is common to all  analysts - analysts are people who are more aware and more experienced to ask for help than other people because they had the opportunity to be helped by a good treatment and to have the opportunity to integrate better.”

Episode Description: Stefano begins by describing the characteristics of many analysts today who seek treatment through the lens of mistrust of dependency and mutuality. Instead, defensive styles lean towards pseudo-autonomy, entitlement, and suspiciousness. We discuss how dealing with initial resistances to the transference is both similar to and different from generations ago. We consider the theoretical advances in understanding earlier developmental struggles as well as our greater appreciation of the medium of countertransference. Stefano notes that today's longer training analyses are an important contribution to these more profound clinical skills. He discusses some of the environmental contributions to current narcissistic inclinations as well as the temptations to reduce the uniqueness of the analytic experience to the familiar and comfortable. He closes by sharing with us his personal story and the essential step for all of us to be able to "ask for help."

Our Guest: Stefano Bolognini, MD, is a psychiatrist and training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), where he served as president (2009-2013). He also was an IPA Board member (2002-2012) and was IPA president from 2013-2017. He was a member of the European Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and a founder of the IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. He has published over 260 psychoanalytic papers, and his books on empathy and on the inter-psychic dimension have been translated into several languages.

Recommended Links and Readings:

Bolognini, Stefano:

Secret Passages. The Theory and Technique of the Interpsychic Relations. IPA New Library, Routledge, London, 2010

Vital Flows between Self and Not-Self, Routledge, London, 2022

The Analyst’s awkward Gift: balancing Recognition of Sexuality with parental protectiveness. Psychoanal. Quart., vol. LXXX, 1, 33-54, 2012.

Enchantments and disenchantments in the formation and use of psychoanalytic theories about psychic reality. The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, 13, 11-24, July 2019.

New forms of psychopathology in a changing world: a challenge for psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century. The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, 2020.

Reflections on the institutional Family of the Analyst and proposing a “fourth Pillar” for Education. Opportunities and problems of transferal dynamics in the training pathway“. In Living and Containing Psychoanalysis in Institutions. Psychoanalysts Working Together, edited by Gabriele Junkers, 89-104, Taylor & Francis, 2022.

From What to How: A Conversational with Stefano Bolognini on Emotional Attunement by Luca Nicoli & Stefano Bolognini. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91 : 3, 443-477, 2022.

The Interpsychic, the Interpersonal, and the Intersubjective: Response to Steven H. Goldberg’s Discussion”. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91:3, 489-494, 2022.

Hidden unconscious, buried unconscious, implicit unconscious. The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual, 16, 87-102, 2022.

"Technology is based on the premise that there can be an optimization of things through algorithmic understanding. ‘Ones and zeros’ data can be manipulated and thus produce an optimal outcome which is a lovely idea for certain kinds of things. It's not necessarily, in my opinion, the best idea for the psyche or for happiness or for developing a life that's meaningful. I think a psychological mindset is slightly different in that our colleagues are really concerned with being with the person, making meanings, suffering sometimes through difficult things, so there isn't just an automatic assumption as there is in the tech mindset that we're trying to optimize for whatever it is that's good. It becomes very philosophical in the end… What is optimized? What is good? Why should we do it? There are all these kinds of questions that one may ask the technology mindset person: Why would we want to hack our nutrition or our mental health in order to become stronger or better? It is a little problematic, I think, as an end goal." 

Episode Description: Nicolle begins by describing her journey from being a math teacher in the inner city to then becoming a consultant in the early days of the tech revolution. She shares the ethical concerns that led her to shift her interest to the mental health field and her eventually becoming Dean of the School of Professional Psychology and Health at California Institute of Integral Studies. While there she observed that "analysts think differently." This led her to seek to train as an analyst while also utilizing her familiarity with the tech mindset to create bridges with those in each field. We discuss the differences in ways of thinking between technologically immersed individuals and those with a psychological orientation - keeping in mind that each has much to learn from the other. We consider the dangers in the developing technological world, which include matters of privacy, distractedness, and a capacity to sit with suffering. We close with Nicolle sharing her vision for the future, which includes analysts playing a part in developing ethical approaches to the upcoming new developments. Her podcast is titled Technology and the Mind.

Our Guest: Nicolle Zapien, Ph.D. is a licensed MFT with 20 years of clinical experience. She is a post-seminar candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC). She serves on the Ethics committee and the Visiting Scholar committee at PINC and also on APsA’s committee for public information. From 2015 to 2019, Dr. Zapien served as Professor and Dean of the School of Professional Psychology and Health at California Institute of Integral Studies, overseeing 6 clinical training degree programs and 5 training clinics. There, she served on the IRB and chaired the research committee. Prior to her clinical work, Dr. Zapien spent a decade as a consultant designing, conducting, and/or overseeing over 200 quantitative and/or qualitative studies for industry clients and non-profits. Some of these studies employed user experience and human factors design methods to optimize the user experiences of technology products and services delivered via smartphones, tablets, websites, or kiosks. She has authored 2 books and several academic articles on themes associated with human decision-making, ethics, and phenomenology.

Recommended Readings:

Bednar, K., & Spiekermann, S. (2022). Eliciting Values for Technology Design with Moral Philosophy: An Empirical Exploration of Effects and Shortcomings. Science, Technology, & Human Values. 

Frankel, R. & Krebs, V. (2022). Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations. Routledge: New York, NY.

Greenfield. A. (2021). Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. Verso: New York, NY.

Marshall, Brandeis Hill (2023). Data Conscience: Algorithmic S1ege on our Humanity.John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ.

Millar, I. (2021). The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence. Palgrave MacMillian: Cham, Switzerland.

Turkle, S. (2022) The Empathy Diaries. Penguin Press: New York, NY.

"In divorce it's fundamental that even though the couple ends, there's not an end to the family. We still owe a debt to the other - that other who offered to love us, who we had the opportunity to love, our debt to the children of that union. We are irrevocably called to ethics and to the continuing sense of responsibility to that other. Even though the marriage doesn't survive, the family needs to. In the high - conflict scenario, not only does the marriage not survive, often the family doesn’t as well. In that sense it is profoundly unethical.  So when I attempt to work with people in that situation, I always do so from an ethical perspective - ethical in the sense of creating a third, so that you try and enter into that system, but it has to be a profoundly ethical presence which I also find is distinctly psychoanalytic. I think our method is saturated with ethics without even realizing it, we're always thinking in ethical terms, managing transference, powerful forces within analytic relationship -  it's a profoundly ethical task that we do. In that sense we also serve as witnesses to what our patients have experienced. The witnessing is also a kind of engagement and we try to do that when we work with people in the high-conflict position." 

Episode Description: We begin by distinguishing high-conflict divorce from less malignant versions. Arthur has found that high-conflict divorce is characterized by a particular timeless destructiveness that lacks regard for the sense of the family or the history of affection that had existed within and between the individuals.

He has noted an experience of overwhelming disillusionment in the histories of those who are unable to mourn and instead remain immersed in vendetta seeking. We discuss the role of ethics, witnessing, and the capacity for the 'third' in these couples. Arthur shares with us his clinical experience with same-sex couples as well as with the unfortunate scenarios of alienated children who attempt to bolster the fragile capacities of one parent by refusing any contact with the other. He concludes by describing that his attention to the inner realities of these individuals is what he uniquely brings as a psychoanalyst to these often behaviorally tumultuous human tragedies.

Our Guest: Arthur Leonoff, Ph.D., is a psychologist and Supervising & Training Analyst of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. He is a past president and recipient of his Society’s Citation of Merit. He is also an Honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Leonoff was the first president of the North American Psychoanalytic Confederation. He currently is chair of the IPA Committee International New Groups.Dr. Leonoff has maintained a private psychoanalytic practice for more than four decades. He is an active clinician, teacher, supervisor, and presenter, as well as author. Recently he has contributed to two edited volumes, Dear Candidate and Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads. He has written on diverse subjects of clinical interest, including the kindling of metaphor in recovering from the impact of early complex psychic trauma.In addition to his psychoanalytic practice, Dr. Leonoff has worked extensively as a consultant and expert witness to the Canadian courts on the confluence of psychopathology and high-conflict divorce. He is the author of three books in this field, most recently The Good Divorce (2015) and When Divorces Fail, Disillusionment, Destructivity & High Conflict Divorce (2021), The Good Divorce has been revised and republished as The Ethical Divorce, which is available from Friesen Press.

Recommended Readings:

Leonoff, A (2021). When Divorces Fail: Disillusionment, Destructivity, and High Conflict Divorce. Rowman & Littlefield.

Leonoff, A. (2021) The Ethical Divorce: A Psychoanalyst’s Guide to Separation, Divorce, and Childcare. Friesen Press.

Fidler, B. and Bala, N. (2020). Conclusions, concepts, controversies, and conundrums of “alienation:” Lessons learned in a decade and reflections on challenges ahead, Family Court Review, 58(2). 576-603.

Greenberg, L., Fidler, B. and Saini, M.A. (Eds). (2019). Evidence-Informed Interventions for Court-Involved Families: Promoting Healthy Coping and Development, Oxford University Press.

Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (R.A. Cohen, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.

Wallerstein, J. and Kelly, J. (1980). Surviving the Breakup: How children and Parents cope with Divorce. Basic Books.

"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).

“The basic principle in defense analysis is that one approaches what is going on right now -  it's an experience-near technique. You don't make conjectures about what would be called experience-distant phenomenon until you have a lot of material, a lot of knowledge about the patient. As the treatment goes on you really stick with what the patient is doing right now.”

Episode Description: Leon shares with us what he sees as the fundamental method of analytic treatment, which "regardless of the manifest theoretical orientation of the therapist ... are effectively utilizing the technique of interpreting defenses against unwelcome affects." He emphasizes the importance of being interested in the patient's defenses and less so the warded-off content. We consider the term 'protection' in place of 'defense'; how these interventions are an amalgam of clarification and interpretation; and the source of the bad reputation that attaches to the concept of 'defense interpretation’. He shares with us how this approach links with the neurosciences and the concept of implicit emotion regulation. We discuss the work of Berta Bornstein, who introduced the importance of defending against unpleasant affects. He discusses two cases of disruptive children and their use of aggression in an effort to avoid sadness and loneliness. We close with his sharing his view of our field and his conclusion that "analysis will survive - it's too powerful a tool."

Our Guest: 

Leon Hoffman, MD, is a psychiatrist and child and adolescent psychiatrist. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is the Co-Director of the Pacella Research Center of NYSI. Among many publications, he is co-author with Timothy Rice and Tracy Prout of Regulation Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C): A Psychodynamic Approach and with Timothy Rice Defense Mechanisms and Implicit Emotion Regulation: A Comparison of a Psychodynamic Construct with One from Contemporary Neuroscience. In 2022, he presented the Norbert and Charlotte Rieger Psychodynamic Psychotherapy lecture at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry on “Helping Parents Spare the Rod: Addressing Their Unbearable Emotions” based on a paper he authored with Tracy Prout. He presented the Paulina Kernberg Memorial Lecture at Weill Cornell Medicine Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Grand Rounds. On Regulation Focused Psychotherapy: An evidence-based psychodynamic treatment for children with disruptive behaviors. And The Bruce A. Gibbard Lectureship in Psychiatry, University of Vermont, Department of Psychiatry.

Linked Episode: 

 Episode 38: A Psychoanalyst Studies ‘Why is it easier to get mad than it is to feel sad?’ with Leon Hoffman

Recommended Readings:

1.      Hoffman, L. (2007) Do Children Get Better When We Interpret Their Defenses Against  Painful Feelings? Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 62:291-313.

2.      Hoffman, L. (2014).  Berta Bornstein’s Frankie: The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic to the Treatment of Children with Disruptive Symptoms. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 68:152-176

3.      Rice, T. R., & Hoffman, L. (2014). Defense mechanisms and implicit emotion regulation: a comparison of a psychodynamic construct with one from contemporary neuroscience. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62(4), 693-708. 

4.      Prout, T. A., Rice, T., Chung, H., Gorokhovsky, Y., Murphy, S., & Hoffman, L. (2021) Randomized controlled trial of Regulation Focused Psychotherapy for Children: A manualized psychodynamic treatment for externalizing behaviors. Psychotherapy Research, 32(5), 555-570. 

5.      Hoffman, L. (2020). How can I help you? Dimensional versus categorical distinctions in the assessment for child analysis and child psychotherapy. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 19(1), 1-15.

6.      Leon Hoffman, Tracy A. Prout, Timothy Rice & Margo Bernstein (2023): Addressing Emotion Regulation with Children: Play, Verbalization of Feelings, and Reappraisal, Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, DOI: 10.1080/15289168.2023.2165874

7.      Prout, T. A., Malone, A., Rice, T., & Hoffman, L. (2019). Resilience, defenses, and implicit emotion regulation in psychodynamic child psychotherapy. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 49(4). 235-244. 

8.      Hoffman, L., & Prout, T. A. (2020). Helping parents spare the rod: Addressing their unbearable emotions. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 73(1), 46-61. 

"He [Bernays] proposed to his uncle that he’d do a translation of this book that had been given to him and Freud, perhaps without thinking too much about it,  approved the idea.  Bernays went about hiring a translator who was a psychology Ph.D. student that he found at Columbia University and he got Stanley Hall to write an introduction for what was published in 1920 as ‘A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis’. Now, shortly after this happened,  Freud had second thoughts about authorizing Bernays to translate his lectures, particularly as he had been working with his trusted colleague Ernest Jones on translations.  But by the time Freud wired Bernays to try to stop this publication, Bernays said that it was already too late and that the advertisements had already been placed and the publication was proceeding. Bernays assured Freud that it would be all right and he also assured him that he would get fame and glory and also substantial recompense for the publication. Freud was not too happy about this, nor was Ernest Jones, and when they finally  received the translation that Bernays had done they were particularly upset." 

Episode Description: We begin by describing the complicated bloodline between Freud and Edward Bernays - Bernays' mother was Freud's sister, and his father was the brother of Freud's wife. We then consider Bernays' role as the founder of the field of public relations. This has led many to inaccurately see him as a manipulator of the masses through the use of his uncle's theories. In fact, Bernays served as the pro-bono literary agent for Freud's books in the US which contributed to his popularization and to providing vital financial support during the years of Austria’s hyperinflation. We also discuss Bernays' role in the American pro-democracy movement, which was designed to counter the influence of Nazi propaganda in the years before WWII. We close with Joseph's describing his interest in this subject and his wish to "set the record straight" about Edward Bernays.

Our Guest: Joseph Malherek is a historian who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He was the Junior Botstiber Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, and he has been a Fulbright Visiting Professor of Austrian-American Studies at the University of Vienna. He has published widely on the topics of transatlantic migration, twentieth-century intellectual history, and the history of capitalism and consumer culture. His book, Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968, was recently published by Central European University Press.

Linked Paper: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/pah.2023.0452?journalCode=pah

Recommended Readings:

Freud’s American Nephew: Edward Bernays and the Selling of Psychoanalysis. 

Psychoanalysis and History 25, no. 1 (2023): 59–78.

Bernays, Edward L. (1923) Crystallizing Public Opinion. New York: Boni and Liveright.

Bernays, Edward L. (1965) Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Freud, Sigmund. (1920) A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. New York: Horace Liveright.

Gay, Peter. (1988) Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton.

Lippmann, Walter. (1922) Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Roudinesco, Élisabeth. (2016) Freud: In His Time and Ours. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

"Analytic candidates in training struggle with the fact that you tend to get thrown into the deep water before you really know what you're doing. Then, the anxious candidate will typically struggle to find something to hang on to - and it's much easier to hang on to a theory than it is to hang on to the subtle and irreproducible nuances of clinical work. Candidates tend to latch on to theory and displace their anxiety about what they don't know to the theory, which is at least in principle knowable in order to calm down  their anxiety about the actual interpersonal event that is the therapy.”

Episode Description: We begin with explaining that our title Technique is Character Rationalized recognizes that we refer to colleagues based on our sense of their character not based on their theoretical orientations. We discuss the use and misuse of theory to offer analysts distancing structures when faced with the uncertainty of intensive treatment. Lee distinguishes between neurotic and perverse mental processes and considers the differing clinical challenges faced with each. We take up sado-masochism as object-preserving, the use of aggression to defend against tenderness, and how privileging psychic reality may for some result in confusing fantasy with reality. We close with Lee sharing with us his personal analytic journey and his reflections on our field now that he is retired.

Our Guest: Lee Grossman, MD trained at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis where he was a training and supervising analyst for 40 years. He served on the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly for fifteen years, and currently serves on the board of JAPA. He is also an exhibiting photographer whose work can be seen at www.leegrossman.net. He and his wife, Jan Baeuerlen, have both just retired from clinical work. They live in Oakland, CA with an English bulldog named Frank.

Recommended Readings:

Bateson, Gregory (2002) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences. Hampton Press.

Erikson, Erik H. (1963). Childhood and Society, 2nd edition. NY: W.W. Norton.

Friedman, Lawrence (1988). The Anatomy of Psychotherapy. Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press

Greenberg, J.R. (1981). Prescription or description: the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Contemp. Psychoanal. 17: 235-57.

Hoffman, I.Z. (1983). The patient as interpreter of the analyst’s experience. Contemp. Psychoanal. 19:389-422.

Levenson, E.A. (1988). Real frogs in imaginary gardens. Facts and fantasies in psychoanalysis. Psa. Inquiry 8:552-67.

Loewald, H.W. (1952). The problem of defense and the neurotic interpretation of reality. Int. J. Psa 33:444-449.

Reed, G. S. (1987) Rules of Clinical Understanding in Classical Psychoanalysis and in Self Psychology: A Comparison. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 35:421-446

Upcoming Episode: Freud's Nephew and the Creation of 'Buzz' for Psychoanalysis with Joseph Malherek, Ph.D. (Raleigh, NC)

"When you're with a patient you take all that you know in your head, all the theory, and you throw it away. You have to listen to the patient and then maybe afterward something becomes clear - you use that ‘in-between’ as a way maybe in the next session. But if you were sitting there and thinking: ‘Now the patient is in the paranoid/schizoid position…’ that would be disastrous. You have to listen with your guts, your emotions, your intellect, and your body, in order to understand what is going on in a particular moment, in a particular session. Then later on you might be able to make sense of it through theory and through supervision." 

Episode Description: We begin with considering the cultural and linguistic contributions to intrapsychic processes and the analytic encounter. Jeanne shares with us her life story involving her 'temporary' visit to California, which became a 37-year stay that included her becoming a psychoanalyst. We discuss the meaning to her and to her analysands of her being German and how she worked with that clinically. She moved to Vienna and began teaching and practicing analysis there, enabling her to compare the two psychoanalytic cultures and methods of practice. We also take up the importance of the German language as the vehicle through which Freud discovered the unconscious. Jeanne concludes by sharing with us her ongoing sense of feeling like an immigrant, a state of mind inherent in the analytic engagement. 

Linked Episode: Episode 121: Polish Psychoanalysis, Ukraine and Intergenerational Trauma with Edyta Biernacka (Krakow) – IPA Off the Couch

Our Guest:

Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein is a psychoanalyst living and working in Vienna, Austria. She is a member and training analyst at the Wiener Arbietskreis für Psychoanalyse, where she is a member on the Board. She is also the head of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Vienna Sigmund Freud Museum, where she had also been the Fulbright Freud Visiting Scholar in Psychoanalysis in 2008. Prior to moving to Vienna, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein was the past president and supervising and personal analyst at PINC (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California). She is still on the faculty at PINC and at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, New York, and teaches at the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse (WAP) She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts, and film. Her most recent publications include, Beyond the Bedrock in Good Enough Endings, (2010) ed. by Jill Salberg, The Space of Transition between Winnicott and Lacan in Between Winnicott and Lacan (2011) ed. by Lewis Kirshner, and the section on Jacques Lacan in The Textbook of Psychoanalysis as well as Living between two languages: A Bi-focal Perspective, in Immigration in Psychoanalysis, (2016) Dora, the unending and unraveling story, in Dora, Hysteria & Gender: Reconsidering Freud’s Case Study, 2018 and Unexpected antecedents to the concept of the death drive: a return to the beginnings, in Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive, in Theory, Clinical Practice and Culture. 2019, 55-68.

Her last publication, resulting from the 2022 EPF congress on the subject of Ideals, is entitled From Narcissus to Echo: The Imaginary Working under the Mask of the Symbolic.

Her book on Edouard Manet, Framing the Past and the Gaze, is forthcoming.

Recommended Readings:

Lots of Freud, over and over again.

Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu

Winnicott, several key essays, over and over again

Philip Sands, East / West Street and The Ratline

Francoise Davoine, History Beyond Trauma, Shandean Psychoanalysis

"I've long had concerns about the practice of psychoanalysis and that the theory underlying it has become a veritable Tower of Babel. We have these multiple views where everything is accepted as ‘psychoanalysis,’ but they really can't be because they're very different models and they call for very different things. I also feel that our field in general is drifting into sociology so that our national and international meetings feel like there is very little room for clinical discussions, and there are just so many clinical discussions that we need to have."

Episode Description: Fred's edited book Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads represents a 'state of the union' for our field. He has brought together contributions representing multiple points of view on a wide range of analytic topics, including those that are considered contentious. After he shares his purpose in compiling this work, we each read a paragraph which serves as a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging discussion. We cover definitions of analysis, the history of narcissistic defenses, the depth of analysis in contrast to more superficial approaches, the role of theory, listening to the impact of one's interventions, curriculum design and the intergenerational struggles around it, and the place of defense analysis. We conclude with Fred sharing with us his concerns for our future and his eagerness to continue to contribute to a depth understanding that can often offer profound relief of suffering to our patients.

Our Guest:

Fred Busch, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and has been invited to teach at many Institutes. He has published over 80 articles on psychoanalytic techniques and six books. His work has been translated into many languages, and he has been invited to present over 180 papers and clinical workshops nationally and internationally. His last five books are: Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind (2014); The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept (2019); Dear Candidate: Analyst from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education, and the Profession (2020); A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique (2021), Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads;: An International Perspective. The Ego and Id: 100 years Later, will appear later this year.

Linked Episode: Wisdom and Enthusiasm for Today's Candidates

Recommended Readings:

Bolognini, S. (1997) Empathy And ‘Empathism.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 78:279-293

Busch, F. (2013). Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind: Psychoanalytic Method and Theory. London: Routledge.

Busch, F. (2019). The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept. London: Routledge.

Da Rocha Barros, E. M. (1995) The Problem Of Originality And Imitation In Psychoanalytic Thought: International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76:835-843.

Diana Diamond, Frank E. Yeomans, Barry L. Stern, and Otto F. Kernberg. (2022). Treating Pathological Narcissism with Transference-Focused Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.

Gray, P. (1982) "Developmental Lag" in the Evolution of Technique for Psychoanalysis of Neurotic Conflict. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 30:621-655.

Joseph, B. (1985) Transference: The Total Situation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 66:447-454

Kris, A. (1982). Free Association. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.

Paniagua, C. (2001) The Attraction of Topographical Technique. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82:671-684

"They interviewed more than 6,000 American parents and their children from ages eight to thirteen. They wanted to identify what the perception and realities were of the parents' use of technology. It is important to know that about one-third of the children said that their parents spent equal or less time with them than in using their devices. Over half of the children felt that their parents check their devices too often and complained that their parents allow themselves to be distracted by the devices during conversation, something that made a third of them feel unimportant. Many parents too, when asked about their device usage, agreed that it was too frequent and many parents also worried about how this looked to the younger generation. Almost a third concluded that they did not set a good example for their children with their internet devices." 

Episode Description: We begin by distinguishing adult addiction to pornography from the situation of childhood overstimulation. Central to the child's experience of being able to psychically metabolize pornographic images is the presence of an adult who is able to recognize "the importance of his presence for the child, the value of their mutual contact so that they can together confront difficult questions and dilemmas." Indeed, Franco and Andrea define the traumatic aspect of pornography for children to be the lack of contact with an object, "a lack that renders impossible the working through of the [pornographic] solicitations." We discuss the three models that characterize parents' rule setting for their children - digital orphans, exiles and heirs - and we also address the meaning to the children of their parents' own dissociative over-involvement in screen watching. They end on an optimistic note finding that "we can view technological experiences as an opportunity to elaborate and construct shared meanings."

Our Guests:

Franco D’Alberton, Ph.D. is a psychologist and child and adolescent psychoanalyst, full member and training analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI/IPA). He worked in NHS services first as a psychologist in the field of child mental health then as consultant in Psychology at the Pediatric Department of S.Orsola University Hospital in Bologna (Italy). Initially focused on adults training in clinical psychology and psychotherapy, he has increasingly turned to children and adolescents and to family problems. He is currently working in private practice.

Andrea Scardovi MD, PHD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and full member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI/IPA). He worked in NHS services and at Bologna University, where for many years taught courses on communicative elements of psychotherapy. He developed a training method to improve interview skills of General Practitioners, which was adopted in various Italian regions. He has been a member of the editorial board of the Italian Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is currently working in private practice.

Linked Episode: Episode 103: Addictive Pornography: Psychoanalytic Considerations with Claudia Spadazzi, MD and Jose Zusman, MD – IPA Off the Couch

Recommended Readings:

Balint, M. (1969) Trauma and Object Relationship. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 50:429-435

Benjamin, J., Atlas, G. (2015). The “Too Muchness” of Excitement: Sexuality in Light of Excess, Attachment, and Affect Regulation. Int. J. Psychoanal, 96(1):39-63.

Freud, S. (1895). Project for a Scientific Psychology. S. E., 1:281-391.

Freud, S. (1908). On the Sexual Theories of Children. S. E., 9:205-226.

Freud, S. (1924). The economic problem of masochism. In S. E., Vol. XIX, 155–70. London: Hogarth Press.

Dodes L. (2019) A general psychoanalytic theory of addiction. In: Savelle-Rocklin, Salman Akhtar, ed., Beyond the Primal Addiction. Food, Sex, Gambling, Internet, Shopping, and Work. Routledge, London.

Gilmore, K. (2017). Development in digital age. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 70(1):82-90.

Green, A. (2000) Time and Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects. London: Free Association Books, 2002, 95-96.

Lemma A., Caparrotta L. (2014). Psychoanalysis in the Technoculture Era. London: Routledge.

Marzi, A. (2013). Introduction. In Marzi, A. (ed.), Psychoanalysis, Identity, and the Internet: Explorations into Cyberspace. London: Karnac, 2016,XXXIII-L.

Tylim, I. (2017). Revisiting adolescents’ narcissism in the age of cyberspace. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 70(1):130-134.

Zusman J.A. (2021) Between Dependency and Addiction. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 74(1): 280-293.

"Some of the shared concepts - even words that psychoanalysis and musicians use - such as conflict, ambiguity, silences, dissonance, resolution or not, working through, is in the Mozart you've heard. What you hear in the very opening four measures was worked through this entire sonata, it was thematic. If we play the whole sonata, and even in the first movement, you get a taste of it. Those themes are present throughout the sonata just like in the patient’s associations and interactions with you -  we have music themes and we have core conflicts, and they get developed.” 

Episode Description: We begin by listening to the opening of Mozart's A minor sonata, performed by Professor Louis Nagel. Mozart wrote this during the time of his mother's death, and it was one of the very few instances of his utilizing a minor key. From that example, we explore the interface between the dynamic mind and the layering of classical music. Concepts of core conflict, displacement, and resolution represent important meanings in both fields. Julie shares clinical examples of how music enters her clinical space with her patients. She also shares with us her life story and how music played a central role in helping her negotiate tumultuous personal circumstances. She demonstrates what it means to be an ambassador for both music and psychoanalysis -  on and off  the couch.

Our Guest: Julie Jaffee Nagel, PhD is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and musician. She graduated from The Juilliard School, the University of Michigan, and The Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She has presented widely on Stage Fright, Careers in the Arts, #Me Too and Music Education, The Value of Music in Mental Life, and “Injustice, Oppression, and Prejudice As ‘Heard’” in Music.” Her fantasy dialogue, A Conversation Between Mozart and Freud, was performed in Steinway Hall, NYC, in February 2020. She is the author of Managing Stage Fright and Melodies of the Mind.

She has served as chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s discussion group Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Music, was a member of the Program Committee, Symposium Committee, and is currently Chair of the Ticho Award Committee. She has presented at The College Music Society, Music Teachers National Conference, and National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy, from whom she received their Distinguished Service Award. Additional Awards include two Nathan Segal Awards (MPI), The Karl Menninger Award, and the Ernst and Gertrude Ticho Award for contribution to psychoanalysis and music.

Her latest book, Career Choices in Music Beyond the Pandemic: Musical and Psychoanalytic Perspectives, offers unique musical and psychological perspectives on one of the most important decisions made in a musician’s (or anyone’s) lifetime: choosing a career.

She is in private practice in Dexter, Michigan.

Louis Nagel is Professor Emeritus of Piano at The University of Michigan School of Music Theatre and Dance and the winner of the Harold Haugh Award for Excellence in Teaching at The University of Michigan

Recommended Readings:

Anderson, E. (1966) The Letters of Mozart and His Family (Second Ed. in two volumes, completed by A. Hyatt King and Monica Carolan). London, Melbourne, Toronto: Macmillan and New New York: St. Martin's Press.

Barale, F. and Minazzi, V. 2008. Off the Beaten Track: Freud, Sound, and Music; Statement of a Problem and Some Historico-critical Notes, 89(5), October: 937-57.

Cheshire, N.M. (1996) The Empire of the Ear: Freud’s Problem with Music. Int. Journal of Psychoanalysis.77: 1177-78.

Feder, S. 1993. “Promissory Notes”: Method in Music and Applied Psychoanalysis, in S. Feder, R.L. Karmel, and GJ. Pollock (eds). Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music. Madison, CT. : International Universities Press. 3-19.

Feder, S., Karmel, and GJ. Pollock (eds) 1990 and 1993. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music.( Vols. 1 and 2) Madison, CT. : International Universities Press

Freud, S. (1914a). The Moses of Michelangelo. S.E.. XIII: 211-36.

Lipson.C. (2006) The Meanings and Functions of Music that Comes into One’s Head. Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 75 (3) 859-78.

McDonald, M. (1970). Transitional Tunes and Music Development. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. 25: 503-20.

Nagel, J.J. 2013. Melodies of the Mind. Routledge, London and New York.

Nagel, J.J. 2017 Managing Stage Fright: A Guide for Musicians and Music Teachers. Oxford University Press.

Nagel, J.J. 2022. Beyond the Consulting Room: How I Discovered “Heard” Immunity Through Music and Psychoanalytic Knowledge. The American Psychoanalyst.

Nagel, JJ. (2023) Career Choices in Music Beyond the Pandemic: Musical and Psychological Perspectives. Rowman and Littlefield. Lanham, Maryland.

Nagel, J.J. (2018) Music. Ch. 32. A Conversation Between Mozart and Freud. In Textbook of Applied Psychoanalysis, (Akhtar, S., and Twemlow, S. Eds.) London and New York. Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 2019. ( This Conversation was revised and performed at Steinway Hall, in New York City on February 13, 2020.)

Noy, P. 1966-1967 a,b,c,d The Psychodynamics of Music. Journal of Music Therapy, 3(4) :126- 34, 4(1);7-23,4 (2);45-51, 4(3);81-94, 4(4);117-25.

Polisi, J. 2005. The Artist as Citizen, New York. Amadeus Press

Ross, A. (2007) The Rest is Noise. New York. Farrar, Straus, and Giraux

Recordings:

Waltz from Gounod’s Faust (Liszt-Gounod-Nagel transcription) - Louis Nagel, Piano - live performance

Variations on a Theme of Beethoven for 2 Pianos, Op. 35 , Camille St. Saens- Julie and Louis Nagel - live performance

“A child [patient] makes a mistake, upsets things - one doesn't console or complain, but just reflects whatever the patient's affect was at that moment, such as, ‘that seems to bother you’ or ‘it's hard to put those two pieces together’- to just observe it, to not have an affective response of disgust or irritation. The same thing is true if a patient comes in bragging or talking about something that made them very proud - to acknowledge their being proud but to not get all excited. The kind of things that often these children who have a lot of difficulty due to parents’ narcissistic investment in them, and we're all narcissistically invested in our kids - they have a lot of trouble knowing what they really feel and what they really want. I think my non-judgmental, either positively judgmental or negatively judgmental attitude, allows them to begin to experience that what they're doing is what they are doing for themselves for some reason, not what they're doing for me or for the witness, that's an enormously important part.”  

Episode Description: We begin with Judy sharing her professional journey that led her to child analysis. She is active as a psychoanalytic clinician, supervisor, teacher, consultant, writer, and editor. We discuss four key papers of hers that study neutrality, enactments, informative experiences, and the role of attachment. Central to her writing and thinking is her curiosity about the inner lives of her patients, especially as action and interaction provide clues to that latent life. We discuss the analyst’s experience of ‘wearing the attributes’ that patients need to project onto us and tolerating the often deep discomfort in doing so. We consider how her model of therapeutic action, entailing surprise and changes in perceptual frame, does and doesn’t have some similarities to psychedelic-assisted therapy. We close with her sharing her analytic experiences with gender-conflicted boys and her hope for the future of our field. 

Our Guest: Judith Fingert Chused, MD, is an Emeritus Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Denver, Cleveland, and Seattle Institutes.  She is also a Clinical Professor of Behavioral Sciences and of Pediatrics at the George Washington School of Medicine. She is married for 57 years to a former nursery school and medical school classmate and has seven delightful, mischievous grandchildren.  

Recommended Readings: 

Chused, J. F. (2016) An Analyst's Uncertainty and Fear. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 85:835-850 

Chused, J. F. (2000) Discussion: A Clinician's View of Attachment Theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 48:1175-1187 

Chused, J. F. (1999) Male Gender Identity and Sexual Behaviour. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 80:1105-1117 

Chused, J. F. (1996) The Patient's Perception of the Analyst's Countertransference. Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis 4:231-253 

Chused, J. F. (1996) The Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis: Abstinence and Informative Experiences. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 44:1047-1071 

Chused, J. F. (1991) The Evocative Power of Enactments. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 39:615-639 

Chused, J. F. (1992) The Patient's Perception of the Analyst: The Hidden Transference. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 61:161-184 

Chused, J. F. (1990) Neutrality in the Analysis of Action-Prone Adolescents. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 38:679-704 

Chused, J. F. (1987) Idealization of the Analyst by the Young Adult. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 35:839-859 

Chused, J. F. (1982) The Role of Analytic Neutrality in the Use of the Child Analyst as a New Object. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 30:3-28 

“This is the first time that I really felt what is meant by cell relations. You have object relations and you have part-object relations and anxieties that are depressive and schizophrenic. But when I deal with primitive anxieties, I really felt cell relations. What I felt is that my cells were going beyond my skin and I felt that she felt that my cells were going beyond her skin. You have this diffuse transference and when you have this sort of transference it took me to prenatal life and biological life.  Also, I had all those theoretical people like Tustin, Meltzer, and Bion - they were all talking about that.” 

Episode Description: Shiri shares with us her journey from immunology to psychology to psychoanalysis. She brings her knowledge of immunologic processes to better grasp the internal mechanisms of the dynamic mind. She sees a relationship between the embryo's capacity to transform the mother's Natural Killer cells into a receptive matrix with later capacities for psychological maturation. We consider how this informed her work with a traumatized 4-year-old girl in a tumultuous analysis that demanded a great deal from each of them. We close with her sharing her vision for the future of psychoanalysis which hopefully will include ongoing collaboration with scientists from many disciplines. 

Our Guest: Shiri Ben Bassat is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. She supervises at Franz Brill Mental Health Center (Ramat Chen, Tel Aviv) and teaches in various programs in the Studying Center of The Israel Psychoanalytic Institute. Shiri previously studied biology and holds an MA degree in immunology. She is the recipient of the 24th Frances Tustin Memorial Prize (2021). 

Recommended Readings: 

EPIGENETICS 

Martin, S. (2014) R. Yehuda, N.P. Daskalakis, A. Lehrner, F. Desarnaud, H.N. Bader, I. Makotkine, J.D. Flory, L.M. Bierer, & M.J. Meaney (2014). Influences of maternal and paternal PTSD on epigenetic regulation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene in Holocaust survivor offspring. American Journal of Psychiatry 171:872-880. 

Karla Ramirez , Rosa Fernández , Sarah Collet , Meltem Kiyar Enrique Delgado-Zayas , Esther Gómez-Gil , Tibbert Van Den Eynde , Guy T'Sjoen , Antonio Guillamon , Sven C Mueller , Eduardo Pásaro (2021) Epigenetics Is Implicated in the Basis of Gender Incongruence: An Epigenome-Wide Association Analysis. Front Neurosci Aug 19; 15:701017 

PRIMITIVE ANXIETIES 

Durban, J. (2019) "“Making a person”: Clinical considerations regarding the interpretation of anxieties in the analyses of children on the autisto-psychotic spectrum" The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 100:5, 921-939. 

PRENATAL AND POSTNATAL 

Meltzer, D. & Williams, M. H. (1988) 2. Aesthetic Conflict: It’s Place in the Developmental Process. The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art, and Violence 146:7-33 

Bion, W. R. (1976) "On a quotation from Freud." In Clinical Seminars and Four Papers, Ed. F. Bion. Abingdon: Fleetwood Press, 1987. 

Joanna Wilheim (2004) The trauma of conception. Presented at a Meeting of the Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis of São Paulo (SBPSP) on October 7, 2004. 

Trnsformation of the mother's immune system. Mandelboim, O. et al’ (2006). Decidual NK cells regulate key developmental processes at the human fetal-maternal interface. Nature Medicine 12: 1065 – 1074. 

"[in the play Freud's Last Session]... with the sound of the bombers both men react as they did the first time - with fear. But this time instead of disguising it they admit to it. That admittance was the bond between them. Freud also was shaken by the whole experience. At the very end of the play, and repeatedly through the play, there were reports on the BBC about the war. The BBC at that point had a live orchestra, and when the news was finished the orchestra would jump in and play music until the next news bulletin. Every time the news was over, Freud immediately turned it off, so he didn’t have to listen to music. Lewis catches on to that at some point and he equates it with Freud's wall that he puts up to shield his emotions because he feels they are being manipulated. But at the very end of the play, after Lewis leaves, Freud listens to the radio and for the first time he doesn't turn off the music. The last image of the play is him just looking at the radio as if trying to really understand music and his own aversion to it.” 

Episode Description: 

The similarity is noted between the clinical encounter and the structure of Mark's play where there are two men in a room intensely engaging with each other. We discuss how the trajectory of the play, like in the consulting room, allows for the emergence of latent meanings to be revealed between Freud and Lewis. Mark shares with us what drew him to these two thinkers and how he created a storyline that would demonstrate the underlying emotional struggles of each, individually and together. It is set at the beginning of World War II, three weeks before Freud's death. The play touches on Freud's childhood, his intense relationship with his daughter Anna and his planned euthanasia. We listen to a reading of a piece of the play that entails a powerful encounter between the characters. Mark has adapted this play for the screen, starring Anthony Hopkins as Freud, that is currently being filmed. We close with his mentioning his fiction writing and an upcoming theatrical release The World's Happiest Man. 

Our Guest: 

Mark St. Germain writes for the stage, television, and film. He is a recipient of the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Off-Broadway Alliance Award. Mark has written the plays Freud’s Last Session (Best Play Award from the Off-Broadway Alliance), Camping with Henry and Tom, Forgiving Typhoid Mary (Time Magazine’s “Year’s Ten Best”), and Becoming Dr. Ruth, the story of Dr. Ruth Westheimer. A sampling of his other plays includes Best of Enemies, Ears on a Beatle, Scott and Hem, Dancing Lessons, and Eleanor. His play, The Happiest Man on Earth premieres in the summer of 2023 at the Barrington Stage Company. He has written a memoir, Walking Evil, and a thriller, The Mirror Man. His screen adaptation of his play Freud’s Last Session has begun filming. 

Recommended Reading: 

Gay, Peter: Freud: A Life for Our Time   

Jones, Ernest: The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud   

Green, Roger Lancelyn and Hooper, Walter: C. S. Lewis: A Biography   

Sayer, George: Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis   

St. Germain, Mark: The Mirror Man: A Thriller 

St. Germain, Mark: Walking Evil: How Man's Best Friend Became My Worst Enemy 

St. Germain, Mark: Becoming Dr. Ruth 

St. Germain, Mark: The God Committee 

"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

"I feel as a psychoanalyst one has to respond to the world. We can’t just simply remain in our consulting rooms although that has always been vitally important for my identity and thinking. We can’t turn a blind eye to what is going on in the world. There are a lot of awful things going on - a lot of genocides, a lot of similar kinds of processes that were seen in the Holocaust, that were seen in slavery, and they are continuing. We need to stand up, we need to say what’s going on, we need to tell people ‘Look, these are the elements.’ In America they came close to disaster with what happened with the capitol riots. We came close with populous movements here, but luckily our democratic structures have been fairly resilient. We have been able to stand up, with all this skepticism one may have, to some of these destructive forces. But other places are not so able to. It was a sense of I can’t simply keep quiet.” 

Episode Description: We begin with Roger's definition of evil, which references the destruction of the subjectivity of the 'other’. We consider the mutual influences of individual psychology and group forces that permit and encourage the degradation and annihilation of the scapegoated. The two examples that he addresses in his book are the Holocaust and British-American Slavery, acknowledging the similarities and differences between them. Roger considers the capacity to provide a "home for otherness" as a vital alternative to evil. We discuss the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France as an example of those who collectively provided such a home for Jews in World War II. We conclude with his sharing his personal and family story with the Holocaust, which informs his life's work as well as the origin of his last name. 

Our Guest: Dr. Roger Kennedy is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and an adult psychoanalyst. He was an NHS consultant in charge of the Family Unit at the Cassel Hospital for nearly thirty years before going into private practice twelve years ago. He was chair of the Child and Family Practice in Bloomsbury and is still a director there. 

His work includes being a training analyst and seeing adults for analysis and therapy, as well as children, families, and parents at his clinic. He is a past president of the British Psychoanalytical Society and is a frequent expert witness in the family courts. He has written fourteen books published on psychoanalysis, interdisciplinary studies, and child, family, and court work, as well as many papers. His previous IPA podcast on music is at http://ipaoffthecouch.org/2020/11/22/episode-72-the-musicality-of-psychoanalysis-and-the-psychoanalysis-of-music-with-roger-kennedy-md/ 

Film: Getting Away with Murder(s) 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5078614/ 

Recommended Readings: 

Bohleber, W. (2010). Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma. London: Routledge. 

Browning, C. (1992). Ordinary Men. New York: Harper. 

Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1990). Reflections of a Psychoanalyst Upon the Nazi Biocracy and Genocide. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 17: 22 167–176. 

Hyatt-Williams, A. (1998). Cruelty, Violence, and Murder. Northvale, NJ: 

Jason Aronson. 

Kennedy, R. (2022), The Evil Imagination, Understanding and Resisting Destructive Forces. London: Phoenix Books. 

Mitscherlich, A., & Mitscherlich, M. (1967). The Inability to Mourn. B. Placzek (Trans.). New York: Grove, 1975. 

Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press. 

Thomas, L. M. (1993). Vessels of Evil. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University 

Press. 

Warnock, B. (2020). Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust. London: Weiner Holocaust Library. 

"Psychoanalysis is a translation of what I call in Spanish, Psicoanalisis Criollo, which means that we are hybrid cultures in Latin America, and that is something that we should never forget. We have been acting in the Psychoanalytical Society for so long as if we were living in some big modern city of the first world, like London, Paris, San Francisco, New York.  I think that this ignoring or even denial of the fact that we are not there, we live in societies which are in many ways different than societies from the first world and we have to take that into account."  

Episode Description: We begin with a description of ‘Psicoanalisis Criollo  - hybrid psychoanalysis,’ "psychoanalysis by and for Latin Americans." We discuss the ways that the analyst’s awareness of cultural factors impacts the clinical approach to deepening the patient’s self-awareness. Jorge presents vignettes where the appearance of socially defined similarities and differences were important elements to address in the treatment. He highlights the delicacy of our culturally colored countertransferences. He shares with us details about his 28-year weekly newspaper column as well as his 330,000 Twitter followers (@jotabruce). We close with his recounting his early history and its contribution to his current interests.  

Our Guest: Jorge Bruce, Licensed in Humanities and Psychology by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. DEA (Master’s degree) by the University of Paris. Member of the Peruvian Society of Psychoanalysis – SPP. Author of several books - the most recent was the new edition of Nos Habíamos Choleado Tanto: Psicoanálisis y Racismo, (2019). Weekly columnist of the national newspaper La República. Former member of the IPA Board (2 periods). Former member of the IPA Executive Committee. Former chair of CAPSA. Former chair of the scientific committee for the IPA Congress on The Infantile. Currant chair of the liaison committee of a Mexican provisional society (ING). 

Jorge Bruce will be a Keynote Speaker at the July 2023 IPA Meetings in Cartagena. Further details at www.ipa.world/cartagena 

Recommended Readings: 

Las Partes en Conflicto: Psicoanálisis, Conflicto y Alteridad. (2015)USMP. Lima, Bruce, Jorge. 

Penser/rêver 21 (2012). Le substitut de Dieu. Pp. 171 – 184. Editions de l’Olivier. Paris. 

Nos habíamos choleado tanto. Psicoanálisis y Racismo, Bruce Jorge. Penguin Random House (Taurus).(2019). Lima.   

Delirio Americano: Una historia cultural y política de América Latina.Granés, C. (2022).  Penguin Random House (Taurus). 

Psychoanalytic views from afar. Lemlij, M. (2022).  Cauces. 

Aires de familia: Cultura y sociedad en América Latina. Monsiváis, C. (2002).ANAGRAMA. 

Freud and the Non-European. Said, E. (2003). Verso. London. 

“Unconsciously, or sometimes just without really focusing on it, we’re always responding to the musicality of the patient’s voice. I think that careful listening and study of opera really hones our ability to do that. We pay more attention to it and we can potentially make not just unconscious use of it but also conscious use of it. As we listen to how the music itself is conveying the story that the patient is telling, it’s not necessarily the same story as the words are telling. What is often interesting is that the musicality of the voice, whether in opera or in the consulting room, often is at variance with the spoken text and that opens up interesting opportunities for generating meaning.” – S.G. 

“The tendency is first to think that the text that is being sung is all important and that the melody and the orchestration behind it are supporting the purpose of the aria. That is generally true in popular Italian operas where the music for the orchestra and the melody seems to support the overall message. Because of Wagner’s influence in wanting to have an orchestration that actually comments on the action on stage as a second opinion, you get into more complex music where often the orchestra is playing something that reminds the listener of a previous theme, a motif, that complexifies the actual aria being sung.” – L.R. 

Episode Description: Our conversation revolves around the idea that appreciating opera can “correct the historical tilt towards the verbal text” that often simplifies analytic listening. Steve and Lee use opera to understand universal unconscious themes that are often represented in opera. They suggest as well that it can alert the analytic listener to multiple levels of meanings that can be represented in the orchestration and melodies in addition to the manifest libretto. The ‘case example’ is The Magic Flute where the trajectory of male development is demonstrated through the evolution of maternal and paternal imagoes over the course of the storyline. They use musical excerpts to demonstrate different character’s affect states that enable the listener to experience their increasing complexity. We close with Steve and Lee sharing some of their own life journeys that have brought them to a place of finding great pleasure in this art form. 

Our Guests: 

Steven Goldberg, M.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He is currently an Associate Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and has for many years co-chaired Opera on the Couch, a collaboration between the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Opera. He has published on a variety of theoretical and technical issues in psychoanalysis as well as on psychoanalytic approaches to opera. 

Lee Rather, Ph.D. is on the faculties of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, where he is also a personal and supervising analyst. He has published and presented on a wide range of topics including the integration of psychoanalytic theories, the existential dynamics of desire, mourning, and acceptance, and the unconscious aspects of creativity in drama, literature, and music. He is in private practice in San Francisco. 

Recommended Readings: 

Bollas, C. (1999). Figures and their functions. In The mystery of things (pp. 35-46). New York: Routledge. 

Britton, R. (1989). The missing link: Parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex. InJ. Steiner (Ed.), The Oedipus complex today: Clinical implications. London: Karnac. 

Chailey, J. (1992). The Magic Flute Unveiled: Esoteric symbolism in Mozart’s Masonic Opera. Vermont: Inner Traditions International. 

Goldberg, S. (2011). Love, loss, and transformation in Wagner's Die Walkure. Fort Da 17:53-60 

Grier, F. (2019). Musicality in the consulting room. International Journal of 

Psychoanalysis,100: 827-885. 

Frattaroli, E. J. (1987). On the Validity of Treating Shakespeare's Characters as if They Were Real People. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Volume 10(3):407-437. 

Freud, S. (1914). The Moses of Michelangelo. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.) The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, (Vol 13 pp. 210-241). 

Freud, S. (1928). Dostoevsky and Parricide. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.) The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, (Vol21, pp. 175-198). 

Knoblauch, S. (2000). The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue. Hillside, N.J. and London: The Analytic Press. 

Nagel, J. (2013). Melodies of the mind: Connections between psychoanalysis and music. New York: Routledge. 

Purcell, S. (2019). Psychic Song and Dance: Dissociation and Duets in the analysis of trauma. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 88: 315-34 

Rather, L. (2008). Reuniting the psychic couple in analytic training and practice: Theoretical reflections. Psychoanalytic Psychology. Vol 25, Number 1, pp. 99-109. 

"The psychoanalytic frame I have built in myself helps me to find a way to not go too near and not be too distant to a person. It is other than what we learn when we learn to be psychoanalysts. Then we have the opportunity to feel in a room where we are not in danger - it’s more the patient that feels in danger. He is coming and he has fears - but we, knowing our room, our couch, we don’t have many fears. But if you work as I did in an open field, in different houses, in different hospitals, in different orphanages, you are first full of fear and at the same time very curious about what happens and what can happen. It's not the same as if you are in your own practice. One of the most important things I had was my psychoanalytic setting in myself - in myself, not in the room in which I work. I can find a way that doesn’t bring too much fear to the patient and at the same time finds some way to get nearer to him, to his inner problems than if I was just a friend or a religious woman."

Episode Description: We begin by discussing the depth of human pain that Barbara encountered in her work in the poorest areas of Eastern Africa. She describes how essential her psychoanalytic sensibility was to enable her attunement to the closeness/distance space that was so important for mutual safety and understanding. She gives examples of the all-encompassing role of the Koran in those with whom she worked as well as the lack of a subjective self in many of the individuals she encountered. We learn of the effects of genital mutilation and the various reactions she had in seeing such suffering. We close with her sharing with us a bit of her personal story that has led her to this work.

Our Guest: Dr. phil. Barbara Saegesser is a training analyst with the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the IPA. She is president of the commission treating ethical problems in the Swiss Society of Psychoanalysis. Since 2005 she has worked part-time in Eastern Islamic African cities: Alexandria, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Hawassa, Djibouti, Kampala, and Zanzibar. Her work has been in orphanages, with street boys, in baby shelters, psychiatric hospitals, and maternity wards for genitally mutilated women.

“When I first started teaching it was most often done through theory, and teaching these complicated words with hard-to-understand concepts. It never made sense to me, to be honest, as a student myself. So, when I began teaching, I would tell stories whether they were about my own life or about my children as a way to express the idea of whatever the concept was. I found that the students became so engaged and interested, and it made sense to them. I think it also made it less frightening when they heard these diagnoses and different terms that scared them. Whatever the concept was I wanted to normalize it and let everyone know that these are experiences we all have. I think it works well for teaching and it’s been fun when I run into a student even 25 years later who says: ‘Oh! I remember that story.” – KM 

“Students are overwhelmed with how much they are learning; they want to know what to say - looking for a kind of formula for that. I think the stories help to show how many different kinds of situations one can encounter with the work and what is happening in the course of a day and how spontaneous an intervention might be. When you are talking about learning to play a musical instrument rather than the theory, we are also learning to listen to the music. I think the stories offer a way of learning how to listen in the layers that an analyst does.” – AA 

Episode Description: We begin by outlining the challenges we face in teaching an affective process while focusing on conceptual abstractions. It's akin to teaching how to play a musical instrument by studying music theory - both are important, but theory won't teach musicality. Kerry and Anne use storytelling as a vehicle to demonstrate the dynamic process as it lives in our everyday lives. We learn from the lessons in the stories as well as from learning to listen to the melodies. They each read their stories and we consider the presence of manifest and latent meanings in what we hear. We are also alerted to the essential role of the therapist's personal responses to the clinical material and with that the childhood memories that are often evoked. We close with their sharing with us something of their backgrounds that have led them to this work as well their involvement in the New Directions in Writing program.  

Our Guests: Anne Adelman, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and Training Analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and the Contemporary Freudian Society. She is the co-editor of the JAPA book review section and launched a feature column called 'Why I write’. She is co-chair of the New Directions in Writing program and maintains a private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland. 

Her books include Psychoanalytic Reflections on Parenting Teens and Young Adults: Changing Patterns of Modern Love, Loss, and Longing (2018), The Therapist in Mourning: From Faraway Nearby with Kerry Malawista (2013) and Wearing my Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories, with Kerry Malawista and Catherine Anderson (2011), When the Garden Isn’t Eden (2022). 

Kerry L. Malawista, Ph.D. is a training and supervising analyst at the Contemporary Freudian Society and a Board Member at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She is co-chair of New Directions in Writing and founder of the recent project The Things They Carry – offering virtual writing workshops for healthcare and frontline workers across the country. She is permanent faculty at the Contemporary Freudian Society and teaches widely. Her essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and The Boston Globe, to name a few. She is the co-author of The Therapist in Mourning: From Faraway Nearby with Kerry Malawista (2013), Wearing my Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories,(2011), When the Garden Isn’t Eden (2022), and Who’s Behind the Couch (2017,). Her first novel Meet the Moon was released in September 2022. 

"It seemed to me in my training, also in my scholarly pursuits, that desire did not have conceptual status in most analytic clinical theory. Most traditions did not have a way of talking about the analyst’s motivations with the exception of the well-worn ideas about the analyst’s ‘blind spots’. But in terms of specific motivations, we just didn’t have a way to think about them. Yet it seemed to me that over and over again, especially around the thorny problem of clinical impasses and iatrogenic resistances caused by the analyst’s activity, that the analyst’s intention and desire was directly at play in those impasses. But we have no way to talk about it."  

Episode Description: We begin by discussing Mitchell's notion of the analyst's desire. We consider its relation to wishes and healing which leads us to consider analytic listening. He embraces the metaphor of the innkeeper who asks, “What brings you here?” Mitchell shares his thoughts on reverie and projective identification which he feels are overvalued as dependable sources of information on the inner life of a patient. We discuss the usefulness of behavior change preceding insight and Lacan's notion of dual-relation resistance. We close with his chapter on termination and with his sharing poignant aspects of his childhood that open the book in Chapter One. 

Our Guest: Mitchell Wilson, MD is a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, writer, editor and teacher. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Wilson has published fiction, literary criticism, and papers on the history of American psychiatry and the DSM. He has practiced and taught psychoanalysis in the Bay Area since 1990. His psychoanalytic writings have cohered around a theory of ethics, desire, and the psychoanalytic process. His book, The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice, was published in 2020. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He is in private practice and leads study groups in Berkeley, California. 

Recommended Readings: 

Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond Doer and Done to: an Intersubjective View of Third-ness. Psychoanal. Q., 73:5-46. 

Chetrit-Vatine, V. (2014). The Ethical Seduction of the Analytic Situation: The Feminine-Maternal Origins of Responsibility for the Other. London: Karnac. 

Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter. New York: Norton. 

Lear, J. (2003). The Idea of a Moral Psychology: The Impact of Psychoanalysis on Philosophy in Britain. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84:1351–1361. 

Wilson, M. (2020). The Analyst's Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice. Bloomsbury Academic Press. 

JAPA Section: Ethical Implications of the Analyst as Person—December 2016 

–– Kite, J.V. The Fundamental Ethical Ambiguity of the Analyst as Person. 

–– Morris, H. The Analyst’s Offer. 

–– Wilson, M. The Ethical Foundation of Analytic Action. 

–– Kattlove, S. Acknowledging the ‘Analyst as Person’: a Developmental Achievement. 

–– Moss, D. Me Here, You There––Now what? Commentary on Kite, Morris, Wilson, and Kattlove. 

"During the treatment they start to think about their family, they want to understand what really happened to their parents that made them such monsters towards their own children? They start to look for the origins of their family and the history of the family and they found transgenerational traumas from both sides - family members who were victims and family members who were persecutors. This is something on the personal level we have to live with all the time. When you can read the memoirs of different people you can also find both sides - the people who realize that in their family were the secrets connected with the fact that they were Jews and they had to hide their identity and until now they are afraid to speak openly about it. And the part of completely delayed history, like what happened to the properties of the family, how the family got this house after the Second World War."  

Episode Description: We begin with a conversation on the current status of the Polish Psychoanalytic Society. Edyta shares with us encouraging information on the recent increase in analytic candidates and the abundance of patients. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she describes the awakening of historical trauma from Poland's history of being invaded. We learn of the arrival of 7 million Ukrainian refugees into Poland with over 3 million staying. She feels that the spirit of reparation for past destructiveness has contributed to the considerable generosity that Poles have shown to those in need despite a history of cruelty between Poland and Ukraine. We discuss the presence in patients' minds of secretive pasts from World War II - that of victims and persecutors. She uses the image of the Dybbuk to characterize a common mysterious experience of being possessed by the ghosts of the dead. We conclude optimistically that perhaps we are seeing for this moment in Polish history an improved trajectory of human decency. 

Our Guest: Edyta Biernacka is a psychoanalyst, vice-president of the Polish Psychoanalytical Society, supervisor and training psychotherapist for Polish Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy Society, therapist and supervisor of Personality Disorders’ Treatment Ward in Psychiatric Babinski Clinic in Krakow where she works with adults in private practice.  

"Aren't these daughters of Persia retelling that myth [Shahnameh] as we speak - they put their hair down, Rudabeh put her hair down. This time maybe from this union there will now be a baby girl that will be born. This new epic female hero will transform this land. Something has happened - it’s an event, and whether we like it or not there is going to be a before and after. We observe the best of Rudabeh’s daughter in every single one of these girls. We know in psychoanalysis that these things are not something that can just happen - that the birth of the subject is a process and this birth of Rudabeh’s daughter has been long overdue. It has been a long time in the making, and I am sorry…I get very emotional, but I look forward to her becoming."  

Episode Description: We begin by acknowledging the political turmoil currently surrounding and impacting our conversation about psychoanalysis in Iran. We discuss the nature of foreignness both as a geographical entity and an intrapsychic experience. Gohar recognizes the essential subversive spirit of discovering one's authentic voice and challenges efforts to homogenize one's identity in an artificial search for sameness. Tolerating discomfort is for her a hallmark of analytic maturation. We discuss the Blues which contain sorrow and promise -"it lives on the edge of falling into melancholy." We learn that Freud was translated into Farsi as early as 1906 and that Gohar was a founder of the Freudian Group of Tehran. We close with hopes for a future inspired by the courage of the young women of today with conversations freed from concerns about safety. 

Our Guest: Gohar Homayounpour, PsyD is a psychoanalyst and author. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Italian Psychoanalytical society, and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. She is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, of which she is also the founder and past president. She is also a member of the scientific board at the Freud Museum in Vienna, and of the IPA group Geographies of Psychoanalysis. 

Her first book, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (2012) won the Gradiva award and has been translated into many languages including French, German, Italian, Turkish, and Spanish. Her latest book is titled Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning (2022). 

Recommended Readings: 

Homayounpour, Gohar.  Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,2012). 

Dislocated Subject, edited by Preta, Lorena (ed.), Geographies of Psychoanalysis, Mimesis International, 2018 

Geographies of Psychoanalysis (Encounters Between Cultures In Tehran), edited by Preta, Lorena (ed.), Mimesis International, 2015. 

Busch, Fred. A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique, selected papers on Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 2021. 

Bolognini, Stefano. Vital Flows between the Self and Non-Self: The Interpsychic. Routledge, 2022. 

"I started with an analyst right as I was ending residency and starting the fellowship in Behavioral Neurology and Movement Disorders. It was right in this transition time, and over time it transitioned into a psychoanalysis, and I think it served a number of functions. There was something about the way of exploring what was going on, trying to get to the bottom of it, trying to understand it, trying to understand oneself with another person, that I think was closer to what I was trying to get to originally. There was also something about him, my analyst, that seem so…calm… but it’s not quite calm, something related to satisfied that I thought I was missing. What I was doing was good, and we can all work hard and do a lot of things, and there are a lot of things you could do. But somehow the fit wasn’t right - I was forcing a fit of some kind or trying to turn something into something that would be a better fit and working pretty hard at that. There was something about his way that made me feel like ‘maybe I could feel like that in my career.’" — RG 

"I went to therapy because I thought I needed help. It was with a psychoanalyst, and we met two sessions a week, so it wasn’t psychoanalysis yet. The thing that I found most exciting with him was that it was a different kind of thinking. I remember sitting in a session and realized that he was thinking totally different from me, and it was so exciting, so overwhelming, a little frightening but something that I actually found an inclination to think like that. I remember that in one of the sessions I had the image of memory as bits on a line, and I understood that he didn’t think like that. For him, memory fragments are a conglomerate of these bits together, like grapes together, it was not linear. I was really amazed and excited by this. During the years when I really started the analysis, I found out that this kind of thinking can really be influential and make a change in my life as a patient and in my life as a therapist." — IB 

Episode Description: Iftah and Rachel share their pre-medicine life stories and describe those factors that contributed to their pursuing medicine and neurology. They both trained in Behavioral Neurology in an effort to reach more deeply into the personal experiences of their patients. Informed by their own analytic treatments they concluded that they were seeking something deeper than neurology could offer them. Training in psychoanalysis allowed them to integrate their studies of the mind with their prior work with the brain - an integration that had its limitations as well as insights. We discuss the challenges of having differing perspectives on how to encounter clinical phenomena. We close with their sharing with us how they bring their analytic minds back to neurology in leading Balint-type groups for neurology residents - a lovely application of analysis off the couch. 

Our Guests: Iftah Biran, MD, a psychiatrist, and a neurologist with a subspecialty in Behavioral Neurology. He recently finished his training in psychoanalysis and joined the Israeli Psychoanalytic Association as a member. He works part-time in his private practice where he mainly practices analysis. In the last years, he’s been working in the department of Neurology at Tel Aviv Medical Center, a tertiary hospital, as a liaison psychiatrist – neuropsychiatrist, and behavioral neurologist. There Dr. Biran mostly takes care of patients with conversion disorders. He’s the co-editor of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis. Dr. Biran is now completing a bachelor's degree in philosophy and literature at the Open University of Israel. 

Rachel Gross, MD. Prior to becoming a psychoanalyst, Dr. Gross began her career as a neurologist. As a member of the neurology faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, she specialized in the care of patients with Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and other neurodegenerative conditions. She also served as co-director of the Penn neurology residency training program. Dr. Gross has a private practice in Philadelphia where she provides psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and medication management. She enjoys teaching, mentoring, and supervising trainees in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy. She also facilitates a group to support the emotional well-being and professional development of neurology residents at the University of Pennsylvania. 

"I feel very often that I can detect when people are doing case presentations, this ubiquitous tendency to not bother about the body. At a very superficial level it is accepted that we run around in bodies. What is actually a slightly deeper idea is that we run around in bodies, but our minds couldn’t have any function at all if our other parts of our functional systems weren’t also working, So the body and the mind of course are deeply interconnected. We do know that too, that’s not news, but it constantly becomes eliminated."  

Episode Description: We begin with an overview of Rosemary's longstanding interest in the role of bodies and how they make their presence and meaning known in the clinical encounter. She discusses the analytic scotoma when it comes to the woman's body especially when it involves pregnancy and childbirth. We consider conflicts over being aware of and speaking freely about the analyst's body and what that is like for both parties. She shares her deep pleasure in the writings and person of Hans Loewald and what it has meant to her to be a physician. We consider how the sublimated role of a father's sexual arousal serves as an aid in his child's individuation. We close with Rosemary sharing her view of our field's past and some aspects of her personal journey.   

Our Guest: Rosemary H. Balsam F.R.C.Psych (London), M.R. C. P. (Edinboro), (originally from Belfast, N. Ireland), is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in Yale Medical School; staff psychiatrist in the Yale Department of Student Mental Health and Counseling, and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, New Haven, Conn. Her special interests are female gender developments; young adulthoods; the body in psychic life; the work of Hans Loewald. Dr. Balsam is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Quarterly and Imago and is a past co-editor of the Book Review Section of JAPA with her husband, Paul Schwaber. Her most recent book is Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis (2012, Routledge); and her latest book review (2021) At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva by Alice Jardine. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 102:629-634. She is on the executive board of the newly inaugurated “Loewald Center,” a joint organization between IPTAR and the WNEIP. Her honors include 2018, winning the Sigourney Award for excellence in the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (she was the first woman in the USA to receive this prize.) 

Recommended Readings: 

Balsam, R.M (2012) Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis London, New York Routledge 

Balsam, R. H (2013) (Re)membering the Female Body in Psychoanalysis: Childbirth JAPA Volume 61: 3 pp. 446 - 470. 

Balsam, R.H. ((2015) The War on Women in Psychoanalytic Theory Building: Past to Present Psychoanal Study Child 69, 83-107. 2015. 

Balsam, R.H. (2019) The Natal Body and its Confusing Place in Mental Life: J,Amer.Psyoanal.Assn 67.1 pp.15- 36 

Balsam, R.H. (2017) Modern Gender Flexibility: Pronoun Changes and the Body’s Activities. Ch 4 In Vaia Tsolas and C. Anzieu Premmeurer (eds.) A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World: On The Body London, New York Routledge. 

Kristeva J. (1980) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez New York: Columbia University Press 1980). 

Toronto, E, Ponder, J, Davisson, K, KellyM.(eds) (2017) A Womb of Her Own: Women’s Struggle for Sexual and Reproductive Autonomy, London, New York Routledge. 

"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.

"I think that writing also is among the things that help me think this through and get there. When I finished my degree, I was actually very pessimistic - I had no idea that at close to age 55-56 that a psychoanalytic institute would even consider me but I did decide to take the leap and I ended up going to BPSI [Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute] and here I am." — Ellen Pinsky 

"The training time was a time of discovering - we read the authors I knew, and what was happening to me also at that moment, what kind of an analyst would I be during and after the training? My background encouraged me to go on - when it was difficult to go on searching for the truth, searching for the knowledge, but the knowledge about myself during the training and it went on in my actual training analysis." —Susana Merlo 

Episode Description: We discuss Susana's and Ellen's first careers in education and what led them "to wish to go deeper." They both describe the formative contributions of their own analyses as well as the influence of analytic writers that they valued. We consider the possible advantages and disadvantages of each of the many backgrounds that we bring to our clinical work and share conclusions about the similarities and differences in how we practice. We discuss some of their favorite writers and we conclude with their perspectives on the future of psychoanalysis both in the States and in Argentina. 

Our Guests: 

Susana Ruth Merlo is a member of APdeBA (Asociación Psicoanalítica de Buenos Aires, Argentina) and holds a position as an Associated Professor at IUSAM of APdeBA (Instituto Universitario de Salud Mental de APdeBA), where she teaches Introduction to the ideas of Melanie Klein and English School. She provided school psychological services in school settings for 15 years. At present provides therapy to children, adolescents, and adults in a private clinic setting. Susana holds two university degrees, School Psychology (1986) and Clinical Psychology (2007). 

Ellen Pinsky came to psychoanalysis as a second profession following 25 years as a middle school English teacher. She says her experience in the classroom with 12 and 13-year-olds taught her most of what she needed to know to become a credible clinician. She is the author of Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts. About her book, Thomas Ogden writes: “Mortal Gifts is a necessary book—necessary for analysts and necessary for the analyses they conduct. In it, Ellen addresses a long-neglected issue in the practice of psychoanalysis: the analyst’s failure to include in the very fiber of the analysis the fact of his or her mortality.” In 2014 she was awarded BPSI’s Deutsch Prize for her essay “The Olympian Delusion” (JAPA, 2011) 

Recommended Readings: 

SM 

Bion, W. Learning from experience. Aprendiendo de la Experiencia Paidós, (2009) Bs.As. 

Hustvedt, S. The Sorrows of an American. Elegía para un Americano. Anagrama (2009) Barcelona. 

Klein, M. Our adult world and its roots in infancy. Nuestro Mundo Adulto y Sus Raíces en la Infancia. En Envidia y Gratitud, OC. Paidós (1991) Bs.As. 

Meltzer, D. A Psychoanalytical Model of the Child in the Family in the Community. Familia y Comunidad, Spatia editorial (1990) Bs. As. 

Nemas, C. Strangers in Virtual Land. Toronto Psychoanalytic Society – 22nd Annual day in applied psychoanalysis (2021) 

EP 

1. Freud, Observations on Transference Love (1915)

Remembering, Repeating and Working-through (1914) 

1. Freud, Fort-Da” from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (1920, 14-15)

Paula Heimann, On Counter-transference (1950) 

1. W. Winnicott, The Use of an Object (1969)

Hans Loewald, On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis (1960) 

James Strachey, The Nature of the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis (1934) 

Brian Bird, Notes on Transference (1972) 

Betty Joseph, Transference: The Total Situation (1985) 

Ida Macalpine, The Development of Transference (1950) 

Irma Brenman Pick, Working through in the Countertransference (1985); 

Selma Fraiberg, Ghosts in the Nursery (1975) 

Hans Loewald, Transference and Love (2000 [1988] 549-563) 

Ella Freeman Sharpe, The Technique of Psychoanalysis, (on “Qualifying as an analyst,” 1930, 256-257). 

"The Archive begins in 1940. The Germans themselves do not decide they are going to murder all the Jews, they don’t decide on the Final Solution until late 1941. When the archive begins, Ringelblum is creating the archive in order to do what Max Weinreich was doing with the YIVO [Yiddish Scientific Institute] - that was to get people to write about their lives, to get people to describe their experiences so as to use the knowledge gained to help the psychological and the community rebuilding after the war. ‘The war will be over, and we will rebuild our lives, what lessons will this experience have taught us?’ The way to get that information is to get people to write essays, to do interviews."   

Episode Description: We begin with the historical background that allowed for the conceptualization and creation of The Ringelblum Archive - the contemporaneous documentation by the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto. The thread of psychoanalytic thinking is identified in this work through the interest in everyday living, “nothing is unimportant,” and through prior contact with Freud and analysts. We discuss the authors’ intent to define themselves through their writings to allow their own voices to be heard as distinct from those of the sadists – as in analysis, to own their own history. We consider the concept of "cultural resistance" and what it means to try “to put a stone under the wheel of history." We close by describing the remarkable story of the uncovering of the hidden archive and the tragic end of Emmanuel Ringelblum. In addition, Sam shares with us aspects of his personal story that has led him to this labor of love. 

Our Guest: Samuel Kassow, PhD, Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, is the author of many studies on Russian and Jewish history including Who Will Write Our History: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto, which was translated into eight languages and made into a film, as well as Volume 9 of the Posen Anthology of Jewish Culture, published by Yale in 2019.  He was part of the scholarly team that planned the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and is currently engaged in a project organized by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to write a history of the Holocaust in Poland. He has been a visiting professor at several universities including Harvard, Toronto and Dartmouth.  Professor Kassow holds a Ph.D from Princeton. 

Recommended Readings: 

Samuel Kassow Who will write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007) 

Israel Gutman, Emanuel Ringelblum: the Man and the Historian (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010) 

Natalia Aleksiun, Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021) 

Cecile Kuznitz YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge University Press: 2014) 

Social Science as a “Weapon of the Weak”: Max Weinreich, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, and the Study of Culture, Personality, and Prejudice 

Author(s): Leila ZenderlandSource: Isis , Vol. 104, No. 4 (December 2013), pp. 742-772. Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society 

"I think every encounter with the patient is a potential re-humanizing experience, also for me as a therapist. Because when we are slowly experiencing this kind of positive emotion, especially when it comes to turning points, where the patient  realizes that it is possible to trust another human being, that is a really remarkable experience with these patients who have all reasons to not believe that it is possible to trust other people - who have been disappointed, failed and maltreated so many times. So that is a re-humanizing experience that happens between the therapist and the patient -  this is the best way to describe the process of a positive outcome of this type of psychoanalytic therapy because they have been dehumanized in so many ways and to such a degree, that for some of them it is a wonder to have normal feeling left." 

Episode Description: We begin by appreciating Sverre's work on the torture-induced impingements on intrapsychic meaning-making. We also learn about the role of community and culture in supporting renewed meaning-making - a vital aspect of rehuminazation. We consider the case of Hassan and come to understand the impact on him of the horrific abuses he suffered and what it means to the analyst who comes to hear about and 'experience' such depths of depravity. We discuss survivor guilt, mourning, and disillusionment. Sverre shares with us aspects of his own childhood that have contributed to his interest in this work. We conclude with learning about the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society and its involvement in assisting colleagues in Ukraine.

Our Guest: Sverre Varvin, MD, Dr. Philos is a training analyst at the Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society. He is a professor emeritus at Oslo Metropolitan University. He has had several positions in IPA. Currently, he is chair of the IPA China Committee and a member of the refugee subcommittee of the Humanitarian Field committee. He has been working with traumatized refugees for more than 30 years: clinically, with research, and in the humanitarian field. He has done human rights work as chair of the Norwegian Medical Association’s committee on human rights in the Balkans (former Yugoslavia), Turkey, and China. He has tried to understand the impact of atrocities on individuals and groups and has been specially occupied with dehumanization and re-humanization.

Dr. Varvin will be a keynote speaker at the IPA Congress in Cartegena, Colombia in July 2023.

The Congress website is www.ipa.world/cartagena

Recommended Readings:

JOHANSEN, J. & VARVIN, S. 2019. I tell my mother that … sometimes he didn’t love us— Young adults’ experiences of childhood in refugee families: A qualitative approach. Childhood, 26, 221-235.

VARVIN, S. 2020. Gender, family, and intergenerational transmission of traumatization. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China, 3.

VARVIN, S. 2021. Psychoanalysis in Social and Cultural Settings: Upheavals and Resilience, New York, London, Routledge.

VARVIN, S. & LÆGREID, E. 2020. Traumatized women—organized violence. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China, 3.

VARVIN, S., VLADISAVLJEVIĆ, I., JOVIC, V. & SAGBAKKEN, M. 2022. “I have no capacities that can help me“. Young asylum seekers in Norway and Serbia. Flight as disturbance of developmental processes. Front. Psychol. , 12.

JOVIC, V. 2018. Working with traumatized refugees on the Balkan route. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 15, 187-201.

ROSENBAUM, B., JOVIC, V. & VARVIN, S. 2020. Understanding the refugee-traumatized persons. Semiotic and psychoanalytic perspectives. psychosocial, 43.

"We are chosen [as children] for the roles of peacekeeper, soother, and possibly entertainer at times, because we temperamentally have been gifted with a certain degree of empathy, sensitivity, and psychological mindedness that was not true of our siblings. There is a reason why we’ve been chosen, and it is because of our innate abilities. Those innate abilities, of course, make for a fit with our chosen occupation. We start out as these empathic sensitive children who truly do not want to see our family members in pain and have a desire to take that pain away."  

Episode Description: We begin with the recognition that psychoanalysts share certain character traits that incline us towards the work we do. Often, wishing to heal our patients is mapped onto our early templates of wishing to heal our parents. Karen describes her own relationship with her mother which she feels contributed to her becoming a psychoanalyst. With that as a basis, we discuss therapists' tendencies towards self-sacrifice and its relation to masochism. We consider the ubiquity of analyst gratifications and the excessive cautions around acknowledging them. We discuss the importance of dealing with interpersonal conflicts in the clinical setting and how that is in contradistinction to a treatment model of mother-infant attunement. We conclude with her consideration that enactments are preceded by repressed negative counter-transference, the awareness of which can deepen the therapeutic moment. 

Our Guest: Karen J. Maroda, Ph.D., ABBP, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at, the Medical College of Wisconsin and in private practice in Milwaukee, WI. She is board certified in psychoanalysis by the American Board of Professional Psychology, and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis. The author of four books, The Power of Countertransference, Seduction, Surrender and Transformation, Psychodynamic Techniques, and The Analyst’s Vulnerability, as well as numerous journal articles and book reviews. She also sits on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She gives lectures and workshops both nationally and internationally.