Click Here To Read: The Certification Debate as a Manifestation of Our Unacknowledged Ambivalences by Leon Hoffman.
Click here to Read: For the historical background of this debate, Paul Mosher and Arnold Richards’s paper “The History of Membership/Certification in the APsaA: Old Demons, New Debates.”
Category: Editorials
Discussion of the Certification Process at APsaA
APsaA members are discussing the subject of certification. This editorial by Arlene Kramer Richards gives us one person’s personal experience of the process, along with suggestions for the future. The piece was originally published in États Generaux de la Psychanalyse (2000) and appears here with the requisite permissions. The IP Blog looks forward to many comments so that people can reflect, with open minds, on their positions – whatever they may be.
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DISCUSSION OF THE CERTIFICATION PROCESS AT THE AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYTIC ASSOCIATION
By Arlene Kramer Richards
I became a certified member of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1998. My experience in becoming certified has caused me to think long and searchingly about the purposes and the consequences of this process. The personal pain induced by the process is the spur for my thinking, but the thinking has gone on long after the pain was assuaged by the concern and sympathetic listening of a few close friends and many colleagues. The process began when I decided to attend a meeting at which prospective candidates for certification were invited to discuss the process. The members of the committee who were present at the meeting assured the prospective candidates that the process would be collegial and that they wanted to use it to get to know the candidates and their way of working as analysts. This sounded good to me. They also gave details of how to write up cases for certification and, most importantly for me as someone who had trained long ago and outside the institutes of the American, said that they were willing to accept a selection of cases from senior people rather than demand that we write up all the cases we had ever had. That was reasonable. I wrote the cases as I would for scientific papers. I tried to spotlight the difficulties that arose in the analyses themselves and the thoughts that had occurred to me as I wrote them up now, many years later. Informed that they had been insufficient, I was encouraged to go to Toronto in May 1998 to present my work in person. This time, I was to bring process on current hours. I was shocked to find that the small subcommittee that interviewed me at that time did not believe that I had presented to them well enough to show that I understood the analytic process. After another write up and another interview, I was told that I had now shown that I did understand the analytic process. For a senior analyst who had done many analyses and supervisions and had been the co-chair of an IPA pre-congress on analytic supervision as well as having been a training analyst so long that some of my analysands were now training analysts, this did not feel good. Was the problem me or was it the process? Or was it both? Much of my thinking about this has been in the service of figuring this out. To begin at the beginning, there was the case write ups. Continue reading Discussion of the Certification Process at APsaA
More Thoughts On The Pope’s Visit from Joseph P. Collins
Many thanks to Jane Hall for bringing the recent Papal visit to the attention of the psychoanalytic community. (Click here to read Jane S. Hall’s editorial.) An international event of this importance has the potential to elicit deeply held emotions in individuals that rise to the surface and reverberate in our society at large. Having attended the Papal Mass at the Washington Nationals Stadium, I witnessed both the hushed attentiveness of over forty thousand faithful in the stands as well as several placard-carrying protestors shouting outside the front gates. Not unexpectedly, people expressed strong feelings around this event. As a psychoanalyst as well as a practicing Roman Catholic, the Papal visit and the reactions to it were of great interest to me.I would now like to share some psychoanalytic thoughts about a particular incident that occurred during this time. My intent is to show that the effects of clerical sexual abuse might be evident in one victim’s encounter with the Pope. Continue reading More Thoughts On The Pope’s Visit from Joseph P. Collins
Thoughts on the Group Self of psychoanalysis…
The International Psychoanalytic website is pleased to present an important op ed piece by Marian Tolpin. This eminent analyst from Chicago explains clearly, articulately, and persuasively why the training analyst title should be retired. The Executive Board of the International Psychoanalytic Association would not permit its publication. The International Psychoanalytic Blog stands for freedom of expression and welcomes comments on this important and timely article.
Jane S. Hall
Op Ed Editor
Thoughts on the Group Self of psychoanalysis,
in light of the controversy over Training Analysis status
Marian Tolpin, M.D.
There is currently a great deal of debate taking place in psychoanalytic training centers, around the world and here in the United States, concerning whether there should be a separate category of graduate psychoanalysts designated as specially qualified to analyze future psychoanalysts. Among those who do believe that there needs to be such a category, further debate has raged on what that special qualification might entail and on the particulars of how (when, by whom) it should be established and evaluated.
In what follows below I reflect on my own experiences in regard to this category and on the lengthy history of the Training Analysis question as a disruptive force in institutional psychoanalysis. As I consider why this fractious issue, which has caused so much dissension in our profession, remains perpetually unresolved, I conclude that the Training Analysis serves a Group Self cohesive function. As such, it joins a list of other myths that have served that function in the past; myths that were clung to but ultimately had to be relinquished in the face of contradictory evidence. Continue reading Thoughts on the Group Self of psychoanalysis…
The Pope’s Visit
I was surprised at my own personal reaction to seeing the Pope on television here in New York City. My hope was stirred as I saw this man who in his white robe spoke of human rights and peace. Cynic that I can be, I was moved and wondered, with the psychoanalytic part of my brain, “what was going on?” I am not a Catholic, nor am I religious. In fact, organized religion mystifies me although I see its benefits for those who choose to practice it. I began to wonder what the Pope and psychoanalysis have in common and came up with one fact: both the church and psychoanalysis are losing candidates. Continue reading The Pope’s Visit
Op-Ed by Sheldon Goodman on Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
On Privacy
Congressman Edward MarkeyStephen L. Richards and Jennifer Bishop Jenkins: A Tale of Two States
A Tale of Two States
By Stephen L. Richards and Jennifer Bishop Jenkins
This is a tale of two states. Let’s call them State A and State B.
Both State A and State B have the death penalty.
In State A, the anti-death penalty movement is strong, well-financed, and well-publicized.
In State B, the anti-death penalty movement is initially weaker, poorer, and not so well-publicized.
In State A, an innocent man, fitted for his burial shroud, comes within hours of execution.
In State B, no innocent man ever comes close to execution.
Continue reading Stephen L. Richards and Jennifer Bishop Jenkins: A Tale of Two States
Harnessing Thanatos
We are pleased to publish Alice Maher’s op ed piece – especially on the eve of our Future of Psychoanalytic Education conference on Dec. 1 & 2 – an ecumenical conference that is bound to influence us all.
Alice says: “The ability to tolerate time, tension, paradox, and ambiguity, to develop greater capacity for empathic imagination, and to be able to learn and change in relationship to an Other, are essential elements of a good analytic process. They need to become goals for our society as well.”
This is exactly what this first ecumenical conference aims to accomplish.
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Harnessing Thanatos : Is it possible to analyze the forces of war in a way that leads to real change? by Alice Lombardo Maher, M.D .
I find that I’m unable to address the topic of conflict among analysts without focusing on the larger phenomena of prejudice and war. If it’s true that there’s more dissention within the analytic community than outside it, it’s because we’ve yet to find ways to address group conflicts on a scale larger than our individual consulting rooms, so the same dynamics that lead to war are emerging in bold relief from within our own community. If we can discover ways to use analytic tools to address the problem of large-scale inter-group conflict, we have an opportunity to unify our paradigms and give society an invaluable gift. If not, the problem will continue to play itself out in our own society, and our “Tower of Babel” will eventually collapse.
Freud taught us that the need to disavow aspects of our selves can lead to symptoms, problematic relationships, and self-destructive acting out, but the opportunity to give voice to those forbidden thoughts, over a long period of time and struggle, can be healing. But his model of thanatos gave us no useful tools, and a feeling of impotence, in relation to social forces. Individual analyses tend not to deal with prejudice except as it arises as part of a dynamic construct in the treatment. But can a democratic analyst analyze a patient to become a better republican? Can a Kleinian analyst give birth to a Freudian or a Relationist? Continue reading Harnessing Thanatos
How Religion—Yes, Religion—Can Save Psychoanalysis
It is a privilege to introduce this op ed piece by Robert Langs whose major volumes on the technique of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with their clear explication of the function of the ‘frame’ in treatment, have guided many clinicians on the journeys they take. In this piece, Lang takes on a different kind of travel using the Bible as a guide.
Jane S. Hall, op editor
[Note: Langs’ latest book, Beyond Yahweh and Jesus: Bringing Death’s Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality, and Psychoanalysis, may be ordered through our Book Mart – click here.]
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How Religion—Yes, Religion—Can Save Psychoanalysis
Robert Langs, M.D.
The separation between psychoanalysis and religion has been as wide and as inviolate as that between church and state. As we know, Freud saw the belief in a transcendental God as a reflection of a wish for an omnipotent father and given his inner-need centered theory of the mind, after seeing religion as the quest for an illusion, his study of Moses not withstanding, he was more or less finished with the subject. As a result, despite the prevalence of religious beliefs, he failed to respond to Thomas Hobbes’ long standing 17th century call for the study of ‘man’s religious nature’ and thus did not engage in a thorough psychoanalytic investigation of religious beliefs and the Bible. In contrast, Jung offered psychoanalytic investigations of various aspects of religion, especially the stories of Job and Christ, and he argued that we must turn to the Bible for fresh insights into psychology and contrariwise, that only psychology can freshly illuminate the Bible. Continue reading How Religion—Yes, Religion—Can Save Psychoanalysis