Confessions of a Marginal Psychologist [Autobiography] (2009)

American Psychologist, 1993

History of Psychology in Autobiography, 2009

Researching beneath the surface: psycho-social …, 2009

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

H ow do we become analysts? In this essay I will present a trajectory of my use of my self and my understanding of the mutual influences my patients and I have had on each other over my professional life. The use of my self and the mutual influences my patients and I have on each other, of course, are about the patient-analyst match. I believe our engagement reflects a process of working through for me, as well as for each of my patients. Events in our lives also affect who we become as people-sometimes only in subtle ways and sometimes more significantly. Changes in our selves have reverberations in our work with patients. When I began my psychoanalytic training in 1968, we were taught that analysts were meant to be "blank screens." Patients could and would project their difficulties onto us. Who we were, our conflicts and character, were to have been smoothed out in our personal analyses and our personalities purged of the tendency to appear in our offices. Analysts were assumed to be interchangeable. I know this sounds like a parody of analysis. I also now know that many analysts, even then, were not like this, but it is what we were taught. I admit to having been incredulous. Really? Who we were as people would not enter our work with patients? Before my training, I had worked primarily with children and been relatively free in using my self intuitively in the work. My classical analytic training did help to provide a discipline for my spontaneity that was useful, but the idea that I, or anyone, could be grayed

International Journal of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, 2018

Psychobiography is a qualitative, idiographic research method; it is the explicit and systematic application of psychological theories and models in writing biographies and analyzing the life history, activity and personality of historically significant persons. This method has been used in the investigation of eminent creativity for more than a hundred years from now. It was originally created by Sigmund Freud; he and his followers made it popular among psychoanalysts in the first half of the 20th century, meanwhile American personality psychologists like GW Allport, HA Murray or Erik H Erikson also contributed to its development. Due to the hegemony of quantitative-positivist research in the 1960s and the 1970s this method was not favored, but-owing to the success of narrative psychology-from the 1990s we can perceive the renaissance of life history approach and psychobiography in personality psychology. In this article I will try to demonstrate that the application of psychobiography in the training of psychologists could have countless beneficial effects. The most important reason for it that using psychobiography in training could alleviate some major intellectual contradictions between university training and clinical practice, and it could also contribute to the development of psychology as a “rigorous science”. In order to understand the importance of this question first I have to analyze the scientific differences between clinical practice and academic research on ontological and epistemological levels. Keywords Psychobiography, Training of psychology students, Clinical practice, Epistemology

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2005

The woman and I are meeting for the first time to discuss whether or not she might like to pursue psychotherapy with me. She is a woman in her forties, with three teenage children and two insane men, her ex-husband and her live-in boyfriend. As the men have become more and more insane, and her concerns about her children have grown accordingly, she has begun to wonder if she, too, is insane. She is having episodes of blind rage in which she smashes things in the house. She thinks she might want to take poison. She is afraid she might need to kill her boyfriend to prevent being killed by him. ''Holy cow,'' I say to myself. ''Do I need this?'' She has been referred, as so many of my patients are, by a friend, or a friend of a friend's friend. So she knows very little about me, about how I work, except that I am rumored to be a good therapist. Toward the end of this first hour, then, I give her the opportunity to get to know me a little better before we begin. ''In order to help you decide whether you want to work with me,'' I say mildly, ''is there anything you need to know about me?'' She fixes me with a glassy stare and says, ''What kind of therapist are you?'' ''Well. I'm not sure what you want to know, but in terms of clinical practice, I describe myself as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.'' She leans forward. ''Psychoanalytic? You're not a Freudian, are you?'' MEETING OUR SECRET IDENTITIES Before I tell you what I said, I will describe the chasm of anxiety that opens up at my feet when I hear these words. As Dr. Lionells' paper describes, contemporary patients who are referred for psychoanalysis

Memoirs of an academic and clinical psychiatrist