Report from China #1
By Categories: In Progress

I have just returned from 21 days in China. I don’t think I have ever worked so hard or eaten so well. If anyone is interested, I will send you a list of the places where I spoke and the people whom I met. A lecture in China usually lasts for 3 hours. Almost every night there was a banquet and often one at lunch too. Most of these arrangements were made by Zhang Haiyan. She is the young psychiatrist who was in analysis with one of our group and who is now in Canada. There, she has just begun her psychoanalytic training at the Toronto Institute. Her professor in China was Richang Zheng, a nationally famous psychologist who seems to know every one in China interested in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. I was passed on from one person to another all issuing invitations for me to speak—so that before I left for China, there were only two free half days in my schedule and these were filled when I got there.

I did a large number of supervisions and also consultations as well as speaking to many heads of departments and programs and individual psychiatrists, psychologists and counselors. This is a very long email so I will put a table on contents here and you can print it out and read it at your leisure or skip the parts that are of no interest. Tomorrow I will try to post a description of what is happening with the two-year training program. Continue reading Report from China #1

Supporting Children Affected by the Iraqi War: What Responders Need to Know
By Categories: Announcements

Click here to view the Flyer 

 Lemberg Children’s Center at Brandeis University, The Mass Chapter of American Academy of Pediatrics, and several others and sponsoring Supporting Children Affected by the Iraqi War: What Responders Need to Know a workshop on Saturday, October 20 in Schwartz Auditorium at Brandeis University. 

 Supporting Children Affected by the Iraqi War: What Responders Need to Know

Betsy McAlister Groves, LICSW
Director, Child Witness to Violence Project, Boston Medical Center, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Boston University School of Medicine.

Major Molinda Chartrand, MD
Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Boston Medical Center, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences
Brandeis University, Schwartz Auditorium

Continue reading Supporting Children Affected by the Iraqi War: What Responders Need to Know

Death as Reunion in Two Films: Magical Wombs in Film III
By Categories: Movies

In August and September, I published articles on this website on the films, Field of Dreams and Contact. I gave them subtitles, “Magical Womb” Part I and II, respectively. With each, I tried to demonstrate a fantasy of a womb with magical properties to overcome death and separation. In each, the central character is reunited with parents long lost in this magical womb.

Part III concerns two films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Hours in which death is not overcome but itself becomes a path to reunion and to the womb. In each, I hope to demonstrate a fantasy of reunion with a loving mother through death and suicide. In The Hours, there are explicit images of a return to the womb. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has images suggestive only of a return to a blissful reunion with a maternal figure. I will deal more briefly with it than with The Hours, perhaps to return to it at another time. Continue reading Death as Reunion in Two Films: Magical Wombs in Film III

Why Do I Want to Include Our Colleagues in Licensing as Psychoanalysts?
By Categories: Editorials

In New York, perhaps more so than in the rest of the country, turf wars are increasing as the turf itself seems to be shrinking. Waging war is expensive in terms of time and money. Such war waging is costing the art, craft, and science of psychoanalysis precious energy and it is for this reason that I post this editorial written by Arlene Kramer Richards. This short and eloquent piece will be delivered at the December 1 and 2 Conference: The Future of Psychoanalytic Education, an ecumenical meeting with Jurgen Reeder as keynote speaker. (Click here for conference details)
Jane S. Hall, Op-Ed Editor

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Why Do I Want to Include Our Colleagues in Licensing as Psychoanalysts? by Arlene Kramer Richards

Different points of view about psychoanalytic education and theory can be grouped, I think, into two categories. One camp argues that psychoanalysis must be safeguarded from those who would debase it by using the name to include therapies that are scheduled for less than three times per week. The other camp argues that psychoanalysis is, as Freud himself defined it, the use of the concepts of transference and resistance to understand the unconscious and especially unconscious affects, wishes, prohibitions and fears. Who is right?

The question has theoretical and practical aspects. Continue reading Why Do I Want to Include Our Colleagues in Licensing as Psychoanalysts?