Resources
3/18/08
Psychoanalysis in the News
There is a new Mystery Series about a psychoanalyst who tracks down killers, by Alma H. Bond, internationally known psychoanalyst.
The third volume in the Dr. Mary Wells Mystery series, "Who Killed Marcia Maynard?" or "The Psychoanalyst is Dead" has just been published. Dr. Marcia Maynard, famous child psychoanalyst and infant researcher, has been murdered in her bed at the El Dorado Apartment House in Manhattan by an unknown killer. Dr. Mary Wells, full-time psychoanalyst and part-time sleuth, helps solve the mystery with her acute analytical and psychological skills. In conjunction with her lover Detective John Franklin, they are an almost unstoppable team. Finding someone angry enough to kill Maynard was not difficult, as many people had histories of being mistreated by the doctor.
English professor Mark Edmundson discusses the psychosocial meaning of Freud and psychoanalysis in his New York Times op-ed: Who's Your Daddy?
Freud's objective as a therapist was to help his patients dismantle their idealized image of him. He taught them to see how the love they demanded from him was love that they had once demanded (and of course never received) from fathers and mothers and other figures of authority. Over time, the patients might come to view the doctor - Freud - as another suffering, striving mortal, not unlike themselves.
3/14/08
Faculty Member Contends With Psychologists in National Security Interrogations
Over the past several years the profession of psychology has engaged in vigorous debate over the proper role of psychologists in interrogations of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the secret CIA black sites. Stephen Soldz, BGSP faculty member, has been a leading figure in these debates. He has written extensively for online sites and blogs on the issue and has been quoted by a number of reporters and had numerous radio and television interviews on the topic. He has also contributed to several scholarly publications on the issue in such journals as Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, and Psychoanalytic Dialogs, and has several forthcoming book chapters on the topic. Recently, Dr. Soldz participated in a workshop on this issue at Harvard Law School with physicians, attorneys and human rights advocates; he is also featured in the latest issue of the Swedish Journal of Psychology. In March, he will be a featured speaker at the Midwest World Affairs Conference at the University of Nebraska, Kearney.
Dr. Soldz is an organizer and will be one of three speakers at a May 3rd forum on Torture and the American Psyche: Blurring the Boundary Between Healers and Interrogators being produced by the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis, together with BGSP's Institute for the Study of violence, the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy, the Massachusetts Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology, Physicians for Human Rights, Psychologists for Social Responsibility End Torture Action Committee, and the First Parish Unitarian Church in Brookline. Other speakers are Leonard Rubenstein, President of Physicians for Human Rights and former Iraq interrogator Eric Fair. The forum will be held at the Unitarian Church, 382 Walnut Street, Brookline, MA, 9:30 AM.
12/5/07
BGSP Participates in Psychoanalytic Education Conference
BGSP cosponsored and sent administrators and faculty to a major inter-institute conference on psychoanalytic education in New York City on December 2-3, 2007. Sponsored by over twenty institutes of all persuasions (members of the Society of Modern Psychoanalysts, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, and others) the conference was ecumenical in spirit as panel after panel examined major issues of interest to psychoanalytic training institutions.
The keynote speaker, Dr. Jurgen Reeder presented his thoughts on the psychoanalytic ethos, arguing it is this which defines psychoanalysis, not frequency of sessions, and that we as psychoanalysts need to "cultivate our ethos". Rather than being pushed into a defensive position by standards from other mental health approaches (e.g., evidence based treatment), or by other sciences, we need to strengthen our "metapsychology", articulate why we do what we do, and defend our knowledge base which is rooted in personal analysis and subjective experience. He further argued that the psychoanalytic ethos is good for society, advocating self reflection, self knowledge, and confidentiality.
Major issues were addressed by panels and audience members: frequency of analytic sessions for candidates and training cases, criteria for becoming certified and becoming a training analyst, legislation and licensure in the field. Discussion was open and, in general, tolerant of diverse points of view, with general agreement on the need to generate research in the field, the importance of promoting psychoanalysis in today's mental health environment, and a consensus that the NY licensing bill is problematic in multiple ways. Major differences persist on how one defines psychoanalysis - by frequency of sessions or by the process itself and on whether such a criterion should be used to distinguish psychoanalysts from psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
Conference organizers promised a "next annual" conference next fall.
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