Selecting a patient or initiating a psychoanalytic process?

The defences provoked in the analyst by the anxieties associated with the difficult tasks of ‘assessment’ and ‘selection’ for psychoanalysis can result in a tendency to think in terms of ‘hurdles to be cleared’ by potential psychoanalytic patients, rather than ‘opening the gates’. This can result in a diminution of the analyst's capacity to enlist and sustain a psychoanalytic stance. Only within a psychoanalytic frame can a meaningful psychoanalytic process unfold, at all stages of a potential patient's movement from their first contact through to, possibly, entering into an analysis. The author illustrates the value of this thinking by describing the work of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis where there has been a shift of emphasis in psychoanalytic consultation towards working with individuals on their potential to initiate a psychoanalytic process, and away from the sole aim of ‘selection of a suitable patient’. In this paper, the author notes that when institutional culture and practice supports psychoanalytic identity, this makes it more possible to recognize and articulate the anxieties provoked by the ‘emotional storm’ inevitable in psychoanalytic consultation, and the draw towards unhelpful enactment that may otherwise obscure the initiation of a psychoanalytic process that may or may not result in analytic treatment. Illustrative case material from the Clinic is presented.     

IFPS 1960–1985: A new home for international and German psychoanalysis?

Abstract

The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) was established in 1962. The first 20 years of the Federation were a time when psychoanalysis was divided into so-called liberal and orthodox factions. The (then orthodox) International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) did not admit all psychoanalytic societies, and some societies did not want to join it. In the IFPS, non-IPA-psychoanalysts from Europe, the USA, and South and Middle America came together to discuss their new approaches to psychoanalysis and to find ways to better cope with their patients’ problems. At the beginning an informal organization of autonomous societies, the IFPS persisted for 12 years without a charter. The first three secretary generals came from the German Psychoanalytical Society and greatly influenced the first few years of the IFPS. The IFPS held several international conferences, and new psychoanalytic societies became members. In 1977, after the VIth Forum in Berlin, the IFPS fell into an identity crisis. The conflicts centered on the assumption of responsibility, the authority of the members, and how to understand the aim and sense of the organization. This article deals with the theoretical background of the early IFPS and the development of its self-concept.     

Psychoanalysis and Social Work

Abstract

This paper traces the close relationship between psychoanalysis and social work after Freudian theory's dramatic impact on social work practice in the 1920s. It shows how revisions and expansion of psychoanalytic theory beyond its traditional base influenced clinical work during later decades until the 1960s, when society turned its attention to macrosystems intervention and other theoretical frameworks and practice models. The paper considers the impact of this change in emphasis on clinicians, direct practice, and schools of social work. Although it describes the resurgence of direct practice that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, it discusses the reasons for the greatly diminished role of psychoanalytic theories in social work curricula. It concludes that there is little reason for optimism about psychoanalysis regaining a prominent position within the profession at the present time and comments on some implications of this state of affairs for those committed to advanced clinical training.     

‘That psychotherapy and counselling trainings should be based in universities’

Psychoanalytic institutes, operating as they do normally outside universities, have been criticized as being like religious institutions, with the emphasis on a narrow set of beliefs more than on critical examination of ideas, and with considerable power invested in the trainers and supervisors. Such criticism may also apply to other schools of psychotherapy. While universities have their own difficulties as institutions, including bureaucracy and even similar standardization of theories in particular disciplines, they can also represent a challenging milieu for psychotherapy and counselling education, for accountability in selection, teaching and assessment, for student participation, and for a broader critique of ideas. The difference between education and training is noted and a two-part assessment, academic and practical, is briefly considered.     

Reflections on Preparing the Group Leader for an Analytic Perspective

Preparation of group therapists for an analytic perspective involves awareness of unconscious processes at the group and individual levels. The adequately prepared group leader should have familiarity with dream interpretation and group-as-a-whole transferences. Training in the use of long-term treatment methods is useful whether or not the practitioner uses these methods in actual practice. The ideal training program would include didactic seminars, weekly supervision, the experience of conducting a long-term (at least two years) therapy group, as well as personal analytic group therapy. Previous individual analytic therapy is also encouraged.     

A Mirror to Analysis

Three books written by psychiatrists for a lay audience are examined. Two are novels, and the third is a psychiatrist's account of the years of his psychiatric residency training. In all three books psychoanalysts are portrayed in negative roles, as arrogant, cold, uncaring, and even venal. The reasons why psychiatrists would portray analysis in this light are examined, and some ways in which psychoanalysts will need to re-examine their role in education and in their relationships with psychiatric colleagues in order to counteract this negative mirror are suggested.     

What Do Teachers Want (from Psychoanalysts)?

From his thirty-year perspective as both a psychoanalyst and teacher educator, the author reviews the programs described by Farley and Manning, Sklarew, and Kusché and Greenberg. He assesses their relationship to Freud's vision and to the needs and wants of current teachers.     

On Teaching Psychoanalysis in Antianalytic Times: A Polemic

The author argues that in the current attitudinal climate, characterized by significant denigration of psychoanalysis coming from biologically oriented psychiatrists, academic psychologists, pharmaceutical firms, insurance companies, managed care organizations, anxious taxpayers, and revisionist critics of Freud, psychoanalysts need to adapt their training and supervisory practices to take into account the preconceptions of many of those seeking training as psychotherapists. Specifically, we need to appreciate the nature of the transferences toward analysts and analysis that exist in the wider mental health community and in the general public. These include assumptions that analysts are cold, arrogant, rigid, and worshipful toward Freud (who is himself seen as cold, arrogant, rigid, and narcissistic), and the prevalent misconception that psychoanalysis has been empirically discredited. Analysts need to find creative and honest ways, some of which are suggested by the author, to challenge the distortions in these stereotypes and to respond nondefensively and generatively to the grains of truth they contain. The essay concludes with some reminders of the legitimate strengths of the psychoanalytic tradition that suggest that its future is not as bleak as its disparagers have assumed.     

对"心理学危机论"的思考

对当前心理学界存在的心理发展的多种危机论进行了分析,认为,心理学的危机并非源于当前的心理学科本身,而在于心理学者的主观认识和实际工作中。要改变心理学发展缓慢的现状,必须打破心理学者之间过分独立的学术研究活动和学术交流活动,消除存在于心理学者之间的成见,找寻存在于心理学自身和存在于社会需求中的发展机遇．     

Behavioral Skills Training With Teachers: Booster Training for Improved Maintenance

Behavioral skills training (BST) has been employed within many different populations for the reduction of problem behaviors and acquisition of new skills; however, these changes have not always maintained over time. This study evaluated the effects of a booster training for re-establishing the classroom management proficiencies that teachers had acquired previously, but had declined over a 12-month period. The single-subject experimental results showed the booster training to be effective in re-establishing teacher performance of skills as measured by both analogue role-play and in situ postassessments within the classroom. These findings suggest that a booster training utilizing BST may be an important strategy for maintaining skill performance over time.     

The return of the prodigal: the emergence of Jungian themes in post-Freudian thought

Stories about reality and the nature of truth constitute the essence of psychological theory. This paper is an overview of the various Jungian-sounding 'storylines' that have slowly been woven into the fabric of Freudian theory, that is, those broad ranges of therapeutic approaches labelled 'psychoanalytic'. These include: hegemony of subjective experience; centrality of the Subject; the ineffable nature of the Subject and its agency; the role of countertransference as primary data in analysis; autonomous structures in the psyche; the nature and function of symbols; desire and its purposiveness; the nature and transformative aspects of primitive affective states. Speculation on the reasons for this occurrence is not considered as merely a function of enlightened theoretical or fraternal interchange, but of an archetypal dynamic of exclusion and reconciliation inherent in the nature of theory building and illustrated by the biblical myth of the prodigal.