American Psychoanalytic Association Research Articles

Poster Summary from the 2018 Poster Session of the American Psychoanalytic Association: Will a Video-Based Psychoanalytic Outreach Effort Engage a Young Audience? The Freudalicious Mind Project.

Poster Summary from the 2018 Poster Session of the American Psychoanalytic Association: Will a Video-Based Psychoanalytic Outreach Effort Engage a Young Audience? The Freudalicious Mind Project.

Teaching Freud Today?

Teaching Freud Today? Jennifer Stuart (bio) In 2017, the United States Library of Congress announced that it had completed, with the support of The Polonsky Foundation and with assistance from the Sigmund Freud Archives, the digitization of the Sigmund Freud Papers. The Library houses the most extensive collection of Freud’s psychoanalytic and personal papers. Its digital collection includes Freud’s handwritten manuscripts, his correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues, his notes and memorabilia, related biographical records, and hundreds of interviews and recollections. It is now fully available to scholars and teachers of Freud at the Library’s website. The creation of the digital Freud Papers at the Library of Congress seemed a propitious moment to consider Freud’s place in contemporary psychoanalytic scholarship and education. With this event as immediate inspiration and bearing in mind a context of cultural and scholarly ambivalence toward Freud, the Sigmund Freud Archives organized the symposium “Teaching Freud Today” at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s National Meeting in January 2017. Two considerations motivated the choice of topic. First, although psychoanalysis began as the creation of a single visionary, Freud’s ideas have become so deeply ingrained in our culture and practice that their influence can be overlooked. Second, Freud’s place in education—both within our institutes and beyond—has been in dispute for years, perhaps never more so than in the present. The panelists whose contributions are published in this issue of American Imago therefore addressed several timely questions: What elements of Freud’s thinking remain vital today, for psychoanalytic clinical training, and for scholarship in other fields of study? How might the clinical application and academic [End Page 287] exploration of Freud’s ideas inform each other? How might we help students of Freud to develop their own attitudes, both appreciative and critical, toward his work? What does Freud’s vision of humankind have to offer, as we move through the twenty-first century? Each contributor to the symposium has taught Freud in multiple settings, both within and outside psychoanalytic training institutes. Each believes in the possibility of a mutually productive exchange between clinical psychoanalysis and adjacent fields of study. Though there is currently much interest in the juncture between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, we confined our focus to neighboring disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. It is in these fields that most of us—and many of our students—first encountered and formed opinions of Freud’s work. Some have been urged to dismiss Freud wholesale. More fortunately, some have learned to appreciate the power of unconscious motivation in shaping literature, arts, and politics. As contributors to this symposium, we were united in feeling that current scholarship in the humanities and social sciences should inform how Freud is taught in our institutes and that balanced, clinically informed, contemporary presentations of Freud should be of interest to academics. We believe it is essential—both for practicing psychoanalysts and for scholars across disciplines—to read Freud in cultural and historical context, and to consider what in Freud’s work remains eternally true, what must be adapted for a new place and time, and what is perhaps best left behind. As practicing clinicians, we have found that teaching Freud (like any other topic) in a classroom setting requires a stance different from what is usual in clinical practice for many psychoanalysts. Just as a clinician must form a “working alliance” with a patient, a classroom instructor must form a “teaching alliance” with students.1 Toward this end, several of us have found it useful to engage students through our own, evolving relationship to Freud and his ideas. In evaluating Freud’s work, we bring personal experience to bear; by making ourselves available to students in this way, we invite them to engage Freud on their own, experiential terms. Some of us explicitly invite students to identify with Freud, to join him as [End Page 288] he sets about making theory from what he observes of his patients’ lives and his own life. Freud wrote not only with conscious aims—to make specific arguments—but also (like any author) with unconscious motives. He wrote, at least in part, to work through personal conflicts and to...

Help Wanted: Psychiatrist/Psychotherapist

Help Wanted: Psychiatrist/Psychotherapist

Erratum.

Brown, G.R. (2017). On Psychic Determinism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 65:423-446. (Original DOI: 10.1177/0003065117712519) On page 442 (lines 6-7) of Robin Gordon Brown's "On Psychic Determinism" (JAPA 65/3, pp. 423-446), "In his review of Dale Boesky's Do You Hear What I Hear? A Review of Psychoanalytic Disagreements in Context (2008), Abramis (2010) writes" should read "In her review of Dale Boesky's Psychoanalytic Disagreements in Context (2008), Abramis (2010) writes." On page 445, the Abramis and Boesky references should read as follows: Abramis, M. (2010). Do you hear what I hear? A review of Psychoanalytic Disagreements in Context, by Dale Boesky. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 46:289-294. Boesky, D. (2008). Psychoanalytic Disagreements in Context. Lanham, MD: Aronson.

Editorial: A twenty‐first century scourge: Introducing the special issue on Islamophobia

Editorial: A twenty‐first century scourge: Introducing the special issue on Islamophobia

Troubling Gender or Engendering Trouble? The Problem With Gender Dysphoria in Psychoanalysis.

This paper reviews existing case reports in the psychoanalytic literature of children diagnosed with gender identity disorder (GID), now called gender dysphoria. It concentrates on a review of problems and psychoanalytic dilemmas inherent in the use of the term GID and elucidates the concurrent quandaries this term both signifies and is symptomatic of. The focus is on reports of child psychoanalyses published during or after 1991, when the American Psychoanalytic Association formally adopted a nondiscrimination policy against homosexuality. These cases reflect common problematic themes in these treatments, for example, the lack of neutrality in specifying the treatment goal of same-gender identification. This paper explores the effects of these problems on the treatments, raises questions regarding the emphasis on gender in the treatments, and discusses an alternative psychoanalytic approach to children with gender variation.

Why Psychotherapy Exposure is Relevant for Medical Students

Why Psychotherapy Exposure is Relevant for Medical Students

A Basis for Creating a Reflective Network in Schools: Reflective Network Therapy in a Small Middle and High School

Expanding the utility of Reflective Network Therapy (RNT) schoolwide and to school pupils far beyond preschool age is now occurring. The process encouraged my integration of several psychoanalytic ...

The psychodynamic diagnostic manual - 2nd edition (PDM-2).

The psychodynamic diagnostic manual - 2nd edition (PDM-2).

Health Care Professionals Learn Signs of Human Trafficking

Health Care Professionals Learn Signs of Human Trafficking

American Psychoanalytic Association Statement on Torture

The journal publishes the January 2007 APsaA Statement on Torture that condemned the use of psychology, psychiatry, and medicine as instruments of torture and reaffirmed psychoanalysis as a theory, method, and procedure of science, scholarship, and healing.

The Schools Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association is now taking submissions for the annual Educational Achievement Award

The Schools Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association is now taking submissions for the annual Educational Achievement Award

Join Your Colleagues for the Psychiatric Event of the Year

Join Your Colleagues for the Psychiatric Event of the Year

In the Street, in the Classroom, and in the Psychoanalytic Institute

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsMark SmallerMark Smaller is an adult and child psychoanalyst practicing in Chicago and Southwest Michigan. He is president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is Founding Executive Director of Project Realize, an in-school treatment and research project at Morton Alternative High School in Cicero, Illinois. Dr. Smaller has lectured and written extensively on psychoanalysis in the community.

Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsLois OppenheimLois Oppenheim, PhD, is University Distinguished Scholar, Professor of French, and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University where she teaches courses in both literature and applied psychoanalysis. She is also Scholar Associate Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Honorary Member of the William Alanson White Society. Dr. Oppenheim has published more than 90 papers and authored or edited 11 books, the most recent being Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion, winner of the 2013 Courage to Dream Prize of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Biographical Sketch of Guest Editors

Susan G. Lazar, M.D. has been systematically reviewing the medical literature, writing, and speaking on the topic of the cost-effectiveness of all kinds of psychotherapy since 1993 when she served as a consultant to Tipper Gore’s Mental Health Work Group of the White House Task Force for National Health Care Reform. She edited and coauthored the 2010 volume Psychotherapy Is Worth It: A Comprehensive Review of Its Cost-Effectiveness with The Committee on Psychotherapy of the Group for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, which she served as Chair. Many other publications include coauthoring a 1997 cover article in The American Journal of Psychiatry, “The Economic Impact of Psychotherapy: A Review.” She also edited and coauthored a special issue of the journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry in 1997, “Extended Dynamic Psychotherapy: Making the Case in an Era of Managed Care.” Dr. Lazar is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine, George Washington University School of Medicine, The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and Supervising and Training Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. She served as the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Visiting Woman Scholar in 2010.

Over Hesperiaanse Melancholie: Eugène Nielen Marais en de Geschiedenis van een poëtische Gemoedsgesteldheid

Abstract The article gives a brief ‘idea history’ of Hesperian melancholy a.k.a. Hesperian depression, the fleeting state of dejection that some humans and animals experience at dusk. The term was apparently coined by the South African poet and naturalist Eugene Marais (1871-1936), who noticed the phenomenon during his field observations of baboons. Marais' observations of primates were in the first place an attempt to shed more light on the evolutionary roots of the human psyche and its afflictions - not in the least his own. A personal focus seems probable in his notes on the use of euphoria-inducing substances among animals and humans, which are an evident reflection of his own morphine addiction; but also in his writings about Hesperian depression. During his lifetime, Marais only published about Hesperian depression twice, once in a very concise article in English, and once in more elaborate form in Afrikaans. The term ‘Hesperian depression’ only became more current when his manuscript on primate behaviour, The Soul of the Ape, was posthumously published in 1963. Since then, the term and its description sometimes appear in (popular) publications of paleobiologists and scholars of the evolution of human behaviour. In psychology and psychiatry, the term was introduced by the eminent American psychoanalyst William G. Niederlander, who presented it in a 1971 article in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association as an idea of his own. It is evident, however, that he took his cue from Marais, who thus was posthumously plagiarized.

The twilight of the training analysis system.

This paper briefly reviews challenges to psychoanalysis at this time, including those derived from both external, societal origins and internal psychoanalytic problems. It focuses attention on serious conflicts around psychoanalytic education, and refers to the training analysis system as a central problem determining fundamental constraints on present-day psychoanalytic education. These constraints are examined in some detail, and the general advantages and disadvantages of the training analysis system are outlined. The effects of all these dynamics on the administrative organization of the American Psychoanalytic Association are explored, and a proposal for a fundamental reorganization of our educational system to resolve the correspondent problems is outlined.

Neuroscience and Forming Empathy in Children and Their Worshiping Communities

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Charles Nelson, Michelle de Haan, and Kathleen Thomas write that “[i]t is important to understand the experiences don't just happen to the brain; rather, experience is the product of an ongoing, reciprocal interaction between the environment and the brain” (in Neuroscience of Cognitive Development: The Role of Experience and the Developing Brain [Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006], 30, emph. added). Nelson, de Haan, and Thomas, 39, 33. William Benzon, Beethoven's Anvil (New York: Basic, 2001), 55, emph. added. John Russon, Human Experience (Albany, NY: SUNY University Press, 2003), 46, 47, emph. added. Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea (Nicomachean Ethics), trans. W. Ross, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 9, ed. R. Hutchins (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), Book I, chapter 1, 1103a14-26 (p. 248). Emph. added. Rollin McCraty and Doc Childre, “The Grateful Heart: The Psychophysiology of Gratitude,” in The Psychology of Gratitude, ed. Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 241. McCraty and Childre, 242, emph. added. At this point I should clarify that while the difference between feeling and emotion is not necessarily relevant to this project, I will use the term emotion as a discrete mental state and feeling as a more pervasive affective state. Emotions, on one hand, have a clear beginning and an end, while feelings spill beyond the mind and are complexly related—and interrelated—throughout the body. For a further explanation, please see Christopher Rodkey, The Synaptic Gospel (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2012) 1–2, 7–8. Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg, The Mystical Mind (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 26, 89. Walter Freeman, “Happiness Doesn't Come in Bottles,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 4, no. 1 (1997): 70. Robert Panzarella, “The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Peak Experiences,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 20, no. 1 (1980): 75–77. Interestingly, visual experience accounts more for “renewal ecstasy”—38%, opposed to 14% for musical experience (75)—and music is associated more strongly for the “fusion-emotional ecstasy”—27%, as opposed to 17% for visual experience (77). Barbara Fredrickson, “Gratitude, Like Other Positive Emotions, Broadens and Builds,” The Psychology of Gratitude, ed. R. Emmons and M. McCullough (New York: Oxford UP, 2004), 153, 155. Fredrickson, 152, 151, citing Pamela Samuels and David Lester, “A Preliminary Investigation of Emotions Experienced toward God by Catholic Nuns and Priests,” Psychology Reports 56 (1985): 706. Dan McAdams and Jack Bauer, “Gratitude in Modern Life,” in The Psychology of Gratitude, ed. R. Emmons and M. McCullough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86. Ibid. McAdams and Bauer continue on this point: “[T]he individual who is capable of gratitude, who is blessed with the propensity to engage with others in gracious ways, may find that his or her standing in the group is ultimately enhanced, contributing ultimately to inclusive fitness. Put simply, the capacity to experience and express gratitude in groups may give an individual an adaptive advantage, positioning him or her well for survival and reproductive opportunities in life. Gratitude may be grouped, therefore, in the same family as kin selection and reciprocated altruism-evolved adaptations that have proven so useful for fitness in group living that they have become, more or less, foundational features of human nature” (86). Fredrickson, 157. Ibid., 157, citing Jennifer George, “Leader Positive Mood and Group Performance,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25, no. 9 (1995): 778–94. Elizabeth Felts and Anthony Robinson, New Occasions Teach New Duties: A Renewed Vision of the Teaching Church (Cleveland, OH: UCC Division of Education, 1994), 46–47. Paul Ricoeur and André LaCocque, Thinking Biblically, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1998); and Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of Proof in Freud's Psychoanalytic Writings,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 25 (1977): 835–71; Stern 15. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher Demuth RodkeyChristopher Demuth Rodkey is pastor of St. Paul's United Church of Christ in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, and teaches philosophy at Penn State York and comparative theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary. He is the author of The Synaptic Gospel and blogs for An und fur sich (http://itself.wordpressw.com).

On Knowing and not Knowing: Theoretical and Relational Transformations During 50 Years of Practice

Until at least 1990, the American Psychoanalytic Association advised dynamic therapists to present themselves as neutral, silent, emotionally distant, personally opaque and ‘seemingly unresponsive’. Therapists were encouraged to think of themselves as powerful authorities, trained to objectively analyze unconscious processes. The therapeutic relationship was carefully designed to foster regression, amplify transference and discourage spontaneous interaction. Relational theorists drastically revised the traditional, positivist guidelines. They argued that analytic treatment cannot reveal objective truth, that therapeutic narratives are co-constructed in a reciprocal, bi-directional, dialogic process, that the boundaries between patients and therapists should be flexible and permeable and that therapists should be authentic, emotionally engaged and selectively self-disclosing. The revisions are a 180° about face from what I originally learned. This paper describes my professional development over a 50-year period. Having originally learned to practice from a drive-ego-developmental perspective, I am now increasingly influenced by relational theories. The paper includes a theoretical discussion, two illustrative case studies and some reflections on the concept of neutrality. As my goal is to encourage other therapists to reflect on and discuss aspects of practice that puzzle them, and as I think confusion can, if attended to, generate professional development, the paper highlights some of my own conflicts and uncertainties.