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In the course of working on a project on a completely different subject, one of us (Mosher) stumbled across a charming pas-sage in a now somewhat obscure book on the history of psychoanalysis. This passage sheds some new, or at least clearer, light on our understanding of the meaning of APsaA’s special status in relation to the Inter-national Psychoanalytical Association and especially how that status came about. So we decided to research it further. (See: http://bit.ly/APsaATrainingStandards) The following account is a distillation of that White Paper.

The book, Psychoanalytic Pioneers: A History of Psychoanalysis as Seen through the Eyes, Lives and Works of Its Most Eminent Teachers, Thinkers and Clinicians, edited by Franz Alex-ander, Samuel Eisenstein and Martin Grotjahn and origionally published in 1966 by Basic Books, apparently was intended to show that psychoanalysis as it then existed had become

the work of a number of contributors and not simply the product of the thought of a single person, Sigmund Freud. That is, in the words of the preface, it is a “history of the men and women who have made psycho-analysis what it is today…”

Published not long after the final volume of Ernest Jones’s three volume biography of Freud (1957), the book seemed intended not only to share credit with others for the suc-cess of the psychoanalytic movement, but also to gently counterbalance a somewhat strict and rigid orthodox “Freudianism,” which had taken hold within some corners of the psychoanalytic world. Included among the sub-jects of the book’s 40 bio-graphical sketches are Rank, Adler, Jung, Klein, Reich, Horney, Hartmann, A. Freud and Erikson. Two chapters at the end of the book, how-ever, leave the mold of bio-graphical sketches to give first person accounts of the history of psychoanalysis in England and the United States. They were written by Edward Glover and John A. P. Millet respectively. It is to a specific passage in the final chapter by Millet, “Psy-choanalysis in the United States,” to which we turn.

THE AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYST • Volume 50, No. 2 • Spr ing/Summer 2016 1

Continued on page 12

Ralph E. Fishkin, D.O., is secretary of the Association, and also a BOPS Fellow representing the Institute of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He has served on the Executive Council as the Philadelphia representative and as councilor-at-large.

Paul W. Mosher, M.D., has served as a member of the APsaA Executive Council including two terms as councilor-at-large. He has also chaired the Joint Committee on Confidentiality, and co-chaired the Task Force on the Externalization of BOPS.

APsaA and the IPA: The Story of American IndependenceR a l p h E . F i s h k i n a n d P a u l W . M o s h e r

Q u a r t e r l y M a g a z i n e o f T h e A m e r i c a n P s y c h o a n a l y t i c A s s o c i a t i o n

INSIDE TAP…

Annual Meeting in Chicago . . . . . . . . . 7

Building New Psychoanalytic Programs Worldwide . . 15

American College of Psychoanalysts . . . . 17

The Courage to Fight Violence Against Women . . . . . 18

theAMERICANPSYCHOANALYST

SPRING/SUMMER 2016Volume 50, No . 2

3 Leadership Mark D. Smaller

5 Diversity of Standards in New APsaA Dwarakanath Rao and Dionne Powell

7 Highlights of the 105th Annual Meeting in Chicago June 17-19 Christine C. Kieffer

8 Candidates’ Council: Psychoanalysis in the Community Phoebe A. Cirio

9 COPE: Study Group on New Technologies Daniel Jacobs

10 Film: Theater Audience Questions a Psychoanalyst about His Discipline Phillip Freeman; Bruce H. Sklarew, Film Editor

12 APsaA and the IPA: The Story of American Independence Ralph E. Fishkin and Paul W. Mosher

15 Building New Psychoanalytic Programs Worldwide Maria Teresa Hooke and Madeleine Bachner (prepared by Lewis Kirshner

on behalf of the North American Representatives to the IPA Board)

17 The American College of Psychoanalysts Norman A. Clemens

18 Courage to Fight Violence Against Women: IPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis Conference Paula L. Ellman and Nancy R. Goodman

C O N T E N T S : S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 1 6

2 THE AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYST • Volume 50, No. 2 • Spr ing/Summer 2016

THE AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYTIC ASSOCIATION

President: Mark Smaller President-Elect: Harriet Wolfe Secretary: Ralph E. Fishkin Treasurer: William A. Myerson Executive Director: Dean K. Stein

THE AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYSTMagazine of the

American Psychoanalytic Association

EditorJanis Chester

Film EditorBruce H. Sklarew

Special Section EditorMichael Slevin

Editorial BoardVera J. Camden, Doug Chavis, Phoebe Cirio, Leslie Cummins,

Phillip S. Freeman, Maxine Fenton Gann, Sheri Butler Hunt, Laura Jensen,

Nadine Levinson, A. Michele Morgan, Julie Jaffee Nagel, Marie Rudden,

Hinda Simon, Vaia Tsolas, Dean K. Stein, ex officio

Senior CorrespondentJane Walvoord

PhotographerMervin Stewart

Manuscript and Production EditorsMichael and Helene Wolff,

Technology Management Communications

The American Psychoanalyst is published quar-terly. Subscriptions are provided automatically to members of The American Psychoanalytic Asso-ciation. For non-members, domestic and Cana-dian subscription rates are $36 for individuals and $80 for institutions. Outside the U.S. and Canada, rates are $56 for individuals and $100 for institu-tions. To subscribe to The American Psychoanalyst, visit http://www.apsa.org/TAPSUB, or write TAP Subscriptions, The American Psychoanalytic Association, 309 East 49th Street, New York, New York 10017; call 212-752-0450 x18 or e-mail [email protected].

Copyright © 2016 The American Psychoanalytic Association. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of The American Psychoanalytic Association, 309 East 49th Street, New York, New York 10017.

ISSN 1052-7958

The American Psychoanalytic Association does not hold itself responsible for statements made in The American Psychoanalyst by contributors or advertisers. Unless otherwise stated, material in The American Psychoanalyst does not reflect the endorsement, official attitude, or position of The American Psychoanalytic Association or The American Psychoanalyst.

Changing of the GuardI have had the honor of serving as the editor of The American Psychoanalyst for nine years, spanning the terms of five presidents . It has been gratifying work, perhaps best summed up by something former editor Arnie Richards said to me in passing, at the elevators in the Waldorf Astoria…“Thanks for babysitting .” Editing TAP has been a generative process, with an ever present due date, and the joy of having the issue delivered . I am grateful to the authors, the Association staff and to our professional editor, Helene Wolff, who has been a reliable, resourceful, patient and talented guide star throughout . I am also thankful that Doug Chavis has agreed to shoulder the task and look forward to reading TAP for years to come .

—Janis Chester


While struggling to write my last column as APsaA president, and with so many feel-ings darting about my office, I received a call. A journalist was writing a feature article about the current presidential election. She wondered what psychoanalysts were think-ing about this election—the relationship between candidates and voters, maternal and paternal transference (her words) feelings towards candidates, charisma and narcissism of candidates and why such qualities engage or turn off voters. She wondered if patients in my practice spoke more about this election cycle than in the past.

This reporter’s sophistication regarding psy-choanalytic perspectives was striking. She had interviewed me and a number of colleagues over the past few years and had come to value what we have to offer about various social and mental health issues, and psychoanalysis as a profession. Her questions and articles have consistently reflected a serious knowledge, thoughtfulness and appreciation for our field.

We spoke about the dynamic relationship between candidates and voters, how one candidate is embraced by a group because he or she speaks with empathy to ideas, wishes, longings and aspirations of that group. The voter feels listened to and responds to the candidate who most closely expresses his subjective view of the world, and maybe most important, does so with authenticity and affect that resonates with the voter. Idealizations easily emerge, as well as intense negativity towards candidates.

We discussed how in this presidential elec-tion cycle, many citizens are feeling marginal-ized, if not neglected, on both ends of the political spectrum. With that marginalization comes anger, helplessness and even rage. A candidate appeals to a group when that anger is responded to with promises, realistic or completely unrealistic, that the candidate will fix things and make that anger and

helplessness go away. By attach-ing to the pow-erful leader, the group feels pow-erful and help-lessness fades.

Sadly, and in a sometimes frightening way, some of those promises involve candidates marginalizing, if not condemning certain eth-nic and racial groups, other candidates, or the president, implying somehow that helpless-ness and rage regarding terrorism, for exam-ple, would go away if we just rid ourselves of this group, or that individual. And, as we know, people behave in groups in ways they would not behave as individuals. The dysregulation leads to the violence that erupted at rallies, and has put all of us on edge. I reported to the journalist that, in addition to my own anxiety, my family, friends and patients were similarly occupied.

Once off the phone with the reporter my mind wandered to the state of APsaA when I ran for president in 2010, and then again in 2012. Many members in various psychoana-lytic “camps” felt angry, frightened, discouraged and helpless. Their view of psychoanalysis—in education, standards, research, application of psychoanalytic ideas in the community—was not being heard, appreciated, valued or understood.

I was one of those members. Those feel-ings were a significant part of running, espe-cially a second time, and my view must have reflected the view of a majority of members that generously gave me an opportunity to serve. And for a time as president-elect, I imagined or at least was determined to keep my campaign promises that APsaA would change, and seriously change, damn it! (I can’t help but consider the tone of current candi-dates running for U.S. president.)

PERSONAL CHANGEWhat I did not realize, what was completely

outside my awareness, and what I could not have predicted through two campaigns, or

even as president-elect, was that the change was not necessarily just about APsaA.

Something was changing in me. Or putting it slightly different—any change in APsaA I might facilitate demanded an inevitable and critical change in me.

It first became apparent during the first meeting of the Executive Committee in Chi-cago in June 2014 that I chaired as a new presi-dent. I told the group we needed to put an end to the lawsuit appeal. No one disagreed. With that, for the first time in the two and a half years I had been on the Executive Com-mittee, the tension suddenly left the room. Even if the outcome of the lawsuit had been different, nothing would have been solved. Members, including me, still would have remained entrenched, absolutely entrenched in winning or losing, and the 60 plus-year organizational impasse would continue.

November 2014, in Buffalo Grove, Illinois (a Chicago suburb), the Executive Committee started listening and talking but mostly listening. With the help of our consultant, Jeffrey Kerr, a process of healing emerged, healing from many injuries on both sides before, during and after the lawsuit. Only then could we consider creat-ing a plan, an imperfect but workable plan that, if reviewed and accepted by the membership, would finally diffuse the anger, helplessness and fear of many members. No one would get everything he or she wanted, but the great majority of members could count on getting most of what they wanted to maintain passionately held views about our profession, our local institutes and centers, and our Asso-ciation. By last June, the plan emerged, and by January, the plan moved forward.

During this process of implementing the Six Point Plan, there have been the inevita-ble heated disagreements and temporary regressions to old divisions sometimes online, sometimes on the Executive Committee. However, what is at stake, what can take us seriously forward has ultimately continued to organize thinking and feeling. The Six Point Plan has been tested but the priority has remained the same. What is best for ALL members? What is best for the future of APsaA? What is best for our profession—not yours or mine, but our profession?

F R O M T H E P R E S I D E N T

Continued on page 4

LeadershipM a r k D . S m a l l e r

Mark D. Smaller, Ph.D., is president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Mark D. Smaller


By the time we arrive in Chicago in June, most of our challenging efforts will be com-ing to fruition. The work groups that became task forces to implement the change and draft appropriate bylaw amendments have worked hard to see this process through. Their efforts and plans will be presented in June and voted on by the Executive Council and the Board on Professional Standards.

With the new Department for Psychoana-lytic Education, the Institute Requirements and Review Committee, and the transfor-mation of our Executive Council as a true board of directors with final authority to steer APsaA, toward its future, I believe One APsaA will be born.

The already functioning external American Board of Psychoanalysis (ABP) will continue providing certification for those individual members who want this credential. Institutes

and centers will decide on their own about the appointment of training analysts and whether certification will be useful or needed in that process.

The American Association for Psychoana-lytic Education (AAPE), still in the process of being established as of this writing, will offer accreditation to those institutes that desire standards based on current APsaA standards. APsaA will approve new institutes through the new Institute Requirements and Review Committee using IPA standards as the base-line of standards.

As I mentioned to the journalist, campaign-ing is about narcissism, charisma, if not inflated self-esteem. It’s about imagining you can solve this issue or that issue better than anyone else, that you are better to serve than some-one else, or at least you try to convince the group you are better. You make promises you don’t necessarily know will be fulfilled once elected. You are trying to provide hope and possibility of real change.

But leading? That’s different. Leading is ulti-mately a humbling experience. Just when you imagine you have it right, you suddenly come to terms with having it wrong. As a psycho-analyst, my best teachers have always been my patients. My best teachers regarding leader-ship over the past three and a half years have been all of you, the membership. You have all taught me to listen, respond and lead. I remain humbled by your allowing me the opportunity to lead, and will forever be grateful.

And finally my Executive Committee, my “essential others”—Harriet Wolfe, Bill Myer-son, Ralph Fishkin, Lee Ascherman, Betsy Brett, Peter Kotcher, and Dean Stein, and more recently Dwarakanath Rao, Dionne Powell, and Lee Jaffe—your commitment, passion, hard work and solid leadership, will never be forgotten by me or the member-ship. Seriously—well done, all of you.

Colleagues, thank you all. One APsaA is emerging because of you. See you in Chicago.

F R O M T H E P R E S I D E N T

LeadershipContinued from page 3


The Six Point Plan will usher in, for the first time in the history of APsaA, a plurality of training standards. Institutes will have the choice of following current APsaA require-ments, or IPA requirements as guidelines, or creating their own, all while remaining in APsaA. For some, the freedom to set one’s own standards is rich with possibility. Others feel no particular lack of freedom with the current standards. As with any unprecedented change, it is not possible to predict with preci-sion what the standards landscape will look like in the future. What is certain is the exter-nal regulatory climate for professions such as ours will become more demanding.

Under the proposed reorganization of APsaA, the Council would be authorized to set/approve IPA or substantially equivalent entry standards for new institutes wishing to affiliate with APsaA. The Board on Profes-sional Standards would sunset, and its non-regulatory functions would be relocated in a new Department of Psychoanalytic Educa-tion (DPE). Regulatory functions would be externalized in the American Association for Psychoanalytic Education (AAPE). Institutes would have the following choices regarding standards: Follow the new APsaA standards, which would be IPA requirements as guide-lines, or follow current APsaA standards. IPA standards do not require certification. “IPA requirements as guidelines” are meant to offer flexibility, but how it will be interpreted is to be determined. We believe that insti-tutes should familiarize themselves with the substantive issues involved. The substantive issues are the merits of external accredita-tion, the merits of current APsaA standards, which meet or exceed IPA requirements, the merits of the proposed new APsaA stan-dards, which are IPA requirements as guide-lines, the merits of certification, and finally,

what constitutes optimal procedures for training analyst appointment. Choice of stan-dards and membership in AAPE will not affect affiliation with APsaA.

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC EDUCATION

The American Association of Psychoana-lytic Education (AAPE) aims to become the external standards organization for those institutes interested in continuing with cur-rent APsaA standards. In addition to cur-ricular and supervisory requirements, these standards are notable for the value placed on certification, the training analyst system, and the minimum required frequency of analytic sessions (three per week in the Wil-liam Alanson White model, and four to five per week in the original APsaA model). In addition, AAPE is working on a memoran-dum of understanding with the Accredita-tion Council for Psychoanalytic Education, Inc. (ACPEinc) that will make AAPE accred-ited institutes eligible for simultaneous national accreditation by ACPEinc. Rigorous standards, one site visit, national accredita-tion—this is what AAPE consolidates in one organization. AAPE will grandfather any APsaA institute in good standing that meets AAPE standards.

WORKING WITH DEPARTMENT FOR PSYCHOANALYTIC EDUCATION

AAPE is designed to work in a comple-mentary, if not synergistic, way with APsaA, bringing to fruition a dream of many for membership and accreditation functions to work together constructively. In practice, this will mean AAPE and the new APsaA Depart-ment of Psychoanalytic Education (DPE) will function in separate, and sometimes overlap-ping, domains—AAPE concerning itself with regulatory matters, including national accred-itation, and the DPE with a wide range of educational and consultative functions. We hope that as both AAPE and DPE mature, there will be opportunities to work together on shared goals in psychoanalytic education.

CERTIFICATION AND THE TRAINING ANALYST SYSTEM

Two ancient struggles within our mem-bership involve cer tification and the train-ing analyst system. AAPE takes a positive stance on both. AAPE will require objec-tive and subjective evaluation of clinical competence in the TA appointment pro-cess. AAPE considers training, graduation, cer tification and training and supervising analyst appointment as a pathway for pro-fessional growth. We believe experience and peer review, under whatever name, will hold value to all in our profession and to the public. Regardless of APsaA’s fraught history, we feel the process of certification and TA appointment, when transparent and subject to checks and balances, is an enrich-ing combination of evaluative, developmen-tal, and aspirational goals necessary in any profession.

HOW ARE AAPE AND BOPS DIFFERENT?

AAPE’s board will have members of the public as well as professional organizations such as APsaA that promote psychoanalytic education, standards and research. This is a far broader representative body than the Board on Professional Standards. Candidates will be vital contributors to the establish-ment and development of AAPE through a Candidate Advisory and Liaison Committee. The AAPE board composition will reflect the needs and experience of seasoned as well as younger analysts. Unlike the Board on Profes-sional Standards, both APsaA and non-APsaA institutes are welcome to become affiliated with AAPE.

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AAPE AND ACPEinc?

ACPEinc, as an independent national accrediting agency, uses its core criteria (including minimum of three sessions per week frequency, certification or its equivalent, and curricular and supervision requirements), but conducts accreditation of an individual institute by referring to standards the insti-tute follows in addition to, or different from, ACPEinc baseline standards.

F R O M T H E B O A R D O N P R O F E S S I O N A L S T A N D A R D S


Dwarakanath Rao, M.D., and Dionne Powell, M.D.

Guest column by chair-elect and secretary-elect of the Board on Professional Standards.

Diversity of Standards in New APsaAD w a r a k a n a t h R a o a n d D i o n n e P o w e l l


Be sure to come to the thought-provok-ing 105th Annual Meeting of the American Psy-c h o a n a l y t i c Association to be held in Chi-cago June 17-19 at the Palmer

House Hotel, right in the middle of the central business district in the Loop. Once again the Program Committee has combined a list of innovative programs with the classic programs that have stood the test of time. Below are some of the highlights of the 105th Annual Meeting. A more detailed list-ing is available in the preliminary program on APsaA’s website: www.apsa.org.

Our opening panel, “So What Is Gender, Anyway? And Who’s Having Sex with Whom?” on Friday morning will focus upon a re-examination of gender and sexuality through the prism of transgender. Ethan M. Grumbach will chair this event, where an epi-sode of the television show Transparent will be shown, followed by commentary by Rob-ert M. Galatzer-Levy and Susan McNamara. This will be followed by a small group discus-sion, ending with an opportunity to share experiences in the large group along with a chance to query the panelists.

On Saturday morning, we will offer another fascinating Clinical Plenary Address, “Beyond the Miles, Memories and Usual Modes of Func-tioning: How We Change as We Help Our Patients Change,” presented by Aisha Abbasi with discussions by Adrienne Harris and Dom-inique Scarfone. Nancy Kulish will chair.

On Friday evening, Monisha Nayar-Akhtar will present the Ticho Award winning lecture, “Psychic Space, Structural Space, Cyber Space: Desire and Intimacy in a Digital World.” She will be introduced by Fred L. Griffin. Harriet L. Wolfe, who will be president at that time, will chair this noteworthy event.

A central part of our twice-yearly pro-gram has been the Two-Day Clinical Work-shop, and we have a host of excellent ones, with erudite speakers, hard-working case presenters, chaired by distinguished mem-bers of the Program Committee. This June, we will have seven Workshops focusing on adult analysis, child analysis and psychoana-lytic psychotherapy. Check the preliminary program for a complete listing of these dynamic two-day sessions.

UNIVERSITY FORUM AND MEET THE AUTHOR

Other twice yearly events with an avid following will also take place. This year, the University Forum will offer a special pro-gram, organized by Stanley J. Coen, “Revital-izing the South Side of Chicago,” chaired by Robert M. Galatzer-Levy. Presenters on this program will include Angela Hurlock, executive director of Claretian Associates, Laurence Ralph, John L. Loeb Associate Pro-fessor of the Social Sciences at Harvard Uni-versity, and Janet Smith, co-director of the Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighbor-hood and Community Improvement.

The Meet-the-Author program will feature the work of Aisha Abbasi, author of The Rup-ture of Serenity: External Intrusions and Psycho-analytic Technique. She will be joined by Gil Katz, who recently has written The Play Within the Play: The Enacted Dimension of Psychoana-lytic Process. Their presentations will be fol-lowed by discussion with the audience, led by chair, Henry J. Friedman.

DISCUSSION GROUPS AND SYMPOSIAAfter their introduction at the 2016 National

Meeting, four new Discussion Groups will continue this June. “Psychoanalysis and Psy-chodynamic Psychotherapy” will be chaired by Ralph Beaumont. Another new Discussion Group, chaired by Dorothy E. Holmes, Don-ald B. Moss and Stephen Seligman is “Apply-ing Historical and Social Factors in Clinical Psychoanalysis.” The third Discussion Group, “The Difficult Child to Reach: A Kleinian Per-spective on Psychoanalytic Work with Chil-dren” will be chaired by Karen Proner. Finally, Daniel A. Plotkin will chair his new Discussion Group, “Psychoanalytic Treatment for Older Adults.” And, of course, you will still be able to attend the ongoing Discussion Groups to which you have become attached.

We also are pleased to announce two fine Symposia. The first, “(Not) Being Seen/(Not) Being Heard: How Do We Think About the Disregard of the Other in the Case of Flint, Michigan?” will be moderated by Maureen A. Katz. The second Symposium, “Recognizing and Helping to Break the Intergenerational Chains of Transmission of Trauma: Black Men and Boys,” will be moderated by Darlene Bregman Ehrenberg.

We are featuring a program sponsored jointly by APsaA and the North American Psy-choanalytic Confederation (NAPsaC): a panel titled, “Psychoanalysis Informs Creation of Courage to Know Violence Against Women.” This program will be chaired by Nancy R. Goodman, introduced by Maureen Murphy, with presentations by panelists, Margarita Cereijido, Goodman, Vivian Blotnick Pender and Arlene K. Richards. Please join me in wel-coming the inauguration of what we hope will be one of many such co-sponsored events.

We look forward to your joining us in Chicago on the Magnificent Mile.

Highlights of the 105th Annual Meeting in ChicagoJune 17-19C h r i s t i n e C . K i e f f e r

Christine C. Kieffer, Ph.D., ABPP, is chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association Program Committee.

Annual Meeting in Chicago

Christine C. Kieffer


The most recent issue of the Candidate Connection, the Candidates’ Council news-letter was devoted to psychoanalysis in the community. The new co-editors, Danielle Dronet and Valentino (Luca) Zullo, candi-dates from Cleveland, are the founders of Siggy’s Village, located in Collinwood, a neighborhood in Cleveland. Siggy’s Village offers pro-bono, low cost and/or insurance reimbursed psychoanalytic psychotherapy. They engage the local community and pro-vide psychoanalytic ideas and therapy to adults, children and families.

As more and more social workers are pursuing psychoanalytic training, they are continuing a long and noble tradition of community clinical intervention. This type of work can take the community as a whole as the patient, building resilience in the community by developing social structure. Intervention in the community can also take the form of clinicians enter-ing community settings to provide indi-vidual and group psychotherapy, and consultation in an institutional setting such as a school, prison, or community center, as well as in private homes. Psy-choanalysts from all professional back-grounds have embarked on community work, applying psychoanalytic concepts and theory to inform their work with individuals, groups and institutions. Cen-tral to psychoanalytic principles is the understanding by our profession that the unconscious is operating in all human activity, and if unacknowledged, these unconscious thoughts can be enacted and determine ensuing events.

Psychoanalysts engaging in community intervention attempt to ameliorate severe social and psychological distress. Analysts in the Trenches, an excellent collection of papers edited by Bruce Sklarew, Stuart W. Twemlow and Sallye M. Wilkinson in 2004 contains a paper that depicts a school-based mourning project in Washington, D.C. The interventions were based on Elvin Semrad’s ideas on resistance to mourning. Semrad’s work with patients was informed by Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917). Semrad understood his patients resisted grieving by utilizing the avoidant defenses, including denial and projection, to manage their feelings of emptiness. Semrad inter-vened by investigating the facts of the losses, encouraging the patients to speak of their losses, and when the patients spoke lucidly, they communicated their pain without falling into psychosis.

In the school-based mourning project, the authors noticed that children living in violent inner-city neighborhoods had the same primitive defenses, and fragile ego-organization, as Semrad’s hospitalized patients. The inner-city children who par-ticipated in the project came from dan-gerous, impoverished communities with a paucity of community supports and over-stressed parents. The children in this com-munity had no models for grieving. Often the parents eschewed their own grieving. They believed grieving was a sign of weak-ness, and if they experienced their grief, it would interfere with their effectiveness as parents. Psychoanalysis provided an under-standing that underlying the violence that

pervaded the neighborhood were feelings of shame, humiliation, hopelessness, and a feeling of having been “dissed.” A cycle of retaliation was the norm, where one vio-lent act would yield another violent act to “save face” for the first victim.

The clinical interventions employed in the school were active methods such as music, drawings, drama, clay and games which enabled the participants to express their grief, and eventually to articulate the feelings of loss, sadness and anger that, if left unvoiced, would be acted out in a violent way or result in depression. Eventually, the children were able to verbalize their feelings about the person in their life who had died.

It is stressful for the therapist to leave the safety and containment of her office and step out into the community to provide clinical services. Psychoanalytic concepts and techniques, while demanding of the clinician, can provide a sense of control and safety in facilitating the deepening of our understand-ing of clinical work with distressed people in unconventional settings. The application of psychoanalytic concepts to community work dignifies all involved by acknowledging the unconscious within each of us.

I want to end with a quote from Chris-topher Bollas, which ran in the New York Times Opinionator section, October 17, 2015: “We all know the wisdom of talking. In trouble, we turn to another person. Being listened to inevitably generates new perspective, and the help we get lies not only in what is said but also in that human connection of talking that promotes unconscious thinking.”

Psychoanalysis in the CommunityP h o e b e A . C i r i o Phoebe A. Cirio

andidates’ councilC


Our ways of communicating with one another have changed dramatically in the last decade. Whereas, we used to wr ite letters or place telephone calls, many of us now e-mail, fax, tweet or send messages on Facebook. Furthermore, we can now employ search engines to find out about almost any-one’s education, financial status, publications and other information. Patients have used these technologies for gathering information about their analysts; on occasion, analysts have used these same technologies to communi-cate with and learn about their patients.

Has communication via new technolo-gies altered analytic intimacy? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using video or other technologies as tools in analysis? How does their use relate to issues of defense and of developing trans-ference? New technologies have not only changed the therapeutic landscape, but also the teaching of analysis as well. How does one measure the benefits and draw-backs of distance learning and treatment? Furthermore, how might the use of new technologies in society affect child and adolescent development?

Our Study Group on New Technologies (one of the largest of the COPE groups) has begun to explore how the advent of new technologies affects our work as analysts, both the techniques we use and the theories of the mind we employ. The members of the group are Ric Almond (Palo Alto), Alice Bartlett (Topeka), Vera Camden (Cleveland), Steven Clarke (Minneapolis), Ralph Fishkin (Philadel-phia), Philip Freeman (Boston), Richard Honig (Stockbridge), Sarah Knox (Cincinnati), Scott Murray (Portland, Oregon), Gerald Melchiode (Dallas), Jill Scharff (D.C.), Ernest Wallwork (D.C.), Nancy Winters (Portland, Oregon) and Lyn Yonack (Great Barrington).

CONNECTIONWe have had four meetings so far : the first

to introduce ourselves and our interests to one another; the next two by teleconference to share experiences of telephone analysis and treatment via video face time. We began by discussing the use of the telephone, which has its own unique qualities, different from other forms of analysis. We tried to under-stand what those qualities are: What do they allow? What may they inhibit in terms of communication? Certainly, non-verbal forms of communication are limited in telephone analyses. We also noted that certain aspects of separation anxiety on the part of both analyst and patients might be greater in tele-phone analysis. Both parties may become concerned as to whether they are in fact still “connected” or if the line has “gone dead.” This may make silences more difficult to bear. The impulse to call a patient who has not called at the appointed time may also be greater because of concerns about whether the patient was able to get through.

It was noted, too, that telephone analyses gave analyst and patients greater freedom in terms of body position and movement and in terms of the physical space from which one

Daniel Jacobs, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He is director of the Hanns Sachs Library and Archives at BPSI and director of the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies at Princeton and Aspen.

Study Group on New TechnologiesD a n i e l J a c o b s

spoke as well as the state of dress of the par-ticipants. Some colleagues request that their patient lie on a couch, others do not, trying instead to analyze the choice of environ-ments from which patients speak to them.

DISTANCEWe agreed the use of the telephone and

the physical distance it creates might have different meanings for different patients and different meanings at different stages of an analysis. For instance, it might provide a sense of needed safety for the patient who has been severely physically traumatized. For another patient, very dependent on measur-ing the slightest reaction of the analyst upon entering and leaving, the absence of visual guidance might awaken deep feelings of aloneness or disorientation. For still others, Oedipal conflicts explored at a physical dis-tance provides either relief or frustration. When might each party long for the physical presence of the other? When might they be relieved by its absence?

How much does the smell and decor of an office, whatever it may be, contribute to the memories and affects of patients? Absence of these features of typical analyses, our group felt, may not mean a less intense interaction, just a different one. It is essential, to analyze the way in which the use of new technologies helps shape transference and countertransference.

At our third meeting, we began a dis-cussion of our experiences with VSee and other video technologies. We will con-tinue this discussion when we next meet.

C O P E


Daniel Jacobs


I had the o p p o r t u n i t y recently to give a talk at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massa-chusetts, where an excellent and wel l-reviewed production of Mark St. Ger-

main’s play Freud’s Last Session was playing. Mark Cuddy, the new Playhouse producer, had requested a psychoanalyst to present a special event featuring a discussion of the play, Freud’s life and psychoanalysis.

Any psychoanalyst who has enjoyed the privilege of doing such a talk in a theater, or a talk-back after a play or film, is familiar with the tension between the wish to communi-cate something of the rich complexity of psychoanalytic ideas and the need to manage the sometimes surprising comments from an audience raised in the waning days of the influence of those psychoanalytic ideas in our culture. What follows reflects the back and forth between reality and reverie, between the wish to reach out and the temptation to retreat. Surely the challenge faced by analysts

seeking to engage a contemporary commu-nity pales before the difficulty faced by the protagonists in this play.

The Cape Playhouse is a beautiful theater, the oldest continuously running theater out-side New York. The audience sits in church pews. Immediately a hand went up.

“My friend told me about the sexual relation-ship that Freud had with his daughter. How could he do his work with patients if he was involved that way with his own daughter?”

Never happened.

I paraphrase here. I enjoyed many pro-longed and interesting exchanges about psy-choanalysis with this engaged group of theater patrons. Still, it can be unsettling to hear what the community, the object of our outreach, is thinking.

The play takes place in 1939. Freud and C.S. Lewis meet for a single conversation at Freud’s invitation just three weeks before his death. Their talk, their debate, about the existence of God and, by implication, the existence of the unconscious, takes place against the backdrop of sirens and radio announcements describing Britain’s entry into war with Germany.

Phillip Freeman

Phillip Freeman, M.D., D.M.H., is a psychoanalyst in Boston.

Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., an associate editor and co-founder of the award-winning Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, organizes the film programs at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association and has co-edited two books on psychoanalysis and film.

Theater Audience Questions a Psychoanalyst about His DisciplineP h i l l i p F r e e m a n

B r u c e H . S k l a r e w , F i l m E d i t o r

F I L M “Was it Freud’s cocaine addiction that gave him the cancer?”

Nope.In 1939, at the moment of the Freud-Lewis

colloquy imagined by the play, the Cape Play-house was staging a production of the suc-cessful Thornton Wilder play Our Town. The summer stages were enjoying a robust season that year throughout New England, but it was to be the last uninterrupted run of summer stock for the many war years that followed.

Wilder wrote his play as a contrast to the ubiquitous millionaire playboy dramas of the day. Kitty Carlisle’s performance at the Play-house in A Successful Calamity earlier that summer season was a case in point. Wilder called for a sparse set and few props, antici-pating the deprivations to come. The Stage Manager who introduces us to the lives and passing of the residents of Grover’s Corners ultimately offers the same conclusions and the same counsel C.S. Lewis offers to Freud: “Everybody knows in their bones that some-thing is eternal, and that something has to do

with human beings. All the great-est people who ever lived have been telling us that for five thou-sand years and yet you’d be sur-prised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal; about every human being.”

Lewis also focused on the risk of “losing hold” of his faith, his discov-ery of God. In St. Germain’s play he tells Freud, “My idea of God; it constantly changes. He shatters it,

time and time again. Still, I feel the world is crowded with Him. He is everywhere. Incog-nito. And His incognito—it’s so hard to pen-etrate. The real struggle is to keep trying. To come awake. Then stay awake.”

Lewis’s faith is represented as a hard-won discovery, fragile and slippery and ever at risk of being lost again, a victim of the temp-tation to take things as they are, to fail to appreciate what lies beneath the surface, providing meaning and purpose. He fights to remain awake to the evidence of things unseen when many around him are moti-vated to question his evidence and his reason.


The Cape Playhouse


He wants to remain awake to a God who appears incognito, in disguise.

Would Freud speak any differently about the manifestations of a ubiqui-tous and wily unconscious? An epiph-any, a something more, ever present, and ever at risk of dismissal and moti-vated re-repression? A disguised uncon-scious that must be rediscovered in clever rationalizations and rooted out from reality-bound hiding places?

“Why didn’t he feel that the Irish could be analyzed?”

Never said it.“When did Freud and Lewis first become

friends?”They only met once.“When did Freud stop being an atheist?”Never did.Is there meaning to such apocrypha, the

distortions and misunderstandings that con-stitute the contemporary grasp of Freud and his work? Perhaps there are fewer opportu-nities to correct these ideas than there were when Auden wrote his 1939 elegy:

If some traces of the autocratic pose,the paternal strictness he distrusted, stillclung to his utterance and features,it was a protective colorationfor one who’d lived among enemies

so long:if often he waswrong and, at times, absurd,to us he is no more a personnowbut a whole climate of opinionunder whom we conduct our

different lives…

What must it have felt like in 1939, only 20 years since the last war had ended, soldiers like Lewis still nursing their battle traumas, to know it was all about to begin again?

Through a pending memorandum of understanding between AAPE and ACPEinc, any APsaA institute grandfathered by AAPE will become eligible for simultaneous pro-visional accreditation by ACPEinc based on the findings of the most recent COI site visit and meeting other ACPEinc require-ments. The proposed collaboration with ACPEinc will result in future site visits being conducted by ACPEinc, with a number of site visitors drawn from AAPE accredited institutes.

ACPEinc is also anticipating being recognized by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE),

at which point it will become the only national psychoanalytic accrediting body with DOE recognition. AAPE standards will become appropriately influential in the national con-versation about psychoanalytic education stan-dards via ACPEinc.

A LAST WORDAs the incoming chair and secretary of the

Board on Professional Standards, we are committed to assisting our institutes to sur-vive and thrive while upholding standards. We are planning to work hard and work together with our colleagues as we move toward innovative and responsible change. To achieve this, we welcome dialogue and discussion from the membership.

Diversity of StandardsContinued from page 5

Our last meeting was taken up with how we might best serve the membership through our study group. We will begin by:

• Implementing a survey about frequency of treating candidates in analysis via video conferencing or telephone. Study group members felt the incidence of this mode of treatment analyses is on the rise both in training analyses and analyses done by candidates. Surprisingly, there is no data currently available about its use.

• Surveying whether there are courses offered at institutes on the use of these new technologies. This survey has already begun under the leadership of study group member Lyn Yonack.

• Publishing on the APsaA website a bibli-ography on the uses of new technologies in treatment and education, along with annotations on some of the works cited.

• Fostering workshops, fur ther panels and publications on the analytic uses of new technologies.

• Collaboration with the APsaA Discus-sion Group, “Psychoanalysis and New Technologies,” chaired by Nancy Win-ters and Scott Murray.

APsaA members interested in the work of this study group should feel free to contact me at [email protected].

New TechnologiesContinued from page 9

We observe the troubles and forebodings of our own time and reach for what com-forts and consolations we might allow. Freud described the tendency toward mysticism during periods of despair and disruption. The play illustrates the resilience of the rationalist and the deist, each in his own fashion.


EARLY APsaA LEADERMillet is not well known today. A descen-

dent of a respected Boston family and a graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in the 1930s, Millet was quite promi-nent in the tiny profession of psychoanalysis in the late 1930s. He later went on to become one of the founders of the Colum-bia Institute as well as president of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. It was Millet who in 1951 made the motion at the APsaA meeting of members to investigate the delays in the admission to membership of some institute graduates, a motion which led to the first legal opinion and committee investigation of the functioning of the Board on Professional Standards in relation to the newly incorporated Association. One might imagine that, as one of the native bred and strongly pro-medical American analysts of his day, he might have been uncomfortable with the infusion of European orthodoxy experienced in New York psychoanalytic circles in the 1930s, which in the view of some members, was being carried forward into the new APsaA.

In his history of the development of psy-choanalysis in the United States, Millet describes the growing tension between the American analysts and their European coun-terparts focused mainly on the question of training requirements and, in particular at that time, the question of training non-med-ical applicants. This issue had reached a peak in 1927 as a number of non-medically trained individuals who had traveled to Europe to be trained as psychoanalysts returned to New York only to be rejected by the New York Society.

By 1939, the Americans declared their independence of the “authoritarian control of the original Viennese group.” The prior year they had issued a statement that the American analysts would no longer partici-pate in the International Training Commis-sion (ITC) or the Executive Committee of the IPA and would make their own deci-sions about training standards in the U.S. They recommended that the ITC should be dissolved and the IPA should relinquish all controls over training standards. Plans were made to hold meetings to discuss this rupture in the fabric of psychoanalysis, but before such meetings could take place, World War II broke out and at the conclu-sion of the war the geography of psycho-analysis had shifted dramatically. The ranks of European analysts had been thinned

drastically by the war, and psychoanalysis in the U.S. was experiencing phenomenal growth, shifting professional membership organization by adding centralized training standards in institutes which it “approved.”

By the 1960s, the status of APsaA in rela-tion to the IPA was finally written into the IPA bylaws in a passage that is the subject of this note: (International Psychoanalytical Association, Rule 4A (3). http://www.ipa.org.uk/en/IPA/ipa_rules/rule-4.aspx). The Amer-ican Psychoanalytic Association was given the status of the only “Regional Association” of the IPA, defined on the one hand as a kind of “Constituent Organization” of the IPA, just like societies in other countries, but different from other constituent organiza-tions in that a “Regional Association” is defined as follows:

For historical and legal reasons, the IPA has one Regional Associa-tion, the American Psychoanalytic Association, which is made up of members of some Psychoanalytical

Societies in its geographic area, the United States of America. This Regional Association, within its structure, ultimately (i) exercises responsibility for the training and qualification of psychoanalysts; (ii) recognises subordinate bodies (its Affiliate Societies, Provisional Soci-eties, Study Groups, and training facilities); and (iii) is responsible for developing and overseeing the performance of those subsidiary bodies.

In the above definition, the word “ulti-mately” conveys the essence of what was worked out between APsaA and the IPA in the years between 1946 and 1963 when the IPA bylaws were finally amended.

ESTABLISHING THE RELATIONSHIPDescribing the condition of psychoanalysis

in the postwar period in this charming pas-sage, and his own personal involvement in the establishing of a relationship between APsaA and the IPA, Millet wrote:

In the meantime, our European colleagues, whose professional activities had been completely dis-rupted under the grinding tyranny of the Hitler regime, exer ted growing pressure for the re-estab-lishment of the International Psy-cho-Analytical Association. Ernest Jones was the prime mover in this undertaking, representing as he did the rapidly thinning ranks of the old guard in Europe. After considerable discussion of plans for a meeting between him and representatives of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a com-mittee was appointed by the

T H E S T O R Y O F A M E R I C A N I N D E P E N D E N C E

APsaA and the IPAContinued from page 1


By 1939, the Americans declared their independence of the

“authoritarian control of the original Viennese group.”

Ralph E. Fishkin Paul W. Mosher


president of the American Associ-ation to review the constitution and bylaws of the International Psycho-Analytical Association and to arrange a meeting with Jones in London to consider what changes should be made to bring these up to date. I was the chairman of the committee. Since the center of psychoanalytic organization was in

the United States, it was expected that the views of the American committee, which included Max Gitelson and Edward and Grete Bibring, would be given full consid-eration. I was warned by some of my colleagues that Jones might be difficult to deal with; he did not like Americans and was resentful that the center of the movement was no longer in Europe or even in London where Anna Freud and some of her friends and colleagues had settled.

Jones invited the committee to dine with him at a well-known restaurant, an unusually hospitable gesture at a time when meat, sugar, and other food products were still strictly rationed in England. He could not have been a more genial and interesting host. He advised us that during our after dinner deliberations we were to be the guests of Anna Freud. After dinner, therefore, in a sort of reverential anticipation, we repaired to her house, where Freud had spent his last days. We all felt greatly honored to be there. As soon as the introductions had been made and the committee assembled, Jones opened the discussion in the friendliest manner conceivable.

Our committee believed that we did not need a lengthy document with the constitutional aims bol-stered and defended by a long list of bylaws. To my great surprise, Jones concurred. After the incor-poration of a few minor changes suggested by him, we found no difficulty in achieving consensus on the various points in the draft,

which became the proposal for a new constitution of the Interna-tional Psycho-Analytical Associa-tion, which was to be submitted to the national associations for con-sideration and approval. That eve-ning’s experience in August 1948, is unforgettable. The ready friendli-ness of our British hosts carried with it none of the authoritarian flavor so familiar in the councils of our national association.

Since that time, the International Psycho-Analytical Association has been gradually restored in some degree to its position as arbiter of the fitness for full accreditation of newly organized psychoanalytic societies. A certain aura of author-ity still clings to its name…. however, it no longer exercises any control over the educational programs of the vari-ous psychoanalytic institutes, whose graduates belong to their national associations. [emphasis added]

As a result of Millet’s description, we believe that, until now, we have been mis-reading the “Regional Association” status of APsaA, because it was agreed APsaA would have complete control of the training standards of our “approved institutes” and would not, in any way, be answerable to



2016 UpdateThe IPA’s lawyers have subsequently

confirmed the findings and conclu-sions that have emerged from our study of these source documents. Ste-fano Bolognini, IPA president, reported this in a letter to the IPA Board of Representatives and so informed the Association on February 27, 2016, in a letter to APsaA president, Mark Smaller, and president-elect, Harriet Wolfe. Bolognini summarizes the find-ings as follows:

1. APsaA is entitled to determine its own training and qualification standards, utterly independent of any standards that the IPA may establish. APsaA, for example, does not need to conform to any of the “Three Models” set out in the IPA’s Procedural Code;

2. Despite another section of the IPA’s Rules stating that all com-ponent organizations must be in compliance with the IPA’s Proce-dural Code (which includes training and qualification stan-dards), this does not overrule APsaA’s entitlement to deter-mine its own training and quali-fication standards—APsaA is required to comply only with those parts of IPA Criteria which are unrelated to training and qualification standards;

3. A consequence of this is that APsaA is absolutely entitled to apply equivalency standards of its own devising when deciding whether to admit into APsaA membership (and, thus, into IPA membership) psychoanalysts trained elsewhere.

The institutional relationship of the IPA and APsaA is clearly a matter of significant importance to all of us. I thought it would be helpful for you to have this information at this time since I think it is the clearest state-ment yet of the extent of APsaA’s independence from the IPA regarding training and qualification standards.

…World War II broke out and at the conclusion of the war

the geography of psychoanalysis had shifted dramatically.


oversight by the IPA. The IPA could, of course, offer advice (“advisory role”) but without any specific authority regarding training standards, except, perhaps, in the most extreme and egregious circumstances where the two organizations could not con-tinue their connection. The authority of the IPA would be limited to the recognition (approval) of new training programs in other countries which did not have a national orga-nization like APsaA. Millet’s account is like a Rosetta Stone, offering an understanding of what the words in the IPA bylaws describing the Regional Association, Rule 4A (3), mean, in particular the word “ultimately,” and in addition tells us why that section relating to the Regional Association (i.e., APsaA) is so brief and uncomplicated.

The second account, “Committees at Work” by Ives Hendrick, was published in a 1948 issue of the Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytical Association (http://pep-web.org/document.php?id=bap.004d.0022a). Also written by Millet, this second account is a less personal version of the same meeting, found in his report from the International Commit-tee of APsaA to the Executive Council at its 1948 meeting. It concluded as follows:

…The fears of our American col-leagues that the officers of the International Association would wish to control such matters as the standards of training and regula-tions for the acceptability of candi-dates appear to be unfounded. The mushroom growth of the psycho-analytic movement in the United States has created a situation, which our English colleagues realize will require a larger measure of auton-omy in the national associations.

Some feeling, however, was expressed that the International Association should retain an advi-sory function, with sufficient author-ity to safeguard the interests of science in those areas where psy-choanalysis is invading virgin territory. [emphasis added]

FURTHER CLARIFICATIONRobert Wallerstein, in his 1998 detailed

book on the history of the lay analysis issue. Lay Analysis: Life Inside the Controversy, alludes to the meeting and in addition quotes from another mention of the meeting found in A Brief History of the International Psycho-analytical Association by Adam Limentani, in a 1996 issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.

Working, evidently without Millet’s report available, Wallerstein nonetheless describes the agreement as having

…two main components: (1) The Americans would have total auton-omy in regard to training stan-dards in the United States with no IPA oversight (such as did exist in relation to all other component Societies in other nations); (2) the American would have this “exclusive

franchise” in its geographical area, meaning that the IPA would recog-nize no training bodies in the U.S. other than those under the aus-pices of the American.

The special status of APsaA among all the IPA Constituent Organizations was codified in the IPA Bylaws in 1963 with the words: “A Regional Association comprises a number of Societies in a Continental, Subcontinental or National Region in which ultimate responsibility for

matters related to the training and qualification of psycho-analysts is assigned to the Regional Association. [emphases in original]

As a result of part of the settle-ment of the psychologists’ lawsuit in the 1990s, through an IPA bylaw amendment, the second point of the agreement was removed, so APsaA’s exclusive franchise was rescinded, but the first part of the agreement, APsaA’s ultimate (now “ultimately” in Rule 4A (3) author-ity or “total authority” was left intact. Hence, APsaA is a part of the IPA, but is not under the IPA’s control insofar as training stan-dards are concerned. APsaA is not required to maintain IPA training standards in the approved institutes but clearly may deviate from those standards, within reason, in what-ever way it sees fit.


APsaA and the IPAContinued from page 13

Editor’s Note: For more information

about this article’s sources, please contact Ralph Fishkin at

[email protected].

…APsaA is a part of the IPA, but is not under the IPA’s

control insofar as training standards are concerned.


Today the map of the IPA stretches beyond the areas in which psychoanalysis was born and developed. Many North American members have expressed interest in the IPA’s support of new programs in countries around the world.

The International New Groups (ING) Committee, chaired by Maria Teresa Hooke, responds to and fosters new psychoanalytic groups in many countries. Members of the committee are appointed by the IPA presi-dent in consultation with the board and the committee chair. The chair reports to the board at each meeting and informs the pres-ident and Executive Committee of important developments between meetings. ING mate-rial is available through the IPA website at http://www.ipa.world.

We now are witnessing a “second wave” of expansion that followed the political and social changes after the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the former USSR, and the opening of China to the West after 1978. Globalization, the growing presence of psychoanalytic thinking, the diffusion of psychological therapies, and major cultural shifts have fostered a climate in which numerous new groups have formed.

Currently, the ING works with 20 study groups and 6 provisional societies that cur-rently train 450 candidates. Countries with Study Groups include: Bulgaria, Estonia-Latvia, Lithuania, Lebanon, Russia, Portugal, South Africa, Turkey, Paraguay, Brazil (five groups), Mexico (two groups) and Panama. In North America, Vermont and in Asia, South Korea and Taiwan. Provisional Societies have been established in Russia, Rumania, Turkey, Croa-tia, Serbia and France. In addition, there are two IPA training institutes: The Psychoanalytic Institute of Eastern Europe (PIEE), now called the European Psychoanalytic Institute (EPI), the Latin American Institute of Psychoanalysis (ILAP) and the China Committee which is also part of the wider umbrella of the ING. We work with four Allied Centres: in China, Korea, Taiwan, and Tunisia.

The ongoing work with these nascent psy-choanalytic entities involves enormous time, energy, expense and the participation of many members.

CHINA COMMITTEEThe IPA China Development Committee

was formed in 2007 with the appointment of Peter Loewenberg by President Claudio Eizirik. Loewenberg and Paolo Fonda of Trieste, head of the PIEE, undertook an intensive site visit to Shanghai and Beijing in May 2007 and issued an extensive report with a plan to implement IPA activity in China. Connections were made with different universities and psychiatric hos-pitals in Beijing, where the first psychoanalyti-cal training began in 2008, when a group of 10 candidates was selected to take seminars. The teachers came partly from the Sino-Norwegian psychotherapy program, a pro-gram started by the current chair of the China Committee, Sverre Varvin, in 2006. Other teachers like Alf Gerlach came from the Sino-German training program in Shanghai. The candidates had the fortunate opportu-nity of an established training analyst in Bei-jing. She stayed there for four years doing “in person analysis” and, afterwards, shuttled to Beijing twice a year (and continues to do so).

In 2011 the second psychoanalytic training started with a group of 10 candidates in Shanghai in cooperation with the Shanghai Mental Health Center. All the candidates, except one, are psychiatrists working in the Mental Health Center, and the training analyst who worked with them also had a connection to the Center. This group had the possibility of having in-person psychoanalysis with a training analyst who stayed eight months every year in China. One candidate has shuttled to the U.S. for 100 sessions a year over several years.

N E W P S Y C H O A N A L Y T I C P R O G R A M S


Lewis Kirshner, M.D., is training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Maria Teresa Hooke is training and supervising analyst of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society and chair of the International New Groups (ING) Committee.

Madeleine Bachner is training and supervising analyst of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the China Committee.

Building New Psychoanalytic Programs WorldwideM a r i a Te r e s a H o o k e a n d M a d e l e i n e B a c h n e r

(prepared by Lewis Kirshner on behalf of the North American Representatives to the IPA Board)

Many members in North America have expressed interest

in the IPA’s development programs in countries around the world.

We asked Maria Teresa Hooke, the chair of the the International

New Groups Committee (ING), and Madeleine Bachner from the

China Committee to summarize their current activities.

Maria Teresa Hooke Madeleine Bachner

An earlier version of the paper by Maria Teresa Hooke was published on

the first issue of the IPA EJournal.


A third training group spanning several cit-ies, including Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, is now being planned. We have several appli-cants and admission interviews are under way. The seminars will be conducted both by e-learning and in person, with teachers com-ing two to three times a year. What is different and important this time is that the Training Committee will involve Chinese direct mem-bers who will be assistant teachers during seminars. The biggest challenge for the new training is access to training analysis and the possibility to have as much in-person analysis as possible. The China Committee is working with this issue together with ING trying to find solutions within the guidelines of IPA training.

The IPA now welcomes five direct mem-bers in China and we hope gradually to move them toward applying for “study group” status. This will be the first step in establishing a society and a training institute in which the Chinese analysts can gradually take over the functions of the committee, including the training of new candidates. In addition, the Outreach Committee, a sub-committee of the China Committee, has been very active in initiating programs for professionals in the mental health area. They have organized seminars on infant observa-tion, attachment research and mentalization.

The work in the China Committee is demanding, stimulating and sometimes diffi-cult. Members are Western psychoanalysts trying to transmit their view of psychoanaly-sis into a country and culture that is very dif-ferent from our own, but, of course, there is much common ground as we are all human beings with desire and curiosity to under-stand the human mind.

FIRST ENCOUNTERThere is a persistent misconception among

members and the public that the IPA and the ING go into new areas like a colonial power. The reality is different; when the ING is asked for help, it responds to the call. The request is inevitably complex, a mixture of need for help, hopefulness at the dawning of individual rights and personal freedom, a quest for

identity, desire to better understand the human mind, and the possibility of relieving personal suffering. New groups begin in a variety of ways, each holding significant con-sequences for future development, yet ING has found common patterns. Often, pioneers who trained in another country bring back a passion to introduce psychoanalysis in their own country. In other countries, where a long-standing psychoanalytic tradition has been crushed by repressive regimes, we see its resurgence under improved political con-ditions. Some groups wish to move away from large societies to develop training in their own cities and to form a separate iden-tity; others have split from an existing society for ethical reasons or unsolvable conflicts.

When a group contacts the ING, a small committee is appointed to assess the possi-bilities of development and then to follow its growth. These sponsors travel twice a year to distant places and different continents with a complex and delicate task: to facilitate, edu-cate, mediate and guide. They work with the new group for five or six years helping to build the basics of a future psychoanalytical society—its organizational structure, training, scientific life and outreach activities.

The encounter between the two cultures, the local culture and the IPA culture transmit-ted by the sponsors, is an emotionally charged encounter. The local group brings desire, expectations, curiosity, hope, need and appre-hension, while the sponsors carry a commit-ment to psychoanalysis and its transmission. The emotions of the group can inspire the sponsors to relive the enthusiasm and wish to learn of their own first encounters with psy-choanalysis. Strong bonds develop and, at times, emotional storms, perhaps necessary and unavoidable engines of these projects. The participants live through a process that changes both parties. ING does not come to bring a closed and dogmatic application of psychoanalysis. More than a matter of intro-ducing Freud and our great thinkers, it aims to encourage a way of thinking analytically, a sharing of the humanizing potential of psycho-analysis and of its universal values, and of its critical and secular thinking.

The transmission of the culture and of the institutional experience of the IPA and its

democratic system of governance also plays a large part. Inevitably, the encounter works both ways. Under the impact of different cultures, histories, and social and educational practices, the sponsors must rethink fundamental psy-choanalytic tenets many are accustomed to take for granted. The tension between the two cultures is always there, as a creative or destructive force depending on the group’s dynamics and the sponsors’ capacity to main-tain a constructive and containing perspective in an emotionally charged atmosphere.

The process involves what Javier Garcia calls “disrobing,” which refers to our capacity in entering new territories to “disassemble” modes of functioning enshrined in our insti-tutions of origin in order to be open to what is “psychoanalytically creative and different.” Experience teaches us something obvious; the beginnings in every group are crucial for its future development. In many regions where psychoanalysis is developing during this second wave, countries have suffered massive historical and social trauma. Spon-sors learn the repercussions of history on the groups, including transgenerational transmis-sion of traumas, historical legacies, persistent ethical issues, conflicts between generations and power struggles. It follows that the atten-tion of the sponsors and of the ING to group dynamics has become an essential part of the work with new groups.

WHAT IGNITES THE FLAME?Paolo Fonda has the view that the crumbling

of totalitarian regimes, which are repressive but also protective, creates new vulnerabilities and raises deep survival anxieties in individu-als now seeking containment and help. Fonda connects this with the huge development of psychotherapies in the past 10 years. In his view, the societal changes open up a space for personal individuation and for psychoanalysis. We are looking at a new phenomenon: the individual emerging from a group that envel-oped him and who is now left exposed. Something similar may be occurring in China, where disorienting and sudden socioeconomic changes and a materialist ethos threaten the traditional Confucian philosophy of family cohesion, harmony, duties and obligations.

N E W P S Y C H O A N A L Y T I C P R O G R A M S

Psychoanalytic ProgramsContinued from page 15



The American College of Psychoanalysts has been an important professional organi-zation for many psychoanalysts, including APsaA’s president-elect, Harriet Wolfe, and councilors-at-large, Malkah Notman and me. Now the College has opened its member-ship for its annual meeting on May 13, 2016, in Atlanta. The College meeting this year offers a highly engaging panel of speakers including Robert Michels, Sander Gilman and Paul Ekman.

The American College of Psychoanalysts was founded in 1969 by Henry Laughlin, who also founded the American College of Psychiatrists at the same time. The College was initially chartered as an organization for psychiatric psychoanalysts. The membership consisted of psychiatric psychoanalysts who had made academic contributions in scholar-ship and education at psychoanalytic insti-tutes or universities. New members were brought in by invitation, based both on their contributions and on their future potential as leaders in psychiatric psychoanalysis. From its inception, the College was apolitical and prided itself on its strong collegial atmo-sphere in which members from around the country could freely share and discuss psy-choanalytic ideas.

Its membership has consistently viewed psychoanalysis as practiced by psychiatrists as having many unique features. Training in med-ical school, and later psychiatry residency, has always emphasized the importance of main-taining an ongoing focus on diagnosis and the interface between mind and body. The flow-ering of sophisticated neuroscience, as articu-lated by Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, who has

met with the College, returns to the forefront our apprecia-tion of mind and body. In addition, many members treat some patients in psychoanalysis while simultane-ously prescribing psychotropic medications. They balance the benefits and disadvan-tages that psychotropic medications bring to the psychoanalytic process. College members were also, in view of their training in psychiatry, focused on research studies and how empirical evidence informs daily clinical practice.

The College is encouraged that other psychoanalyst practitioners have their own organizations, such as for psychologists (Division 39) or social workers (American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work), just as the College exists for psychiatrists. Yet, we find a common ground, even comity, just as the early psychoanalysts did in Vienna and Berlin.

The College’s annual meeting, usually scheduled in conjunction with either the American Psychiatric Association or the American Psychoanalytic Association, has two plenary speakers in the morning and several colloquia in the afternoon. Luminar-ies on neuro-psychoanalysis have included Gerald Edelman, Steven Pinker, Jaak Pank-sepp, David Silberszweig, Alfred Lewy and Joseph LaDoux. Other plenary speakers have included well-known researchers such as Howard Shevrin, Norman Rosenthal, Charles Nemeroff, Vamik Volkan, Robert Michels, Nancy Andreason, Robert Emde, Mardi Horwitz and Richard C. Friedman. The second plenary speaker would often be an expert in anthropology or literature. The afternoon colloquia focused on a wide

range of psychoanalytic topics, including developing psychoanalytic understandings of prominent political figures and of psycho-analytic practice in other countries. Over the past 10 years the College expanded its membership to include international mem-bers, discussing clinical work in France, Tur-key and Germany.

The College has always invited psychiatrist psychoanalytic candidates in the cities where meetings were held to attend the scientific meeting and annual banquet free of charge. This is designated as Laughlin Fellowships, supported by Henry Laughlin’s generosity. The College also established membership opportunities for candidates several years ago. Spouses/partners have always been wel-come to attend meetings.

NEW OPPORTUNITIESIn the past several years, members of

the College have become increasingly aware of the decline in psychodynamic teaching for psychiatric trainees and the need for readily available educational opportunities for psychiatrists who wish to expand their understanding of psychodynamics. Mem-bers have also become increasingly aware of how the unique professional identity of the psychiatric psychoanalyst might be better presented by other professional organizations committed to training and research, such as residency training pro-grams, medical schools and, of course, neu-roscience programs.

To address the paucity of psychodynamic training, the College has initiated a program for early career psychiatrists (ECPs) called “Clinical Enhancement of Psychodynamic Skills: Virtual Psychotherapy Rounds.” ECPs participate in distance learning via video con-ferencing through twice-monthly group semi-nars led by a member of the College. Sixteen ECPs applied from 12 states, D.C., and India, forming two groups of eight. These confer-ences are focused on psychodynamic issues in conducting psychotherapy in the attend-ees’ actual practice.

This past year the College has opened its membership appeal to all psychiatric psycho-analysts trained to APsaA or IPA standards.

A M E R I C A N C O L L E G E O F P S Y C H O A N A L Y S T S


Norman A. Clemens, M.D., is president of the American College of Psychoanalysts, training and supervising analyst at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, and emeritus clinical professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University.

The American College of PsychoanalystsN o r m a n A . C l e m e n s

Norman A. Clemens


A community of psychoanalysts, scholars and activists focused on the issue of Finding Courage to Fight Violence Against Women at the IPA Committee on Women and Psycho-analysis Conference held in Washington, D.C., March 4-5. The conference was co-spon-sored by the Contemporary Freudian Soci-ety, the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis.

In recent years there has been a surge in awareness of the many arenas in which vio-lence against women occurs. In this confer-ence, psychoanalysts showed how violence can be seen, known and represented on the world stage and in psychoanalytic treatment. Throughout, there was an interweaving of psychoanalytic thinking and how it can be uti-lized to understand traumatic violence. Scholars and psychoanalysts from Argentina, Mexico, Peru, the United Kingdom and the United States addressed this serious prob-lem along with depictions of violence against women in film, art, drama and poetry. Diverse perspectives and multiple modalities brought the topic to life demonstrating the courage to fight violence as it plays out globally and in the unconscious.

HEALING BY SYMBOLIZINGPresentations on sex trafficking, sexual

assaults on college campuses, forced genital mutilation of young girls, and the rampant rape of incarcerated women brought neces-sary attention to problem areas. Psychoana-lytic insight and understanding facilitated the containment of horrors. Discussions of wit-nessing and the ways that processing trauma makes for courage and resilience accompa-nied graphic presentations of interviews with victims of sex trafficking, femicide in Mexico, asylum-seekers and refugees, all victims of violence against women.

Psychoanalysis and community interven-tions came together in a project in the Yucatan Peninsula. A psychoanalyst works with young professionals traumatized through their inter-ventions with adolescent female victims of rape and childhood marriage. An instance of the process of healing by symbolizing trauma was demonstrated by community interven-tions in post-conflict countries through sew-ing circles. Here women victims weave story cloths bringing narrative and symbolization to processing unnamed trauma.

Presentations of how images represent vio-lence against women in classical and contem-porary paintings and sculpture, and the power

of women in pre-Colombian Andean ceram-ics allowed for powerful sensory experiences. Filmmakers, poets and a playwright’s musical docudrama provided further artistic explora-tion of demonstrating courage to represent, know and fight violence against women. The Hunting Ground is a film in which two women who created a movement to fight sexual violence on campuses were interviewed. As they made trauma of rape speakable and offered their witnessing of other victims, their activism formed into an effective national NGO. Identifications with the perpetrators were broken through containment and alli-ances. In another film, Nina Quebrada, an adolescent girl is betrayed by her boyfriend, imprisoned in a brothel, and comes close to being defeated in shame and helplessness.

V I O L E N C E C O N F E R E N C E

Courage to Fight Violence Against WomenIPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis ConferenceP a u l a L . E l l m a n a n d N a n c y R . G o o d m a n


Paula L. Ellman, Ph.D., ABPP, private practice in Rockville, MD and D.C.; training and supervising analyst CFS and IPA; vice president CFS Board, member—IPA COWAP; visiting professor, Sino-American Training Project, Wuhan China; publishes on enactment, sadomasochism and unconscious fantasy.

Nancy R. Goodman, Ph.D., private practice, Bethesda, MD, training and supervising analyst (CFS and IPA). She publishes about trauma (The Power of Witnessing), enactments, sadomasochism (Battling Life and Death Forces), unconscious fantasy, and directs the Virtual Psychoanalytic Museum.

Paula L. Ellman Nancy R. Goodman

Paula Ellman, Myra Sklarew, Nancy Goodman, Andrea Pino, Annie Clark, Joy Kassett, Donald Campbell and Brenda Smith.

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Transforming shame into courage, she breaks out and reunites with her family in reparation and return. Psy-choanalytic understanding of ruptured object relations and repair is dramati-cally demonstrated.

UNCONSCIOUS FANTASYPsychoanalysts presented clinical

papers on the ruthless rage of a man in treatment and the powerful mater-nal imago in the analysis of a woman by a woman, both connected to fears of the all-powerful early mother. Psy-choanalysts considered the place of unconscious fantasy in both perpetrator and victim while keeping close the work of activ-ists who demonstrate strength by conquering fear to bring change and make a difference. This conference, with its immense creativity, brought together both internal psychic reali-ties with harsh external realities. The confer-ence organizers wanted psychoanalysis to meet the traumas of violence in scholarship, activism and the arts and to highlight the cour-age it takes to face the horror of violence.

In addition to the two authors, the Con-ference Planning Committee was composed of Margarita Cereijido, Robin Dean, Justine Kalas-Reeves, Joy Kassett, Lizbeth Moses and Carla Neely.

* * *

The IPA Committee on Women and Psy-choanalysis (COWAP) is grateful to the con-ference participants: Cecile Bassen, Alexandra Billinghurst, Raquel Berman, Donald Camp-bell, Annie Clark and Andrea Pino, Rachel Cohen, Paula L. Ellman, Hope Ferdowsian, Louis Goodman, Nancy R. Goodman, Ger-traud Schlesinger-Kipp, Moises Lemlij, Janice Lieberman, Gail Humphries Mardirosian, Maureen Meyer, E. Ethelbert Miller, Vivian Pender, Rosine Perelberg, Jack Rasmussen, Arlene Kramer Richards, Diana Romero, Katalin Roth, Myra Sklarew, Brenda Smith and Peter Starr.

On the other hand, ideologies and political systems can continue to influence groups forming in countries with recent histories of political violence and totalitarian governance. ING has observed these patterns repeated in the life of the group.

COMPLEX SCENARIOToday the ING operates in a much more

complex and delicate environment. In some countries, the sociopolitical context remains unstable, unpredictable, possibly dangerous, and the implications for our groups and our sponsors are not always easy to evaluate. We also face the fact that nowadays there are very few truly new areas. The local scene into which the ING enters is usually heavily satu-rated with psychotherapy organizations and psychoanalytic programs, some well qualified others less so, at times in competition with the IPA. The way ING approaches the scene, our attitude, and how we move among the inter-twined network of relationships, is extremely important and affects the development of new groups and future IPA societies. What Freud recommended in 1914 in his Papers on Technique and what Bion echoed in his paper Notes on Memory and Desire continue to be useful today. In our encounters with patients in the consulting room and with other cultures, we strive for an open, receptive state of mind, free of expectations, inclinations or judgment. Both Freud and Bion recommended the analyst remain open to the unknown, but both also understood that the dread of the unknown is common to the human experi-ence, common to both analyst and patient, and also in the encounter with another cul-ture. An open mind on our part implies the capacity of psychoanalysis to reflect on the universality of its basic assumptions and on the possibility that these could find a home in very different cultural contexts.

Psychoanalytic ProgramsContinued from page 16

Membership is no longer by invitation and all psychiatric psychoanalysts are welcome to become members. This includes psychiatric psychoanalysts from around the world; there are now members from Europe and Japan.

At the College’s annual meeting in Atlanta the preliminary program includes Paul Ekman, discussing his work on emotions and his work with the Dali Lama; Robert Michels, speaking on the unique identity of the psy-chiatric psychoanalyst; Virginia Barry on the sense of smell; and Sander Gilman, discussing his new work on how biases become diag-nostic entities.

The American College of Psychoanalysts provides a professional home for psychiatric

psychoanalysts where their unique identity can be recognized and nurtured. The Col-lege aspires to help remedy the decline in psychodynamic thinking within psychiatry, to keep the psyche alive in psychiatry. And the College, since its inception, has continued a strong commitment to research, which must remain a central tenet for psychoanalysis. The members of the College feel strongly these efforts will strengthen psychoanalysis as a whole and that fostering the unique identities that make up our world of psy-choanalysis will strengthen psychoanalysis overall. Each individual discipline within psy-choanalysis can make its own valuable con-tribution to the vitality of our field. Psychiatric psychoanalysts who wish to join the College will find the application form on its website, AmericanCollegeofPsychoanalysts.org.

American CollegeContinued from page 17

Editor’s Note: For more information about the sources

for this article, contact the author at [email protected].

Story Cloth of Common Threads“This is hard to say in words”

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