Category: Letters To Editors

Myron S. Lazar: Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post
By Categories: Letters To Editors

Mike Jolkovski’s alert regarding a misguided article about dreams in the Washington Post resulted in my writing the following letter that was printed yesterday.

Much Ado About Dreams

The article’s discussion of the dream process was tilted toward sources representing only one side of an ongoing scientific controversy: reports mainly from non-clinicians who don’t deal with dreams on a daily basis.

While dream interpretation is no longer the centerpiece of psychoanalysis as it was during Freud’s time, it is still useful in understanding the human psyche. For example, revisiting the writer’s Ang Lee dream you might discover the hidden meaning by employing the procedure Freud used to decode his own dreams.
 
After writing down your dream, start at the beginning and, word by word, associate freely (without judging anything as silly or without potential meaning) and note whatever images and thoughts come to mind. Eventually,with practice and willingness to accept unpleasant and surprising thoughts about yourself, you can discover a dream’s meaning.

Myron S. Lazar, PhD
Clinical Professor
Departments of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology
University of Texas Southwestern Medical
Center

Myron S. Lazar, Ph.D.
Training & Supervising Analyst
Dallas Psychoanalytic Center
8215 Westchester Dr.
Suite 316
Dallas, Texas 75225
214-691-1153

Arlene Kramer Richards’s Letter to the New York Times
By Categories: Letters To Editors

The excellent article by Maggie Jones on “Looking for Their Children’s Birth Mothers” happily coincided with a conference on international adoption this weekend. Both your article and our conference came to the conclusion that cross-racial succeeds best when parents respond to their children’s questions rather than force answers on them. One presenter at our conference told of her own gratitude that she had been included in her adoptive parents’ culture rather than being forced into a necessarily superficial and artificial submersion in the culture of her homeland. Parents, researchers, and therapists agreed that once a person develops an identity as member of the family in which she is raised she can become interested in the culture of her homeland and her birth family. The most important thing the adoptive family can do is to include the their child in what authentically matters to their family, and allow her to be the leader in restoring what interests her as she grows up. Readers interested in the papers given at the conference can find them on http://www.InternationalPsychoanalysis.net

–Arlene Kramer Richards, North American Cochair of the Committee of Women and Psychoanalysis on the International Psychoanalytic Association

 Click Here to Read: The Article by Maggie Jones in the New York Times.

Letter to the NY Science Times
By Categories: Letters To Editors, NYPSI Centenary 1911-2011

To The Editor NY Science Times

The thrust of Benedict Carey’s article on dreams is that dreams have to do with memory and cognition, not, as Freud proposed, with emotional motivation. However, the findings presented in this article do not address adequately the fuller context of our knowledge about the nature of dreams, or about their meaning and their use in psychoanalysis. Mark Solms, for example, has assembled a very persuasive body of neuroscientific studies supporting the view that dreaming has to do with motivation and desire as well as cognition. Carey cites Allen Hobson without noting that Hobson, along with most of his research colleagues, has abandoned his original theory that dreams are the product of random neural firings. A hundred years of psychoanalytic research and experience show that much can be learned about people’s mental and emotional lives through dream interpretation and other psychoanalytic methods. Time Magazine had it right. Freud is NOT dead.

Arnold D. Richards

Click Here to Read the New York Science Times Article

Leon Hoffman’s Letter to the Editor re: Mark Edmundson’s Article on “Defender of the Faith?”
By Categories: Letters To Editors

Agency and autonomy from the Israelites

NY Times Magazine
Letter to the Editor
September 13, 2007

Dear Editor,

In “Defender of the Faith?” (The Way we live now, September 9), Mark Edmundson writes that Freud stressed that the ability to believe in an internal, invisible God vastly improves people’s capacity forabstraction. Quoting Freud, he says,  “The prohibition against making an image of God – the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see,” he says, meant that in Judaism “a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea – a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.” Continue reading Leon Hoffman’s Letter to the Editor re: Mark Edmundson’s Article on “Defender of the Faith?”

Miri Abramis’s Letter to The New York Times re the article: The Frayed Couch
By Categories: Letters To Editors

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. Continue reading Miri Abramis’s Letter to The New York Times re the article: The Frayed Couch

Another Letter to the New York Times by Larry Sandberg
By Categories: Letters To Editors

The New York Times
September 20, 2007
The Brain, the Mind and Mental Illness
To the Editor:

Sally Satel (“Mind Over Manual,” Op-Ed, Sept. 13) suggests that the diagnostic confusion within psychiatry is due to a lack of “a clear picture of the brain mechanisms underlying … mental illnesses.” She says psychiatry “lacks a firm grasp of the causal underpinnings of mental illness,” suggesting the “staggering complexity of the brain” as one reason.

Her article suffers in its being biased by the current zeitgeist that overemphasizes brain-based mechanisms as causes. While this may, in fact, have explanatory power for some conditions, it is more likely that causal explanations will often include frames of reference that are psychological (including psychodynamic) as well as biological.  Continue reading Another Letter to the New York Times by Larry Sandberg

Larry Sandberg’s Letter Re: The New York Times article on “The Frayed Couch”
By Categories: Letters To Editors

The New York Times
September 16, 2007
The City

To the Editor:

Re “Patching Up the Frayed Couch” (Sept. 9):

It is not only psychoanalysis, but all intensive psychotherapies that have become less popular in contemporary culture. This is due, in part, to the introduction of alternative therapies like drug therapy and cognitive behavior therapy. But there is also a devaluation of time and an overemphasis on speed and efficiency that discourage many people who are in need from engaging in a deeply introspective process.

Continue reading Larry Sandberg’s Letter Re: The New York Times article on “The Frayed Couch”

Letter to the New York Times Editor re: Patching Up the Frayed Couch
By Categories: Letters To Editors, NYPSI Centenary 1911-2011

To the Editor:
I would like to add to the article Patching Up the Frayed Couch recognition of the contribution to psychoanalytic scholarship made by members on the New York Psychoanalytic Society The editors of two of the most important journals in psychoanalysis the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly were for decades members of NYPSI.

Just as the venerable New York Times has been reinventing it self the article points out for me the need for NYPSI and psychoanalysis to reinvent ourself for a new time.

Arnold Richards

Member NYPSA
Former Editor JAPA

Click here for Link to the New York Times Article: Patching-up the Frayed Couch

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/nyregion/thecity/09anal.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=thecity

Letter To The New York Times Editor re: David Brooks’ Review of Drew Westen’s book
By Categories: Letters To Editors

To the Editor:

Ah, Mr. Brooks, you have been hoisted on your own petard. Your very emotional response (August 26, 2007 “Stop Making Sense”) to Dr. Westen’s book only proves his point. I assume you wanted to present a rational argument, but it doesn’t sound anything but prejudiced, sarcastic and, well, argumentative.

People respond to their own emotional needs. For instance, John Kerry may have appealed to widespread emotional needs for maturity, fatherly protectiveness, quiet leadership and reserve. When he didn’t fight back after the Swift Boat attacks, he was a disappointment. Emotions all.

If reason could always trump emotional bias, members of the Supreme Court, all Constitutional scholars, would always agree. But they, like the rest of us, are human and make choices colored by their emotions. Isn’t that a reasonable conclusion Mr.Brooks ?

Leslie Schweitzer-Miller, M.D.

Click to read of David Brooks’ review of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation” by Drew Westen appeared in The New York Times.

About That Mean Streak
By Categories: Letters To Editors

My Letter to the Editor appeared in today’s New York Times, as follows:

To the Editor:

Re “About That Mean Streak of Yours: Psychiatry Can Do Only So Much” (Feb. 6): The examples Dr. Richard A. Friedman uses to promote his view that some people “can be mean or bad just like anyone else” give psychiatry a bad name.

Psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, in my experience, can help a person understand the roots of meanness, and only with such understanding is there hope for modulated change. I would ask Dr. Friedman what he means when he says that one patient had “all the benefits of an upper-middle-class upbringing?” And how did the psychotic patient happen to have the home phone number of a female resident? The vignettes do not substantiate his thesis.

Jane S. Hall
New York

The writer is the founder of the New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

These types of arguments and articles unfortunately reflect poorly not only on psychiatry but on all mental health workers. As a psychoanalyst with a social work background I have treated many people whose so called “mean streaks” are wrecking their lives. Psychoanalytically-oriented work provides a deeper, broader look at why people react in “mean” ways. This off-putting attitude is a symptom of anxiety about closeness and intimacy that has become characterological and though adaptive in one way, also extremely injurious. We must speak up in support of our field and to educate the public.