The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Aug 7, 2000
The authors describe their experience teaching 'The Writings of Sigmund Freud' to... more The authors describe their experience teaching 'The Writings of Sigmund Freud' to undergraduates at Columbia College over a three-year period. The course focused on Freud's developing theory of the mind, his application of psychoanalytic theory to the study of culture, and the autobiographical and historical context in which the texts were written. The students entered the course intrigued by the controversy surrounding Freud. They immersed themselves in the intellectual task of understanding Freud's work while at the same time discovering its power to speak directly to their personal concerns. The students found in Freud a companion in the search for personal meaning in the 'great books' of the western canon. At a deeper level, they found in Freud an ally in the drama of coming-of-age, experienced in terms of separation and loss, concerns about normality and sexuality, the quest for autonomy and the search for identity. While interested in Freud's ideas about infantile sexuality, for the most part, they rejected the concept of the Oedipus complex. The authors present excerpts from the students' written work and classroom discussion. Their responses are explored in relation to the developmental tasks of adolescence.
Sit back, or should I say, recline, with your copy of On the Couch: A Repressed History of the An... more Sit back, or should I say, recline, with your copy of On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud by Nathan Kravis (2017). Kravis wears many hats penning this work, as psychoanalyst, art historian, Freud biographer, cultural critic and furniture connoisseur. He shepherds us through the history of reclining and of the couch itself, and how troubled psyches came to lay their heads comfortably on their analysts' couches millennia later. And throughout, he breathes life into the themes of luxury, social intimacy, and healing through his carefully selected commentary and images. On the Couch allows the reader to reflect more broadly on how history, culture, and bodily ritual shape the modern doctor-patient encounter. The narrative of the couch begins in ancient Greece and Rome, traveling through Renaissance painting and sculpture, to covers of The New Yorker. Kravis guides the reader through the first-century frescos and funerary urns, unpacking the concept of reclining as a symbol of luxury and privilege. We then greet religious works depicting the Virgin Mary anachronistically laying on a bed. While she would have been too poor to have given birth on beds like those depicted in the twelfth-and thirteenth-century nativity scenes, Mary reclining on the bed signifies domesticity and status that contemporary viewers would have understood (28-29). The sofa evolved in the eighteenth century, and with it, a home for intimate conversations within a domestic milieu (35-43). The reclining nude in works by Giorgione to Canova and David from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries reinvented the recumbent position from the classical age, bringing with it eroticism and what Kravis deems, a transgressive, force. The eighteenth-century French aristocracy embraced the sofa, which comes from the Arabic soffah (cushion), and its partner, the ottoman'' (39). These furniture pieces and their popular designs ''evoked the romanticized Orient,'' visual
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Oct 1, 2017
Kierkegaard's concept of leveling is applied to the dynamics of envy, particularly as they come i... more Kierkegaard's concept of leveling is applied to the dynamics of envy, particularly as they come into play among psychoanalysts doing clinical analytic work. This is illustrated in two clinical vignettes. The technocultural surround of the digital age impinges on analytic identity in ways that can evoke fantasied retreats into sameness and erasure of distinction. The "digital reality principle" is introduced as a way of conceptualizing an aspect of the hatred of thinking and certain envious responses to distinction. Charisma is considered as a possible release from sameness and the prevalent homogenization of experience. Among analysts, an internalized leveling process can sometimes function as a bulwark of homogenization. W riting in 1846, Søren Kierkegaard declared, in the long essay "The Present Age," that "a revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity" (p. 6). And, one might add, ours is the age of hypertransparency in the form of memoir-writing, reality TV shows, exposés, documentaries, and selfies. Imagine an age in which everyone's journey to becoming an analyst is digitized and searchable for all its embarrassing, shameful, mortifying, and traumatic moments. It would then be possible for anyone to see why that person had to become a psychoanalyst. This is indeed our present age. Every mistake one has ever made is, or soon will be, available online. The process of becoming an analyst is
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Sep 1, 2006
Lawrence Friedman is a preeminent theorist, critic, and commentator in American psychoanalysis to... more Lawrence Friedman is a preeminent theorist, critic, and commentator in American psychoanalysis today. The major themes of his work, beginning with his magnum opus, The Anatomy of Psychotherapy (1988), are examined in an effort to identify conceptual shifts and problems in contemporary psychoanalysis. In the years since publication of that work, Friedman's texts have increasingly focused on the epistemological controversies faced by contemporary psychoanalysts. He has become a vocal critic of recent developments in relational psychoanalysis, advancing views that are explored here and subjected to critical appraisal. To better understand Friedman's ideas, areas of disagreement with other authors, including Schafer, Renik, Hoffman, Mitchell, Rorty, and Michels, are explored. Finally, Friedman is presented as a cryptointersubjectivist whose work effects a realignment of theory with practice.
Charisma is best understood as an intersubjective phenomenon irreducible to individual psychology... more Charisma is best understood as an intersubjective phenomenon irreducible to individual psychology, though to some extent the phenomena of charisma and narcissism overlap. From its earliest stipulation by St. Paul as a gift of grace to Weber’s (1922, 1946, 1968) seminal work on charismatic authority and its inevitable routinization, the concept has evolved into a more nuanced construct that can be useful in formulating leadership/followership dynamics. Via a case vignette, the author illustrates how charismatic organization functions in the clinical situation. Linking Weber’s work on enthusiasm to Bion’s (1958) stipulation of arrogance and stupidity, he shows how the concept of charismatic organization bridges recent social science research and psychoanalytic understanding and provides a way of relating certain clinical phenomena to events on the larger sociopolitical stage.
Analytic work is loved and hated. Both attitudes deserve scrutiny, but the analyst&#3... more Analytic work is loved and hated. Both attitudes deserve scrutiny, but the analyst's hatred of analysis, which transcends countertransference responses to individual patients, represents an impediment to gratifying analytic work whose recognition and conceptualization has been resisted. The author suggests that antipathy among analysts toward analysis and the analytic situation is normative and expectable, yet commonly experienced as shameful. He speculates that it is sometimes disavowed and projected. Training institutes might inadvertently foster this sense of shame rather than promote its working through. The recognition that analytic identity functions as both a loving and a persecutory internal object has implications for psychoanalytic education and practice.
Analytic work is loved and hated. Both attitudes deserve scrutiny, but the analyst&#3... more Analytic work is loved and hated. Both attitudes deserve scrutiny, but the analyst's hatred of analysis, which transcends countertransference responses to individual patients, represents an impediment to gratifying analytic work whose recognition and conceptualization has been resisted. The author suggests that antipathy among analysts toward analysis and the analytic situation is normative and expectable, yet commonly experienced as shameful. He speculates that it is sometimes disavowed and projected. Training institutes might inadvertently foster this sense of shame rather than promote its working through. The recognition that analytic identity functions as both a loving and a persecutory internal object has implications for psychoanalytic education and practice.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2008
The four-year writing curriculum of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research ... more The four-year writing curriculum of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research has as its main objective to teach candidates to learn about analysis through writing. Learning to write about analyses ultimately entails learning to clarify and then express how one thinks and functions as an analyst. Since its inception ten years ago, the program has evolved into its current structure, a stepwise approach through the years of candidate training based on a didactic method called “layering.” For each level of the course, candidates' typical writing difficulties are examined, and examples given of write-ups and how they were used in teaching. The essential role of the faculty experience is also described.
Charisma is best understood as an intersubjective phenomenon irreducible to individual psychology... more Charisma is best understood as an intersubjective phenomenon irreducible to individual psychology, though to some extent the phenomena of charisma and narcissism overlap. From its earliest stipulation by St. Paul as a gift of grace to Weber's (1922, 1946, 1968) seminal work on charismatic authority and its inevitable routinization, the concept has evolved into a more nuanced construct that can be useful in formulating leadership/followership dynamics. Via a case vignette, the author illustrates how charismatic organization functions in the clinical situation. Linking Weber's work on enthusiasm to Bion's (1958) stipulation of arrogance and stupidity, he shows how the concept of charismatic organization bridges recent social science research and psychoanalytic understanding and provides a way of relating certain clinical phenomena to events on the larger sociopolitical stage.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2017
Kierkegaard's concept of leveling is applied to the dynamics of envy, particularly as they co... more Kierkegaard's concept of leveling is applied to the dynamics of envy, particularly as they come into play among psychoanalysts doing clinical analytic work. This is illustrated in two clinical vignettes. The technocultural surround of the digital age impinges on analytic identity in ways that can evoke fantasied retreats into sameness and erasure of distinction. The "digital reality principle" is introduced as a way of conceptualizing an aspect of the hatred of thinking and certain envious responses to distinction. Charisma is considered as a possible release from sameness and the prevalent homogenization of experience. Among analysts, an internalized leveling process can sometimes function as a bulwark of homogenization.
James Braid is both a neglected and integral figure in the history of dynamic psychiatry. With th... more James Braid is both a neglected and integral figure in the history of dynamic psychiatry. With the introduction of his neurophysiologic theory of hypnosis in the early 1840s he buried Mesmer's doctrine of animal magnetism and established hypnotic phenomena as data suitable for scientific inquiry. He subsequently elaborated a sophisticated psychophysiology with emphasis on the psychology of suggestion and the phenomenon of double consciousness. His espousal of hypnotism as a tool of scientific investigation and his innovative use of hypnosis to cure hysterical paralysis profoundly influenced the debates of the 1880s and 1890s concerning suggestive therapeutics and the nature of hypnosis.
The authors describe their experience teaching 'The Writings of Sigmund Freud' to... more The authors describe their experience teaching 'The Writings of Sigmund Freud' to undergraduates at Columbia College over a three-year period. The course focused on Freud's developing theory of the mind, his application of psychoanalytic theory to the study of culture, and the autobiographical and historical context in which the texts were written. The students entered the course intrigued by the controversy surrounding Freud. They immersed themselves in the intellectual task of understanding Freud's work while at the same time discovering its power to speak directly to their personal concerns. The students found in Freud a companion in the search for personal meaning in the 'great books' of the western canon. At a deeper level, they found in Freud an ally in the drama of coming-of-age, experienced in terms of separation and loss, concerns about normality and sexuality, the quest for autonomy and the search for identity. While interested in Freud's ideas about infantile sexuality, for the most part, they rejected the concept of the Oedipus complex. The authors present excerpts from the students' written work and classroom discussion. Their responses are explored in relation to the developmental tasks of adolescence.
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Aug 7, 2000
The authors describe their experience teaching 'The Writings of Sigmund Freud' to... more The authors describe their experience teaching 'The Writings of Sigmund Freud' to undergraduates at Columbia College over a three-year period. The course focused on Freud's developing theory of the mind, his application of psychoanalytic theory to the study of culture, and the autobiographical and historical context in which the texts were written. The students entered the course intrigued by the controversy surrounding Freud. They immersed themselves in the intellectual task of understanding Freud's work while at the same time discovering its power to speak directly to their personal concerns. The students found in Freud a companion in the search for personal meaning in the 'great books' of the western canon. At a deeper level, they found in Freud an ally in the drama of coming-of-age, experienced in terms of separation and loss, concerns about normality and sexuality, the quest for autonomy and the search for identity. While interested in Freud's ideas about infantile sexuality, for the most part, they rejected the concept of the Oedipus complex. The authors present excerpts from the students' written work and classroom discussion. Their responses are explored in relation to the developmental tasks of adolescence.
Sit back, or should I say, recline, with your copy of On the Couch: A Repressed History of the An... more Sit back, or should I say, recline, with your copy of On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud by Nathan Kravis (2017). Kravis wears many hats penning this work, as psychoanalyst, art historian, Freud biographer, cultural critic and furniture connoisseur. He shepherds us through the history of reclining and of the couch itself, and how troubled psyches came to lay their heads comfortably on their analysts' couches millennia later. And throughout, he breathes life into the themes of luxury, social intimacy, and healing through his carefully selected commentary and images. On the Couch allows the reader to reflect more broadly on how history, culture, and bodily ritual shape the modern doctor-patient encounter. The narrative of the couch begins in ancient Greece and Rome, traveling through Renaissance painting and sculpture, to covers of The New Yorker. Kravis guides the reader through the first-century frescos and funerary urns, unpacking the concept of reclining as a symbol of luxury and privilege. We then greet religious works depicting the Virgin Mary anachronistically laying on a bed. While she would have been too poor to have given birth on beds like those depicted in the twelfth-and thirteenth-century nativity scenes, Mary reclining on the bed signifies domesticity and status that contemporary viewers would have understood (28-29). The sofa evolved in the eighteenth century, and with it, a home for intimate conversations within a domestic milieu (35-43). The reclining nude in works by Giorgione to Canova and David from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries reinvented the recumbent position from the classical age, bringing with it eroticism and what Kravis deems, a transgressive, force. The eighteenth-century French aristocracy embraced the sofa, which comes from the Arabic soffah (cushion), and its partner, the ottoman'' (39). These furniture pieces and their popular designs ''evoked the romanticized Orient,'' visual
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Oct 1, 2017
Kierkegaard's concept of leveling is applied to the dynamics of envy, particularly as they come i... more Kierkegaard's concept of leveling is applied to the dynamics of envy, particularly as they come into play among psychoanalysts doing clinical analytic work. This is illustrated in two clinical vignettes. The technocultural surround of the digital age impinges on analytic identity in ways that can evoke fantasied retreats into sameness and erasure of distinction. The "digital reality principle" is introduced as a way of conceptualizing an aspect of the hatred of thinking and certain envious responses to distinction. Charisma is considered as a possible release from sameness and the prevalent homogenization of experience. Among analysts, an internalized leveling process can sometimes function as a bulwark of homogenization. W riting in 1846, Søren Kierkegaard declared, in the long essay "The Present Age," that "a revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity" (p. 6). And, one might add, ours is the age of hypertransparency in the form of memoir-writing, reality TV shows, exposés, documentaries, and selfies. Imagine an age in which everyone's journey to becoming an analyst is digitized and searchable for all its embarrassing, shameful, mortifying, and traumatic moments. It would then be possible for anyone to see why that person had to become a psychoanalyst. This is indeed our present age. Every mistake one has ever made is, or soon will be, available online. The process of becoming an analyst is
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Sep 1, 2006
Lawrence Friedman is a preeminent theorist, critic, and commentator in American psychoanalysis to... more Lawrence Friedman is a preeminent theorist, critic, and commentator in American psychoanalysis today. The major themes of his work, beginning with his magnum opus, The Anatomy of Psychotherapy (1988), are examined in an effort to identify conceptual shifts and problems in contemporary psychoanalysis. In the years since publication of that work, Friedman's texts have increasingly focused on the epistemological controversies faced by contemporary psychoanalysts. He has become a vocal critic of recent developments in relational psychoanalysis, advancing views that are explored here and subjected to critical appraisal. To better understand Friedman's ideas, areas of disagreement with other authors, including Schafer, Renik, Hoffman, Mitchell, Rorty, and Michels, are explored. Finally, Friedman is presented as a cryptointersubjectivist whose work effects a realignment of theory with practice.
Charisma is best understood as an intersubjective phenomenon irreducible to individual psychology... more Charisma is best understood as an intersubjective phenomenon irreducible to individual psychology, though to some extent the phenomena of charisma and narcissism overlap. From its earliest stipulation by St. Paul as a gift of grace to Weber’s (1922, 1946, 1968) seminal work on charismatic authority and its inevitable routinization, the concept has evolved into a more nuanced construct that can be useful in formulating leadership/followership dynamics. Via a case vignette, the author illustrates how charismatic organization functions in the clinical situation. Linking Weber’s work on enthusiasm to Bion’s (1958) stipulation of arrogance and stupidity, he shows how the concept of charismatic organization bridges recent social science research and psychoanalytic understanding and provides a way of relating certain clinical phenomena to events on the larger sociopolitical stage.
Analytic work is loved and hated. Both attitudes deserve scrutiny, but the analyst&#3... more Analytic work is loved and hated. Both attitudes deserve scrutiny, but the analyst's hatred of analysis, which transcends countertransference responses to individual patients, represents an impediment to gratifying analytic work whose recognition and conceptualization has been resisted. The author suggests that antipathy among analysts toward analysis and the analytic situation is normative and expectable, yet commonly experienced as shameful. He speculates that it is sometimes disavowed and projected. Training institutes might inadvertently foster this sense of shame rather than promote its working through. The recognition that analytic identity functions as both a loving and a persecutory internal object has implications for psychoanalytic education and practice.
Analytic work is loved and hated. Both attitudes deserve scrutiny, but the analyst&#3... more Analytic work is loved and hated. Both attitudes deserve scrutiny, but the analyst's hatred of analysis, which transcends countertransference responses to individual patients, represents an impediment to gratifying analytic work whose recognition and conceptualization has been resisted. The author suggests that antipathy among analysts toward analysis and the analytic situation is normative and expectable, yet commonly experienced as shameful. He speculates that it is sometimes disavowed and projected. Training institutes might inadvertently foster this sense of shame rather than promote its working through. The recognition that analytic identity functions as both a loving and a persecutory internal object has implications for psychoanalytic education and practice.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2008
The four-year writing curriculum of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research ... more The four-year writing curriculum of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research has as its main objective to teach candidates to learn about analysis through writing. Learning to write about analyses ultimately entails learning to clarify and then express how one thinks and functions as an analyst. Since its inception ten years ago, the program has evolved into its current structure, a stepwise approach through the years of candidate training based on a didactic method called “layering.” For each level of the course, candidates' typical writing difficulties are examined, and examples given of write-ups and how they were used in teaching. The essential role of the faculty experience is also described.
Charisma is best understood as an intersubjective phenomenon irreducible to individual psychology... more Charisma is best understood as an intersubjective phenomenon irreducible to individual psychology, though to some extent the phenomena of charisma and narcissism overlap. From its earliest stipulation by St. Paul as a gift of grace to Weber's (1922, 1946, 1968) seminal work on charismatic authority and its inevitable routinization, the concept has evolved into a more nuanced construct that can be useful in formulating leadership/followership dynamics. Via a case vignette, the author illustrates how charismatic organization functions in the clinical situation. Linking Weber's work on enthusiasm to Bion's (1958) stipulation of arrogance and stupidity, he shows how the concept of charismatic organization bridges recent social science research and psychoanalytic understanding and provides a way of relating certain clinical phenomena to events on the larger sociopolitical stage.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2017
Kierkegaard's concept of leveling is applied to the dynamics of envy, particularly as they co... more Kierkegaard's concept of leveling is applied to the dynamics of envy, particularly as they come into play among psychoanalysts doing clinical analytic work. This is illustrated in two clinical vignettes. The technocultural surround of the digital age impinges on analytic identity in ways that can evoke fantasied retreats into sameness and erasure of distinction. The "digital reality principle" is introduced as a way of conceptualizing an aspect of the hatred of thinking and certain envious responses to distinction. Charisma is considered as a possible release from sameness and the prevalent homogenization of experience. Among analysts, an internalized leveling process can sometimes function as a bulwark of homogenization.
James Braid is both a neglected and integral figure in the history of dynamic psychiatry. With th... more James Braid is both a neglected and integral figure in the history of dynamic psychiatry. With the introduction of his neurophysiologic theory of hypnosis in the early 1840s he buried Mesmer's doctrine of animal magnetism and established hypnotic phenomena as data suitable for scientific inquiry. He subsequently elaborated a sophisticated psychophysiology with emphasis on the psychology of suggestion and the phenomenon of double consciousness. His espousal of hypnotism as a tool of scientific investigation and his innovative use of hypnosis to cure hysterical paralysis profoundly influenced the debates of the 1880s and 1890s concerning suggestive therapeutics and the nature of hypnosis.
The authors describe their experience teaching 'The Writings of Sigmund Freud' to... more The authors describe their experience teaching 'The Writings of Sigmund Freud' to undergraduates at Columbia College over a three-year period. The course focused on Freud's developing theory of the mind, his application of psychoanalytic theory to the study of culture, and the autobiographical and historical context in which the texts were written. The students entered the course intrigued by the controversy surrounding Freud. They immersed themselves in the intellectual task of understanding Freud's work while at the same time discovering its power to speak directly to their personal concerns. The students found in Freud a companion in the search for personal meaning in the 'great books' of the western canon. At a deeper level, they found in Freud an ally in the drama of coming-of-age, experienced in terms of separation and loss, concerns about normality and sexuality, the quest for autonomy and the search for identity. While interested in Freud's ideas about infantile sexuality, for the most part, they rejected the concept of the Oedipus complex. The authors present excerpts from the students' written work and classroom discussion. Their responses are explored in relation to the developmental tasks of adolescence.
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