Themes for Survivors: A Chorale by Luis Feder
By Categories: Music

Dear Audience:

The music and introductory text of ‘Themes for Survivors” “Temas para Survientes” with introductory text and music by Luis Feder with texts in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramic, is going to be prefaced in the voice of my late, dear friend and distinguished colleague, Dr. Merton Gill, who translated from Spanish and recorded it in Chicago in the Winter 1981. He established the precondition for this recording to delete whatever he was not in agreement with. As a result, he took out the name of Dr. Anna Ornstein, for her own protection and gave me his reasons. Dr. Ornstein was the one who stimulated with her story, this whole musical project. He also went to great trouble to contact his brother who in turn consulted a Rabbi, and the Rabbi sent me a quotation from the scriptures establishing that a Jew could not gladden with the death of his slain enemy. I do not recall this kind of an indication in my Spanish text, but I fully agree with all the preconditions. As a result, I had the privilege of getting his rich, raw, baritone voice, his prestigious translation and adaptation, the humanitarian preconditions, and the recognition and enthusiasm that he showed to my first symphonic chorale. It has been heard in many lands and played in Villa de Janedo, Brasil on the eighth of May anniversary of the Nazi signature of surrender to the allies.

“Themes for Survivors” has been proposed as part of a disk where Arnold Rosner’s moving work from the Dairies of Arancho Yakov , Ernest Block poem Troi Poems Juisse would be included. It is to be performed by the Phiharmonia of London and to be recorded by Harmony Mundi, directed by Maestro David Hasmish, just as soon as the funds for the event are gathered.

Meanwhile, kindly accept a more modest recording by one of our best orchestral groups, Orchestra Symphonica of Mexico, our national Symphony Orchestra directed at the Jewish Music Festival by Maestro Lazlo Roth, in its world premiere March 12th, 1990, here in Mexico City, at the Teatro Oringiolisli where the use of the horns and the blowing of the Shofarim bursting in a protest that no deniers of the Holocaust could ever silence.

The performance lasts approximately 25 minutes. I hope you enjoy it. This is Luis Feder, Mexico City, December 8th, 1995.

Themes for Survivors by Luis Feder

6/12 Chengdu: A visit to a school in the earthquake area
By Categories: China

6/12 Chengdu Update

Things are becoming less chaotic here. Coalitions are forming between government departments, Chinese corporations, and Chinese NGO’s. They want university professors to train volunteers and others. The university professors want us to train them. A variety of large groups are holding training session in the next three days, some of them three day sessions: the Chinese Red Cross, the Chinese Academy of Science (under the auspices of the Foundation for Sichuan Earthquake Psychological Assistance a large newly formed Chinese NGO), the Counseling Department of Sichuan University, a large Buddhist group and the Young Communist League of Sichuan (in association with EAP in China a group whose on-line training we arranged). I don’t know whether to describe my self as a spider in the center of a large net or as a match-maker. It has been a real pleasure for me to watch and help these various groups coalesce and begin working together.

I usually have breakfast and dinner with old or new friends and colleagues (People I know from Beijing and Shanghai are constantly arriving to work in the disaster zone or to train others.) or journalists. We talk about the earthquake and what each group or person can do for the other and what I and CAPA can do for them. We also talk about—what else?— politics. Here as many views are expressed as freely as they are in America. No secret police at the dinner table. No glancing uneasily over one’s shoulder when something critical of the government is said. (I am writing all these details in part because of the TAP article, which gives such a bizarre picture of China and in part to give those of you who have not been here some view of how it is.) Continue reading 6/12 Chengdu: A visit to a school in the earthquake area

Psychoanalytic Theories of Infant Development and its Disturbances: A Critical Evaluation by Sylvia Brody and a letter to Dr. Brody from Charles Brenner
By Categories: Controversial

 Click Here to Read: Psychoanalytic Theories of Infant Development and its Disturbances: A Critical Evaluation by Sylvia Brody. This article was previously published as: Brody, Sylvia (1982).  Psychoanalytic Theories of Infant Development and its Disturbances: A Critical Evaluation. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 51: pp. 526-597 and appears here with all requisite rights and permissions.

 © The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Inc.; first published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Volume 51, pages 526-597 

Click here to read: Letter from Charles Brenner to Sylvia Brody about this article, written on May 4th, 1983. 

Renewing Relationships: Communication Workshop Materials from NYDCC
By Categories: Announcements, Controversial

The following materials from the New York Disaster Counseling Coalitions are being made available here to all.  They are especially useful to non-profits working with people in relationships.

Click Here for: Participants’ Workbook: Enriching, Reconnecting and Rebuilding Intimate Partnerships

Click Here for: Module 1: Feeling and Facts about Stress and Resiliance

Click Here for:  Module 3: Communication Skills

Click Here for:  Faclitator’s Guide.  

“Off the Couch, Back on its Feet” by Matthew Reisz from the London Times
By Categories: Controversial

Off the couch, back on its feet
12 June 2008 Times Higher Education 

By Matthew Reisz

Psychoanalysis may have little place in university psychology departments, but it is flourishing within the arts and humanities. Matthew Reisz reports on the debates – and divisions – between academics and clinicians

The American Psychoanalytic Association recently set up a task force with an ambitious goal – to “reach and captivate the 10,000 best minds of the next generation with the power of psychoanalytic ideas”. Clearly worried that its influence was in decline, it employed Jonathan Redmond and Michael Shulman to research “access to psychoanalytic ideas in American undergraduate institutions”. Their report was recently published in the association’s journal. Continue reading “Off the Couch, Back on its Feet” by Matthew Reisz from the London Times

6/10 UPDATE FROM CHENGDU
By Categories: China

REPORT FROM CHENGDU Tuesday JUNE 10 2008

First let me apologize both for the length and the disorganization of this report.
This is a kind of nuts and bolts report of what I have been doing up until the 10th. Later today I will write a report about my visit to a devastated village with 110 dead children and also about some plans to reduce the chaos.

Each day when I sat down to write, something happened and I could not continue with it. I get up at about 5 and fall into bed at midnight. New volunteers continue to email me, the result of all of you sending on my postings. Thank you.

This report is somewhat chaotic, mirroring the situation in Sichuan. I left NY on Monday 6/2. I am staying at a Sichuan University guesthouse, a large three star hotel on the edge of campus. Chengdu’s climate is like that of Savannah, hot humid—but there is less pollution than on any of my previous visits. The city is bustling, all the classy high-end shops, boutiques (places like Prada etc) are filled with smiling shoppers and lots of beautiful clothing, etc. The only sign of the earthquake is the small tent cities that have been used to house local Chengdu people whose houses fell down. About 1000 people died in Chengdu, but there is no feel of a place only 40 miles from devastation. There has only been one mild set of tremors since I came. Sitting in my 4th floor room with two Chinese volunteers from a local medical school. I asked, What do we do? They said, Keep on talking– and so we did. Continue reading 6/10 UPDATE FROM CHENGDU

The Certification Debate In the American Psychoanalytic Association
By Categories: Controversial, Editorials, NYPSI Centenary 1911-2011

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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.”
  
 
 
 
  

Freud at the Crossroads in Rome Monologue (with optional Epilogue) By Robert L. Lippman
By Categories: In Progress

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Click Here To Read: Freud at the Crossroads in Rome Monologue (with optional Epilogue) By Robert  L. Lippman. Robert Lippman PhD is an all but retired clinical psychologist living in Elizebethtown,  Kentucky. This play was given last September in Elizabethtown. Also staged this year by NYC’s Emerging Artists Theatre on May 23rd, 2008.