September 23, 2007
The City Section
An Active Approach to Psychic Change
To the Editor:
Re “Patching Up the Frayed Couch” (Sept. 9), about the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute:
Idealization of leaders and institutes, Freud or otherwise, should always be questioned, and has led to institutional and intellectual fossilization. For many years, vital psychoanalytic debate and creativity could only thrive outside of the mainstream Freudian institutes.
]Nonetheless, whatever the institute and the debates, contemporary psychoanalysts still share Freud’s revolutionary insight that what is out of awareness powerfully affects our experience and functioning (increasingly documented by brain studies). We also share a conviction that psychic change depends on working actively in the room with the patient on the relationship with the analyst.
So you can playfully caricature psychoanalysis, spin the words of your interviewees and slyly equate psychoanalysis with religion, but in doing so, you miss a more profound struggle. Like New York City itself, psychoanalysis is involved in an active, lively and, at times, painful effort to maintain the best of our history while making room for the new.
Comparative psychoanalytic theory has vastly enriched our work, as has feminist theory, the growing body of scientific research on the brain, on human attachment and interaction. Nonetheless, like this city, we struggle to maintain our solid essence and vitality against the depersonalized corporate mall — in our case, insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry, enticing us with images, fads and the allure of superficial quick fixes.
Miri Abramis
Upper West Side
The writer is on the faculty of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology
Click Here to Read: The New York Times Article on “The Frayed Couch.”