Introducing Nathan Szajnberg, Managing Editor of InternationalPsychoanalysis.net

Aug 2, 2011

Arnie Richards created /International Psychoanalysis.net / to be our agora, our Central Park: a place for us to gather when we emerge from behind the couch; a place to explore, to share, to reflect, to discuss, to debate. Central Park gives us different areas for strolling, resting, exploring, and observing — the wide open Sheep Meadow, the Lake, the tangles of the Bramble, Poet’s Alley, the Delacorte Theater. IP does the same. It offers a psychoanalytic “slant upon the world” and its many categories — art, books, movies, music, papers, oral history, controversy. It’s a place to try out ideas amongst our peers: responses are quick and come from around the world.


This website is a new way for analysts to explore and consider, to refine and revise a precious discipline whose subject is inner life. The inner universe is planeted by feelings and fears, hopes and desires, and its gravity holds us together. We are a psychoanalytic community, Freud’s disciples.

When we had dinner together to discuss the position of managing editor, Arnie suggested I write something like the Reading Notes that Dr. Karl contributed to the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic. I didn’t know Dr. Karl; perhaps the closest I can imagine is my former department chairman Roy Grinker, Sr. But I am neither of those men. What to do? What to say?

Arnie and I both spent time at the University of Chicago, where teachers encouraged their students to cross disciplines in search of truth, knowledge, wisdom. We did so as a community, with respect and regard for each other and for the excitement of our individual intellectual voyages. I will try to bring this respect, this regard, and this excitement to /IP.net/ and to you, its readers.

I will write weekly. But I have also invited colleagues to contribute on anything they find interesting and challenging in
contemporary psychoanalysis. Expect to hear from:
anthropologist/psychoanalyst Bobby Paul on the cultures of psychoanalysis; Marianne Leutzinger-Bohleber on research (that alienating word) in psychoanalysis; Emanuel Berman, the Israeli author of The Impossible Education/; cultural historian/psychoanalyst D. J. Fischer on Lacan’s influences; and Charlie Gardner (a former resident of mine at Cornell, whose father taught my dream course) on the vicissitudes of practicing in small communities. I myself will write on emotions research and its contributions to our understanding of the feelings that are so universal in our work. Expect these; expect more. We also hope to find a technological website fix to make your comments more feasible, so that you can join in this conversation that is sculpting our discipline.

I am honored to join /International Psychoanalysis.net/ and hope that my efforts will justify this honor.

 


Nathan M. Szajnberg, MD
Training Analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic and Member, Columbia and New York Psychoanalytic Societies
Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis, SFCP