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