CIPS WINTER 2021 NEWSBRIEFS
Letter from the Editor
Dear CIPS Community,
This letter attempts to orient you, dear Reader, to the variety contained in this issue. Here you will find examples of courage, inspiration, and creativity as well as be confronted with both bone chilling realities and healing ones.
We begin, as usual, with letters from the CIPS President, Batya Monder, who both offers reflections and updates us on the recent accomplishments and upcoming events at CIPS. We then “meet” the CIPS President-elect, Maureen Murphy, and learn about her priorities for her upcoming tenure. This past February, NAPsaC welcomed its new president, Mary Kay O’Neil, who shares her vision with us as well.
In the aftermath of the domestic terrorism at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, NewsBriefs invited the presidents of all the member societies to respond. Their letters are included here.
Adriana Prengler, vice president-elect of the IPA, introduces us to the good work of The IPA’s committee on Psychoanalytic Emigration and Relocation (PERC). Adriana is the former chair of this committee.
Many have described that as the pandemic and our physical isolation from each other and the world continues that it’s harder to think and harder to do. Reminders that others are out there too---living, loving and doing--is somehow a salve reminding us that better days are ahead. We are privileged again in this issue to hear from various members of our societies about matters deeply personal and important to them. There is quite a gamut: reflections on living in these uncertain times of the pandemic, on working the phones prior to the November election, on documenting the sadistic and dehumanizing realities of the US immigration detention centers, on being inspired by courage in the Warsaw ghetto to engage in the present struggles. Haikus! And a poem, written by the analyst to his granddaughter, that can’t help but make us smile.
The Reporters of each society share the publications, awards and important speaking engagements of their candidates, members and fellows. We can both learn about and celebrate their hard work and accomplishments.
We hear also from Fred Busch about the book which he edited, entitled Dear Candidate: Analysts from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, 1
Education and the Profession. He was also kind enough to include a plethora of excerpts from the contributions of senior analysts to whet our appetite.
The CIPS Books Series editors inform us about and invite us to participate in the waiting-to- be written intriguing new CIPS book series of society-based volumes.
In the In Memoriam section, we are honored to bear witness to those in our societies whom we have lost. In this issue we remember Dr. Sharen Westin and Dr. Howard Hansen, both long-time members of PCC.
We offer our thanks to the presidents of each of the societies for responding to the request to speak to the domestic terrorism of January 6th: Andrea Greenman (CFS), Doris Silverman (IPTAR), Pamela Dirham (LAISPS), Barbara Sewell (NPSI), Jennifer Langham (PCC), and Bruce Weitzman (PINC).
And, as always, we thank the Reporters from each society who gathered the Reflection pieces as well as news of publications, awards and speaking engagements during 2020. They are a steadfast, creative, and good-natured crew: Mary Wall (CFS), Joe Davis (LAISPS), Dave Parnes (NPSI), Susan Mitchell (PCC) and Drew Tillotson (PINC).
We encourage you to read this from virtual “cover to cover” – we promise you will feel enriched as you go along.
With warm regards,
Leslie Wells, LP, FIPA
President’s Column
When I first submitted this essay to NewsBriefs, I had hoped that as 2020 receded, we could perhaps begin to mourn some of the sorrow of the past year. But that was before the defining event on January 6, 2021-- the attack on the Capitol. Even the raging pandemic receded in the face of the insurrection. Never has this country experienced an attempt to overthrow a presidential election, an attempt led by the sitting President.
Prior to January 6th, the pandemic overshadowed all else. We lost colleagues and saw friends and family members fall ill. We witnessed how ill equipped our political leaders were to martial the nation’s resources. Our TV screens brought home the tragic loss of Black lives at the hands of police officers as well as the protests for social justice that erupted in their aftermath. We have watched local businesses be shuttered, unemployment soar, food banks be overwhelmed. And as if that were not enough, January 6th happened.
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The storming of the Capitol has galvanized many in our professional world. And we at CIPS are now grappling with how best to use our psychoanalytic knowledge to be of help in the coming weeks and months. A task force has been organized to think through how to proceed.
At the start of 2021, we can feel grateful that we have vaccines to fight the virus and a new president who will manage the rollout and provide much needed guidance and leadership. More personally, we can also be grateful that as psychoanalysts, we have been able to continue to work. Necessity required us to adapt and “see” our patients remotely; similarly, our societies have also adapted. We couldn’t come together in person, but we could meet on Zoom, both in large groups and small, making sure that we retained our collegial connections and furthered our learning. Our professional lives moved forward.
CIPS too continued to move ahead. We recently held an election. Maureen Murphy (PINC) is president-elect, and Matthew von Unwerth (IPTAR) is vice president-elect. Their term begins July 1, 2021, and runs till June 30, 2023.
The spring lineup of videoconference courses will begin with the Introductory Infant Observation Seminar, which is being done in conjunction with the Anni Bergman Parent- Infant Program. Five other courses will be offered through June.
Two focus a psychoanalytic lens on the politics of our times: Psychoanalytic Musings on Trumpism, Delusions, and Malignant Populism and The Indispensable, Unheard Voice of Psychoanalysis in American Politics. In addition, offerings include Trauma and Primitive Mental States as well as Working with Suicidal Patients and Survivors of Suicide Loss. A fifth course, as yet untitled, will focus on Lacan.
Look for the announcements in your inbox and note that all courses offered by CIPS are open to members and candidates and provide a wonderful opportunity to learn with analysts from other parts of the country. CIPS is now able to offer CEU’s --something we had wanted to do for a long time. And because we now have a HIPAA compliant Zoom account available to our instructors, they will have the option to record their courses for a time-limited period, allowing people who cannot meet at the prescribed time to be able to take the course.
The CIPS Book Series, now in its 11th year, has launched a new initiative to encourage each of our component societies to produce a “society-based” volume representing the work of its members. The Series editors--Rick Perlman, Phyllis Sloate, and Beth Kalish-- are committed to helping fulfill your publication aspirations.
The CIPS Biannual Clinical Conference, initially planned for Spring 2020, was one of the many professional casualties of COVID-19. Speakers are lined up and ready to present as soon as it is safe for us to travel. It will be a great reunion to look forward to, hopefully in the Spring of 2022.
Until then, please remain safe.
Batya R. Monder, MSW, BCD President, CIPS 3
Letter from the CIPS President-Elect
Dear CIPS Colleagues,
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands." -Rainer Maria Rilke
I'm honored to be elected as the incoming CIPS president and to be joined by Matthew Von Unwerth as vice president. Thank you for your confidence in us to steward the fine work that Batya and Lisa are doing on CIPS behalf.
My commitment to CIPS over the last decade is as a voice for the Independent component societies- a hard won and important voice within international psychoanalysis. During this time, I've had the chance to participate in the many ways that CIPS serves this community: our bi-annual Clinical Conference, a book series, study groups, certification and, importantly, outreach to Candidates. These experiences have provided a canvas for imagining some next steps.
Going forward, if Matthew and I were to create a banner to encompass our planning for CIPS, it would be Communication and Education.
I'll start with Communication.
Since joining CIPS, I've had the opportunity to meet analysts and develop colleagues and friendships that I would not have otherwise experienced. Of the many benefits of CIPS, these are my most valued. Yet many members only know CIPS as a set of organizational initials. In that spirit, increasing contact among societies, individual members and the IPA is a major goal.
This affiliation is already in progress with NewsBriefs under the able editorship of Leslie Wells and our Book Series, a new initiative of society based volumes - a project that will be discussed later in the Newsletter. The other area of communication will be with our Candidate members. CIPS has long provided IPSO membership to all of our Candidate members- acknowledging these analysts in training as our future.
Now to Education.
In the past two years CIPS has increased its educational offerings including continuing education units for all our courses, and we intend to continue these efforts. We envision a series of Clinical Controversies in which a panel of analysts respond to a given topic from multiple points of view. In addition, we plan to initiate Supervision seminars geared to candidates.
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At this moment, analytic training is at an inflection point dealing with remote analysis, and a modified Eitingon model. The pandemic has further insisted that we reconsider elements of practice that we held as essential: the structure of the frame, embodied dyadic contact and the dynamics of the transference/countertransference matrix. Now, more than ever, CIPS is in a position to help define the future of psychoanalysis locally and globally. Mathew and I look forward to this task.
Maureen Murphy, PhD, FIPA
Letter from the President of NAPsaC, Mary Kay O’Neil
Dear Members of the CIPS community,
As the President of the North American Psychoanalytic Confederation (NAPsaC), I am pleased to have the opportunity to welcome the CIPS Directors and their alternates to the NAPsaC Board. It also gives me great pleasure to have Leigh Tobias (NAPsaC experienced), a member of CIPS (PCC), on the Executive Committee as President-Elect. I am grateful to Carolyn Steinberg for accepting the position of Secretary-elect of NAPsaC and to Sandra Borden for continuing as Treasurer and I look forward to working with them on the Ex-Com.
I also look forward to becoming more familiar with the NAPsaC Organizations (the Societies of APsaA, Independents, Canadian, and Study Groups of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vermont). I would now like to introduce myself and to present goals I hope to accomplish during my tenure (February 2021- February 2023).
I am a supervising and training psychoanalyst and a registered psychologist in private practice in Toronto, Ontario. I have a PhD from the University of Toronto and have trained in psychoanalysis at the Toronto Institute. Currently, I am a member of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis where I teach; a member of the TPS Board of Directors and of several TIP Committees. I am a past director of the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis (Quebec English), and a former NAm representative on the IPA Board. Author of The Unsung Psychoanalyst: The Quiet Influence of Ruth Easser, I have co-edited six other books and contributed numerous journal articles, book chapters and book reviews. My research includes studies of depression, young adult development, sole-support mothers, post-termination contact, and psychoanalytic ethics. Married to Frederick Lowy, a retired psychoanalyst, I am a mother of four children and grandmother to nine. My priorities are my work as a psychoanalyst and my family.
The considerable achievements of President Robin Deutsch, especially the transition from a Confederation of Members to an Organization of Organizations, leave very big shoes to fill. I will work with energy and dedication to achieve a vision of growth which includes the following goals:
1. Promote familiarity and unity among the Member Organizations of our Confederation;
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2. Explore ways of increasing our income without undo increase in dues and develop NAPsaC Programs;
3. Increase NAPsaC’s presence in NAm Societies and Study Groups;
4. Work closely with IPA and ensure that NAPsaC is represented within IPA; and
5. Increase affiliation with EPF (European Psychoanalytic Federation) and FEPAL (Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies of Latin America). Attend their Annual or Biannual congresses.
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to introduce myself and set out my preliminary goals as NAPsaC’s President, none of which I can achieve alone. I look forward to working with the members of CIPS. Please feel free to contact me at any time at [email protected].
Warmest wishes to all,
Mary Kay O’Neil, PhD, FIPA
Domestic Terrorism at the U.S. Capitol, January 6, 2021: The Immediate Response of Societies
In light of the stunning events of January 6th, NewsBriefs asked the presidents of each of our member societies if they wished to include a statement here. The societies were given the option to submit their own statement or to become co-signatories to The Contemporary Freudian Society’s (CFS) letter, which was already more widely in circulation. Three societies are co-signatories to the CFS letter, and two other institutes submitted their own letters. One society elected to not submit a letter at this time.
These letters were written shortly after the events of January 6th and they have not been edited to reflect more recent events, e.g., the Inauguration of President Biden. So, in one sense, they are dated. Nonetheless, these letters alert us to present and on-going dangers impacting our social and democratic fabric which continues despite the actual transition of presidential power. Mr. Trump and those who share his views remain active, well-funded and destructive not only to democratic norms and principles, but to civility, the capacity to think and also to the existence of a shared sense of a common reality amongst Americans. (Social media and the Silicon Valley giants are implicated here as well.)
Letter written by The Contemporary Freudian Society, co-signed by The Psychoanalytic Center of California and Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies
In the past few days, we have been witness to events that have shaken us to the core as Americans. Our commitment to democratic values, to thoughtful resolution of conflict, and to 6 the peaceful transfer of power has been challenged in ways and to a degree unimaginable until recently, by the violence of fellow Americans stoked by their enablers in the White House and in Congress. For four years now, we have been at the mercy of a despotic leader who has been willing to sacrifice the lives, health, safety, and well-being of human beings to further his own stranglehold on power and control. We join the ranks of others in the psychoanalytic world in standing up to register our strongest condemnation of these murderous and shameful acts.
Painfully, as students of human behavior, we have watched without surprise as this demagogic leader has stirred his followers and legitimized their primitive rage, fueling racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and hatred of the weak and infirm in the most sordid ways, epitomizing cruel and inhumane behavior. Many, including experts in mental health, have expressed their outrage and mounting concerns about the unbridled behavior of the president and his facilitators during the course of this administration, to no avail. How is it that, we, the American people, have allowed this to happen?
Psychoanalysts understand that human beings protect themselves from facing aspects of reality that cause overwhelming distress. The wish to believe in the inherent goodness and power of paternal leaders can be mesmerizing for followers who are challenged in their own sense of empowerment and efficacy and we can understand, although not condone, the impulse to subsume themselves to follow the leadership of a demagogue.
As psychoanalysts, we are emphatic in our conviction that understanding is the most important element in increasing self-awareness and improving how we live our lives and the world we live in. However, we are also humble enough to acknowledge when curiosity and understanding are not sufficient, when actions must be taken. We find ourselves in a time of national crisis, confronting massive attacks on basic freedoms that involve attempts to twist and poison minds as well as to mobilize violence against individuals and democratic institutions. This is a time for action.
Thus, the Board of Directors of the Contemporary Freudian Society urges the immediate removal and/or impeachment of Donald Trump, actions that need to be taken in order to condemn his egregious behavior as well as prevent him from ever running for public office again. In addition, we urge that members of Congress who actively stoked the flames of violence ahead of last Wednesday should be removed from office. This is essential in order to begin the process of re-establishing the US as a place in which it is safe to think, work, and live together with those with whom we do not agree. While many factors led to the attack on the Capitol building last Wednesday, including unconscious dynamics, none can be addressed until Donald Trump and his enablers are held accountable.
The Board of Directors Contemporary Freudian Society
The Board of Directors The Psychoanalytic Center of California
Pamela Dirham, PhD, FIPA, President, on behalf of The Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies
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IPTAR’s Statement on the Threat to Democracy
IPTAR joins with the opinion publicly expressed by the American Psychoanalytic Association entitled “President’s Message on Threat to Democracy.” We are appalled at the assault on the democratic process that has taken place not only physically in the storming of the capital building, but psychologically on the assault on truth that has been taking place for many years as a consequence of the words and actions of Trump and his enablers. They have encouraged the erosion of the values upon which the psychological health of our democratic society depends -- decency, a respect for truth, and a recognition of the mutual interactions that bind us together.
Freud recognized the interdependence of an individual’s psychological health with societal forces and strove to create psychoanalytic institutions that addressed social problems. IPTAR has continued that tradition. As part of that heritage, we believe it is essential that we oppose the threat to democracy that has been taking place over time under the leadership of Trump and has now -- sadly -- burst fully into the open.
We believe that Trump must be removed as President either through impeachment or the 25th amendment before he is able to do additional damage; and we further believe as psychoanalysts that our role extends to our openly indicating when we believe that a leader’s psychological state creates a danger for our country and for the world.
Doris Silverman, President Richard Reichbart, President-Elect Michael Moskowitz, Past President
NPSI’s Statement Condemning the Attack on the Capitol
The leaders of NPSI join the many voices in our country and abroad in expressing our condemnation of the attack on the Capitol on January 6th and in calling for our nation’s government to bring those involved to justice. We also recognize that the decision to speak out publicly as an organization is a decision that each institute, like each individual, must arrive at through their own process of deliberation and we respect and honor those institutes that are not prepared to take such action at this time.
NPSI is committed to democratic principles, both within our institute and in our nation. We are unable to make any institute or society-wide comments without more time for thoughtful reflection and discussion to include all voices within NPSI.
Beyond this, we look forward to discussing, collectively, how the institutes of CIPS can bring our psychoanalytic knowledge into the national dialogue.
Sincerely,
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Barbara Sewell, MIPA President, Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
David Parnes, FIPA Director of Training, Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
Maxine Nelson, FIPA Past-President, Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute Primary Director from NPSI to the CIPS Board
The Necessity of International Cooperation
IPA in the World and the Psychoanalyst Emigration and Relocation Committee (PERC)
We are beginning 2021 with the hope that in a few months we will be back to our “normal” lives, but it is impossible to predict how the world will be after the pandemic is over. Before the pandemic, the problem of emigration and exile was increasing every year and The United Nations reported that in 2018 more than seventy million people around the world were displaced from their homes by natural disasters or for political or religious reasons. These waves of emigration have created different reactions within the countries receiving these immigrants: On one side, there are the nationalistic tendencies of many who are worried about defending their frontiers and their way of life, and on the other side, there are those defending the rights of displaced people. Naturally, and unfortunately, many of our psychoanalytic colleagues have been caught up in the same tide of forced exile or voluntary but compelled emigration and it is expectable that when this pandemic ends and the frontiers open again, the movement will continue. When our colleagues look for a new home, they search for countries that will welcome their psychoanalytic skills and allow them to carry on with their work.
In 2017 Stefano Bolognini, then-President of the IPA, called for the creation of a committee to research and better understand the challenges that psychoanalysts and candidates face when emigrating from their former homes to their new home countries. The IPA Psychoanalyst Emigration and Relocation Committee (PERC) was strongly supported by the new administration of President Virginia Ungar and Vice-President Sergio Nick and will be reinforced by the next administration of Harriet Wolfe and Adriana Prengler that will begin in July 2021.
The committee examines the opportunities available for IPA members and candidates seeking re-integration into a psychoanalytic society or institute belonging to the IPA and also explores the legal conditions members need to meet in order to re-establish their practices in their new places. The work of this committee is to provide information that will assist in making the emigration experience a little less traumatic for our colleagues. It can take a long time to reinsert oneself in a new place, and this committee aims to help facilitate that process as quickly and as smoothly as possible.
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In 1938 Ernest Jones and Marie Bonaparte made heroic efforts to facilitate the free passage and emigration of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud and a number of their colleagues from Nazi occupied Vienna, Austria, to London, England. Upon their arrival in England, they received work permits and were welcomed into the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
Each society has its own rules for the acceptance of new members and candidates, and some have benefited greatly from receiving well-trained IPA members from other regions, eager to professionally integrate into the societies of their adopted cities, to work, and offer new ideas and perspectives. This, without a doubt, will translate into diversity for the enrichment of our clinical theory and practice and for the development of psychoanalysis in the world. If you are an IPA immigrant member or candidate or planning to move, we invite you to get in touch with the committee (email [email protected]).
We have the privilege of being an international association and if we can make our immigrant members and candidates welcomed in our component societies, we will have added another substantial benefit to our membership in the IPA.
Note that this is the first of a two-part offering related to PERC. In the next issue of NewsBriefs, the current chair of PERC will share with us about its on-going activities.
CREATIVE CONTRIBUTIONS FROM OUR COLLEAGUES
This section begins with the Reflections generously offered to us by candidates, members and fellows from the societies in response to the Reporters requests for contributions. We will then turn to a much needed and delightful volume edited by Fred Busch entitled Dear Candidate: Analysts from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education and the Profession.
We also share here are the contributions made by various members of our societies –writing, speaking and awards.
REFLECTIONS OFFERED BY CANDIDATES, MEMBERS AND FELLOWS (In alphabetical order by author’s last name)
The CIPS Reporters each reached out to their respective communities inviting its members to offer a Reflection for this issue. The suggested theme was intentionally broad: “During this time of unrest and uncertainty….” We all face some combination of multiple concurrent challenges, whether it was COVID-related, the call to rally against racial injustice, the frightening drama surrounding the election, out-of-control wildfires, profound strain balancing work and family care, to name a few.
So, we especially thank those who responded. We can easily admire how they retained the capacity to reflect, write and share -- despite it all.
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“Peace, Justice, and Love - Lessons from contemporary Afghanistan on the irrevocable link between psychosocial well-being and peace”
Martha Bragin, PhD, LCSW (IPTAR)
Editor’s Note: Please find here a description of a collaborative US-Afghanistan study and its findings. If we sometimes feel weary, we can feel fortified by the work reflected here. Before we get to the description of the study, some context about Martha and her work is provided. Martha was also generous to include a link to the webinar – please take a look and “meet” some of our colleagues working tirelessly to forge not only peace but also the right to mental health and wellness for the people of Afghanistan.
Martha Bragin has developed a protocol for psychosocial wellbeing founded in psychoanalytic thinking as well as other traditions, which she has implemented in a number of post-war, post-conflict, post-disaster places in the world.
In this study, Martha viewed her role as providing a space to think together in the midst of unrelenting violence and personal threats. This work of accompaniment informed by Jessica Benjamin’s conceptual framework of recognition, acknowledgement, and providing a third space for such thought to exist. The act of doing the work, of moving forward, also promotes an atmosphere of reparative action that allows participants to survive their psychic responses to the violence and terror they experience. The use of a participatory methodology that engaged hundreds of practitioners around the country, allowed for a strengthened awareness that they were not alone in this work, and that their ideas could build a new way of thinking and working.
Background to the Study:
• In December 2001, the Afghan Interim Authority took over governance of their country. Preceding civil wars had destroyed nearly all infrastructure, closed public services, and created conditions of constant random violence and insecurity. Over 3.5 million refugees had fled the country and 965,000 persons were internally displaced. Record levels of malnutrition, infectious disease, maternal and infant mortality prevailed. Epidemiological studies indicated high prevalence rates of mental illnesses including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Turton & Marsden, 2001; Cardozo, et al, 2004). • The new Afghan Authority moved quickly to address these issues. Schools opened on schedule in March 2002 welcoming 3 million students. The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) set out to reduce mortality and infectious disease through the creation of a Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS) available at country-wide community clinics. The BPHS included essential mental health services, and the public health system embarked on an ambitious program to train both medical professionals, paraprofessional health workers, and mental health workers to treat serious and persistent mental illness and severe cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. • However, after a dozen years of consistently building successes, the conflict expanded again, destroying economic gains. With it came the myriad daily stressors inhibiting Afghanistan’s progress in all areas of development. By that time, 80% of Afghans visiting mental health clinics exhibited emotional distress not related to 11
psychiatric illness, but rather the result of adversity-related stressors that overwhelmed the protective factors that might have mitigated them in better times, requiring psychosocial support (Wildt, et.al., 2017). • As a response to this, the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) called for the establishment of academic departments of psychological counselling that could prepare Afghan professionals to address the psychosocial effects of stressors at individual, family, group and community levels (Babury & Hayward, 2013). • If non-medical, culturally relevant, group and community focussed methods were to be initiated, local standards of psychosocial wellbeing, beyond individual diagnoses provided by the ICD10 classification, were required so that these standards could be used to evaluate program effectiveness. The Results • The results surprised the research team. After coding the results and coming back for a second round of qualitative concept validation, researchers found that regardless of gender, ethnicity, region, religious tendency, client population, the respondents associated participating in actions or progress toward peace and justice as the number one requirement for psychological and social wellbeing. The second and third were love and friendship within the family, and freedom, including freedom of speech, writing, travel and expressions of faith. The Webinar • This webinar discusses the resulting phenomenological study conducted by a team of educators from the Counselling Departments of Herat and Kabul Universities to define and operationalize the concept of psychosocial well-being • This webinar describes the study and how the study team has taken the results forward, and notes that in a country at war, there is no mental health without peace and justice, and there is no peace and justice without mental health. The link to this inspiring webinar is below. It features the Study’s authors: Mariam Ahmady, Spozhmay Oriya, Raihana Faqiri, and Rohina Zaffari from Kabul University along with Martha Bragin from Hunter College, City University of New York. https://youtu.be/mqK46f1iaGY
COVID-19: A RITUAL PROCESS Lynn H. Cunningham, MA, MA, PhD, LICSW (NPSI)
The phrase rites de passage, coined by ethnologist Arnold van Gennep (1909), showed how all societies enact this ritualized action to soothe the painful effects of change from “one situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another.”1 For those of us who notice such things, the worldwide disturbance caused by the Coronavirus is emerging
1 Van Gennep, Arnold, “Territorial Passage and the Classification of Rites” (1909), Readings in Ritual Studies, ed. Ronald L. Grimes (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1996) 532. An engaged couple exemplifies the transitional: they are neither single nor married. Until their status changes, they exist in a liminal space where uncertainty is experienced and assessed.
12 as a rite of passage. The visual metaphors of wearing a mask, withholding human touch, and quarantine make an especially powerful and persuasive identification with both the permanency of death and the fragility of life. These graphic expressions of reality summon both an intellectual and emotional response to death and dying evoked on our imaginative stage. In effect, as philosopher Hans Jonas observed, “The mind has gone where vision pointed.”2
Van Gennep divided his social structural model into three phases: separation, transition, and incorporation. Since the beginning of 2020, Americans have watched in horror as country leaders consigned their entire populations to quarantine. As the virus gained international momentum, we were caught in its domino effect too, causing an abrupt, confusing, and painful separation from our former experience of life. Social pleasures were deemed verboten; school was verboten; office work was verboten; social gatherings were verboten. Thousands of people became ill and died and continue to die ─ alone due to the risk of contagion. Physical and emotional disorientation, chaos, fear, and uncertainty has left us all scrambling to carve new order out of the left-over reality.
Asked to ‘merely’ survive in this transitional space, we exist neither where we were nor where we will be. We waver between the two realms. We try to expunge the invisible menace with ultra-hygiene or, in some cases, denial. Data, both true and false, bombards us from every communicative device, overstimulating even the sturdiest of us. We sleep poorly; our concentration falters, and old temptations and suppressed demons threaten to take over. For most people, this plunge into uncertainty is a humbling process of psychical realignment, offering a unique opportunity for creativity. For others, there is a need to intensify experience through transgression, revealing an underlying character that wishes to alter reality and refuse the struggle between the instinct toward life, preferring instead to exist in suspension.
We have not yet reached the final phase or incorporation, the period when personal insights culminate in the synthesis of new meaning. By degrees, we will achieve a new state of stability, a new status in which ambivalent feelings are transformed into greater certainty. It means looking optimistically toward a future that cannot be seen or articulated and putting aside the suffering associated with a perception of a future dominated by fantasy. A rite of passage is a process meant to soothe and heal the mental suffering imposed by death, real or symbolic, but it is also a fluid process that is sensitive to changes in the practices of social life. From my observer/participant perspective, COVID 19 has plunged us into a mourning ritual that is forcing an unwanted reordering of reality and offering a way to conserve life.
2 Jonas, Hans, “The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses,” The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966) 135-156. Unlike other senses that exist in sequence, sight gives us coexistence, simultaneous representation of the visual field.
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“Survival during this time of Unrest and Uncertainty” Fang Duan, LMSW (IPTAR)
“During this Time of Unrest and Uncertainty…” I am thinking of how to better survive. The two parts of the word, sur-vival, literally mean “in addition” and “live” combined, living beyond. To sur-vive, to live beyond, I am thinking perhaps we can consider a need, a possibility, to learn from the other, inside and outside, visible and invisible, not to satisfy the curiosity for knowledge, but more importantly, to be exposed to the infinite mystery of the other, to go beyond the inevitable limitations of the self, for new possibilities.
I am particularly touched by a recent talk by Dr. Beverly Stoute, fellow of IPTAR, on black rage and black love: a justifiable and just rage against the trashing of humanity, a gracious love to uphold human dignity and pursue human possibilities. This talk of “other” affects stretches me, inspires me, teaches me how to live beyond. For the same purpose of sur- vival, during my graduate years in Canada I participated in a two-year Holocaust education program, including several field trips to Germany, Poland, and Israel. Getting to know holocaust survivors and their offspring in person and immersing myself in their life stories helped me see hope in the midst of destruction and atrocities and think about what could make another, different, new life, resurrection or rebirth, possible at all.
I am other to myself. It is through psychoanalysis that I have been learning to accept my inner otherness and outsider position. I used to consider myself a normal neurotic, totally sane, autonomous and kind. Only through more than a decade’s personal psychoanalysis with three different analysts did I come to realize I have been de-animating myself by disavowing the otherness inside and outside of me: my deep fear, dread, alienation, hallucinatory grandiosity and narcissistic injury, not unlike those more pronounced symptoms of a psychotic sister who also taught me to love, to care, to be on the side of life, throughout her life.
Blindness to one’s own otherness is ubiquitous. In this time of Black Lives Matter movement a patient laments how his mainstream identity has become a burden. As an older creative artist he is afraid that from now on people will lose interest in his works, because he is, in his own words, “a regular, mainstream white guy who knows little about foreign cultures and nothing at all about anything black”. Believe it or not, both of his parents are immigrants, father from South Africa, mother from East Europe. Perhaps, in psychotherapy, this patient could learn to re-imagine himself through encountering his own otherness, and mine?
In this time of unrest and uncertainty I am asking: Could we learn to face the other not as adversarial or opposite of me, but as further of, additional to, more than, beyond, infinitely other to me, an encounter with whom/which could be potentially transforming? Could we allow ourselves to be touched by the otherness of the other, to be astonished, extended and expanded, to become what we have not yet become? A most important lesson I have been learning from psychoanalysis is: openness to the other could be life-changing. For me, by targeting the other, unknown aspects of our embodied history and live subjectivity, psychoanalysis challenges us to go beyond and exceed our self-identity, to interrupt our accustomed frames of perception, with the hope of launching a restructuring of our conscious and unconscious world, making it more free-flowing, more sentient, more resonant with the aliveness of the world.
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Haikus written during the Covid-19 Pandemic Julie Hendrickson, MA, LMHC, FIPA (NPSI)
A bright metal screen. Eyes peering, ears harkening. Together with Zoom.
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Covid therapy – Your internet connection Is unstable. Sigh…
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Birds at my window – A chair, a screen, me, then you. Virtual session.
Arrogance and Ignorance in the Time of COVID David Jachim, PhD, FIPA (NPSI)
“The part of life we live is really small.” - Unknown Poet
As psychoanalysts we are familiar with the clinical concepts of arrogance and ignorance. We understand that arrogance, in particular, is a derivative of unresolved infantile omnipotence. Ignorance, often a corollary to arrogance, might also be understood as a state of either not knowing or refusing to know (remaining ignorant). The death instinct further complicates the profile of arrogance (with pride as its subsidiary) by adding a pathological curve to the mix. Bion has noted “When pride is present with the life instinct, pride becomes self-respect. If it is present with the death instinct, it becomes arrogance.” Charles Caleb Colton has added to the helix of arrogance by stating, “The whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous, they mutually beget each other.”
Omnipotence provides a defense against the anxiety of smallness and dependency, an early wound that is created by a reality that arrives prematurely and en masse. Steiner has observed, there is a traumatic shock wave in the sequence to maturity (“from “I am the breast” to “I need the beast and I am not the breast.”). Steiner has also pointed out that the premature uncovering of infantile omnipotence lends a sense of shame as well and, we might also say, obstructs the ability to accept the uncertainty that is part of reality and the human condition. Indeed, uncertainty only increases as we become more aware of our universe (“There has been an alarming increase in what we do not know” – Scientific American).
COVID has become the reality that challenges our smallness, our vulnerability. For many, the pandemic has increased the anxiety in meeting the real, natural world and thus the need 15 to retreat to ignorance. Masks, for instance, become the hallmark of arrogance and ignorance as it symbolizes to some that their independence and power is being taken away (“Don’t Tread on Me”). Such defenses obscure the reality that we are all vulnerable, inter dependent and need to protect one another. Such pathological maneuvers are further reflected in the idolization of a deeply wounded president who was raised in an aura of arrogance and ignorance.
COVID has also brought these issues to smack us in the face in our clinical settings. How do we talk with patients about this terrible threat to our existence and how we are all tied together in its wake? Of course, we can analyze the clinical meaning of this dilemma for each individual patient e.g., the patient’s own degree of omnipotence, fear of uncertainty, dependency and refusal to accept, as Steiner has pointed out, the feminine that exists in all of us. However, we may have the duty also to address the humbling and sometimes painful acceptance of the natural world and the larger, sociological interdependence between human beings that also provides a vital boost to each of our emotional immunities.
Adam and Eve were cast from the Garden of Eden in sorrow, guilt and shame but they also gained the valuable assets of humility, human need and responsibility. I think we all need to exit the Garden together.
“Ignorance is the womb of monsters.” - Henry Ward Beecher
Untitled Natasha Kurchanova, PhD (IPTAR)
When I was asked my reflections on the theme of this issue, “During the Time of Unrest and Uncertainty,” I was a bit at a loss. I was not sure which aspect of this uncertain time I could bring up so that it would be both true to my experience and interesting for others to read. I felt that some of most poignant moments – like my husband getting sick with the virus -- may be too personal to share, and the ones that affected everyone – like the lockdown, the quarantine, and working with my patients remotely – may be too common to capture my readers’ attention.
During several Zoom meetings with candidates, members, and fellows of my institute, we talked at length about the changes that the pandemic brought upon all of us – our psychoanalytic community and the society at large. There was a lot of anxiety and grief expressed about a rising number of infected people, mounting death toll, and the ability of our government to handle the situation in an efficacious way. There were also shared experiences of finding positive aspects in this situation – such as saving time on transportation and general moving around and socializing and having more time for quiet activities, such as reflection and self-reflection.
Lately, a few people at these meetings mentioned Freud’s text “On Transience” as a helpful guide to reflection at this difficult time. I now turn to this text for this purpose.
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Written in 1915, in the middle of the First World War, this short text relates Freud’s tale of his journey into a countryside with a “taciturn friend” and a “young, but already famous poet.” Freud argued with his companions – and the poet in particular -- about their melancholic attitude toward the passing beauty of nature, which could not bring them joy, because it was bound to disappear in the winter. Freud took a view that “what is painful may none the less be true” and that “transience of what is beautiful” does not “involve any loss of its worth.” Essentially, in the nutshell, he presented an argument of “Morning and Melancholia,” which he had recently elaborated, because Freud concluded that a “powerful emotional factor” that prevented his companions from enjoying transient beauty was their inability – or rather refusal – to mourn. Freud went on to explain the mourning process as a “detachment of libido from its objects,” and wondered why it had to be such a painful process. He linked this telltale reflection to the current war-time situation in Austria, which “robbed us of very much that we had loved and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.” He warned his readers about renouncing “the possessions which we have now lost” as “worthless” and says that they are “simply” experiencing a healthy “state of mourning for what is lost,” which will come to a “spontaneous end and will liberate “our libido … to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious.”
This text struck me as being very philosophical and somewhat removed from the reality of a devastating war that was affecting Freud and his family in a very tangible way – such as him basically losing his practice because his patients were drafted into the army and his eldest son has been sent to the Russian front, where he had been wounded. Freud wrote about the reality of war in a more direct way in another short text from the same year, entitled “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” “On Transience,” however, had been commissioned by the Berlin Goethe Society for their commemorative volume Goethe’s Country, the title of which suggests not only a cultural and patriotic, but also a somewhat nationalistic bent. It is interesting to observe therefore that in his text, Freud argues with the poet who, for him, may stand for the readers of this commemorative volume and who may therefore refuse to mourn what they have lost, becoming eternally melancholic. Freud’s “On Transience,” then, reminds us of the importance of the ability to let go of things the memory of which we cherish, but which we do not have any longer, in order to be able to be open to life as it is around us in the moment.
Love in the Age of COVID-19 Janice S. Lieberman, PhD, FIPA (IPTAR)
Covid -19 is a worldwide tragedy of epic proportions that has created painful bodily damage, death, loss of loved ones, social isolation, economic insecurity, and food insecurity for many. Its psychological aftermath will be with us for many years to come. The intrapsychic meanings of the pandemic for each individual must be considered. Relationships have been ridden with mistrust, even paranoia, over this invisible menace.
Nevertheless, human beings are resilient and for some, positive gains have emerged; Eros has conquered Thanatos in many instances. We are here to talk about love. One could ask, as Tina Turner asked: “What does love have to do with it?” As we know, “Love makes the world go round”. As two of my admired teachers, Martin Bergmann and Ethel Person noted, many years ago when psychoanalysts actually wrote about love, there are many kinds of
17 love: romantic, friendship, parental, filial, self-love, love of God, of country, of mankind. Love has come to the fore in many places in these past several months. In my work with patients and supervisees in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, I have heard many “love stories” related to the quarantine, the lockdown, the demand that we “shelter in place”. Love is not pure as the poets would have it, but is, as we psychoanalysts know, often embedded with pain, aggression, masochism, sadism, narcissism. These vignettes are very sketchy due to time constraints, and these cases do not compare with the grand emotions described by Garcia Marquez in “Love in the Time of Cholera”, for which this series was named, or in Thomas Mann’s great novella “Death in Venice”, in which the elderly Aschenbach dies of cholera in his longing for the young boy Tadzio.
I. Romantic love: Theresa is a single traveling salesperson in her early 40’s who has been neurotically, obsessively, searching for love for many years. Her sessions were replete with her desires for a series of men from the different cities to which she travelled for her work. Each of these men were periodically unavailable to her, and she was in denial as to why. She trusted each one in a childlike, naive manner. It seemed obvious to her analyst that each one more than likely was living with another woman or was married. The vicissitudes of her Oedipal phase were being repeated, replayed, re-experienced with eventual discovery and heartache. Unrequited love was their theme song. Finally, Theresa met a recently divorced man, Edward, who seemed to be an appropriate match for her. Her analyst thought she had finally begun to overcome her neurosis. Mid- March, when New Yorkers were ordered to shelter in place, Edward told Theresa that he was joining his parents in the mountains a few hours from the city. They continued to text and speak on the phone. Theresa was isolated in her apartment alone, could not travel for her work, which would distract her from thoughts of Edward. She was finally able to admit that he was quarantining with another woman and did not love her. She was forced to look inside herself, to face that reality, and to recover painful childhood memories from her Oedipal years. She reluctantly remembered signs that her parents really loved one another, heretofore denied. Without this opportunity to stop her busy life and its complications, the repetition would have continued.
The lockdown was especially difficult for those living alone. Elizabeth, a college professor, began treatment at this time realizing that “everyone she knew had someone to be with and she had no one.” She planned now to make time to search for someone to love.
The busy lives of New Yorkers in normal times helps them to defend against awareness of unwanted feelings and perceptions. The lockdown forced them to reflect and their progress in treatment improved.
II. Filial love: Covid -19 has challenged many families to make sacrifices in order to care for the elderly and the very young, the most vulnerable. Their love has manifested itself in staying in strict quarantine long after the government has relaxed restrictions and allowed certain stores to re-open, etc. Many families saw to it that grandparents stay far from grandchildren, causing many to suffer and feel especially lonely. “If you love Grandpa, stay far away from him”. What does that do to their love bond?
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Mary and Bob went into lockdown at his parents’ home outside the city and his unmarried brother Nat joined them. They did not leave the house even to buy groceries for several months until the lockdown ended, and most people went outside and shopped and went to restaurants. Mary and Bob wanted to see their apartment in the city and to bring back some clothes. Nat accused them of not loving their parents, that going into the city was tantamount to killing them and him, and that they could not come back if they left for a few hours. Needless to say, Bob had to work hard in his therapy to access long repressed memories of his brother’s competitiveness with him for their parents’ love, their sibling rivalry, in order to free himself and Mary to go into the city. He had to access his love for his parents while feeling angry at them in the midst of his brother’s self-righteousness and paranoia. He and Mary went into the city and his parents took them back. Eventually they decided to move back home and leave the claustrophobic circumstances his family was living in. Bob had to work through his fear that separating from his family in this way would lead to banishment and loss of love, which it did not.
This “love story” has been told many times as families quarantining together re-experience old conflicts relived in the context of COVID 19 and the personal assessment of what is safe and what will protect one’s loved ones. Some seem to go overboard with this, and it seems that love is mixed with a need to control others, fear of the outside world, undoing the pain of separation when adult children leave, etc.
III. My final example is of “self-love” during the pandemic. Marjorie, a 70 year old single woman, lived a very isolated life prior to the pandemic. Travel to her sessions was fraught with irritation about subway noise and nasty people in the streets. Her relationships with others, male and female, usually started out well, even idealized, but soon morphed into anger and pettiness. Her therapist was worried about the lockdown, that it would isolate her even further. To her surprise, Marjorie began to thrive using ZOOM. She joined art classes, writing classes, cooking classes in which she received positive feedback from her new classmates. She began to dress up and get made up for these classes, where she could see her own image as others saw her too. She chose to be on FaceTime with her therapist and called attention to her hair, her face, the rooms in her apartment which the therapist never had seen. After having ignored her therapist and the therapist’s office for years, she asked where she was, appreciated a photograph she saw and liked. Self-love, her narcissism, seemed improved because of this “mirroring” experience. Clearly, she seemed happier and pleased with herself. It would take years of therapy until she could show concern or caring about those sick or dying outside her own cocoon.
This is just a beginning effort on my part to document a few of the many varieties of love the pandemic and the lockdown have manifested. I have, and many of my colleagues have, reported sessions going well on the phone and video. It is too soon to know if the changes we have witnessed will be lasting. And I would say that love has a lot to do with it.
REFERENCES
Bergmann, M. (1987) The Anatomy of Loving: The Story of Man’s Quest to Know What Love Is Ballantine Books.
Garcia Marquez, G. (1988) Love in the Time of Cholera New York: Vintage Books.
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Mann, T. (1912) Death in Venice S. Fischer Verlag.
Person, E. (1988) Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Love
Reflection: To Act or Not to Act? Becky McGuire, LMHC, (NPSI)
A unique dilemma for psychoanalysis during unprecedented uncertainty.
To act or not to act? That is the question facing candidates, analysts, and training institutions as we live through unprecedented world and national events. What started in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump has been compounded exponentially with the ensuing events of a global pandemic hitting America in March 2020, a national awakening to institutional racism with the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and, most recently a violent and murderous insurrection on the capitol of the United States on January 6, 2021.
Since the inception of psychoanalysis, the unconscious and psychic reality have been privileged as the focus of inquiry. Indeed, it is the hallmark of psychoanalysis and sets psychoanalysis apart as a unique form of treatment. Freud asserted the analytic stance of neutrality and evenly hovering attention so that the analyst can be most receptive to the unconscious of the patient. Over time this concept has evolved with other descriptions such as free-floating responsiveness, listening with the third ear, negative capability, no memory or desire, and reverie to name a few. Although each of these has unique characteristics, underlying each, the privileged focus of inquiry is still the unconscious and psychic reality; that has not changed.
Practicing psychoanalysis requires one to become skilled in quieting themselves and refraining from acting on or acting out the various projective identifications received from the patient. Careful attention is paid to countertransference to identify the projections, think about the projections, understand the communication of the projection, and metabolize the projection, before giving back, in modified, digested form an interpretation. The action is in making an interpretation. The analytic stance is one of openness, curiosity, and thoughtfulness to promote understanding. The analytic stance is of holding, containing, and metabolizing. It is inevitable that some projections are acted on or out, thus we have enactments and then the analysis of the enactment ensues with the primary focus on openness, curiosity, and seeking to understand the unconscious elements of the enactment.
External reality is often considered a resistance or defense and the analyst always keeps one ear open for the latent content in the patient's report of external reality to find the manifestation of the unconscious. External reality is usually not taken at face value, but rather is considered in terms of the dynamic interaction between the intrapsychic and external reality. To be clear, external reality is not denied, but it is not emphasized, nor the primary focus of inquiry. When external reality does become the focus of inquiry, terms like projecting into the real and concretization are used to describe the process.
Due to the aforementioned global and national events, external reality has taken an unprecedented focus in our consulting rooms and training institutes. We are all living through these external realities. The barrier between the analyst’s external reality and the patient’s 20 external reality has become thin and overlapping. Winnicott asserted that development occurs in the real environment which I am calling external reality for the purposes of this paper. Responsiveness to experiences in the real environment creates a facilitating environment that promotes healthy development. Failure to respond appropriately to the real environment leads to a false self.
How are we to think about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis as these catastrophic changes roll across the nation and globe? Does psychoanalysis have a public role beyond our consulting rooms and training institutes? If yes, then what is that role? How is that role defined and promoted? How can psychoanalysis be responsive to the real environment of the pandemic, institutional racism, and the on-going attack on our democracy?
During the controversial discussions, the story is told of the intense debate that was taking place among those in attendance. During the debate, bombs began to drop. The debate continued as if there was no immediate danger until Winnicott called attention to the bombing and the need for action.
The events of the past 4 years are bombs that have exploded. The election of Donald Trump sent shock waves across the nation and world. The women’s march originated in Washington DC but became a global march calling on all people to stand up for equality. The pandemic exploded around the world and we acted almost overnight to change and adapt our practices and training institutes from in-person to remote work as did many other businesses. The murder of George Floyd was a bomb that caused the action of protests around the world during the worst global pandemic in 100 years. The insurrection was a violent attack on our democracy; while the insurrection was quashed, the attack on our democracy is on-going. On January 27, 2021, the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin through the National Terrorist Advisory System (NTAS) warning of the possibility of more domestic terrorism. Because of the lies told by Donald Trump and his enablers about the results of the 2020 election, anger over COVID-19 restrictions, and the insurrection on the capitol, domestic terrorists and extremists are emboldened and may take more violent action. What will the fate of our democracy be if we do not respond to the real environment in which we now live? What will the fate of our profession be if we do not respond to the real environment in which we now practice and train?
We know from Bion that lies are poisonous to the mind and the antidote is truth. At my institute, Jim Gooch spoke about healthy aggression. Analysts are quite familiar with the actions of healthy aggression and we practice them daily as we end sessions on time, even when a patient is emotional or in the middle of a story. We take the action to charge for missed appointments, even though patients may rage against this. We do this because we know we must take these actions because they promote the psychic development and mental health of the patient. The lies of Donald Trump and his enablers are poisonous to democracy and we, the practitioners of psychoanalysis must transform the modes of action used in the consulting room into actions to defend democracy.
After 147 Republicans voted against certification of the electoral votes, corporations such as Amazon, Wal Mart, Marriott, Google, Hallmark, Ford, Microsoft, and dozens more, made public statements against the insurrection and halted donations to those Republicans and to PACs. We must go beyond the borders of our analytic community and speak the truth to the public about the psychopathology infecting and destroying our democracy. We must use 21 ordinary language and reserve explicating our psychoanalytic concepts for scientific meetings, study groups, and other analytic events. Institutes must be prepared to make public statements just as corporate America has done.
Psychoanalysis as a profession is learning how to be responsive to the real environment in which we now find ourselves and we are navigating that uncertain path. ROOM A sketchbook for Analytic Action is an online journal created after the election of Donald Trump to respond to the turbulent political reality. In 2017, 37 psychiatrists and other mental health professionals defied the Goldwater rule prohibiting the diagnosis of public figures and wrote the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. For this issue, NewsBriefs has invited each of its institutes to respond with a statement to the insurrection.
In music, when there is more than one pitch sounding at the same time, harmony is created. Without multiple pitches, there can be no harmony. A song sung in harmony is richer, deeper, more resonant, and more impactful. We do not have to set aside our focus on the unconscious and intrapsychic in order to respond to the real environment. Doing both, we will create a facilitating environment that is richer, deeper, more resonant, and more impactful.
Two Poems Rich Reichbart, PhD, FIPA (IPTAR)
Poem 1: The Cheerleader
I dreamed a crowd of people wearing masks, Each with a white mask that covered mouth and nose Advanced upon me and leading them A man with orange hair twirled a baton.
“I am the cheerleader,” he shouted. “Cheer for me.” The streets were empty and the hollow sound Of marching echoed in the stillest air. As they approached I saw each one of them
Held a syringe of yellow liquid. Each mask Was painted with a head of death. They did not stop for me but vacant-eyed And soulless, still advanced. And then I woke.
Was it a dream? Oh my America, my new found land What has become of you? Where did you stray? What potion of dumb aggrandizement Do you imbibe to keep the shakes away?
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Wake me again, that I may never know How deep your fault, how dark your night can be. Fulfill your promise and your noble words. Banish the lies. Dismiss your perfidy.
Poem 2: There was a little virus: Poem for my ten year old granddaughter
There was a little virus -- that I have never seen -- It actually did require us To at-home quarantine,
Which was not nice at all , you know: I had to mask my face; To school I could no longer go, Nor party at my place.
If I could see that virus, I would jump and stomp on it! I really do desire us To tell it: Will You Quit?
I am not by nature impolite, But viruses are mean. I think what we should do with it: Have the virus self-quarantine!
Comments on an analytic forensic experience at a detention center Susan Siegeltuch, LCSW, FIPA (CFS)
Most of us know about the unconscionable Trump administration policy to separate immigrant parents and their children at the United States border as a deterrent to enter this country illegally. This was implemented in April 2018.
As psychoanalysts we are acutely aware of the catastrophic impact that separations can have on the development of children. Often, there are life-long developmental consequences including the reactivation of trauma in parents and children who are already vulnerable when they come to our borders seeking asylum. For the most part, the asylum seekers have suffered trauma in their countries of origin which is precisely why they flee and seek a safe haven. Most of these protective parents and their children have suffered horrific experiences of rape, physical and sexual abuse, violence, prostitution, threats of being murdered, extortion--sometimes some or all in combination. Protection of children and safeguarding their well-being and emotional, physical and social health is a human right the world over.
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Shortly after this policy was enacted, Dr. Gilbert Kliman* offered training in forensic evaluations (ongoing) to members of the Association of Child Psychoanalysis. I had the privilege, as difficult as it was, to be part of a team that accompanied Dr. Kliman to a detention facility in August of 2018. We went to a "family residential center" a misnomer for these for- profit prisons. Then and now, there was no question in my mind that I had to accompany Dr. Kliman.
There is a Holocaust story in my own history. That history combined with growing up in South America, has given me cultural sensitivity and fluency in Spanish. Although at the time I felt that I could meet the challenge emotionally and professionally, nonetheless after this first experience, I returned home and was mute for a week. It is difficult and inordinately painful to bear witness to the stories of asylum seekers without absorbing the brutality and desperation of those you are evaluating.
The second experience I had was in late January 2019, again with Dr. Kliman. Our purpose was conducting forensic evaluations of a Central American mother and her suicidal teen daughter. Our task was to offer opinions regarding their emotional states, the credibility of their fears and any possible psychiatric damages in connection with the asylum-seeking process.
This mother's experiences of trauma in her home country, at the USA border, in this country and at the hands of ICE in detention were harrowing. A consequence of missing her ICE appointment by half an hour, this mother and daughter were placed in detention for 7 months. Let that sink in: 7 months in detention including one week in isolation.
That length of imprisonment is a violation of the Flores Agreement, a court settlement that has been in place for over two decades. This agreement set limits on the length of time and conditions under which children could be incarcerated in immigration detention. The Trump administration disregarded these safeguards for children, including the transfer requirement to a non-secure, licensed facility within three to five days of apprehension.
The dyad with whom I worked was in isolation in a cold, windowless room. This was punishment for an anxious outburst the adolescent girl had at the airport secondary to her terror of being deported to their home country. The pair was told by detention center officers "just leave because we don't want you here." Dr. Kliman and I had a parallel experience in that we, too, were isolated to a separate building watched by an officer who paced back and forth in front of our open office door. This "castigo" (punishment) was the consequence for them, as well as us, for daring to be non-compliant and for associating ourselves with the "other".
Furthermore, the dyad was terrorized with the constant looming threat of "we will separate you." The threat of separation is all too common for those in detention. Additional punishments included being kept in an ice-cold room, hosed down by freezing water, given raw chicken to eat, mocking and humiliation. These are all violations of human rights, and cruel and sadistic to say the least.
To quote the charming, bright, engaging teen: "Of all the bad things that happened to me in my country and in this country before detention, eight days in isolation and the seven months
24 here are the worst. I am like a bird in a cage. My only crime, and it is very unjust, is coming to the States." The mother's grief was palpable. She reiterated that being in detention and isolation were also her worst experiences, but seeing her daughter suffer was "horrible for any mother." In a moment of great anguish, this mother said, "What have I done wrong except to protect my child?" I, too, felt the heartbreak of this caring, protective, and loving mother.
As psychoanalysts and clinicians, we need to think about the conscious and unconscious sadism and cruelty of groups and how leaders communicate this in subtle and not so subtle ways. Who gets triggered and why? And who does not?
For me, the experience with this dyad and people suffering deeply has been personally and professionally powerful. The mother in detention, at parting said in a remarkably moving moment, “May God bless you. I prayed last night for God to protect you. I can't pay you, but I so much appreciate your being here. We will see each other again. Outside.” Our ability to offer humane and emphatic analytic listening might offer a temporary respite to asylum seekers but may also offer possibilities for human interactions that are potentially therapeutic.
If I leave you with anything, let it be this. Be willing to get uncomfortable. Move outside the confines of your office. Use your voice. We have much to offer and our skills are necessary during a most critical time.
This experience will be with me forever.
*(Dr. Gilbert Kliman is the Founder and Medical Director of the Children’s Psychological Health Center, San Francisco, California. He is the recipient of multiple awards. In February, 2020 he received the APsaA President’s Humanitarian Award).
Susan was awarded the Plumsock Prize, which is granted yearly to a CFS member.
Oyneg Shabes Mary Claudia Wall, LCSW, FIPA
In spring of 2019 at Symphony Space, I watched a compelling film, “Who Will Write Our History.” This movie is about a group of 60 living among approximately 400 Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. They organized clandestinely to feed the hungry and ensure the survival of their stories/truths - in the likely event that they would all be murdered. All but three were. Their written stories were buried underground in various places for safekeeping. The code name for this secret operation was Oyneg Shabes (Joys of Shabbat.)
In this country, African Americans have been murdered by the police for minor offenses; Latin American children are separated from their parents at the border and neglected by those charged with protecting them; our environmental protection policies are decimated and, last but certainly not least, our role as a beacon of hope in the world is eroding as our President had no respect for what we have built. These atrocities have left me feeling helpless, despairing, and enraged! I thought to myself if the members of Oyneg Shabes could find the strength to risk their lives and preserve their truth I should be able to work productively and join forces with others to stem the tide of fascism in our country.
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Rather than getting caught up in concern that nothing I could do would be enough, I decided to start with phone banking in the Midwest in the months leading up to the 2020 election. My “rooted’ familiarity, (I was born and raised in the Midwest) gave me an “in” with people who might otherwise have dismissed a conversation with a New Yorker.
I am sharing three vignettes that are illustrative of my dialogue with those who would most likely vote for Trump. It also illustrates the dichotomous world I was immersed in and the power of QAnon on those who either can’t discern or choose not to. That being said, a retired electrical engineer and I had a lengthy discussion. He was pleased with Trump’s progress regarding tax cuts, adjusted tariff policy for China and the plan to do away with “socialized’ Obama health care. I asked him whether the “character” issue about Trump bothered him as much as it did me.
He responded that he did not understand what I meant by “character.” I talked about Trump’s lack of an internal moral compass and further elaborated that he was not concerned about doing the right thing. It seems to be all the about “the deal or no deal.” I added that he was not capable of concern for others. He listened but added that Trump manages to get things done and he was pleased with the direction Trump was headed. We further talked about his concerns about his adult children, two of whom were unemployed. I empathized with how hard that had to be to witness for him as a concerned parent. As our conversation was concluding, he offered this concession, “I understand what you mean by character.” He then told me about a cousin who embodies qualities he admires, those of thoughtfulness and sensitivity to others.” He did not say he was going to reconsider his presidential choice, however.
Another example was a male whose wife passed the phone to him. This was not unusual in homes where the husband/father was the “decider.” This middle-aged man wanted to talk about the issues important to him such as price of soybeans, jobs, pandemic until we got to taxes. He unexpectedly pivoted and asked rhetorically, “You have to be upset about how little Trump paid in taxes.” I acknowledged that I was but added that since he raised the issue, I wondered if he too was upset but attributed his opinion to me. He giggled and was silent. I think he was not committing one way or the other — at least to me — but I did think the injustice of the tax issue was significant for him.
As Election Day grew close, QAnon was quoted more as if the QAnon forces were panicking about the potential for losing. Several people emphatically shared that “Biden was a pedofile.” I was flummoxed by this accusation and never quite figured out how to respond quickly enough before the conversation was abruptly ended by whomever answered the phone. I would call back but encountered little success for further dialogue. I felt as though it was Halloween, and a poisonous treat was left at my door without a trace of knowing where it came from.
I’m certain that the retired engineer lived a moral life. Yet, it did not seem to bother him whether our President did. The man whose wife passed the phone to him was really upset about the minute amount of taxes paid by Trump, but I am not so sure it was a “deal breaker.”
It's important to acknowledge that Trump won 53% of the vote while Biden won 46% percent in this midwestern state. Voter turnout was stronger compared to the previous presidential 26 election. 73% of people voted where I was phone banking. 80% voted in a neighboring state while 63% voted in New York. I learned we are indeed a divided country! Dialogue across the divide is critical. Not to mention the importance of ensuring that our voting system continues to be overhauled so all people are eligible and supported by accessibility to the process.
And, in case you are curious, and I hope you are, two thirds of the documents buried by the secret operation of Oyneg Shabes have been recovered. They are in the safe hands of UNESCO in the Memory of the World Register (“The Ringelblum Archive”). In 1999, these precious, life-affirming documents were banked with and enriched by the company of the works of Copernicus and Masterpieces of Chopin --as they so justly deserve and more! May we remember and continue to be inspired by the brave members of Oyneg Shabes!
“Dear Candidate: Analysts from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education and the Profession” Fred Busch, Ed.
While this book is geared toward candidates and those entering the profession, analysts at all levels might be inspired to think, once again, about this impossible but fascinating profession.
The book, Dear Candidate: Analysts from Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education and the Profession, was published by Routledge, November 2020.
Candidates have always been our future. They are our legacy. However, there is little in our literature that might help younger clinicians reflect upon what it means to be a psychoanalytic candidate, and its role in the professional life they are about to enter. In the first-of-kind book I attempted to speak to these issues by inviting senior psychoanalysts from around the world to write personal letters to candidates that included memories of their own training, what it was like to become a psychoanalyst, and what they would like most to convey to the candidate of today. The request to write something for this book was met with great enthusiasm, and it shows. In these rich letters one finds insights that can help analysts in training, and those recently entering the profession, reflect upon what it means to be a psychoanalytic candidate, and what it’s like to begin a life as a psychoanalyst. Sharing their own experiences, these analysts demonstrate a vital commitment to psychoanalysis and give lively descriptions of how each of them became and remained a psychoanalyst. They talk about the enduring satisfactions of being an analyst, and are candid about the anxieties, ambiguities, and the complications they faced in training and entering the profession. Many offer ways to think about dealing with these hurdles. Some suggest it is useful to realize one is always in the process of becoming a psychoanalyst. To do so is to be open to a life-long process of learning and testing one’s ideas.
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Below are edited excerpts from these letters that I think will give the reader an idea of their richness, and also the authors’ joys and disappointments they’ve had in analytic training and the profession. Ways of thinking about training to help candidates deal with what they are experiencing are offered. The conclusion for almost all the letters is: it was worth it. – Fred Busch
Arthur Leonoff (Canada)
As much as I have felt the need at various points to reflect on my analytic training, to revisit its valuable teachings, I have also had to work through experiences of disillusionment. I also understand better now why analysts work well into their old age and sometimes through it. There is the excitement in being an analyst – the capacity to help people deeply, to inch them towards deeper change, to learn what has been previously unknowable, all the while further refining one’s analytic capacity that continues to grow. It is hard for me to imagine giving this up, as long as there are patients willing and eager to work with me and profit from what we as a group of committed clinicians have to offer.
H. Shmuel Erlich (Israel) Dear Candidate, Although we have never met and hardly know each other, I feel the need to write to you, to share some of my own experiences (alas, too long! The years go by too quickly…) which I hope will mean something to you and to tell you why I feel so close and involved in what you must be going through. I hope you won’t mind if I get a bit personal, because it is an important part of the story: It is all so very personal and not merely professional. Talking to a candidate like you invariably raises in me the questions I faced when I applied, was accepted, and began my training in the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute. One big question was: Why in the world do I need this? And that was even before I knew what I was getting into. I was fortunate to have an excellent psychoanalytically oriented training as a post-doctoral student at the Austen Riggs Center, and when I returned to Israel, I was regarded by many as a psychoanalyst. I quickly realized, however, that the people with whom I shared a common language were all psychoanalysts, so I decided to complete my training, applied to the Institute and was accepted. In the first place, therefore, the answer to why I needed this is at this level: to be with the people I would have a great deal in common with. To be frank, and as you may already have experienced yourself, it is true that even within the Institute, and later in the Psychoanalytic Society, I have more in common with some, less with others, and very little with a few others. But even this taught me an important, if humbling, lesson: people always are different from one another in everything they do or belong to. This is so even within a family, where people differ in so many ways. And yet, again as in a family, there is a commonness that holds and binds them together, over and beyond any discrepancies and disagreements. Something else I discovered over the years, and again the family metaphor serves me in this, is that I (and most of the colleagues I know) are in this psychoanalytic venture not for any financial gains (there aren’t any) nor for getting the esteem of those outside the field (there is rarely anything vaguely approaching it, more often one gets the astonished response of why belong to something extinct, esoteric, and irrelevant) but simply for the love of it. Believe me, it is a rare privilege, a great pleasure, and immeasurably worthwhile to spend your life engaged in something.
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Claudio Eizirik (Brazil)
A suggestion to you: try to participate in the meetings of your Institute and Society, dare to ask questions and make comments at the seminars, don`t accept anything without raising your doubts, when it`s the case. If you think a concept is strange, unjustifiable, or even ridiculous, share your ideas and ask for clarification.
Fredric Perlman (USA)
In this world, we psychoanalysts are outliers in our thinking and our practices, marginal to the mental health industry and to the larger culture that shapes it. This is a difficult status to inhabit but I encourage you to embrace it. Let it invigorate rather than dispirit you. Psychoanalysts are not agents of social adjustment, or symptomatic melioration, but healers of inner pain, midwives to selves emerging from confusion. We analysts are the only healers I know of whose core purpose is to understand and illuminate rather than to persuade: to help our patients make sense of themselves, to retrieve the lost stories behind their troubles, to restore their sense of coherence and self-worth, and over time, to promote their capacity and courage to create their own designs for living. Psychoanalysis is nothing if not a cure of the soul: a cure attained by curiosity not correctives, by thoughtful insights jointly ascertained, and by kindness conveyed in the currency of empathy, respect, and compassion.
Heribert Blass (Germany)
This leads me to the question of anxiety in psychoanalytic education. I think anxiety is unavoidable. Of course, I was also anxious about how I and my psychoanalytic work would be assessed by my supervisors and my fellow candidates. And I was also worried if I could understand my patients well enough. I still have this worry every day. But I would like to distinguish between anxiety as a helpful signal of never being too sure and anxiety as a fear of disapproval and exclusion. The latter paralyzes one’s own feelings and thoughts. So, I would like to encourage you to be anxious in a caring sense, but not anxious in the form of submission. Be open to your teachers, but do not follow them blindly. Rather dare to discuss difficult analytical processes with them and hopefully find common solutions instead of either submitting or superficially agreeing and then doing something else. This includes dealing with mistakes.
Otto Kernberg (USA)
To begin: it is well worth it to become a psychoanalyst at this time, when psychoanalysis is widely being questioned and criticized - sometimes with good reason (more about that, later). Psychoanalysis, I believe is the most profound and comprehensive theory about the functions, structure, development and pathology of the human mind. It also provides a spectrum of psychoanalytically based psychotherapies, including the classical or standard psychoanalytic treatment, and several derived, empirically validated psychotherapies. And it is a unique potential instrument for research on the mind.
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Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau (USA, Switzerland)
You’ve made a great choice when you decided to go for psychoanalytic training! To work with the human mind is endlessly fascinating. No two patients are the same, even if they carry the same diagnosis. To trace, the particular defense strategies of your patients’ ego when faced with challenge and opportunity, and to experience the emergence of their unconscious fantasies and infantile theories will always reward you with awe and amazement. As much suffering as a patient may put on your couch or chair, to eventually access and resolve together the unconscious core-conflicts and beliefs that are at its root, will enlighten both of you with pleasure. And not to forget: which other profession would allow you to linger on dreams, to look at their intricate layers of meaning, and enjoy the beauty, wit, and even the archaic bluntness of their imagery? Since this complexity is what makes psychoanalysis such an intriguing profession, it is obviously a daunting task to study it.
Stefano Bolognini (Italy)
In short, if I compare my early situation as a Candidate with yours, I would say we had probably more grandiose idealizing illusions (such as being somehow “pioneers”, easily recruiting needy patients asking for being rescued via classical treatment, dealing with a univocal, undisputable theory all explaining, etc.) to be progressively reduced and realistically proportioned by experience; while you can have today more consistent and refined analytic instruments, a more advanced professional community and a different awareness of the contemporary psychoanalyst on how the human mentality, uses, interior organization and availability to invest are rapidly changing in the relational attitude of the subject towards the object.
What instead remains substantially unchanged, in my opinion, is that analysts are in fact the only owners of the keys of the door to the unconscious, and the only possible guide for a patient needing deep and stable changes in his/her life. Isn’t this enough for motivating you to become such a specialist, exactly as it was 40/50 years ago?
Eric Marcus (USA)
Training is not easy. It is time intensive. It is financially difficult. It is emotionally demanding. It is self-confronting. It helps if you want it very badly, if your interest is compelling, if you love patient care, if you need to think deeply about the mind. In training you learn difficult theory, treat challenging patients, are supervised in uncomfortably personal ways, and read an exciting but seemingly endless and dense literature. Because the study is personally so demanding, you meet many puffed up egos, one adaptation to the humbling of grandiosity. Ignore the ego aggrandizement. The field is riven theoretically, as all growing fields tend to be, and you see many heated arguments. Enjoy the show and do not confuse truth with the theoretical Sturm und Drang. Do not click on the emotional click bait of pedagogy. Focus on your learning. Learn from all. Integrating theory and developing your clinical working style are lifelong developments.
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Michael Diamond (USA)
What begins in candidacy will hopefully grow into a career-long project to develop your capacity to work with unconscious material and appreciate the life of the psyche. Yet, this will invariably test your ability to tolerate uncertainty, confusion, insecurity, and intense feelings, often in ways that entail considerable vulnerability. Additionally, particularly through helpful supervisory experiences and your personal analysis, you must reckon with your ability to tolerate disappointment, responsibility, and manage narcissistic investment in your work, often in great inner solitude. Despite the intimacy within analytic space, we are unutterably alone in the deepest and most important aspects of our work. Your solitude as an analyst must become an anchor where you can eventually find your way, often amid turbulent and unfamiliar conditions that candidacy can help you learn to accept and even bear with curiosity. One way of maintaining its vitality is, in my opinion, to encourage ourselves to rethink, to question each and every one of its concepts in light of the epochal changes as well as contributions from other disciplines.
Rachel Blass (Israel)
While psychoanalysis offers an understanding of the person that falls into the field of psychology, and a practice that could be considered a form of therapy, the unique nature of the psychological understanding and therapeutic practice that it offers also shapes a profound ethical vision. We can and should, in my view, be motivated by this vision. I consider this vision to be one regarding the power of truth and of love. It proposes that failure to know oneself, one’s inner truths, is what lies at the foundation of psychic disorder, and analytic cure is to allow the patient to come to know these previously unknown, unconscious, truths. Coming to know truth in this context is not simply an intellectual matter, but rather involves the integration of parts of ourselves; it means a lived experience of these parts. And it is also a motivated act, as is the failure to come to know. That is, we, in a sense “choose” to know and “choose” to deny and, in this sense, we are also responsible for our psychic suffering, and the suffering we cause others as a result. In other words, what I am emphasizing here is that psychoanalysis provides the person with a way to know and be oneself—to choose to live truthfully, to take responsibility for whom one is and what one does. This is an ethical aim, and to become an analyst is to embrace it. Therapeutic relief through analysis, in this context, is only a derivative of striving toward this analytic aim—one of its important benefits. That is, to be an analyst, as I see it, is not to seek the best ways toward symptom relief but to be part of a search for the deepest integration of the patient’s unconscious mind, of the truths with which at bottom he struggles.
Virginia Ungar (Argentina)
Just one personal point: I started to attend local, regional, and international scientific meetings early on and this opened-up my mind in a way that only recently, in the position that I now occupy in the IPA, I realize was the start of the journey that brought me to where I am today. I don’t want to give an idealized picture of my training, however. Again, I say that there was a lot of effort and dedication in those years, and time scraped from wherever possible, especially family life. I had excellent teachers, and some not so. I had wonderful supervisors who were as generous as they were demanding. My colleagues said that I chose the most difficult ones, but from them I learnt during my clinical experience so much about 31 psychoanalysis. Above all, however, and being faithful to Bion, I learnt through experience what it is to be dedicated to a task and to have a passion for psychoanalysis.
Harriet Wolfe (USA)
Psychoanalysis is an approach to thinking and education that emphasizes reflection and understanding. It becomes a contradiction in terms when rules regarding the psychoanalytic training model take on an absolutist quality. The preservation of a certain model rather than the establishment of policies and procedures that reflect attention to individual training and clinical needs is inconsistent with fundamental psychoanalytic principles. The allure of rules is that they offer a sense of security and stability, especially during times of rapid change. At best, rules promote healthy functioning and improve output. They make us better. At worst, rules become a bastion against important new thinking like an orthodoxy that can only perpetuate itself. Somewhere in between seems right. Quality control is essential, but we have a potent, well-tested analytic method and ways of understanding human nature that merit organizational confidence. In my view, flexibility in the face of shifting technological and cultural change is not a specific risk to psychoanalysis or a harbinger of a slippery slope. Flexibility, as I see it, is an approach reflecting an overall attitude of curiosity, discovery, and openness to new thinking and willingness to face challenges without excessive fear.
Dear Candidate, we need your help in exploring the pros and cons of flexibility in the goals and standards for analytic training. Please be active participants in the conversations at your institute while you live through the process! Also, participate in the national and international conversations, now so much easier thanks to communication technology. An open and transparent educational system promises to allow greater emphasis on scholarship, research, and collaborative thinking, all good for the future of psychoanalysis.
Alan Sugarman (USA)
It is important that you find an analyst with whom you feel comfortable being brutally honest about the workings of your mind as well as the ways you work with your patients. Unfortunately, this does not always happen in one’s training analysis. If it doesn’t, seek another analysis when you can. For me, my third analysis, when I was already an established analyst, is the one that truly helped me to know and master my deepest conflicts. As expected, my clinical work improved remarkably. For this reason, my parting words will be to remember Freud’s suggestion that we all be reanalyzed periodically. Do not shy away from another analysis if you find that you are getting in your own way at any point in your analytic career.
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Feeling inspired?
Perhaps the poems, reflections and letters stimulated your creative juices. Consider: A chapter in a book or a short article?
CIPS Book Series
Dear Members,
It gives us great satisfaction and pleasure to report on our wonderful CIPS Book Series.
Over the last ten years, the CIPS Book Series has published ten volumes of original psychoanalytic scholarship, each authored by one or more of our own members, each contributing to the psychoanalytic literature of the 21st Century, and each representing the intellectual wealth and creative ferment of our CIPS community. As we now enter our second decade of publication, we remain dedicated to the same core purposes that inspired us to launch our book series years ago: to advance psychoanalytic thought, to publicize the work of our members, and to promote the work of our vibrant and diverse psychoanalytic community.
This year, we are launching a new initiative to encourage each of our component societies to produce “society based” volumes representing the work of their respective communities. Society based volumes will help our individual societies to raise their profiles and recruit new members and candidates, while promoting the work of their contributing authors as well as our larger national community. The spectrum of subjects about which our members can write is expanding as CIPS grows. Therefore, it is really good news that the range of books we can publish in our book series is also expanding. As you may know, our book series is being published by Routledge Press, a division of the Taylor and Francis group, whose journals and books cover a wide spectrum of academic and clinical fields. The Routledge division for mental health publications, the division which hosts our series, is eager to publish books on a wide variety of psychoanalytic topics, including specialized practice areas, such as analytic couple and group treatment, as well as books addressing today’s “widening scope” of analytic treatment, including clinical problems like addiction, obsessional conditions, attentional problems, or emerging issues related to the pandemic. We are especially excited to learn that Routledge is interested in interdisciplinary studies that connect psychoanalysis with traditionally separate areas such as politics, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and, of special interest to many of our members, the world of literature. These academic domains offer wonderful contexts for creative collaboration among members of our national multidisciplinary community.
Do you have an idea for a collection of essays on a particular theme that you would like to edit? Do you envision a book on a particular topic that you would really like to develop with a team of collaborators? Whether you are looking for contributors or for creative collaborators, we can help you connect with other members whose interests and publication goals dovetail with your own - just contact any of us at the email addresses below.
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The CIPS Book Series is a terrific opportunity for each of our members and societies to develop, refine, and publish their work. Every publication enhances the vitality and cohesion of our community and contributes to our profession. We invite any member or group of members to propose book projects, and of course, we encourage each of our societies to do the same.
For more information about the book series and its procedures, please take a look at the Book Series pages on the CIPS website (www.cipsusa.org). With great enthusiasm for CIPS and our growing collaborative potential,
Rick Perlman Book Series Editor [email protected]
Phyllis Sloate Associate Series Editor [email protected]
Beth Kalish Associate Series Editor [email protected]
For a shorter piece (maximum 1500 words), consider ROOM:
In case you have not heard of ROOM before, here is some context:
ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action is a community online magazine that brings different perspectives to bear on how culture and politics a ffect our psyche. The magazine aims to address how our psychic reality impacts our political and social worlds. ROOM began after the U.S. 2016 election. The 12 magazines archived in our website form a timeline of the last four years, while inviting greater familiarity with psychoanalysis as an important lens for personal, cultural, and political discourse.
In 2020, CIPS contributors broke down as follows (note there were many additional contributors beyond CIPS members): 10 from IPTAR, 2 from PINC and 1 from NPSI. In a way, this makes sense because ROOM was created by various IPTAR members and candidates so perhaps it is best known at IPTAR. However, how about some collegial competition?!
All CIPS members (candidates, members, and fellows) from all of the CIPS societies are invited to contribute. The next issue will be released in June and is receiving submissions through May 1st. Please go to the following link to find out more. https://analytic- room.submittable.com/submit
We congratulate those CIPS members who were published in ROOM during 2020, including:
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C. Jama Adams, Sheldon Bach, Joseph A. Cancelmo, Michael Diamond, Richard Grose, Gabriel Heller, Dinah Mendes, Kate Muldowny, Adriana Prengler, Jared Russell, Alice Lowe Shaw, Aneta Stojnić, and Drew Tillotson.
Members and Candidates Publications, Awards, and Speaking Engagements during 2020
Psychoanalysts and candidates are a creative and generative bunch, forever exploring and expanding their understanding and sensitivity. Here are some of the things our colleagues wrote about, spoke about and were honored for during 2020.
Collected by the Society’s Reporter (Presented in alphabetical order by society)
Contemporary Freudian Society (CFS) Reporter: Mary Wall, LCSW, FIPA
Debra Gill, LCSW, FIPA
Dimensionality in Analytic Treatment: Engaging with Racial and Cultural Difference During Covid- 19 at MITPP on October 23, 2020.
Susan Roane, PhD, FIPA
Shares that in 2020 Psychoanalytic Brooklyn held several seminars: "Introduction to the Work of Jean LaPlanche" with Rogeio Sosnik; "Sexual Boundary Violations: Traversing the minefields of sex and love in the consulting room" with Liz Goren; "Deepening the Treatment" with Jane Hall; and "The Impasse" with Jules Owen and Ann Rudovsky
Ani Buk, LP, FIPA
For the Psychoanalytic Training Institute of CFS, Ani Buk taught the Continuous Case Seminar, the Continuing Education seminar Analytic Listening: Foundations of Psychoanalytic Practice, and presented a case for the Clinical Moments Open House. She taught a two-day intensive seminar for the Kint Institute entitled "Applications of Art Therapy to Trauma Treatment: Working with Image and Symbol," and co-taught a workshop entitled "The Courage to Feel, The Challenge of Holding (On): Cultivating Resilience in the Pandemic” at the annual Expressive Therapies Summit in NYC. 35
In her role as Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Art Therapy Program of NYU she also taught the course Working with Traumatized Populations: Clinical and Countertransference Issues for Art Therapists.
John Rosegrant, PhD, FIPA
Rosegrant, J. (2020). Review of The clinical Erik Erikson [Review of the book The Clinical Erik Erikson, by S. Schlein]. Psychoanalytic Psychology. Advance online publication.
Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) Reporter: Leslie Wells, LP, FIPA
Publications, Awards and Speaking Engagements
C. Jama Adams, PhD
Adams, C. J. (2020). Social and Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Use of Physical Punishment among Low-Income African Americans. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 73, 1, 73-90.
Adams, C. J. (2020). Discussion: Hunting the Real. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 17, 3, 272-282
Adams, C.J. (2020, October). Thirteen Tasks in a Time of Rage and Opportunity. ROOM: A sketchbook for analytic action. Retrieve from ROOM A sketchbook for Analytic Action
Martha Bragin, PhD, LCSW
Award
Partners in Advancing Education for International Social Work (PIE) Award. Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), 2020.
Speaking Engagements
Peacebuilding and Psychosocial Well-Being- The Afghan Experience. Round Table on MHPSS and Peace-building for Afghanistan Convened by the Government of the Netherlands, Online. July 2, 2020
Between war and pandemic: Activating the agency of Syrian teens through a participatory study of resources and needs Annual Meeting: Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action. October, 2020.
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Peace, love and justice: A participatory study of psychosocial well-being among Afghan adults. Annual Conference of the Society of Social Work and Research (SSWR) Washington, D.C. 15 January, 2020.
Publications
Bragin, M., Mikulka, J., Lewis, M., Opiro, G., Guzzardi, S. (in press). Thinking and learning together: Classroom interventions for children affected by war and community violence. Child Welfare.
Bragin, M., Akesson, B., Ahmady, M., Akbari, M., Ayubi, B., Faqiri, R., Faiq, Z., Oriya, S., Rasooli, H. Zaffari, R., Azizi, B., Barakzai, F., Ahmadi, J., Sharifi, K., Wolfson, H., Karimi, B., & Sediqi, S. (2020). Peace, love and justice: A Participatory Study of Psychosocial Wellbeing in Afghanistan International Social Work.
Bragin, M. (2020). Clinical social work with survivors of disaster and terrorism: A social ecological approach. In J. Brandell, (Ed.), Theory and practice in clinical social work (3rd ed. pp. 303- 333). San Diego, CA: Cognella, Inc.
Bragin, M. (2020). Inter-agency guidelines for psychosocial intervention in emergencies. In Oxford Encyclopedia of Social Work. Oxford University Press.
Joseph Cancelmo, PsyD, FIPA
Joseph A.Cancelmo, Parting is such sweet sorrow: Contemplating endings in psychoanalysis. IPTAR Salon – Loss in the Psychoanalytic Encounter (March 8, 2020).
Monica Carsky, PhD, FIPA
Carsky, Monica (2020) How Treatment arrangements enhance transference analysis in Transference-Focused Psychotherapy. Psychoanalytic Psychology 37(4).
Monica also gave a 2.5 CE webinar at the American Psychological Association 2020 national meeting on Setting the Treatment Frame to Ensure Good Treatment Outcomes for Personality Disordered Patients, another work to show how transference analysis is Central.
Yuen Chan, LMSW
Yuen Chan (2020). Through a Glass Darkly: A Personal Journey toward Psychoanalytic Training Through the Contemporary Prism of Race, Diversity, and Inclusion, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 56:2-3, 305-329.
Berrak Cigeroglu, MD, FIPA
"Is this a Nightmare or Is This Really Happening?" at the Online Symposium “Psychoanalytic Views: Uncanny Home/Universe”. Hosted from Istanbul, Turkey on 6 December 6, 2020.
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William Fried, PhD, FIPA
Fried, W. (2020) Frida: Portrait of a Self. Journal of Clinical Psychology. 76, 8, August 2020, Pp 1483-1491.
Fried, W. (2020) Freud's Rib. International Journal of Controversial Discussions. 3, Sept. 2020, Pp 62-66.
Fried, W. (2020) Take (a poem). Psychoanalytic Perspectives. 17, 3, Oct. 2020, P 402.
Geoffrey Goodman, PhD
Halfon, S., Goodman, G., & Bulut, P. (2020). Interaction structures as predictors of outcome in a naturalistic study of psychodynamic child psychotherapy. Psychotherapy Research, 30, 251-266.
Ramires, V. R. R., Carvalho, C., Polli, R. G., Goodman, G., & Midgley, N. (2020). The therapeutic process in psychodynamic therapy with children with different capacities for mentalizing. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 19, 358-370.
Anthony Graves, MFA
Anthony works as an artist under the name Camel Collective and is currently showing new works at Ulterior Gallery as part of Voices: Camel Collective, Douglas Goldberg, and Carrie Yamaoka, on view through March 6th. link to gallery website: http://www.ulteriorgallery.com/voices link to 3D tour of the exhibition: https://tinyurl.com/4ve6fuh6 link to his website: https://camelcollective.org/ Claudia Heilbrunn, MA
Heilbrunn, C. (Ed.). (2020). What Happens When the Analyst Dies: Unexpected Terminations In Psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Routledge.
Laura Kleinerman, MS, FIPA
Kleinerman, L. (2020). Maintenant Il faut se quitter, Now We Must Part). Paris: PUF, 2017. JAPA 68:4. (August 2020)
Janice Lieberman, PhD, FIPA
Panelist in IPA Webinar “Love in the Age of COVID” [text in this issue]. August 2020.
Paper Presentation “What Should a Wife Want?” New York Society of Clinical Social Workers. October 2020.
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The Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (LAISPS) Reporter: Joe Davis, PhD
Jill Barth, PhD, FIPA has been selected to receive one of this year's Edith Sabshin Teaching Awards given by the American Psychoanalytic Association. The award recognizes members of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) who have made outstanding contributions as educators of students who are not candidates and acknowledges that teaching non-candidate students is one of the most significant ways in which psychoanalysts contribute to our field, and to education. Selected by her colleagues at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, the award recognizes Dr. Barth for “being a superior educator, with a style and commitment to education to which others can aspire.”
Fred Busch, PhD, FIPA published Busch, F. (2020) (Editor) Dear candidate: analysts from around the world offer personal reflections on psychoanalytic training, education, and the profession. New York/London, Routledge. Dr. Busch made two recent presentations as well:
Busch, F. and Bayona, I. Dear Candidate. Presentation to the Sociedad Columbian de Psicoanalisis. (Zoom). January 2021.
Busch, F and Stimmel, B. Dear Candidate: A Conversation with Freud Busch and Barbara Stimmel.(Zoom) Metropolitan Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. February 2021.
Michael J. Diamond, PhD, FIPA has a completed a new book to be published this Spring entitled Masculinity and Its Discontents: The Male Psyche and the Inherent Tensions of Maturing Manhood. Routledge:London
In addition, Dr. Diamond has written two recent book chapters and four journal articles. The book chapters appeared as:
“Dear Candidate – Letter To A Psychoanalytic Candidate.” In Busch, F. (2020) (Editor). Dear Candidate: Analysts from around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education, and the Profession, New York/London, Routledge, pp. 6-10.
“Treating the traumatized mind: Dissociation and psychoanalytic technique.” In McBride, T., & Murphy, M. (2020), (Eds) Trauma and the Destructive-Transformative Struggle. London: Routledge, pp. 200-212.
And Dr. Diamond's journal articles included:
Encompassing the multitude, animating the contradictions, and building bridges: Reply to commentaries. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2020), 68: 921-947. Return of the repressed: Dissociation and the psychoanalysis of the traumatized mind. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2020), 68: 839-874.
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The elusiveness of ‘the feminine” in the male analyst: Living in yet not being of the binary. Psychoanalytic Quarterly (2020), 89: 503-526.
A review of “Changing Notions Of The Feminine: Confronting Psychoanalysts’ Prejudices,”edited by Margarita Cereijido. International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2020), 101: 230-234.
Alan Spivak, PhD, FIPA has contributed a chapter to a book: “The Central Role of Unconscious Fantasy in the Analysis of Child Abuse Trauma,” Chapter 16. In Trauma and the Destructive-Transformative Struggle: Clinical Perspectives by T. McBride and Maureen Murphy (eds), London: Routledge 2020, pp. 213-231. And Dr.Spivak also wrote a book review: Warmed by the Fires: Selected Papers of Allan Frosch by Joseph A. Cancelmo, Batya R. Monder, & Hattie B. Myers (Eds), Queens, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2019, 360. Pp., Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2021, Vol. 38, No. 1, 91-95.
Peter Wolson, PhD, FIPA presented a paper: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on America’s 2020 Presidential election at an October workshop at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. He has shared this paper with LAISPS members and candidates, and makes it available to CIPS members at:
PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES ON AMERICA'S 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION5.pdf
PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES ON AMERICA'S 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION5.docx
Dr. Wolson also conducted a workshop for the Los Angeles County Psychological Association: The Psychology of Narcissism: Psychoanalytic perspectives, which was APA approved for 6 CEU credits. The workshop explored three major psychoanalytic theories of narcissism, Sigmund Freud’s seminal concepts, Heinz Kohut’s self psychology, and Otto Kernberg’s “Pathological narcissism.” The workshop focused on the most pivotal diagnostic and treatment issues for each theory, comparing and contrasting their clinical applicability.
Additionally, Dr. Wolson contributed an essay, “Some Pros and Cons of Psychoanalytic Teletherapy,” to the April, 2021 issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology The entire issue is devoted to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy during the time of COVID-19. The April issue is tentatively titled: Notes from a Pandemic: Reflections from 19 Clinicians on the Year of COVID-19.
Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NPSI) Reporter: Dave Parnes, LICSW, FIPA
Jeff Eaton, LMHC, FIPA
Jeff is presenting a yearlong course titled “Eight Gates for Listening: Exploring A Psychotherapist’s Attention” for The Center for Object Relations, Sept 2020- June 2021.
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In November 2020 he presented a lecture titled “The Second Life of Dreaming” in a webinar sponsored by The Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy of Western Australia.
In April 2021 he is presenting with Joshua Durban of Tel Aviv a webinar titled “Encountering Autism: The Analyst’s Workspace and the Language of Suchness” sponsored by The Frances Tustin Memorial Trust.
Judy Eekhoff, PhD, FIPA
On September 14, 2020, Judy was an invited speaker for the C. Philip Wilson Memorial Lecture at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (formerly the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute) meeting. She presented a paper via zoom, entitled “The Black Hole: Alarm signal of Catastrophe.”
On November 30 & 31,2020, Judy was a plenary speaker with Howard Levine & Dominique Scarfone for the Annual Scientific Conference of the Western Branch of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Association, “Aftermath of Trauma.” The paper presented was entitled “No Words to Say It: Trauma & Its Aftermath.
The Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC) Reporter: Susan Mitchell, PhD
PCC has established a committee on Diversity. Diane Garcia, PhD, FIPA is the chair of the committee.
On Sunday, November 8, 2020 John Steiner, MD, FIPA, held a Master Class via zoom for PCC members and candidates. PCC candidate Joseph Turner, PsyD, presented to Dr. Steiner. The morning was informative and led to a stimulating discussion.
On Saturday, December 5, 2020, PCC Member and Training Analyst Desy Safan-Gerard, PHD, FIPA presented her paper, “Obstacles To Creativity” to the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Community. The talk took place on zoom and was sponsored by the New Center for Psychoanalysis.
PCC is having an Institute wide discussion to consider and reevaluate the qualifications for Training Analyst given the rapidly changing culture.
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Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) Reporter: Drew Tillotson, PsyD, FIPA
Publications/Awards/Presentations
Samuel Gerson, PhD
Gerson, S. (2020). The failure of manic defense in the face of pandemic: A case vignette. Psychoanalysis Today, #11, July 2020.
Terrance McLarnan, MFT, FIPA
Fort Da. Vol. XXVI, No. 2 (Fall 2020)
Two poems: “Remembering Us: An Open Series” and “Daydream's Rough Cut”
Drew Tillotson, PsyD, FIPA
Tillotson, D. (2020). The body in adolescence: psychic isolation and physical symptoms; Analytic engagements with adolescents: sex, gender, and subversion: by Mary T. Brady, London, Routledge, 2016,118 pp., £27.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1138797765. Int. J. Psycho-Anal.,101(3):628-633.
Tillotson, D. (2020). A letter from Lockdown. ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, #2, June 20, 2020. Ortal Kirson-Trilling, Psy.D.
Kirson-Trilling (2020), “What if we’re not that bad?” On learning to metabolize the Dead Mother/Dead Self. Fort Da, 26 (2):21-23.
Extra-Curricular Talks and Courses at PINC
Era Lowensteing, PhD: In Dark Times: Psychoanalytic Praxis as a Form of Resistance (August 22, 2020);
Era Lowensteing, PhD: Understanding Perverse States of Mind (September 9- October 21, 2020);
Molly Merson, LMFT, and Elise Geltman, LCSW: Working While “White” (September 15- October 20, 2020); Hannah Zeavin, PhD: Tele-therapy: History, Theory, Practice (October 5- November 9, 2020);
Jed Sekoff, PhD: PINC 2nd Fridays: Rupture, Resistance, and the Reclamation of Imagination in the Golden Age of Television (October 9, 2020);
Katherine Olivetti, MSW: Contemporary Touchstones in Psychoanalytic Thinking and Practice (October 28-December 16, 2020);
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Nancy Kates, MFA: PINC 2nd Fridays: COVID as Metaphor (November 13, 2020);
Margaret Zellner, LP: The Interpersonal Construction of Memory (January 5- June 4, 2021); and
Robert Grossmark (Visiting scholar): The Untelling: Enactment, Narrative and Time in Psychoanalysis (February 6, 2021).
IN MEMORIAM
Susan Mitchell (PCC) shares:
PCC sadly, has lost distinguished members in the past year.
Of course, we have acknowledged the unfortunate passing of CIPS co-founder, Jim Gooch, MD, FIPA, who passed away on April 4, 2020. Remembrances of Dr. Gooch by Leigh Tobias, PhD, FIPA and Steven Ellman, PhD, FIPA appeared in past CIPS newsletters.
Training and Supervising Analyst and PCC Member, Sharen Westin, MD, FIPA unexpectedly passed away on June 5, 2020.
PCC member Don Freeman, MD, FIPA remembers Dr. Westin as his suite mate and friend:
Sharen and I had adjoining offices and shared a break room – the site of countless educational, friendly, and funny exchanges. She was a trenchant physician, gifted analyst, spirited instructor, and friend and advocate to many.
Sharen was born on May 23, 1953, in Newton, MA. She attended Chicago Medical School graduating in 1986, and then went to UCLA both the Harbor program and at the main campus where she did her psychiatric residency. She received her psychoanalytic training at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. Soon after graduation she became a member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC), where she taught in both the Psychotherapy Program and the Core Training Program. She was a member of the Ethics Committee and Co-Chaired the Faculty Committee for many years.
Dr. Westin was known and valued for her clinical acumen, her imaginative teaching, and her warmth. The memory of her diverse character lives on in the lives of patients, students, colleagues, and family. She will be missed by the PCC Community.
Howard Hansen, MD, FIPA died on October 1, 2020. Dr. Hansen, a Life Member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California worked tirelessly on difficult matters that threatened the Institute’s stability early on. He was a graduate and member of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. Dr. Hansen was involved with the merger of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute with the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and Society now known as New Center for Psychoanalysis.
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Dr. Howard Hansen was a pioneer for child advocacy. After completing his residency in child psychiatry, he moved to London to serve as child psychiatrist for the military and became involved in the psychoanalytic community, where he collaborated with Donald Meltzer to understand the emotional states of seriously ill children. While in London, he promoted early bonding by keeping mother and baby together immediately after birth, a practice that was later introduced by others to the United States. Upon Dr. Hansen’s return to this country, he became head of child psychiatry at Children’s Hospital. He introduced many innovations there, including psychological preparation of children for surgery. After leaving Children’s Hospital, he served as the director of the Child Study Center at St. John’s Hospital, where he supported a training program for child therapists.
He was well respected and well-liked by all for his generosity, leadership, creativity, and his sense of humor! His wife, children, grandchildren, friends and the PCC Community will profoundly miss him.
Our hearts go out to all of those who have lost loved ones – both within our analytic community and in all of the states and countries beyond: 2020 was a year of devastating loss and disruption throughout the globe.
Thank You, Dear Reader
Thanks for taking the time to read this issue. We at NewsBriefs extend our warm regards to you and wish you and your loved ones health and well-being.
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