Psychoanalysts and money

It is suggested that many of the rules of technique about handling questions of money in analysis have been adopted more because they are self-serving for the analyst than because they genuinely aid the therapeutic process. Examples are given of gross deviations that appear to have enhanced the process rather than interfered with it. The idea is that analysis should be a corrective emotional experience.     

Psychoanalysts in the Public Eye: Internal Resistances

An attitude against public presentations has been part of the inward looking stance of organized psychoanalysis and has contributed to the often-heard comment that psychoanalysis is a dying profession. Because of the very private nature of clinical psychoanalytic work, this ambivalence to public appearances continues to exist in all psychoanalysts. We have to realize that it is crucial for psychoanalysts to educate the public about psychoanalytic ideas while being aware of possible unintended negative consequences, such as interference in transference issues with patients, ethical and privacy violations, distortion in the press coverage, unfairly biased antipsychoanalytic coverage, and concern about disapproval from prominent and influential members of psychoanalytic organizations about the nature of the press coverage (or even of press coverage at all) leading to criticism of an individual psychoanalyst and interference with his or her progression. Our public information efforts have to include using misfired efforts as teaching tools and insure that presentation of clinical material is limited and sufficiently disguised.     

Contribution of Hungarian Psychoanalysts to Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics

How is psyche related to soma? What tricks does the mind play on the body—and vice-versa? In psychoanalysis, few have probed these questions more deeply than analysts from the Budapest school. Their work began in Hungary and was carried forward in other countries, following their forced emigration. In this study, I touch upon common features of Ferenczi's and Groddeck's thinking about psychosomatics. I explore the work of Sándor Ferenczi, Lajos Lévy and Mihály Bálint among others, and the attraction between avant garde Hungarian intellectuals—mainly writers influenced by Ferenczi—and Georg Groddeck.     

Mental Health Values of Psychotherapists: How Psychologists,Psychiatrists, Psychoanalysts,and Social Workers Conceptualize Good Mental Health

Previous research suggests that laypersons differ as a function of gender and ethnicity in their views about the meaning of “mental health.” The current study examined agreement among psychotherapists about the nature of healthy psychological functioning. National samples of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and psychoanalysts completed the Mental Health Values Questionnaire, a measure of value dimensions used in appraising emotional adjustment. Results indicated a relatively high degree of consensus among the four professional disciplines surveyed. Individual differences were associated with gender and with the geographic area in which the therapist was raised.     

Our Immigration and Human Rights Work Group in Action: Psychoanalysts Evaluating Asylum Seekers,Trauma and Family Devastation

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the story of a family of four refugees from Central America seeking asylum in the United States, and of the experience of a group of psychoanalysts, members of the New York University Postdoctoral Program Immigration and Human Rights Work Group, who evaluated each member of the family and wrote affidavits in support of their applications for asylum. The work described provides an example of how clinicians can apply their skills and understandings outside the consulting room to address the dire needs of refugees who have fled from their homes. We discuss the process of refugees seeking asylum and the role of a psychological evaluation in the asylum process. We elaborate on the content and process of the evaluations of each member of the family with a focus on the trauma suffered and its sequelae on two school-aged children, their adolescent aunt, and their courageous and protective mother. We also address the analysts’ experience of doing psychological evaluations and writing affidavits for asylum seekers who have experienced trauma.     

Psychoanalysis in Spain: A Brief Account of the Transformative Pathways Between the Psychoanalysts and Their Institutions

Psychoanalysis in Spain has a plural history. Rooted in the Freudian and Kleinian traditions, it has developed in different directions and incorporated trends from contemporary psychoanalysis. The impact of socio-political factors forced several migratory movements that came back to Spain under the form of criticism to classical psychoanalysis, following ideas that were emerging from Latin America (e.g., Pichon Rivière) and North America (Cultural and Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, Self Psychology, and Intersubjective System theories) that enriched psychoanalytic thinking, and promoted new psychoanalytic institutions. Finally, Steve Mitchell’s relational perspective plays a crucial role among present developments.     

How the Psychoanalyst Working Primarily with One Person Can Make a Successful Couple Intervention; Or,Why Psychoanalysts Should Not Back Away from Working with Couples

This paper illustrates the value of the individual analyst's deep knowledge of the patient in a couple setting; describes how the analyst informed by many theoretical perspectives decided to work in different modalities (individual, group, couple) with the same patient; and discusses when such additions would have been contraindicated as well as what could have been the consequences if the analyst did not attune to the patient's need for “optimum space” or follow the direction of the patient's creative gestures.