Hanns Sachs Library Newsletter Spring 2023 |
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Director of Library
Dan Jacobs, MD
Librarian/Archivist
Veronica Davis, MA, MLIS
Library Committee
Delia Kostner, PhD
John Martin-Joy, MD
Malkah Notman, MD
Marcia Smith-Hutton, LICSW, BCD
Rita Teusch, PhD
Shari Thurer, ScD
Steven Varga-Golovcsenko, MD
Lora Heims Tessman, PhD
Managing Director
Carole Nathan, MBA
Senior Administrator & Director of Continuing Education
Karen Smolens
Accounting and Operations Specialist
Drew Brydon, MLIS
Education Program Assistant
Stephanie Cavanaugh
Member Services Administrative Associate
Niramon (Nikki) Yan
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From the Director
For the past ninety years, since the founding of our Institute in 1933, the Hanns Sachs Library and Archives has been serving our members as well as scholars worldwide. Much of this work has fallen on our librarians, four of whom I have had the pleasure of working with and learning from. Ann Menashi was here when I was a candidate and after, helping our previous Library Director Sanford Gifford create a world class Archive that includes an Oral History component highlighted in this issue. Steve Morandi who followed Ann was instrumental in putting together our first library sponsored publication, Freud and Me, a celebration of Freud’s 150th birthday. Vivien Goldman succeeded Steve. Her remarkable talent as a photographer led to a BPSI-Hebrew College jointly sponsored exhibition of her images with panel discussion of her work. It was Vivien who found the Edward Bibring photos in our archives that was the basis for our next library publication. When Vivien left, we were fortunate enough to hire Olga Umanksy as our next librarian. Olga expanded the library's presence on the internet, published a work on The Wolf Man, was a contributor to TAP and an active member of APsA’s library committee. It was she who found Grete Bibring’s small black notebooks in our collection - notebooks that became the subject of a monograph and will soon be on display at an Austen Riggs exhibit (see below). Now Veronica Davis joins us. She is already helping us develop a clear and detailed library policy recently approved by our Board of Trustees, and her interest in history has already led her to want to reorganize and improve our archives.
For a library to survive it has to keep changing: buying new books and journals, discarding others, creating new ways of informing members of their colleagues' literary contributions, and developing new projects and exhibits. Our Library Committee member John Martin-Joy is working with the Social Awareness Committee to develop new library exhibits that focus on the Committee’s work. In addition, Delia Kostner and Rita Teusch are spearheading an effort to publish a monograph on climate change in clinical treatment under the auspices of our Library Committee (see Rita’s book review on the subject in this issue).
Look for a new display casein our library, donated in memory of Anna Wolff, that will exhibit photos and letters of historical interest. Hopefully, our library will continue to grow as it also remembers.
~Dan Jacobs, MD
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From the Librarian/Archivist
As I look back at my first nine months at BPSI, I am amazed at how much I have learned about this Institution and the field of psychoanalysis. I thank everyone who has taken the time to speak with me on the subject and answered my questions, even when they have been inexhaustible! I know that I have more to learn, but I am thoroughly enjoying the process.
Today, 90 years on from its creation, the library has grown alongside the Institute, emerging from the basement at 82 Marlborough Street that Sanford Gifford affectionately referred to as "the proverbial smoke-filled room where all our seminars and scientific meetings were held." Our archive serves researchers worldwide, with requests this year, ranging from the US to Israel to Holland. We've partnered with the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna for exhibits and published our own books such as Grete Bibring: A Culinary Biography.
In the library we now have a new display case for archival materials, so please visit to see items on display. We are also pleased to share that Cris Ratiner, PhD, has presented a way to donate books to psychoanalysts practicing in Ukraine. We continue to work with our members to ensure that our collections are up to date and reflect the research needs of BPSI's analysts and trainees. I am proud of the work that I'm able to do alongside Dan and the amazing members of the Library Committee. Cheers to 90 years, and here's to 90 more!
~Veronica Davis, MA, MLIS; Librarian/Archivist
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Please see if you have library books on loan ready to be returned. You can either mail them to the library or drop them off during your next visit to BPSI.
We maintain Who is Reading Us? blog featuring a compilation of reviews of books that have been recently published by our members. Check out the Library Corner of the BPSI Blog for recently posted film and book reviews. If you have a publication in press or your recent work has been reviewed, please share your news with our library!
To see a list of the newly purchased books for the library, click here. You can also check out our Library Catalog anytime to see what books we have available to check out.
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Publications by BPSI Authors |
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Books published by BPSI authors can be found on our Recent Work blog.
An updated list of recent journal articles by BPSI authors can be found in the Library Corner section of our blog.
If you have works that you would like to be added to these pages, please contact Veronica Davis via at [email protected].
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Building on Winnicott’s theory of play, this book defines the concept of play from the perspective of clinical practice, elaborating on its application to clinical problems. Although Winnicott’s theory of play constitutes a radical understanding of the intersubjectivity of therapy, Cooper contends, there remains a need to explore the significance of play to the enactment of transference-countertransference. Among several ideas, this book considers how to help patients as they navigate debilitating internal object relations, supporting them to engage with "bad objects" in alternatively playful ways. In addition, throughout the book, Cooper develops an ethic of play that can support the analyst to find "ventilated spaces" of their own, whereby they can reflect on transference-countertransference. Rather than being hindered by the limits of the therapeutic setting, this book explores how possibilities for play can develop out of these very constraints, ultimately providing a fulsome exploration of the concept without eviscerating its magic. With a broad theoretical base, and a wide definition of play, this book will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wanting to understand how play functions within and can transform their clinical practice.
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Through a series of expansive essays, Transference, Love, Being explores the centrality of love in psychoanalytic practice. Starting with the immersion of the analyst, this book reimagines several aspects of the psychoanalytic process, including transference, countertransference, boundaries, embodiment, subjectivity, and eroticism. To love is to cultivate to be. Psychoanalysis, as essentially vitalizing, is a playspace for taboo subjects within clear and safe parameters. Interweaving loving, being and perceiving, this book provides challenging new perspectives on the analyst's subjectivity, receptivity, and its immersive influence on the analytic process. These essays refine theoretical understandings of the irreducible and omnipresent nature of love in psychoanalysis, thereby offering clarity to psychoanalysts, psychodynamic therapists and scholars through the often-prohibited love and eroticism, here viewed as indispensable psychoanalytic theory and practice.
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Recordings of past Meet the Author events, as well as recordings of other BPSI events, can be watched here.
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Recent Inquiries
Please contact Archivist Veronica Davis for access to any of these materials
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The Austen Riggs Center reached out to the library in November 2022 to let us know of an exhibit they were planning, "Organized Escape: Psychoanalysis in Exile" which was originally created in 2021 by the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. BPSI contributed 32 of Edward Bibring's photographs to the Museum's exhibition which will be included at the Austen Riggs showcase as well. We will also be loaning Grete Bibring's dinner guest books and recipe notebooks for the exhibit. |
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Grete Bibring, Anna Freud, and Helene Deutsch at the 15th International Psychoanalytical Association Congress in Paris, France, 1938 |
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These notebooks were the subject of a monograph Grete Bibring: A Culinary Biography (2018), authored by Olga Umanksy and Dan Jacobs.
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Sanford Gifford Interviews
Miriam Nunberg, a family member of Marianne Kris, reached out for access to the Sanford Gifford's Oral History interview that he conducted with Kris in 1979.
The BPSI Oral History Interview records collection consists of audio and video interviews regarding prominent figures in the field of psychoanalysis, an initiative started by Dr. Sanford Gifford (1918 – 2013). In partnership with the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and other researchers, over 50 years of audio interviews have been recorded.
To see a list of the interviews conducted, please click here.
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Beata Rank
Klara Naszkowska, PhD, a Fulbright Scholar at Union Theological Seminary and Visiting Scholar, inquired about the use of some photographs of Beata Rank and Olga Wermer for her forthcoming edited anthology on the first women psychoanalysts (Routledge).
Photos of Beata Rank can be found in our BPSI Photograph Collection, as well as our Putnam Children's Center Collection. Photos of Olga Wermer, an analyst and longtime patient of Edward Bibring, can also be found in the Bibring Photograph Collection.
For access and inquiry, please contact Archivist Veronica Davis, linked here.
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The Arthur Valenstein Collection
Udodiri Okwandu, a PhD student and Harvard researcher, visited the Archive to look at our Valenstein collection, and to learn more about the 1961 work, "A Study of the Psychological Processes in Pregnancy and of the Earliest Mother-Child Relationship" that he conducted with Grete Bibring, Thomas Dwyer, and Dorothy Huntington. The Valenstein collection includes personal papers, correspondence, and other materials from his career that were able to shed more light on his research process and observations from his time working on this project.
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An Excerpt from The History of Women at BPSI
A Forthcoming Book by Malkah Notman, MD
To be published under the auspices of our Library Committee
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Elizabeth Zetzel: 1907–1970
Elizabeth Zetzel was a distinguished member of the BPSI faculty. She was born in New York to prominent and accomplished parents. After graduating from Smith College, she studied economics at the London School of Economics. While there, she became interested in medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. She was described as having brilliant intellectual capacity and distinguished herself as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital and as a psychoanalyst in the British Psychoanalytic Society. She completed her medical training and psychoanalytic training in London. She married an English psychiatrist, with whom she had a daughter and a son. She continued her psychoanalytic practice in London. Her husband died after a few years, and she then married Dr. Louis Zetzel, a Bostonian, and came with him to Boston in 1949, where she became a member of BPSI. They had a son and a daughter. Dr. Zetzel taught, practiced, and was an admired supervisor and training analyst. She wrote pivotal papers, which were internationally acclaimed. Her book, The Capacity for Emotional Growth contained a sampling of her life’s work. She was considered a major contributor to psychoanalysis, its theory and practice. She received many honors and was appreciated for the scope and depth of her contribution.
She also rose in the International Psychoanalytic Association and was Vice President at the time she died.
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Steven Varga-Golovcsenko, MD, hopes to publish the memoirs of his father Seymon Troyanoff. As much of the memoir is in Russian, Steve is looking for a translator. Troyanoff was a gifted ballet dancer, balletmaster, and choreographer who survived imprisonment and death several times. His ticket to survival each time was his profession. Steven describes him as a" free spirit”” who turned down offers from Diaghilev (Ballets Russes) and deBasil (Ballets Russes) to tour on his own with different partners. He performed in the major capitals of Europe before coming to the States in 1954. |
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Semyon Troyanoff and Anna Liudmilla
in "Le Corsaire." Paris, c. 1927
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If you have "works in progress" that you would like us to know about,
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Schinaia, C. (2022). Psychoanalysis and Ecology - The Unconscious and the Environment. Routledge. 147pp.
We are living in a time of environmental crisis that could potentially lead to the extinction of our species. Given the climate emergency and serious environmental degradation involving death on a large scale, one would expect mass mobilization and an “unprecedented effort” to address it, as advocated by the United Nations. However, our individual, national and international efforts so far have been woefully insufficient, and efforts to address goals to ameliorate the damage have even been reversed. Schinaia sets out to illuminate this paradoxical response and the unconscious resistances that we employ to avoid recognition of the magnitude of the climate crisis. In his thoughtful, interdisciplinary book he describes psychodynamics, attitudes toward nature, and social mechanisms that prevent industrialized societies from responding more rationally and effectively to the reality of climate change and environmental degradation.
Cosimo Schinaia is a psychiatrist and training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society with a clinical practice in Genoa, Italy. He has written several books addressing interdisciplinary topics. His book Psychoanalysis and Ecology- The Unconscious and the Environment (2022) has already been translated into French and Spanish, and is described as “an extraordinary contribution of psychoanalysis to the protection of the environment and the human species that lives in it with such frequent self-destructive lack of awareness” (Bolognini, S. 2022).
Schinaia’s book is a powerful and revealing invitation to concern ourselves with the reality of climate change and environmental degradation. Given the urgency of the issue, I highly recommend it. Schinaia references the works of scholars from different academic disciplines who have written on nature, the environment, and our relationship with technology, i.e., psychoanalysts past and present, historians, philosophers, poets, novelists, artists, ecologists, anthropologists, environmentalists, climate activists. Extensive footnotes help elaborate their insights. The result is a vivid picture of our complex conscious and unconscious struggles to fully comprehend the climate crisis and environmental degradation and its consequences for mental and physical health.
The book has ten Chapters. There is a foreword by Sally Weintrobe, the British psychoanalyst who has written extensively on the climate crisis and elucidated defenses that we employ to avoid facing it (Weintrobe, 2013, 2021, 2022). There is also a fascinating introduction by Lorena Preta, Italian Psychoanalytic Society and Chair of the IPA’s Group “Geographies of Psychoanalysis”.
Chapter 1 provides Schinaia’s assessment of the current environmental crisis, the attempts to solve it and disagreements that delay a solution. He proposes that there is an emotional, more than cognitive difficulty in comprehending the current state of our planet. He investigates the relationship of mutual co-determination between the individual traumatic stories told in the consulting room and the attitudes toward the environment that are exhibited by these patients. From a position of empathy and through balanced exploration, rather than with judgment, pessimism, nihilism, or denial, he examines the complex psychological defenses of dissociation, splitting, denial, and minimization that arise when people are faced with a traumatizing reality. Schinaia cites Lacan (1959-1960) who in his VII Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis proposed “an involved psychoanalysis”, a psychoanalysis that in spite of its enormous and well-defined body of work is still able to enrich itself, thanks to theoretical and clinical terms derived from other cultures” (p.2). Schinaia proposes a “new psychoanalysis”, i.e., a “living, evolving organism that is able to understand and imagine which humanity is taking form, or rather, which humanity we are constructing” (Preta, 2019. p.2). He maintains that psychoanalysis must not be considered a luxury good but rather a crucial source that can help define the individual and group defense mechanisms that obstruct our awareness of today’s grave ecological problems- the catastrophes and challenges we must face (p.2).
To face our new reality, psychoanalysis needs to use new and old tools and transcend what we have known. The analyst’s role is to imagine what another person has experienced. This ability to imagine is crucial, because if we fail to imagine what has actually occurred, we are denying it. We must use our imagination even when what appears in front of us looks like a blank hole, a blank image… we must imagine what has disappeared and been taken apart, the deleted traces and clues (Fedida, 2007), p.2. It is the task of a new psychoanalysis to be open-minded (while also rooted in tradition), to face the new psychosocial realities, deeply understand the new discontents of civilization and the novel forms of psychical suffering related to the disintegration of the traditional structures of identity. Psychoanalysis can make an important contribution to the massive cultural effort that is needed to change our relationship with our environment so that people’s mental health, and the health of all living beings, can be safeguarded.
Chapter 2 delineates Schinaia’s view that there is a strong interrelation between all living beings and all species- the recognition of which is an antidote to the destruction of the eco-system. His book focuses on ecology, i.e the relationship between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. He shows with many examples that we are not separate from the environment, but that the environment resides inside us from the beginning of our lives. A healthy environment is crucial to our mental and physical health. Schinaia pushes our current discussion of the “individual” versus the “social” to another level, proposing an “osmotic exchange” between the internal (intra-psychic) and external (interpersonal) register. I found the term osmotic very helpful because it helps us understand on a visceral level the continuous exchange between the external and internal.
Chapter 3 presents Freud’s writings on nature and the environment, his love and admiration as well as his ambivalence about the power of nature, which he described repeatedly in his works and his voluminous correspondence. In The Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1927) and Civilizations and its Discontents (1930) Freud stated that continuous technological advances have not increased the happiness of human beings. He saw an inherent, unresolvable contradiction between basic libidinal and aggressive drives/needs of individual human beings and the demands of the society/community/nations humans create to protect themselves from vulnerability, the power of nature and their aggressive instincts. For society to function, our aggressive instincts need to be repressed and libidinal instincts are sublimated and expressed only in a narrow way. Humans bind their aggressiveness by projecting it onto “the other”, i.e. culturally different people, other societies and nations. “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance in their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction” (Freud, 1930, p. 146).
Chapter 4 introduces Post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory about nature and the environment, including significant difficulties of psychoanalysts to confront ecological topics. This fascinating chapter reviews multiple theoretical models by various clinicians in the past 30 years. Many of the authors were unfamiliar to me, and their psychoanalytic insights are compelling. Schinaia also reviews the landmark paper by Harold Searles from 1972: Unconscious Processes in Relation to the Environmental Crisis, which is still relevant today. Searles wrote: “The generalized apathy about the ecological crisis is mainly based on the Ego’s unconscious defenses against anxiety… our relationship with the environment comprises ambivalence and destructiveness and our ego defenses swing between dependence and control, submission and exploitation, envy and gratitude… and there is an unconscious hatred toward future generations”.(p.43) Searles referenced unresolved oedipal conflicts for this hatred, but stated that unconscious hatred goes well beyond the oedipal phase as Klein has demonstrated when she described the feelings that are typical of the paranoid-schizoid position (p.43).
Other analysts whose contributions about defenses against the recognition of reality are Ferenczi (1932), who elaborated on our identification with the aggressor, a mechanism that makes an external aggressor disappear (p. 1). Furthermore, Winnicott (1965) and Melanie Klein(1954, 1952), and Donald Meltzer (1967) who wrote that we treat the Earth as a “toilet-mother”, or “toilet breast”, i.e., an enormous dump absorbing our toxicity endlessly. So painful and hateful is the child of its dependency needs that they wish to control and destroy the mother. Kohut (1981) proposed the “cultural self-object”, Keene (2013), Bellamy (2019), and Foer (2019) explored our defenses against the seriousness of the climate crisis and the difficulties of the human being-environment relationship. The crucial question all these writers pose: why humans do not take the critical action to efficaciously respond to the climate emergency, in spite of contemporary science’s almost complete knowledge of its catastrophic aspects” (p.51).
Chapter 5 presents an important discussion on Consumerism and Waste. Schinaia reminds us that Freud was concerned about environmental degradation, the disposal of waste and the effects of chemical and heat emissions from large urban centers (p. 56). Schinaia surmises that Freud was influenced by Sir Arthur George Tansley (1871-1955) who was a British botanist and a pioneer in the science of ecology and who was Freud’s patient in 1922/23. In 1935, Arthur Tansley proposed a new concept, the ecosystem, which provided a unified framework within which to study both plant and animal communities together, their interactions with inorganic nature, and their interrelations with human communities.
Schinaia presents diverse symbolic meanings of waste and includes several clinical vignettes that show how neurotic aspects of personality play a crucial role in the relationship between human beings and refuse. I found Schinaia’s clinical discussion of patients in his practice especially enlightening. He demonstrates how the denial of individual traumatic situations, such as sexual abuse or intergenerational trauma leads to the development of obsessive- compulsive tendencies and repetitions of unconscious trauma. In particular, the patient’s confusion about what is reality leads to specific defenses, such as dissociation, projection, and obsessive mechanisms to create and/or control “waste”. Rather than accepting waste and excrements as normal products of being human and dealing with them rationally, traumatic experiences that remain unconscious and unprocessed result in a compulsive and ambivalent attitude toward waste, i.e. to fill an internal void, to avert depression, to feel a sense of power and control, and an inability to symbolize. The reality of waste is dissociated. We hide the amount of waste we produce as a society; we feel unconscious pleasure in creating waste and our destructiveness of our environment/mother; we avoid the recognition of the reality of the destruction of the environment and the responsibility for our part in this. This is similar to how a patient’s personal victimization/reality is often not acknowledged. Schinaia emphasizes the importance of psychotherapy and analysis to decrease defenses such as avoidance and denial, give a name to fears and anxieties, help the patient recognize her losses and support the work of mourning, which is essential for any change of attitude (p. 61).
In Chapter 6 Schinaia discusses wasted resources of water and electricity in the home and consumerism in general- showing again with clinical vignettes the interdependence between the individual’s internal world and the larger “internal world” of a society and the environment.
Chapter 7 describes the psychophysical well-being of humans and other species that is under attack because of pollution, intrusive sounds, and lights. He shows with clinical examples of patients who have been overstimulated by sound and light how these traumatic experiences live on in them and contribute to wastefulness and degradation of the environment.
Chapter 8 illuminates the connection, similarities, and differences between individual and group defense mechanisms. Freud (1924) noted that only few people can tolerate reality without misrepresenting or manipulating it. Bion (1978) stated that our fear of dealing with the truth can be so great that doses of truth are lethal. Schinaia comments that it is no coincidence that great literature has never seriously considered the topic of environmental disasters.
Groups and communities exhibit many of the same defense mechanisms we find in individual patients such as confusion, obsession, denial, projection, idealization, rigidity, obsessive dramatization, externalization, splitting and dissociation. With regard to climate change, people may report anxiety and fear, but resent or deny what they cannot accept as a justifiable change in their behavior (p.87). Schinaia does not think that militant environmentalism is helpful as it involves a fanatic, idealizing adherence to environmentalism and an opposition to any kind of scientific progress. It can be terroristic, blaming and does not consider people's confused affective reactions, investments, memories and anxieties.
Chapter 9 describes Schinaia’s personal experience of the devastation of the beautiful city of his birthplace, Taranto, where a steel-plant created an ecological tragedy, which destroyed livability and sustainability.
In Chapter 10 Schinaia outlines his ideas to deal with the climate/environmental crisis in a realistic way both on the individual and group level. As a starting point he recommends that we recognize our collective suffering and feelings toward climate change such as confusion, bewilderment, anger, resigned resentment, pain, and fear. He mentions that Edward Munch’s painting “The Scream”, which has become one of the symbols of restlessness and despair of contemporary human beings, was actually inspired by Munch’s awe about the great power of nature, i.e. “an infinite scream passing through nature” as Munch described it (p. 113.)
Schinaia reminds us that mourning is a process towards awareness and not a hindrance. We need to begin the work of mourning our dreams and illusions and listen to our many, often contradictory emotions about what is happening around us. The psychological work on these topics will enable us to feel freer and act positively (p.90). He advocates that we be realistic about how much reality we can take in. We all need to be protected in our current environmental situation; facing too much loss and conflict at once creates denial, distancing and apathy. Schinaia, advocates, as have others, that we create spaces of dialogue and collaboration in which we can share our internal worlds and connect with our creativity and capacity to mend. We need to create conditions for participation, avoid judgment, and reduce the space of the environmental superego. We need to come to accept that there are no easy solutions, that life is inherently conflictual, that there are limits to technological progress, and “that our planet cannot always tolerate our transformative interventions” (Ambrosiano, 2016 p. 95). Schinaia envisions “a new economic paradigm” in which “groups and communities … can connect well-being and growth, development, sustainability, inclusion and livelihood, and collectivity and the individual” (p. 105).
He states that ecology needs psychoanalysis and vice versa, and we need to listen to nature’s cry for help and the pleas of the younger generations. Although there is little time to take efficacious action for the benefit of humankind, we must realize that we are both the problem and the solution. In the Age of Anthropocene, we must take charge of a new awareness and a new ethics, and avoid dangerous rationalizations. Schinaia ends on a cautiously optimistic note with a quote from Freud (1927, p. 53), “We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind (…)”. Perhaps a similar, hopeful sentiment, given the challenges of today, was expressed in the words of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): “Pessimism of the Intellect and Optimism of the Will”.
~Rita Teusch, PhD
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Daniels, K. (2022). Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis. West Virginial University Press. 216pp.
This is the story of a negative transference written by the bearer of those hostile feelings – the patient. The resulting book, The Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis by Kate Daniels, describes her three-year psychoanalysis with a novice analyst whose imperfect diction infuriates her. Daniels is a veteran poet and professor of English at Vanderbilt. It was an unfortunate patient/therapist mismatch.
Daniels’ goal was to “create a literary text that might suggest the feel and form of one particular analytic treatment…through a projection of poetic images and distinctive rhythm…” In the book, Daniels moves back and forth between poetry and prose. It is interspersed with quotations from Emily Dickinson, whose poetry Daniels uses as a springboard for the interpretation of her own experience. Critics have praised the book as beautifully crafted and burning with soulfulness. Indeed, the writing is lyrical and allusive.
In the course of treatment for intractable depression, Daniels develops a powerful erotic transference towards Ama, the analyst. In her frustration she admits to becoming “aggressive and hostile.” She carps ceaselessly about such matters as Ama’s office décor, her accent, her spelling (on the invoice), her “chortle,” her note-taking, and her lack of originality in her interpretations. Daniels compares her analyst to a cold appliance.
None of this was analyzed. But, of course, the book was written from the perspective of the patient, not the analyst, and it was intended for a non-specialist audience. Presumably the reader is meant to take these comments by the author at face value. Perhaps Ama’s office actually was ugly and Ama was inept. Perhaps, as a therapist myself, I identify with Ama and feel defensive. In Slow Fuse of the Possible Ama is not given a point of view. In any case, Daniels eventually started taking Zoloft and felt better.
~Shari Thurer, Sc.D
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Recent Donations - Thank You! |
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John Mack
Karin Austin, Executive Director of the John E. Mack Institute, donated three boxes of books that belonged to former BPSI member John Mack, MD, along with teaching notes from his time as an instructor at BPSI.
Andrew Cohn
A “Children’s Diary” by a Andrew Cohn, who was trained in social anthropology and child development. covers a 17-year time frame, beginning in December of 1986, when the two children were, respectively, 22 months (son) and 6 years, 8 months (daughter). The diary includes detailed, dated descriptions of dialogue and behavior, and observations about interactions and elements of family life over time. The 35-volume text is in the process of being scanned onto two (2) USBs that will be readily searchable by date, and that will include appropriate background information useful to any future viewer of the diary archive. The BPSI Library will archive only the USBs.
Roberta Apfel and Bennett Simon
Members Roberta Apfel, MD, and Bennett Simon, MD, donated 2 boxes of books as well as papers and journal articles for our Children in War archival collection.
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We are deeply grateful to Deborah Choate, Jack Foehl, Ellen Goldberg, Mark Goldblatt, Dan Mollod, Malkah Notman, Rafael Ornstein, Dean Solomon, Rita Teusch, Steven Varga-Golovscenko, and Julie Watts for donating print journal issues to the library.
With funds established by Morton and Raisa Newman many years ago, we continue building our child analysis and neuropsychology collections, and our Gifford fund helps to purchase books on the history of psychoanalysis.
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