Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

"I started to notice that the very things that I was seeing in patients on the couch were occurring at a much greater macro level in society - the issues of disavowal, of exceptionalism, of abandoning reality if it means that you have to give something up. That is why I got so interested in the subject as an analyst because I thought: We have something to say about what is happening in the world."  

 

Episode Description: We discuss the differing states of mind with which the climate crisis is currently being viewed. One assumption is built on exceptionalism with its characteristic omnipotence of thought, idealization, and denial of separateness. The other is object-related with its recognition of fragility, mourning, and the potential for joy. 

We consider the implications of applying insights from the couch to the culture. We appreciate the importance of 'lively entitlement' as contrasted with its narcissistic version and how that liveliness invigorates so many of our passions. We review case material, the recognition of both manifest and latent levels of meaning, and the role of 'therapeutic activism'. We conclude with learning a bit about Sally's early years and its role in her current dedication. 

 

Our Guest: Sally Weintrobe, BScHons, Chartered Clin. Psychol., a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society, and chair of the International Psychoanalytic Association's Climate Committee. Formerly she was a member of senior staff at the Tavistock Clinic, Hon Senior Lecturer at the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London and she Chaired the Scientific Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Society. Her published areas of interest are entitlement attitudes and their relationship to grievance and complaint, prejudice, our relationship to nature and psychoanalytic reflections on the climate crisis. She is one of the 31 Global Commissioners from different disciplines for the (2021) Cambridge Sustainability Report. She edited and contributed to (2012) Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New Library of Psychoanalysis. 

Her new book is (2021) Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare, published by Bloomsbury. 

 

 

Recommended Readings: 

Psychoanalytic and Psychosocial Perspectives on the Climate Crisis. Hoggett, P. (2012).  

Climate Change in a Perverse Culture. In S. Weintrobe (Ed.), Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: New Library of Psychoanalysis and Routledge. 

 

Orange, D. (2017). Climate Change, Psychoanalysis and Radical Ethics. Oxford: Routledge. 

 

Randall, R. (2012). Great Expectations: The Psychodynamics of Ecological Debt. In S. Weintrobe (Ed.). op cit. 

 

Searles, H. F. (1972). Unconscious Processes in Relation to the Environmental Crisis. Psychoanal. Rev., 59 (3): 361–74. 

 

General Background to the Climate Crisis. Higgins, P. (2015). Eradicating Ecocide. London: Shepheard Walwyn. 

 

Klein, N. (2019). On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. London: Penguin. 

 

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

 

Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. London: Penguin. 

 

Thunberg, G. (2019). No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. London: Penguin. 

Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Penguin. 

 

"It’s very exhilarating to have shared an in-depth experience with another person the way you do as an analyst. You know the inner workings of people’s struggles, of their strengths, and of the things they overcome. We’re granted such a privilege to be part of someone’s’ world and to be able to help them get more freedom and more pleasure in that world, and when it works well, the patients are really exhilarated in the end."

 

 

Episode Description: Dr. Kantrowitz discovered many facets of the analytic process, termination period, and post-analytic time that challenge assumptions under which the field has been operating. She derived these conclusions from detailed interviews with 82 individuals who had completed their analyses. We review the common post analysis intrapsychic processes that former analysands face and recognize that neither certainties nor formulas do justice to the authenticity and variety of their experiences. We discuss the multiplicity of affects that accompany endings and review the delicacy of negotiating the closeness and distance that the two individuals may face in post-analytic contacts. We conclude with Dr. Kantrowitz sharing some of the personal meanings that her interest in termination has had for her.

 

Our Guest: “Hard to believe; I have been doing psychoanalysis for almost 50 years. I began my training at a time when psychologists were not permitted to analyze patients except for research purposes. If not for this requirement, I wonder whether I would ever have begun a research project since my interest was only in being a clinician — and it is true to this day. Since my early progressive education taught me to question authority, it was always hard for me to just accept what we were taught.

My research has been in investigating issues that made no sense to me: the ability to predict who is analyzable in advance; psychoanalysis as a one-person enterprise; countertransference as inevitably pathology rather than informative; how we preserve confidentiality in writing about patients; there being only one way of terminating a psychoanalysis.

My interest has always been in character. I have always been a reader of novels, wanted to be a writer originally but lacked that imaginative ark. I've been lucky to find a way to integrate my love of character and writing in my professional work. I have written four books: The Patient's Impact on the Analyst (1996); Writing about Patients: responsibilities, risks, and ramifications (2006); Myths of Termination: What patients can teach analyst about endings (2014) and The Role of Patient - Analyst Match in the Process and Outcome of Psychoanalysis (2020) as well as over 40 papers. Over the years my writing has become more and more purely clinical, and I have felt increasingly able to be more personal, hopefully without being inappropriate, in what I write.

I love to supervise, to teach, to mentor and have been fortunate to have ample opportunity to do all of that as a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute as well as working with many other analysts in other states.  Psychoanalysis has also provided me with a world of colleagues many of whom have become close friends. My hope is that I have helped to convey and provide for others some of the richness and joy that psychoanalysis has brought to my life.

 

Recommended Readings:

Kantrowitz, J.L. (2015). Myths of Termination: What Patients Can Teach Psychoanalysts About Endings. Routledge, London

 

Kantrowitz, J.L. Reflections on Mortality: A Patient Faces Death. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Assn.2017: 65:673-686

 

Kantrowitz, J.L. A Psychoanalytic Memoir: The Analyst, Enabled and Disabled by What's Persona. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Assn,2020.:68 83-100.

 

"The workbook contextualizes the child in his or her network. The idea being that the more the child has a supportive network and that they can use this network, the more they will be able to

face the aspects of COVID-19. So it’s not only the illness and having people in the family who are ill or might have died, but also the other impacts of COVID-19 which is to livelihood."

 

Episode Description:

We begin by describing the challenges to making mental health resources available to children in a materially impoverished community in South Africa. Ms. Davids organized a team and built upon the work done by Dr. Gilbert Kliman who had created a workbook for American children to aid in processing the difficult emotional circumstances of living under COVID. She and her South African colleagues modified this workbook to meet the cultural characteristics of the local community. We discuss the format and content of the workbook and its success in aiding the children in representing their individual voices as well as their place in the collective chorus. We close with her sharing her family history of community outreach in South Africa.

 

Our Guest:

Jennifer Davids M.Sc. Clinical Psychology (U.C.T) is a child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst, a member of the teaching staff at BPAS, a supervising analyst for child and adolescent psychoanalysis at the British Psychoanalytical Society in London as well as the Director, Africa Projects, at the Children's Psychological Health Center in San Francisco, California.

 

Workbook: http://www.sdu.uct.ac.za/sdu/publications/books

 

Email: [email protected]

 

Recommended Readings:

Eagle, G. and Kaminer, D. 2013 Continuous traumatic stress: Expanding the Lexicon of Traumatic Stress.Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 19,2,85-99.

 

Marans, S., Smaller, M., Twemlow, S. and Oppenheim, L. 2014 Round Table: Being A socially Active Psychoanalyst in the 21st Century. Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy 13,4, 283 -297.

 

Straker, G. & the Sanctuaries Counselling Team. 1987 The Continuous Traumatic Stress Syndrome: The single therapeutic interview Psychology in Society, 8, 48-78.

 

Holinger, P.C., Spira, N., Barrett, D. and Barrett, T.F. 2020 Psychoanalysis and public health: Potential for integration? International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 17:39-48.

"What kind of home [institute] have you got to live in? If you design a home, not as a refuge but where there is a place to be able to think, it’s a slightly different concept. I’m not going to hide you in this secondary container, but I am going to help you to think in this secondary container. Then it feels easier to turn to colleagues and be open to them and get help. Whereas if you think that colleagues are going to be making judgments about you in this more paranoid-schizoid way, then it is not a safe place to go. And then you become stuck doing things that otherwise you would not have done."

 

Description: We discuss the ambiguity between technical and common-sense language as it applies to clinical concepts, i.e. 'resistance' and 'boundaries'. We trace the development of early curiosity through the child's experience of frustration and encouragement. Internal conflict is valued as an intrapsychic capacity as well as that which takes place at the boundary of the analytic encounter. There, unconscious beliefs can be recognized as the internal constructions that they are which then allows for uncertainty, creativity, and curiosity. This has application to our understanding of ethics and collegiality which Philip describes as the 'secondary container' of our work. We close with a conversation about his childhood development that contributed to his current interests.

 

Our Guest: Philip Stokoe is a Psychoanalyst in private practice in London working with adults and couples, and is an Organisational Consultant, providing consultation to a wide range of organizations. He worked in the Adult Department of the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust between 1994 and 2012 and he was the Clinical Director from 2007.

During his career he developed a model for understanding organizations called the Healthy Organization Model. He also designed the Primary Care Psychotherapy Consultation Service (PCPCS) as well as two Masters’ courses and was the co-designer of the Couple Psychotherapy Training at the Tavistock Clinic. He is a member of the European Psychoanalytic Federation Forum on Institutional Matters, which studies the nature of psychoanalytic institutions.

His book, The Curiosity Drive: Our Need for Inquisitive Thinking, was published by Phoenix Publishing House in November 2020. 

 

Recommended Readings:

 

Stokoe, P. (2000): Holding the Boundaries, Chapter 4 in S. Brookes & P. Hodson (Eds), The Invisible Matrix, Rebus Press.

 

Stokoe, P. (2003): Group Thinking, Chapter 6 in K. Kasinski, J. Pooley, A. Ward, & A. Worthington (Eds), Therapeutic Communities for Children & Young People.

 

Stokoe, P. (2010): The Theory and Practice of the Group Relations Conference, Chapter 9 in The Groups Book, Psychoanalytic Group Therapy: Principles and Practice, C. Garland (Ed), Karnac Books.

 

Stokoe, P. (2011): The Healthy and the Unhealthy Organisation: how can we help teams to remain effective? Chapter 13 in A. Rubitel & D. Reiss (Ed), Containment in the Community: Frameworks for Thinking about Antisocial Behaviour and Mental Health, Karnac Books.

 

Stokoe, P. (2013): James Fisher (1937-2012) An Appreciation. In: Couple and Family Psychoanalysis Vol 3 No. 1, pp 120-127.

 

Stokoe, P. (2013): Review of Richard III at Tobacco Factory, Bristol. In: Couple and Family Psychoanalysis Vol 3 No. 2, pp 263-266.

 

Morgan, M & Stokoe, P. (2014): Curiosity. In: Couple and Family Psychoanalysis 4(1) 42–55

 

Stokoe, P. (2015): Ethics and Complaints Procedures for Psychoanalytic Organisations: Some Thoughts About Principles. In: Couple & Family Psychoanalysis 5(2) 188–204

 

Stokoe, P. (2019): The Unconscious in Social and Political Life, Chapter 1, Where have all the adults gone? in Morgan, D (Ed); Bicester, Phoenix Publishing House

 

Stokoe, P. (2019): Loss in Organisations, in Akhtar, S (Ed), Loss: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms, Part 2, Chapter 4, Routledge

 

Stokoe, P. (2020): The Curiosity Drive: Our Need for Inquisitive Thinking, Bicester, Phoenix Publishing House

"We, as analysts, really need to use our psychoanalytic understanding of the value of the inner life of every individual and of the value of growth and development that occurs in a relationship. We need to use that kind of knowledge to find alternative ways, other than the intensive treatment we offer in our offices, to reach those not only in developing countries but also in our own country."

 

Episode Description: We begin with a conversation on the nature of altruism and the benefit it offers to the self. We specifically consider the role it plays in repairing "mismatches" that we all have in our pasts. Dr. Harrison describes the many activities of her international organization, Supporting Child Caregivers. She walks us through her early training in infant development and the learning curve she went through when she first brought that knowledge to an orphanage in El Salvador. Her experiences there taught her how to find the care-givers' language which enabled her to help them engage with the children with greater attunement. We consider the presence of trauma in the lives of these families and the help that sensitive caregiving can provide. A clinical vignette from her work in Pakistan demonstrates the power of 'magic moments.'

 

Our Guest:

Alexandra Murray Harrison, M.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in Adult and Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis, and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Harrison has an adult and child psychoanalytic and psychiatric private practice in Cambridge Massachusetts. She has a particular clinical interest in treating preschool children and consulting with their families and treating children with autistic spectrum disorders. In 2017, Dr. Harrison co-founded a non-profit, Supporting Child Caregivers, that offers training in infant-parent mental health to child caregivers throughout the world.

 

Dr. Harrison has co-authored a book on autism and published articles on numerous topics, including body image, play therapy, therapeutic change, and volunteer consultation. Dr. Harrison has lectured extensively in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Central and South America.

 

Recommended Readings:

Supporting Child Caregivers

 

Harrison AM (2014). The Sandwich Model: The 'Music and Dance' of Therapeutic Action, Internat J of Psychoanal, 95(2):313-340. Harrison AM (2017).

 

Harrison AM (2017). Altruism as Reparation of Mismatch or Disruption in the Self, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 37(7): 464-473

 

Harrison A, M Gregory G, Neelgund P, Stieglitz A, (2019). Supporting Child Caregivers in South Indian Orphanages: Identifying 'Ghosts' and Creating 'Angels', Institutionalised Children Explorations and Beyond, 6(2):142-150.

 

Harrison AM, Beebe B (2018). Rhythms of dialogue in infant research and child analysis: Implicit and explicit forms of therapeutic action, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 35(4):367-381.

 

"Persecutory guilt is simply a form of self-attack, it is tormenting and it belongs to the paranoid schizoid position and it is narcissistic. People sometimes don’t fully recognize the narcissism in the paranoid-schizoid position, because it is in that position you are feeling hunted by predators… When we're in the depressive/reparative position other people are real to us, we not only are able to empathize with them we need to go beyond empathy to sympathy in the depressive position where I not only know how you feel, but I care and I wish to relieve your pain."

Description:

We discuss the differences between guilt that reflects concern for the other and alternatively self-abuse that serves narcissistic purposes. The former relates to Klein's depressive/reparative stage, labeled ‘conscience’ by Carveth, and the latter derives from the paranoid/schizoid position, labeled ‘superego’. We review varying technical approaches to each of these clinical presentations and note that the countertransference provides vital guidance in understanding the state of the analysand's mind. We close by considering how the capacity to bear guilt may be a measure of the maturation of a civilization.

 

Our Guest:

Donald L Carveth, Ph.D., RP, FIPA is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought at York University in Toronto. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, past Director of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, and past Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse. He is the author of The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience (Karnac, 2013) and Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2018). He is in private practice in Toronto.

Many of his publications are available at http://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth.

His video-lectures on psychoanalysis may be found at www.youtube.com/doncarveth.

 

Recommended Readings:

Sagan, E. (1988). Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil. New York: Basic Books.

 

Carveth, D. (2013). The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience. London: Karnac.

 

Carveth, D. (2016). Why we should stop conflating the superego with the conscience. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Vol. 22, 1, 15–32.

"Each one of these individuals who I interviewed, watched their testimony or read their last words in the desperate letters they wrote to Nazi agencies asking for a little more time to raise a little more money - each one of these individual Jews of Vienna who I came into contact with, brought me closer to my own roots, to my own grandparents who I loved very much and who I never got to ask the questions."

 

Episode description:

We discuss the political and social context for Freud's years in Vienna starting with Hitler's rise to power in 1933 along with the burning of Freud's books at that time. We learn of the varying optimism and pessimism that were rampant in the Jewish Viennese community culminating in the German invasion in March 1938. We cover the pogrom of March 1938, the role of the witnesses to the atrocities along with the family suicides that became commonplace.

After Freud and most of his family escaped in June 1938 we recognize both the celebration of his reception in London as well as the ongoing calamity that remained in Vienna leading up to Kristallnacht in November 1938.

We also discuss the personal meaning that these events have for Professor Offenberger

 

Our Guest:

Professor Ilana F. Offenberger is a scholar of history and author of the book, The Jews of Nazi-Vienna, 1938-1945: Rescue and Destruction published by Palgrave Macmillan (2017). Professor Offenberger received a Ph.D. in History from Clark University (Worcester, MA) in May 2010, graduating from the doctoral program in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies.  She earned a B.A. in German Studies from Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY) in 2000 and spent a year of undergraduate study in Salzburg, Austria.   Her dissertation, The Nazification of Vienna and the Response of the Viennese Jews was selected for the first annual Radomir Luza Prize for an outstanding work in Austrian and/or Czechoslovak history in 2012. 

 

Since 2012, Offenberger teaches in the department of History at University of Massachusetts- Dartmouth.  Her many courses include “Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust;” “Germany 1933-Present;” “Europe in the 20th Century;” “From Auschwitz to Israel;”  “The Jews of Nazi-Vienna,”

 

She is currently working on a second book project: Preserving Czech-Jewish Life Under Nazi Occupation, 1939-1945.

 

 

 

Recommended Readings:

Bukey, Evan.  Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era 1938-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000) OVERVIEW  HISTORY NAZISM AUSTRIA

 

Clare, George. Last Waltz in Vienna: The Rise and Destruction of a Family: 1842-1942 (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston,1982)  CLASSIC MEMOIR of VIENNESE FAMLY

Offenberger, Ilana F. The Jews of Nazi-Vienna: 1938-1945, Rescue and Destruction.  (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)  COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY JEWISH LIFE IN VIENNA

 

Orgel, Dorris.  The Devil in Vienna. (Logan: Perfection Learning Corporation, 2004).  A GREAT READ FOR YOUNG ADULTS! FRIENDSHIP, FAMILY, LIFE AFTER ANSCHLUSS

 

Spitzer, Leo.  Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (New York: Hill and Wang,1998) MEMOIR: THEMES OF IDENTITY & DISPLACEMENT AFTER EXILE

 

Secher, Pierre H.  Left Behind in Nazi Vienna: Letters of a Jewish family caught in the Holocaust, 1939-1941 (Jefferson: McFarland & Co, 2004) PRIMARY SOUCE LETTER COLLECTION /A VIENNESE FAMILY DESTROYED BY NAZISM

"By sitting down with me, they were really, in a way, forced to be more reflective, so I had only reflected back to them some of what they were saying and not paying attention to, but I think sitting with me encouraged them to be a little more reflective themselves. They would have to slow down because they were trying to attune to me as I was trying to attune to them."

Description: Dr. Steven Rolfe welcomes Dr. Kenneth Eisold to today’s episode to talk about leadership, groups, what psychoanalysis brings to consulting, and the differences between psychoanalysis and consulting with organizations.

 

Kenneth Eisold, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst, who has been consulting on management dilemmas for a number of years. In addition to having a deep understanding of individual behavior, honed through his extensive counseling and coaching practice with executives and leaders, he has a wide understanding of the complexities of system-wide behavior, both overt and covert, affecting the ability of organizations to address their missions.

 

Dr. Eisold is currently President of the William Alanson White Institute In New York City, he previously served as President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. For several years he directed the A. K. Rice Institute’s National Conference, devoted to the study of leadership, authority, and organizational dynamics. He has also worked on conferences designed to help managers grasp the complex dynamics of systems in New York, Washington, Chicago, Houston, St. Louis, and Seattle.

In 2010, he published What You Don't Know You Know: Our Hidden Motives in Life, Business, and Everything Else, a review of unconscious dynamics in individual, group and organizational settings, as understood in psychoanalytic theory and updated by more recent neuropsychological research. 2017 saw the publication of his collected papers on The Organizational Life of Psychoanalysis (La Psicoanalisi e le sue Instituzioni was published two years earlier in Italy.) Dr. Eisold has worked extensively with professional organizations, hospitals, university schools and departments, law firms, and training institutes. He has coached leaders in the financial industry, public health, law, and higher education.

Key takeaways:

[6:26] Dr. Eisold shares his thoughts about the concept of applied psychoanalysis.

[8:07] Dr. Eisold talks about how he got immersed in consulting.

[11:07] What does Dr. Eisold think now about the interaction between the leader and the group after more than 20 years of conceptualizing the myth of the heroic leader?

[13:01] Dr. Eisold explains the differences between therapy and consulting.

[17:45] What does psychoanalysis bring to consulting?

[19:52] Similarities between supervision and consulting.

[22:38] How can psychoanalysts be further trained to work with organizations?

[25:59] Dr. Eisold shares some examples from his work with organizations.

[33:19] Dr. Eisold and  Dr. Rolfe talk about the unconscious needs behind the decision-making process in organizations.

[37:58] Dr. Eisold talks about a case of a trader he used to work with.

[40:11] Dr. Rolfe shares an abstract from one of Dr. Eisold’s papers written in 2004. 

[41:50] Dr. Eisold reflects on the paper he wrote in 2004 and how much is still true today.

 

Mentioned in this episode: 

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org  

 

Recommended Readings:

Eisold, Kenneth, The Organizational Life of Psychoanalysis: Conflicts, Dilemmas and the Future of the Profession, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018.

 

Eisold, Kenneth. Corporate Greed and the New Class System, Chapter 5 in Greed: Developmental, Cultural and Clinical Realms, Salman Akhtar, ed., pp 87 – 105, London: Karnac, 20015.

 

Eisold, Kenneth. Psychoanalysis at Work, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol 22: no 5 ( 2012), pp 517-528.

 

Eisold, Kenneth, What You Don't Know You Know: Our Hidden Motivations in Life, Business, and Everything Else. New York: Other Press, 2010.

“Every individual reaction was specific and idiosyncratic – it was absolutely related to the previous experience. Even the symptoms that were formed could be understood as the reaction to adult trauma but shaped according to a childhood experience.”

 

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Vladimir Jovic to today’s episode. Dr. Jovic is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Belgrade, Serbia, and since the early 90’s he has been working with refugees, war veterans, and victims of torture in former Yugoslavia.

In 1997, together with other colleagues, he established the Center for Rehabilitation of Torture Victims (CRTV) in Belgrade, where they employed a variety of psychosocial programs that were developed in a framework of rehabilitation of torture victims.

Dr. Jovic was active in the development of independent mechanisms for the prevention of torture in places of detention such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals for the National Preventive Mechanism. Today he works as a consultant for the CRTV and has been newly appointed member of the board of trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture.

 

In today’s conversation, Drs. Schwartz and Jovic discuss how an analyst can engage with those who have been involved in torture, the importance of psychosocial outreach and the importance of making sure the basic needs of these individuals are met. Dr. Jovic describes visiting the countryside, making contact with people who have been traumatized all of which embodies the work of psychoanalysts off the couch.

 

Today you will also hear about the role of political cultures facilitating the acting out of individual aggression, the usefulness and limitations of the label of PTSD, and the subject of current trauma and how it relates to childhood vulnerabilities.

 

Key takeaways:

[7:12] What it takes for someone to make it to a psychoanalyst’s office?

[8:27] How did Dr. Jovic learn to work with those involved in torture?

[12:10] Dr. Jovic shares the interventions he uses to engage with these traumatized patients.

[15:04] Dr. Jovic affirms that the reaction to war trauma is directly shaped by childhood experiences.

[17:30] Dr. Jovic shares an example to describe the importance of paying attention to the current trauma.

[18:55] The clinical value of PTSD.

[21:49] The event has to become traumatic in our psyche in order to notice PTSD symptoms.

[23:05] Dr. Jovic talks about how certain political cultures allow for the acting out of impulses.

[28:45] Dr. Jovic talks about the consequences of torture.

[33:45] Dr. Jovics dives deep into the need to rehumanize the lives of the victims of torture and war survivors.

[35:27] What the narratives of the victims unveil.

[37:05] The question that can help an analyst engage with veterans: “What did you do in war that you wished you hadn’t?”

[39:59] Dr. Jovic talks about the thin line between victims and perpetrators.

[40:35] Dr. Jovic shares how at the beginning veterans use to resist treatment since the analyst was not in war and did not have what takes to understand.

[41:35] Dr. Jovic talks about the circumstances that led him to his field of expertise.

 

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

 

Recommended Readings:

Špirić, Ž., Knežević, G., Jović, V., & Opačić, G. (2004). Torture in War, Consequences and Rehabilitation of Victims: Yugoslav experience. Belgrade: IAN-International Aid Network.

 

Opačić, G., Jović, V., Radović, B., & Knežević, G. (2006). Redress in action: Consequences of forcible mobilization of refugees in 1995. Belgrade: International Aid Network.

 

Jović, V. (2017). Kriegstrauma, Migration und ihre Konsequenzen. In M. Leuzinger-Bohleber, U. Bahrke, S. Hau, T. Fischmann, & S. Arnold (Eds.), Flucht, Migration und Trauma: Die Folgen für die nächste Generation (pp. 175–198). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co.

 

Jovic, V., Varvin, S., Rosenbaum, B., Fischmann, T., Leuzinger-Bohleber, M., & Hau, S. (2018). Sleep Studies in Serbian Victims of Torture: analysis of traumatic dreams. In E. Vermetten, T.

C. Neylan, M. Kramer, & S. R. Pandi-Perumal (Eds.), Sleep and Combat-related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Springer Science.

 

Jović, V. (2018). Working with Traumatized Refugees on the Balkan Route. Int J Appl Psychoanal Studies, 187 – 201.

 

Varvin, S., Fischmann, T., Jovic, V., Rosenbaum, B., & Hau, S. (2012). Traumatic dreams: symbolization gone astray. In P. Fonagy, H. Kächele, M. Leuzinger-Bohleber, & D. Taylor (Eds.), The significance of dreams. Bridging Clinical and Extraclinical Research in Psychoanalysis (pp.

182–211). London: Karnac Books.

 

Jović, V. (in press). Refugees, Torture, and Dehumanization. In D. Bughra (Ed.), Oxford Textbook of Migrant Psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

"When you think about the analyst's reverie - we are in a session and something is happening, the patient is telling you something and your mind starts to drift - an image comes to your mind that just sticks and it won't let go. It may well be that something is happening to the patient that they cannot tell you because they don’t know. But it is stirring up something in you that is resonating and an image will come out of that - something that allows us to find a register, a meaningful register, in which to speak to the patient,"

 

Description: Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Prof. Marsha Hewitt to today’s episode. Professor Hewitt is a psychoanalyst with a private practice in Toronto, Canada. She is also a Professor of Religion in the Department of the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, Trinity College.

 

Prof. Hewitt’s books include From Theology to Social Theory: Juan Luis Segundo and the Theology of Liberation, Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis. and Freud on Religion (Key Thinkers in the Study of Religion). Her most recent book is called Legacies of the Occult: Psychoanalysis, Religion and Unconscious Communication. Unconscious communication is precisely the subject that is addressed in today’s episode through a discussion about the early history of psychoanalysis and Freud’s relationship to unconscious communication - what he called ‘thought transference’

 

Prof. Hewitt dives deep into the meaning of being in relation to an analysand, talking about the moments in which an analyst has the experience of daydreaming about something, experiencing a reverie, and moments later, hearing the same thoughts and images from the patient. Dr. Hewitt also emphasizes the importance for analysts to always maintain an open-minded psychoanalytic curiosity about what the meaning of the phenomena happening in the dyad.

 

Key takeaways:

[10:33] Dr. Hewitt talks about unconscious communication.

[15:56] What is the meaning of a cult?

[18:38] Telepathy means feeling in the distance.

[20:26] Prof. Hewitt talks about the term bracketing.

[22:04] Prof. Hewitt relates the drift of the unconscious and the job of the analyst.

[24:06] There is an aspect of the transference that cannot be understood.

[27:20] Dr. Schwartz shares a case to exemplify how he experienced reverie with a patient.

[29:30] Prof. Hewitt encourages analysts to keep thinking about what is not understood by sharing a case example.

[32:50] Prof. Hewitt dives deep into the concept of intersubjectivity.

[38:10] Prof. Hewitt continues sharing her efforts in understanding what was not evident.

[39:50] The experience of working with people that have been traumatized.

[43:55] Even in the most flagrant psychosis there is truth.

[45:42] Prof. Hewitt explains where her passion for the unseen and the different forms of subjectivity comes from.

 

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

 

Recommended Readings:

From Theology to Social Theory: Juan Luis Segundo and the Theology of Liberation, Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis, Marsha Hewitt

 

Freud on Religion (Key Thinkers in the Study of Religion), Marsha Hewitt

 

Legacies of the Occult: Psychoanalysis, Religion and Unconscious Communication, Marsha Hewitt