Psychoanalytic Institute Research Articles

History and Psychoanalysis, History of Psychoanalysis. Some reflections on Stephen Frosh and Belinda Mandelbaum’s article


 
 
 Stephen Frosh and Belinda Mandelbaum start their thought-provoking article by pointing out that it is not “an attempt at writing history,” but an “inter- vention into the history of psychoanalysis from the point of view of psychosocial studies.” However, in this important piece, the authors address a series of critical issues (some of which have been discussed in previous articles; Frosh and Mandelbaum, 2017; Rubin, Mandelbaum and Frosh, 2016) associated to the pro- blems inherent to writing the history of psychoanalysis. I must confess that I am not really familiar with the field of psychosocial studies, and therefore my comments will be grounded on the point of view of a historian (I am not a psychoanalyst either, as the authors suggest in another piece: cf. Rubin, Mandelbaum, and Frosh, 2016). It seems to me, however, that the purpose of analyzing “the processes of construction of psychoa- nalysis and [...] [of] understanding the stories it tells itself about that construction” –which according to the authors constitutes the goal of psychosocial studies– is perfectly compatible with what cultural and intellec- tual historians usually do.
 
 
 Frosh and Mandelbaum ́s point of departure appears to be a certain feeling of perplexity originating in two issues: first, the fact that in Brazil psychoa- nalysis and repression existed alongside during the dictatorship. As the authors point out, not only did the brutal social and political policies implemented by the military not generate any form of criticism on the part of the official psychoanalytic institutions, but there were documented cases of actual connivance between members of those institutions and the regime. This passivity or complicity of the psychoanalytic insti- tutions towards a murderous military regime con- tradicts, according to the authors, the “progressive” ethical dimension that they attribute to psychoanaly- sis. Social and political progressivism are “true to the psychoanalytic mission as a whole, as they derive from its conditions of formation in the social revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and also reflect its potential [...] to disturb the comfort of the status quo.” 
 
 

The Distance from Home by Daniel Jacobs

Reviewed by: The Distance from Home by Daniel Jacobs Dr. Jeffrey Berman The Distance from Home by Daniel Jacobs. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books. 220 pages. “You must change your life.” Daniel Jacobs, the author of the 2019 novel The Distance from Home, does not quote Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous injunction, which appears at the end of his 1908 poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” but it describes precisely the predicament of his protagonist, Hannah Avery. Not that her life was entirely bad when she decided, twenty-two years earlier, in 1972, to accept George Albright’s invitation to join him, his wife Pru, and friends on a trip to Nepal. Hannah was thirty-seven at the time, single, still mourning the death of her mother when she was nine. An art curator at the Musϧe Baudry, Hannah enjoys her work, but it doesn’t prevent her from feeling lonely, restless, and unfulfilled. Past relationships with men have not worked out; her boss has recently disparaged her work, and she feels the biological clock ticking. She is looking for someone or something that will help her change her life. Will trekking through the unforgiving Himalayan mountains provide Hannah with that opportunity? This is the question that drives the novel. Daniel Jacobs is well known in the psychoanalytic community. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Director of the Hanns Sachs Library. He is also Director of the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies at Princeton and Aspen. A coauthor of the 1995 book The Supervisory Encounter: A Guide for Teachers of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Jacobs has published many articles on psychoanalysis, but The Distance from Home is his first novel—a daunting challenge for an octogenarian. The Distance from Home contains a wide cast of compelling characters, beginning with Hannah, who is complex, sympathetic, and believable. Jacobs narrates the story through Hannah’s point of view, and we trust her perceptions and value judgments. She realizes, from the moment she agrees to travel to Nepal, that the experience may be life-transforming. An authority on seventeenth-century Dutch garden design, she loves paintings because they never change—unlike people, who do. [End Page 446] Jacobs knows the art world well, and Hannah’s judgments about painting are authoritative without being opinionated. Unlike other curators, she never believes that she knows more about a painting than the artist who painted it. (Just as a literary critic doesn’t know more about a story than the writer who created it.) She understands that you must look at a painting for hours before it reveals itself. The same is true for a novel: you need to reflect on it and read it more than once before it reveals itself. Indeed, nearly everything Hannah says about painting is true of literature. She is involved in the restoration of art—and as we ponder the novel, we see that she is involved in nothing less than the restoration of her own life, trying to repair the damaged parts of her existence caused by her mother’s early death, her father’s self-absorption and alcoholism, and her boyfriends’ lack of understanding. “Only art clarifies things—for a moment anyway” (p. 30), she tells her former lover, the painter Leon Kaminsky, who is anxious to resume their relationship in Nepal. The two characters could not be more different. “Loving is so messy,” he declares; she points out that the opposite is true for her: “Love order things” (p. 62). Part of Hannah’s attraction to art is that it gives her the order and control she needs. Similarly, part of the pleasure of reading The Distance from Home is that we see how Jacobs portrays Hannah’s pursuit of love and order while trekking through Nepal. She knows that love is not always enough, but without love and self-esteem, she cannot imagine the possibility of happiness. Hannah’s mother remains an absent presence throughout the novel. There are more than a dozen references to the woman who wasted away from metastatic cancer while her daughter looked on helplessly. Hannah cannot exorcise the image of her mother...

Anna Kris Wolff 1931–2019

Anna Kris Wolff 1931–2019 Daniel Jacobs Anna Wolff was the kind of friend everyone wants and the kind of teacher everyone needs. She would listen carefully, consider seriously what you were telling her, whether it was about yourself or a patient. Then, in no uncertain terms, she would tell you what she thought. Her response went to the core of the issue at hand in often surprising ways. Her friend and colleague Dr. Warren Poland put it best, “What she said was always original, from a fresh slant, always seeming to arise from her sense of the immediacy of the moment in the clinical process; yes, informed by theory but never originating there.” There was never anything inauthentic or artificial about her. Anna’s name was not widely known among psychoanalysts. She contributed very little to the psychoanalytic literature. She had an abhorrence of public speaking. She was a private person. She worked quietly out of her office in her home with its large, beautiful garden, of which she was very proud, on Channing Street in Cambridge, MA. She was happy there. Forced to move several times as a child, she commented: “In my grownup life, I have always wanted to stay put in one place and have a house that I could keep as my own and not have to leave.” There she was surrounded by artwork that her father Ernst, an art historian as well as analyst, had purchased. In her quiet elegance, she exemplified the many talented analysts whose outstanding work often is not fully recognized because they choose to avoid the limelight. Anna was the daughter of Ernst and Marianne Kris, analysts themselves and friends of the Freuds. Of her mother, Anna said, “She was very honest and able to tell difficult things to people. And she would always do it in a thoughtful way so that they learned, and weren’t hurt by it.” Anna was cut from the same cloth. “I don’t think I ever was in Anna‘s presence when [End Page 455] I didn’t go away feeling better about myself and the world,” a colleague reported. Anna was born in Vienna in 1931. Despite the growing danger around her, she remembered somehow feeling secure. But she also remembered not being able to go out to the park with her mother who was “Jewish looking” though Anna and her brother Anton, with their blonde hair, were allowed out with others. In 1938, her family fled Vienna, first to London, where Anna was separated from her family during the London bombing, and then to New York City in 1940. Anna attended the Fieldston School, going on to Radcliffe and Harvard Medical School. Her residency was at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and Children’s Hospital of DC. She did her psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute where she became a training and supervising analyst, serving on many committees and becoming a central figure on the Library Committee. For nearly twenty years, she reviewed and recommended books, worked on historic exhibits, researched and wrote biographies of BPSI’s early members, assessed rare books, and participated in various archival research projects. When young, Anna was married briefly to Dr. Carl Wolff, a psychiatrist. She had no children. But that did not stop her from loving the children of others: her two nephews, the offspring of friends, and the children in her own practice. Her special interest in youngsters led her to the Putnam Children’s Center where was involved in longitudinal studies of atypical children. For many years she was a sought-after supervisor in the Beth Israel and Mclean child psychiatry programs. She also taught a popular child psychotherapy observation seminar. When asked about Anna’s child work, Dr. Judy Yanof, who studied and taught with her and became a very close friend, wrote: Her real gift was in being able to talk with children about their inner worlds in a language they could immediately understand. She had a fundamental grasp of where they were developmentally, and a deep, empathic creativity about how to address what troubled them. It was not just her words, but the music in the words, and...

On the genealogy of group analysis: Our version of the Greek context

This article aims at pinpointing some aspects of group analysis, especially in relationship to psychoanalysis, as they have emerged and developed in the context of Greek group-analytic (and psychoanalytic) institutions. Group analysis in our country has been trapped and rigidified either as a ‘therapeutic-community-oriented’, anti-psychoanalytic polemic or as a ‘psychoanalytically-informed-group-work’ project, applied in institutional settings and attributing secondary importance to group matrix. This situation has been amplified by the prevailing psychoanalytic institutions’ tendency (in opposition to Freud’s legacy) to minimize the social origins of the unconscious processes. In our current Greek context, the Institute of Group Analysis ‘S.H. Foulkes’, has as its core aim a healing return to the original, integrative Foulkesian vision: A search for integration of contemporary psychoanalytic developments and the legacy of group analysis.

Give a Woman an Inch, She’ll Take a Penis: The Expanded Version

Women speaking out against sexual violence is nothing new, but institutions firing the male perpetrators or those accused, is novel. This article integrates and builds upon a blogpost written about #MeToo and various explorations of community-based practices and strategies to decrease and address sexual violence within colleges and psychoanalytic institutes. Community-based interventions are more complex ways of disrupting institutional responses to sexual misconduct, and as such, hold a potential to disrupt institutional betrayals that fuel, and are often plentiful in the wake of, sexual misconduct. However, this shift from the guilty individual to the corrupt or at least culpable institution, requires a more complicated theory of subjectivity, one that speaks to the coemergences of the human in relation to not just other humans but the nonhuman—institutions. Assemblage and theories of new materialisms can be integrated to help us deconstruct our narcissism around human exceptionalism as well as the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal responses to vulnerability and shame that seem to fuel much of the sexual (and other forms) of masculinized violence and the justifications for it.

Teaching Psychotherapy to Psychoanalytic Candidates

Psychoanalytic institutes have developed a variety of approaches to address the reality that psychoanalytically trained clinicians generally practice more psychodynamic psychotherapy than they do formal psychoanalysis. At the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research we developed a course for advanced candidates challenging them to integrate what they have learned about doing psychoanalysis during training with their ongoing fund of knowledge about psychotherapy practice. We encourage them to consider how they select treatments and to reflect on similarities and differences between the two modalities with regard to listening, selecting a focus, intervening, and managing the relationship. We also discuss how they approach terminations and how they transition between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. We selectively use the psychotherapy research literature grounded in the common factors approach in order to update candidates about current knowledge in the field.

How Many Times?

Session frequency can be seen as definitive of psychoanalytic identity but contemporary relational and constructivist perspectives and trends towards psychoanalytic work being conducted at lower and varying frequencies are leading increasingly to a rift between psychoanalytic work as theorized and practised on the one hand and as ‘taught at’ specified frequencies within psychoanalytic institutions on the other. The value of high‐frequency work in the right conditions is considered, while automatic equations between high‐frequency, high‐intensity and high‐value clinical work are questioned. Pressure towards higher frequency work, sometimes to meet training requirements, may imperil the psychoanalytic stance it seeks to preserve, particularly the recognition of patients’ frequency preferences as a psychic phenomenon requiring understanding rather than manipulation. The roots of coercive attitudes to session frequency in unresolved issues relating to institutional psychoanalytic superegos are explored; implications for training, ethics and the status of psychoanalytic work are considered.

"Playing Out" Our "Playing in the Dark": Racial Enactments and Psychoanalytic Institutions.

"Playing Out" Our "Playing in the Dark": Racial Enactments and Psychoanalytic Institutions.

The Meaning of Resilience as a Psychoanalytic Concept: An exploratory Study of the Perspectives of Training and Supervising Psychoanalysts

Objective The objective of this study was to investigate how psychoanalysts perceive the concept of resilience and how it can be applied in this field. Method Exploratory qualitative research was undertaken with a sampleof 10 training and supervising psychoanalysts belonging to a psychoanalytic institution in southern Brazil. A semi‐structured interview was used to collect the data. Results Based on the material collected, the following final four categories were established: (1) the evident complexity of the origin andconceptual definition of resilience; (2) the technical potential ofresilience: communication and effects from a psychoanalytical perspective; (3) the life stories and difficulties of resilient beings: conditions, characteristics and development; and (4) the association between the clinical aspects of trauma and a subject's resources – resilience under discussion. Conclusions The origin of the phenomenon of resilience opens up important questions and reflections for psychoanalysts even though the term's technical potential for the psychoanalytic clinic is recognized and serves as an important prognostic factor. Resilience relates to personality and resources of the ego, and this fact would seem to suggest the need for further study into the aetiological equation. It can be defined as the ability to elaborate on one's experiences.

Assembling Justice: Reviving Nonhuman Subjectivities to Examine Institutional Betrayal Around Sexual Misconduct.

While some colleges have adopted bystander intervention and restorative justice practices to address sexual misconduct as a community issue, psychoanalytic institutes facing crises of sexual misconduct have typically relied on the tried-and-true tactic of identifying the neoliberal individual as the sole site of trouble. Successful strategies used in colleges can be applied to the psychoanalytic setting by focusing on institutional betrayal. This systemic, community-based approach decenters not only individual bodies but human subjectivities. Here institutions become not just containers for group or networked affect, as if affect itself emanates from individuals into an institution. Agency and affect emerge through networks, not individual bodies, and institutions are active agents in violent betrayal. Acknowledging the ways the nonhuman and the human co-emerge creates the space to hold the vitalities and agencies of both, including multiple potentialities for (re)traumatization, resistance, and transformation.

Evaluating the impact of Work Discussion techniques on the formation of psychoanalytic skills and attitudes: research designs and first results

ABSTRACTWork Discussion, developed at the Tavistock Clinic in London, is a specific psychoanalytical method which is used in order to stimulate, encourage and support the development of a wide range of psychoanalytic skills and attitudes of relevance for psychotherapy and related fields of psychosocial work. For this aim Work Discussion is an element of several psychoanalytically based Master’s degree programmes. In the paper, it is discussed how the use of Work Discussion can be evaluated and the impact of Work Discussion on the development of psychoanalytic skills and attitudes can be investigated. With special respect to two Master’s degree programmes offered in Vienna, it is shown that teachers ranked Work Discussion as the most important element of a psychagogic Master’s programme and how Work Discussion seminar papers have been analysed in order to evaluate the professional developments of psychotherapeutic candidates of two psychoanalytic training institutes.

Questions and worries: On the correspondence between Grete Bibring and Anna Freud 1949–1975

ABSTRACT Grete Bibring (1899–1977) was a representative of the second generation of analysts. Having emigrated from Vienna to London in 1938, she left for Boston in 1941 where she made a remarkable career. In 1946, she became head of the department of psychiatry at the Beth Israel Hospital at Harvard and, from 1961, the first woman professor of medicine there. She maintained a connection with European psychoanalysis in the person of Anna Freud, with whom she corresponded regularly. Their letters contain an interesting exchange of ideas about psychoanalytic institutions (e.g. the American Psychoanalytical Association) and papers (e.g. on pregnancy). It is also the testimony of an exceptional friendship.

A mixed-model for psychoanalytic education

If psychoanalysis is to avoid total marginalization, something has to be changed in the way future generations are prepared for working with patients and doing research. Reformation of psychoanalytic education may easily be the crucial issue when it comes to the survival of psychoanalysis. Its current organizational scheme has been criticized for various reasons, and various models of its structure have been proposed. I advocate a model that would combine the best features of the university education (training in clinical skills together with philosophy of science and research methodology) with personal analysis as part of psychoanalytic institutes. Although universities can remedy some of the problems of psychoanalytic institutions, they cannot contain the subjective experience of being analyzed.

Catching a Wave: The Hypnosis-Sensitive Transference-Based Treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

In this article, I will describe the way in which I work with enactment-prone dissociative patients in the transference. This approach requires an appreciation of the phenomena of hypnosis and the auto-hypnotic aspects of some forms of dissociation. Essentially, I learn from the patient and my interactions with the patient how hypnotic phenomena and auto-hypnotic defenses manifest themselves in the therapeutic relationship in order both to understand them and ultimately to bring them under conscious control. Because of the fluidity and turbulence of these states, I use the analogy of catching a wave, in which timing and balance are essential, albeit elusive factors in effecting a successful treatment. The importance of having experience with many patients, attending conferences, seeking supervision, and undergoing one’s own therapy will be also discussed as important prerequisites for the clinician endeavoring to utilize this type of approach. This preparation, this quest for such a “balance,” is modeled after the so-called tripartite model of training employed in psychoanalytic training institutes. I will offer clinical material to illustrate this approach, which I have described as “psychoactive psychotherapy.” In such treatments, the clinician may be taken by surprise and is likely to be thrown “off balance” from time to time. The mutually shared understanding of such moments is essential to regaining clinical balance in the therapeutic setting, and can lead to if not create important turning points in the treatment process.

Like a phoenix from the ashes – or “sack cloth and ashes”?: The reconstitution of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany since 1945 and its consequences

Here, I attempt to formulate some thoughts about the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis and its institutions in Germany. To do this, I have employed my varied experience as a supervisor and consultant to many such psychoanalytic institutes over the past several years. Themes discussed include the history of psychoanalysis in postwar Germany, the organizational structure of German psychoanalytic institutes, and their cultures in regard to group and organizational dynamics, and political and economic aspects. Finally, I add brief thoughts about the future, taking into account recent developments relating to planned changes in laws governing psychotherapy in Germany. Further, I attempt to analyze and comment on: coming to terms with the past; how to begin after the “Zero Hour”; the form of organization of psychoanalytic institutes in Germany; missing patients and missing candidates; constructive debate and hurting people’s feelings; the lack of “detoxification” and “recycling” of the poisonous remains of psychoanalytic processes; and the future of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany. I end with an example of a typical primary task used in conducting large groups in the institutes in which I worked, and include an anonymized table listing individual interventions, their duration, and frequency. These should provide an idea of my way of working, and an overview of the dimensions of the task.

Tiresias and His Trouble with Ambiguity in Gender

Tiresias and His Trouble with Ambiguity in Gender Marco Posadas (bio) To begin, I would like to identify my position as chair of the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). The IPA is the first, oldest, and largest international psychoanalytical association in the world. It was created by Freud with the help of Ferenzci, Jung, Eitington, Abraham, and Jones in 1910 with the purpose of organizing what started to be a body of theory and clinical mental health practice, and for the promotion of scientific activities at an international level. Today the IPA has almost fourteen thousand members and more than six thousand candidates within three consolidated regions—North America (including China, Korea, and Japan), Europe (including New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa), and Latin America—and a new, fourth region, Asia, which hopes to consolidate China, Korea, Japan, India, New Zealand, and Australia. It organizes a biannual international congress that is one of the largest psychoanalytic events in the world. The IPA has four official languages—English, French, German, and Spanish—and more than fifty languages among all its constituent psychoanalytic societies and institutes. A large part of its organizational and scientific work is divided, planned and executed by committees. Committees are appointed by the executive committee and ratified by the IPA board. The committee I chair was appointed by Stefano Bolognini's administration in June 2017. Our committee is fortunate to continue to be strongly supported [End Page 93] by Virginia Ungar, the first female president of the IPA, and Vice President Sergio Nick's administration. Before the creation of the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee, during its planning stages, there was already a lot of ambiguity around addressing issues of gender and sexual diversities in psychoanalysis. An important part of the committee's mandate is to create spaces for IPA-affiliated psychoanalysts and candidates and for non-IPA-affiliated psychodynamic clinicians and psychotherapists, among an increasing number of people interested in psychoanalysis, to discuss issues pertaining to psychoanalytic clinical theory and practice and to the intersection of sexual and gender diversity. Although our committee had anticipated the resistance that has been historically present when addressing these types of topics in psychoanalytic institutions (Drescher 2008; Roughton 1995, 2002), we were not able to identify and agree upon a specific point of contingence within psychoanalytic theory and practice that could cause the most resistance. This article is an initial step to engage with the resistance encountered in analytic spaces when we shift from a binary system to a non-binary way of thinking gender and sexuality. I will describe the experience in an attempt to provide models of understanding and working through these types of conflicts. Why am I calling it a conflict? This will be better answered with an example, in this case a non-clinical general vignette. I will disguise the participants' identities and will use a composite vignette to protect confidentiality. The Trouble with Ambiguity In 2016, I was delivering a workshop to strengthen clinical skills when working with racialized LGBTQ patients from a psychoanalytic perspective using an anti-oppressive approach. I was surprised to hear a senior analyst openly state from the back of the room that they preferred to hold on to their prejudices regarding trans and gender-creative patients. The audience mostly consisted of psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic candidates, training [End Page 94] analysts, and psychology graduates interested in psychoanalysis. Given the wide range of the audience and our shared interest in psychoanalysis, I usually clarify Freud's "progressive" perspective toward homosexual patients and the distortions of Freud's statements as the message got passed around through generations of culturally sanctioned homophobic clinicians (Socarides 1968; Roughton 2002). The questions from this particular audience led to a discussion about misconceptions in psychoanalytic literature about trans experiences and of trans bodies being misrepresented and misdiagnosed as psychotic (Millot 1989). Addressing misrepresentations of gender variance rooted in prejudiced formulations of trans subjectivities within psychoanalytic theory and proposing less-biased ways of approaching gender polymorphism from a non-pathological perspective can be a complicated task. This is not unheard-of in our field; in fact, queer theorists, Lacanian analysts, and transgender...

A Psychoanalyst’s Gift: Lillian Malcove as Collector

A Psychoanalyst’s Gift: Lillian Malcove as Collector Mary Kay O’Neil (bio) Introduction Like Freud, many psychoanalysts have collected art and antiquities, taking much personal pleasure in their collections. As Kuspit noted in 1991, much has been written about the psychoanalytic interpretation of visual art—“insights about artists, art work, and art audience have been incorporated in art discourse” (pp. 1)—most of which is passionate, partisan and political. In fact, the relationship between art and psychoanalysis has a long history; Ernst Kris (1952), among others, was a pioneer in combining expertise in both areas. There is, however, a paucity of discourse on the psychodynamics of collecting, and the analyst as collector has not appeared in the psychoanalytic literature. Even Freud, aside from a few comments, did not open his own passionate hobby of collecting to systematic and detailed analysis. What has been written by analysts has been learned clinically from patients and focuses primarily on the pathological aspects of collecting. Subkowski (2006), nevertheless, outlined criteria for a collection and a collector. His criteria included: the selection of objects with subjective value in a definable area(s) and an attempt at completion; the collector is affectively, passionately involved in the collection, has an interest in relevant background literature, and behaves consistently over time. Subkowski then considered the psychodynamics of collecting. Recognizing that there are no clear boundaries, he related modes of collecting to various structural levels and states of regression. He asserted that integrated or non-pathological forms of collecting result from the depressive position and attempt to repair the lost and [End Page 611] damaged object on a symbolic level and to make reparation for one’s own destructive impulses. This type of collector is well aware that the collection will never be complete—that is, on an unconscious level, it can never take the place of the actual lost object (Subkowski, 2006, p. 391). The collection does not have to be an obstacle to relating to the outside world, but can be a transitional object. The analyst who collects is simply a person who happens to be a collector. However, just as the person and the collection are not separate, each analyst has a particular way of working and perhaps the person, the analyst, and the collector are not separate, but ideally, integrated. This paper examines the life of an unusual psychoanalyst and collector, Lillian Malcove. By chance, I became aware that her collection had surprisingly come to the University of Toronto and also that Dr. Malcove was remarkable in several ways. First, she was a woman collector and it is known that women tend to collect less frequently than men1. Unlike wealthy women collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim (1983) and Isabella Stewart Gardner (Tharp, 1965), Malcove assembled, with relatively little money, an extensive and valuable collection over some 30 years, while she worked full time as a psychoanalyst. A pioneer, she was one of the early women to be trained at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, one of the first Canadian women to qualify as a psychoanalyst; and her collection was given to the University of Toronto, an institution little known to her. Fascinated, I decided to learn more about Lillian Malcove by viewing her collection, studying its catalogue (Campbell, 1985), researching archives at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, as well as the so-called “mystery box”2 and her professional papers (Malcove, 1933, 1945, 1974). I also interviewed several people still living who had known her, including friends and psychoanalysts. A Psychoanalyst’s Collection Dr. Lillian Malcove was a Supervising and Training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI). She was, of course, also an avid art collector. She amassed a [End Page 612] collection of over 500 pieces of exquisite thought-provoking art and artefacts encompassing works from the Bronze Age to the modern era, with the majority from the medieval period (CE 600–1500). The focus of her collecting was primarily Egyptian, Coptic, and Christian art, but also included Byzantine, Russian, Ethiopian, and Greek artefacts. Among these works were liturgical objects including over 100 icons, as well as domestic objects, antique furniture, fabrics, and leaves from illuminated...

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...

In the Event of Deleuze

In the Event of Deleuze Ronald Bogue (bio) Gilles Deleuze Frida Beckman Reaktion Books www.reaktionbooks.co.uk 160 Pages; Print, $19.00 Biographies of philosophers are always tricky, given the uncertain relationship between philosophers' lives and their thought, but the problems are compounded when the philosopher lives a relatively uneventful life. Such is the case of Gilles Deleuze, who seldom traveled, founded no school, sought no followers, and promulgated no particular method. François Dosse, in his 2007 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, side-stepped the broad life/thought issue by simply shuttling between anecdotal narratives of the life and lengthy summaries of individual books. He addressed the difficulty of animating Deleuze's uneventful life by conducting multiple interviews with students, friends, and colleagues, which yielded a great deal of intriguing, if not always reliable, information. But he also enlivened his study considerably by including Guattari in his story—indeed, a great deal of the energy of Dosse's book comes from his accounts of Guattari's frenetic and incessant activism in psychoanalytic and psychiatric institutions, research collectives and political movements. In her contribution to Reaktion Books's Critical Lives Series, Frida Beckman, by contrast, focuses on Deleuze alone, and she makes the life-thought issue the center of her analysis. Hers is a "critical biography," she says, "not the kind of biography based on interviews with friends and family intended to unbury all the details of a writer's life, but rather a critical effort that endeavours to illuminate some fruitful dialogues between Deleuze's life and work." The results of this effort are truly remarkable. In his literary studies, Deleuze repeatedly states that there can be no separation between writers' lives and their works, but he also insists that great writers never create their works directly from their personal memories and experiences. Rather, they discover and give voice to impersonal affects and percepts immanent within their experience. Something similar holds true for philosophers, who seek to extract impersonal events from their personal lives and create concepts that are responsive to those events. The mode of individuation of an event is that of the anexact, neither a concrete individual (this circle) nor a universal idea (the circle), but a process of becoming (a circle: a becoming-circle or circling). With the anexact in mind, Beckman organizes her biography around five events: A Child (Deleuze's early life); An Apprenticeship (Deleuze's philosophical portraits of Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Spinoza leading up to Difference and Repetition [1968] and The Logic of Sense [1969]); A Friendship (Deleuze's collaborative writings with Claire Parnet and Guattari and his book on Foucault); A Practice (Deleuze's works in the 1980s on Francis Bacon and cinema); and A Life (Deleuze's illness and his late essays "The Exhausted" and "Immanence: A Life"). Though these chapters demarcate a chronological sequence, Beckman remains true to the floating, non-chronological time of the event, tracing within each section transverse relations among various texts and occurrences across Deleuze's life. Her controlling concept in tracing these relations is the assemblage, which is an ad hoc collection of "forces, bodies, objects and territories . . . fueled by desire and with a particular function." Her proposal, thus, is that "if we approach Deleuze's biography in order to delineate how components of his life and work emerge and are part of larger assemblages with collective functions, then we may be able to provide an account of his life that is also, at least to some extent, illustrative of his philosophy." The child of right-wing parents, Deleuze grew up in the shadow of his older brother, who was enshrined by his parents when he died at the hands of the Nazis, leaving Deleuze in the position of the always not quite good enough son. No doubt this background contributed to Deleuze's lifelong antipathy to bourgeois pieties, but what Beckman emphasizes are the events that allowed Deleuze to escape that background, not those that might have constrained him. Crucial were his friendship with a young literature professor, his introduction to philosophy at the Lycée Carnot, and his interaction with such luminaries as Pierre Klossowski, Jean Paulhan...

Opening Remarks: Celebrating Western New England’s 60th Anniversary: Hans Loewald’s Enduring Contribution to Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACTThe introduction of the 2015 Western New England Psychoanalytic Society Spring Symposium addresses Hans Loewald as an innovator and pivotal contributor to modern psychoanalysis. The opening remarks of the symposium give a glimpse into the vibrant analytic atmosphere that permeated the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis (WNEIP), at the forefront of training and professional analytic development from the very start. In 1955 Hans Loewald joined this newly founded WNEIP; his revolutionary approach has inspired generations of analysts, and his work has been an essential component of the history of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society.