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What is CORE? 

CORE is the Committee on Race and Ethnicity, formerly known as the Multicultural Committee. CORE co-sponsors colloquia hosted by the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, bringing in speakers to address topics around race, class, ethnicity and the intersection with psychoanalysis. In the past, CORE led reading groups on race and culture, as well as a supervision group focused on transference and countertransference with race in mind. CORE has collaborated with MIP administration in the creation of a class on race and ethnicity, which is now required in the five-year program. During the last year, CORE has been actively advocating for change in all levels of analytic training, such as diversifying faculty and curriculum, as well as collaborating with administration to gear the institute toward an anti-racist lens in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. CORE Dialogues organically formed in response to racial violence.  

What is CORE Dialogues? 

CORE Dialogues started as a way for the Manhattan Institute community to talk openly about race. The group evolved from exploring “how to talk about race” into a process group on racialized dynamics in the mixed race space. We meet every two weeks to identify and speak to our own inner truths, while also respecting each other’s positionality, which considers racial, class, gender and sexual identities in the context of the sociopolitical world. We also are reminded of and take into context each other’s social locations, which are more specific to our social identities in society.  

How does the group function?

A rotation of two different co-facilitators lead each group. This models a sense of community and our collective effort within the group process, and allows new themes to emerge each time, depending on who is leading the group. We typically begin with a question that threads back to our last meeting, and the conversation flows from there. Our aim is to help people speak freely with each other about race. As painful as it can be, people report feeling transformed by these conversations—they are learning to be braver, acknowledging their felt experience with racism, and they are becoming more self-aware.

We acknowledge that our group is not outside of history and we fully expect that we will enact racialized traumas. As we aim to work through and understand, we continue to deepen our awareness of our own racial biases and racism, including BIPOC members of the group. Since its inception, we have come together and agreed to continue, including white people, to keep coming no matter hard it gets. Our aim is to speak our truth, bear witness and be authentic without collapsing the space. Every once in a while, the space collapses and implodes, yet we continue to circle back to each other to speak our truths.

When and how did Dialogues originate? 

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, CORE called a Town Hall meeting on June 12, 2020, to offer the MIP community members an open forum to talk about whatever came up for people. Some folks wanted advice on how to work with and bring up the topic of race with people of color in the consulting room, and others wanted help talking about race and privilege among people of the same race. We addressed how the institute could respond to the racial violence and began drafting a statement. People talked about their practices, about themselves, and about not wanting to say or do the wrong things. What emerged from this meeting was a strong desire to continue our conversations, even though many feared bringing up race with their patients, and even with their BIPOC colleagues and friends. 

Both of us have been working through identifying and emerging our own racialized selves as we navigate institutional white spaces. We raised challenging questions with the group, such as: “What would acknowledging institutional racism look like?” and: “Can you be a good person and a racist?” It was clear from their reactions and participation that people wanted to learn how to better talk about race. Thus, CORE Dialogues organically evolved, and we have been meeting every two weeks since then.

Who may attend?  

Dialogues is open to members of Manhattan Institute community—graduates, candidates, supervisors, faculty, board members, and administration. As the group continues to evolve, we hold the tension of deepening our process with members who attend regularly, and welcoming newcomers who may have an experience-near, “finger on the pulse” encounter. 

Is the group open or closed? 

Anyone who is interested is welcome to attend CORE Dialogues, whether it be once to see what it’s like, or as often as desired. We hope that many more people within our community and outside of it will benefit from this unique, transformative experience as we discuss the impact of race and the interplay of racialized roles with one another. When new members drop in, they can easily follow along and catch up, and decide whether or not they would like to participate. Even if newcomers choose not to speak, their bearing witness to the forum is powerful on its own and/or can elicit responses from other group members. 

What is the vision for Dialogues moving forward?

We hope that CORE Dialogues participants take what they are learning about themselves and apply it to every aspect of their lives, both inside and outside of the consulting room, and in the community at large. 

Rossanna Echegoyén, LCSW, is a Latina/bilingual psychoanalyst whose life trajectory is marked by her experience as a first generation American to immigrant parents from Central America, and a pursuit for social justice, which led her to the helping profession. She is Founder and Co-Chair of the Committee on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is active on the Psychoanalytic Coalition for Social Justice, the Board of Division 39, Section 9—Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, and is faculty and supervisor at various institutes in New York City, where she is in private practice.

Chanda D. Griffin, LCSW, is a teaching, training, and supervising analyst at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Co-Chair of the Committee on Race and Ethnicity at MIP.  Additionally, she is a faculty member of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and an Adjunct Professor at the Silberman Graduate School of Social Work at Hunter College. Chanda is a member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak, and she is in private practice in New York City.

Stay tuned for our next blog post in our Spotlight on CORE series, featuring Voices from Dialogues…

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The post Spotlight on CORE: Part I appeared first on Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Panic stricken and on autopilot, I pretended as if nothing weird was going on outside and sat for my first licensing exam the Friday before NYC shut down—March 20th. Licensing was all I could tangibly clutch after and hope toward in my abject terror, and I had scheduled the exam back when the virus was thought to be limited to Wuhan and Italy. 

Feeling antsy, perched atop an office chair swiveled up a little too high even for me, and dangerously exposed weeks before prophylactic masks and gloves were procurable, I tried to recall what my case argued theoretically. Though my mind went blank, my fingers began nimbly dashing off—with increasing speed and typos flying—something resembling my 12,000-word case narrative in three short hours. 

After the exam I slouched in a socially distant line at City Point Trader Joe’s, poised to snag any leftover dregs of the purported apocalyptic scavenging and hoarding. As my empty IKEA tote flapped wildly in the wind, a creeping, sickening certainty of failure swept over me. All I could remember of the blur, now, was how the X key had begun to stick an hour into furiously pounding away at the keyboard—on a case that featured prominently a discussion of sexxxxxuality.

Six weeks later the testing center reopened, and the same sweet proctor suggested over the phone that I schedule my second test now, before they booked up with essential workers requiring priority. I took the next slot, and prepared in four days—plus the two years I had been culling my case together with supervisors—but I had more confidence now that I knew the drill. I knew which exit to take out of the subway, and I remembered the numerical code for the bathroom. I was going to crush that second test! 

On May 8th, that dear, patient proctor allowed me to take my time hammering at each station to select the room’s most premier, buttery, springiest keyboard. I found my goldilocks chair and rolled it underneath the clock, my mask and latex gloves the only things sticking this time, with all 7 x 10 feet to myself. In the last half hour, a man with buzzed hair sat at the opposite end. I tried not to breathe too deeply and typed faster.

My class—half CPP and half LQP—graduated from the Manhattan Institute on June 7, 2020, after a proud half decade of psychoanalytic training. This was before Zoom had officially swept the world’s remote work and social communities. We opted against a party over video—unable to bear putting colleagues and family through a lame virtual graduation if we couldn’t even pop champagne for them—and instead we quietly rang in our accomplishments privately as the world crashed down around us, on fire with protests, plague and literal wildfires.

I purchased my first jigsaw puzzle, streamed shows I won’t name here and continued to see clinic patients over video, who wanted to talk about the general fear of dying in a nation at war with itself. They needed to know that I wasn’t dying (yet) and asked every session how I was doing. In the new normal, I felt it my responsibility to join them, and I didn’t do the therapist thing of withholding, but answered openly, which I still do for its grounding effect in isolation.

Through trial and error imposed by faulty internet, pre router update, I discovered that I communicated better with certain people over the phone, which in remote work functions rather like the couch does in person. It was freeing on those inevitable days that video denied us and we found ourselves somehow more connected.

Agonizing summer weeks ticked endlessly by, and my unanswered polite inquiries to the state went unacknowledged until August 6th—fiveish months after my first exam. Great news: you passed your first exam! 

August 8th, two days later—bad news: you failed your second exam! A total bomb of a low score—too low to admit here. What had happened? I had thought the complete opposite. My anxiety shot through the roof.

I put my head down and crammed for three solid months—a case I already knew, inside and out. I tried to study during the debates. I recorded myself reading my case aloud. I went to sleep with my own voice reading my case, and when I reached that point of deliriously belting out in song for myself I always laughed, no matter how half asleep I was. I filled notebooks with felt-tip markers repeating my case narrative in loud colors: defenses, resistance, history, transference, countertransference, interventions. I made flashcards. I stood to integrate new neural pathways with old muscle memory, reciting each card before peeking. I reversed the order. I kept forgetting to refer back to the presenting problem. I watched with bated breath the returns, and the election—my own personal arbitrary deadline—came and went.

I retook my second exam on December 7th—this time in a huge room with better social distancing and the sun shining through a sheer shade directly into my eyeballs. My case pulled up on the screen and I had to squint from the piercing sun and also to believe my eyes: I had dissociated so entirely during my second exam that I had clearly improvised a case I now barely recognized! In an unprecedented cavalier self state with some serious swagger I had made almost everything up on the spot. 

This time around my fingers knew what to do. Ten months into the plague, on January 12th, I finally passed. 

Tricia Brock, MFA, LP, graduate of MIP’s licensure qualifying program, is editor of the Analysis Now blog. She is also in private practice in NYC. 

For LP exam jitters, see: Preparing for the New York State Case Narrative Examination for the License in Psychoanalysis: An Unofficial Guide by Vanessa Bright, L.Ac., L.P.

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The post A Tale of Two Licensing Exams appeared first on Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis.

“As a relational analyst, the exchange inevitably touched on who we are in the room: our race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality…” In the second of our series on race, Tara Chivukula, graduate of Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, grapples with what it means to be considered the Buddha of Analysis.

The Buddha of Analysis

By Tara Chivukula, LCSW

Karen sank into the sofa, sighing deeply. Her shoulders slumped down as she looked up. Fixing a determined gaze on me, she announced: “You’re my Buddha.”

I paused, and considered her words: the note of possession. The exclusivity. And finally, the Buddha. The tone of her voice was affectionate, authoritative.

This wasn’t the first time that Karen had proclaimed me her Buddha. In prior sessions she had called me Swami (an honorific that contained, at least for me, latent associations to a charlatan). We had analyzed in the transference her choice of words and her choice of me, a straight-identified Indian-American woman as her therapist. Buddhas were serene, peaceful, sexually removed, wise. Buddhas didn’t deal with the romantic turmoil that plagued mere mortals. After all, the real Buddha himself, Siddhartha Gautama had abandoned his royal post, his wife and son for a life of asceticism. In Karen’s eyes, she was the seeker, and I the found.

As a relational analyst, the exchange inevitably touched on who we are in the room: our race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. As a professional queer-identified woman of Jewish parentage in her 30’s, Karen experienced an upbringing that intersected with my own in many ways. We were both women raised in upper-middle class homes in suburbia and socialized in a patriarchal culture. However, Karen dealt with bigotry for being both Jewish and queer. Her grandparents were Holocaust survivors. She struggled with issues of sexuality and identity.

My parents were part of a wave of professional immigrants welcomed into the U.S. after implementation of the 1965 Immigration & Nationality Act. The Act abolished the national origins quota system (to no more than 20,000 visas per year from any one country) that had been in place restricting Asian immigration to the U.S. Upon arrival, they like many other immigrants and people of color, were subject to racism and discrimination in their professional and personal lives.

We hailed from cultures that were stereotypically clannish, family oriented, and focused on educational and professional achievement at all costs.

While such common ground was tacitly acknowledged, being a Buddha implied Otherness. My analyst silence deemed wise. My measured response deemed spiritual. The act of holding space in the consulting room deemed holy.

Karen, of course, was commenting on aspects of my personality. In contrast to the decidedly non-Buddha-like women in her life, I embodied an Orientalist trope—an inscrutable, wise, serene therapist residing in the office/dream space: static, frozen, fixed eternally.

As Edward Said notes in Orientalism:

The very possibility of development, transformation, human movement—is denied the Orient and the Oriental. As a known and ultimately an immobilized or unproductive quality, they come to be identified with a bad sort of eternality: hence, when the Orient is being approved, such phrases as “the wisdom of the East.”

As a sign of this supposed wisdom, near my Union Square office, a number of yoga studios have proliferated over the years. The emphasis on “Eastern spirituality,” pseudo or not, is strong. Buddhism is in vogue. Sankskrit words/concepts like karma, dharma, moksha, and samsara trip off the tongue. The message is clear: The East rejects materialism in favor of spirituality, religion, yoga, and self-knowledge/growth. This one-dimensional view did not square with the complexities of the India I knew. As Gita Mehta wryly notes of this exchange between East & West in Karma Cola:

The seduction lay in the chaos. They thought they were simple. We thought they were neon. They thought we were profound. We knew we were provincial. Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong.

On the other hand, I could not deny that Karen was also commenting on those aspects of me that were essentially unknowable, unreachable. She had repeatedly despaired of the lack of truly being able to “know” me though some self-disclosure had been made over the years we’d been working together. She admittedly worried that one day I would reveal myself to be the “mess” that she knew most women in her life were. That is, emotionally volatile & deceitful. In some ways, unacknowledged, she preferred the racist trope to the sexist. In doing so, she kept safe from those destructive aspects of myself she was afraid to know (one could argue that I was afraid to know) and protected the men (her father) in her life who had failed her. She rendered me a man—A Buddha who had abandoned the material world.

I often wondered if I were not Indian-American, would Karen have called me a Buddha or Swami? Or did my personality, not to mention my profession, make such a comparison inevitable? After all, most people initially found me hard to read. As analysts we are very often more observer than participant, hidden away in asymmetrical relationships. It was hard to tell.

I wondered too, how much I had colluded in this perception. Had I unconsciously adhered to a Buddha-like persona? W.E.B Dubois coined the idea of a “double consciousness,” a term describing the psychological challenge faced by African-Americans ‘of always looking at oneself through the eyes’ of a racist white society and attempting to reconcile their race/ethnicity with an upbringing in a European-dominated society.’ This struggle to deal with a multi-faceted conception of self was something Karen and I undoubtedly shared.

Reflecting on our dyad from a relational standpoint, I noted feeling boxed in—unseen by her comment, as though I was an idea or an ideal that she needed me to be: unchanging and static in my steadiness. A feeling of despair ensued where I imagined never quite being known by her. And I understood that very likely she felt this way in her life—that I, like her primary caregivers, would never quite know or understand her. And she felt boxed in by her need to please and fulfill expectation.

I began to realize that I was not the only Buddha in the room. A Buddha symbolized some shameful aspects in her—static, passive, unchanging, never roused to anger—that Karen had projected onto me.

By opening up the discussion and considering the myriad meanings of a word, the opportunity for greater freedom and spontaneity arose, a welcome and necessary outcome for the both of us.

*Names and other details have been changed for reasons of confidentiality.

References

Double Consciousness. (March 31^st, 2016). In Wikipedia: Retrieved: April 23, 2016, from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness

Mehta, Gita (1979). Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Said, Edward (1978). Orientalism. New York: Random House.

Tara Chivukula, LCSW is a graduate of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is in private practice in New York City.

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For years, psychoanalytic institutes have been struggling with how to develop a more multi-culturally diverse Institute culture – in their candidate pool, faculty, and curriculum. In this light, John Turtz, PhD, Co-Director of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, reflects on his personal responses to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book and National Book Award winner, Between the World and Me. He references psychoanalysis’ “history of exclusion” and discusses the need for psychoanalysts to struggle with these difficult issues around race.

Reflections on Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

By John Turtz, PhD

Hatred is an ordinary human experience that has extraordinary results.
Kathleen Pogue White, Ph.D.

Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015), an African-American writer and journalist, has written an extraordinary book entitled Between the World and Me. It is a masterpiece in the form of a letter to his son. Coates writes of the subjugation of the Black body by the powers that be in white America. He writes about the social construction of race, stating, “But race is the child of racism, not the father” (p. 7). I recently listened to Coates read this letter himself in the audiobook version; this is a beautiful recording. The letter to his son is as much poetry as it is prose. It is, from my perspective, simply magnificent, and it led me to the following reflections.

The philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas has written about the importance of “the Other.” Colin Davis (1996), a scholar of twentieth century French literature, wrote, “The thought of Emmanuel Levinas is governed by one simple yet far-reaching idea: Western philosophy has consistently practiced a suppression of the Other” (p. 1). Through various means such as empathy and domination, we try to make the Other a part of ourselves. We attempt to eliminate the difference and assimilate the Other into the same. Levinas, on the other hand, focuses on the radical alterity of the Other and on how the Other simply cannot somehow be reduced to the familiar sameness of the subjective self’s personal domain. In fact, the subject is born only in recognition of the Other’s radical otherness.

The Lacanian psychoanalyst, Bruce Fink (2007), in a book on psychoanalytic technique, has written about the difficulty in listening and truly hearing and experiencing otherness. He writes, “We tend to hear everything in relation to ourselves” (p. 1) and “Most simply stated, our usual way of listening overlooks or rejects the otherness of the other” (p. 2). Fink then advises, in a similar vein as Edgar Levenson, “Stop trying to understand so quickly” (p. 6). Our tendency is to listen for the familiar, thereby making false assumptions that we then take to be fact.

Listening to Coates read his letter to his son made me even more aware of my own deficiencies in my attempts to deal with my own internal struggles around race and otherness. Lacan has asserted that inauthenticity leads to a power hierarchy (Ehrenberg, 1992, p. 83), and postmodernists have examined the nature of binaries and how they too lead to hierarchical power structures. We therefore need to move toward greater authenticity in dealing with race issues and toward the deconstruction of binaries with regard to race. Psychoanalysts of color, such as Kathleen Pogue White (2002) and Kirkland Vaughans, and white analysts such as Melanie Suchet (2007) and Neil Altman (2004) have initiated the difficult and challenging but essential dialogue on race issues. It is crucial for all psychoanalysts, I believe, to struggle to a much greater degree with these issues. Psychoanalysis itself has, since its origins, been a mostly white, often Jewish, culture with a great history of exclusion. Is it no wonder that we have a difficult time attracting people of color to come train with us? There are no easy answers (that’s perhaps the understatement of the year), but we must continue the struggle begun by analysts that have been courageous enough to sail into these stormy waters.

The American dream has generated a lot of trauma. From the Trail of Tears to the shackling of African-Americans in chattel slavery for centuries to Black men hanged by white men hiding behind white sheets or shot in the back by police officers empowered by the culture of whiteness, there is a deplorable side to America. It’s so much easier to not see what there is to be seen, to pretend that this is all in the past, to pretend that I am not at all responsible, to avoid otherness, and to hide from others as well as from myself what I feel are unacceptable aspects of myself.

I do not consider myself to be innocent. My hope is to struggle with these issues in a more open and authentic manner moving forward. Though it may be myth, it is told that Martin Luther said, “If I knew that tomorrow was the end of the world, I would plant an apple tree today!” Whether true or not, it is a beautiful expression of hope and the human spirit. In this spirit, I hope to work toward greater awareness of my own “not me” aspects, struggle to get to know these aspects of myself in a more intimate way, and thereby struggle to deal more constructively with that deeply ingrained white mask of privilege, power, dominance and subjugation.

References

Altman, N. (2004). Whiteness Uncovered. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14:439-446.

Coates, T. (2015). Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Davis, C. (1996). Levinas: An Introduction. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

Ehrenberg, D. B. (1992). The Intimate Edge: Extending the Reach of Psychoanalytic Interaction. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Fink, B. (2007). Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Suchet, M. (2007). Unraveling Whiteness. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 17:867-886.

White, K. P. (2002). Surviving Hating and Being Hated. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 38:401-422.

John Turtz, PhD is Co-director of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis and Director of the Couples Therapy Training Program at the Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is in private practice in Manhattan and Larchmont, NY.

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On Reading

By Justine Duhr, MFA

“He opened the book; and as he did so it became not his own. He let his fingers riffle through the pages and felt a tingling, as if those pages were alive. The tingling came through his fingers and coursed through his flesh and bone; he was minutely aware of it, and he waited until it contained him, until the old excitement that was like terror fixed him where he lay. The sunlight, passing his window, shone upon the page, and he could not see what was written there.”

-from the closing lines of John Williams’ Stoner

It’s just past midnight on a Tuesday. I’m lying in bed with my dog on one side, a cooling cup of tea on the other. My husband is asleep, lightly snoring, having already embarked, no doubt, on tonight’s unconscious adventures. In the street below, it’s starting to rain. I can tell by the cling-clang of drops on the city’s metal and also by the new way sound seems to carry. A young woman’s playful shriek, a baby’s shrill cry, these sounds echo around the block and reach me finally, as if from a great distance.

I’ve just closed John Williams’ Stoner, just consumed the final delicious lines not for the first time nor nearly the last. Now I lie very quiet and very still with the book in my lap, feeling its precious weight in my hands, feeling the way I almost always feel upon finishing a novel: impossibly painfully irrevocably human.

That’s why I read, I think. In a highly collaborative effort of imagination and feeling, I connect with the story, the characters, the writer, and also with something deep inside myself.

Sandra Buechler in Making a Difference in Patients’ Lives: Emotional Experience in the Therapeutic Setting (2008) likens the role of the therapist to that of the poet. Buechler writes:

As analysts, our target, like the poet’s, is to evoke more than we say. This makes it more likely that phrases that resonate with the patient’s inner experience will be cocreated. The culture the patient and I have in common provides a dictionary that exists “outside” us. From it we create a kind of poetry by using highly evocative language. Layers of meaning come from experiences we have had with each other, or talked about. Like all poetry, its function, aside from giving us joy and helping us feel connected, is to prompt us to think just a bit beyond what we have already consciously known. (pp. 213-14)

Here we see the therapeutic dyad as a microcosm of the human experience, our perpetual search for connection, through the art of language in the case of psychoanalysis and poetry—and, I would argue, poetic prose. Just as patient and analyst work together to discover and examine the patient’s inner life (the cocreation Buechler points to), so too do author and reader collaborate to create an experience that is both illuminating and therapeutic in its own right. Through the act of reading we have the profound experience of connecting to something larger than ourselves.

In reading as in analysis, the experience is the thing. In interpersonal analysis especially, in which meaningful change depends so heavily upon the particular relationship that develops between therapist and patient, the experience is everything.

I remember one 11^th-grade English class during which my teacher, Mr. Scott, busied himself at the blackboard drawing diagram after diagram: plot in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, character arc in Song of Solomon, symbolism in Song of Solomon, and so on. I had already by then fallen deeply in love with literature and, as was my habit in those days, had adopted my most recent read as my favorite. I felt defensive about the book, protective even, and silently rebelled against this rigid structure that I feared would explain my experience away. This can’t be what this book is about, I thought, surveying the tidy chalk lines that seemed to me like a death sentence. I wanted not hard knowledge, not facts, but acknowledgement of my feelings as I read this great work. I understood in my heart before I did in my head that charts and diagrams couldn’t possibly do justice to my experience, my personal connection with the novel, which was for better or worse uniquely my own.

I felt changed by Song of Solomon, and by countless reading experiences after—Housekeeping, Frankenstein, Crime and Punishment, The Lover, to name just a few. These encounters became part of me. I was altered by them, no matter that I didn’t know then and don’t know now and likely won’t ever know precisely how. Morrison, Robinson, Shelley, Dostoevsky, Duras, these authors and I worked together to create the unique reading experiences that conspired to make me who I am. I read, and their stories became entwined with my own.

In this way, reading keeps me connected. I read to know others. I read to know myself.

But what it is to know is, of course, not so simple. Knowledge, insight, and experience are fickle and fleeting. Illumination can obscure as much as it reveals, as Stoner’s sunlight that “shone upon the page, and he could not see what was written there.” And so we keep trying, searching for connection, striving towards meaning, because we’re human and that’s what we do. Thankfully, in books and in analysis, there is no end of stories to tell.

Buechler, S. (2008). Making a difference in patients’ lives: Emotional experience in the therapeutic setting. New York, NY: Routledge.

Justine Duhr, MFA, is a psychoanalytic candidate at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the Texas Observer, Publishing Perspectives, The Review Review, Whiskey Island, Fringe Magazine, and beyond. She owns and operates WriteByNight, a writers’ service dedicated to helping people achieve their creative potential and literary goals.

Click here for more information about the Licensure Qualifying Program at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis.

The post On Reading appeared first on Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis.

January: A Perfect Time to Ask About Drinking

By Emily Damron, LCSW

“There’s no problem that can’t be made worse with alcohol.”

When I use this line with clients, they look a bit startled and then laugh with recognition. Like any good interpretation, this pithy saying from Alcoholics Anonymous makes its point without being preachy or judgmental. It often leads us into further exploration and reflection about the patient’s relationship to alcohol.

January is the perfect month for therapists to follow up, “How were your holidays?” with some questions about the patient’s drinking. Many people see the old year out with a bang, or with a binge, or with a series of binges. They wake up in the New Year with a massive hangover, a crateful of regrets, and a boatload of resolutions. Some discover their closest relationships are in a shambles and that they’ve gotten themselves into a mess they can’t remember, let alone sort out. Remorse and resolutions are why gyms are so full the first weeks of January. It’s also why newcomers appear at AA meetings with their “day counts” in the single digits.

Therapists are uniquely positioned to help their alcohol-abusing patients recognize the problem before they actually “hit bottom”. But historically, psychoanalysts have been leery of wading into the troubled waters of substance abuse (Freimuth 2003). “I know they have a problem, but I’m not sure how to talk to them about it,” they often say. Sometimes a therapist’s reticence has to do with not wanting to depart from customary techniques, such as following the patient’s associations, careful listening, and avoiding ‘leading the patient’ at any cost. “I don’t want to impose my agenda on them,” is what I sometimes hear.

Interpersonalists have an edge in this regard. Because of our comfort in asking questions, we can easily adapt the detailed inquiry to an assessment of someone’s substance use or abuse. We know from experience that if we don’t ask, the patient often won’t volunteer the data. But when we do, all sorts of useful information come out that can further the treatment.

God (or the devil) is in the details

There are two other obstacles to our conducting a detailed assessment of a person’s drinking or drug use. “I don’t want to come across as critical or moralistic,” therapists will say. Naturally, we all want to maintain an empathic stance with our patients. But I’ve found it possible to do this while sensitively exploring a person’s important, and often hidden, relationship to alcohol. The approach I use is to ask people to talk about their own concerns about their drinking, focusing specifically on harmful consequences they’ve experienced (Damron 2003).

For the last obstacle, “What questions should I ask?” there are several assessment tools that have enabled therapists, doctors, and other helping professionals to quickly ascertain whether a patient’s alcohol use has crossed over into dependence. Two of the simplest ones are the four-question CAGE questionnaire, developed by Dr. John Ewing (1984) and the 10-question AUDIT, which targets quantities, harmful consequences, and loss of control. Psychotherapists who have an already-established relationship with a patient who drinks or drugs will probably want to adapt these questions to their own way of speaking.

For example, when someone mentions loss of control while drinking, I’ll ask if this happened recently. If the patient alludes to a three-day binge, I’ll say, “Can you walk me through it? (i.e., what time did it start, how much did you drink, at what point did you fall asleep, etc.). Following up with, “Did anything happen during the binge that wouldn’t have happened if alcohol hadn’t been involved?” may highlight for the patient the way alcohol abuse is making them betray their own values. Such a realization can act as a powerful motivator for cutting back or stopping altogether (Frankfeldt 2002). In this way, therapists can assist in raising a patient’s “bottom”. A detailed inquiry about a patient’s substance use or abuse can last several sessions, and might even become an important and ongoing theme in the treatment.

If someone does come in this month expressing concern about how much they partied over the holidays, this would be the perfect time to start exploring it with them.

CAGE & AUDIT Questionnaires:

www.addictionsandrecovery.org/addiction-self-test.htm

Damron, E. (2003). A Guideline for Understanding & Assessing Addiction. The Participant Observer: The Newsletter of The Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, 2:2, Spring Issue. 4 pp.

Freimuth, M. (2003). The Unseen Diagnosis: Addiction Assessment, The Psychotherapy Bulletin, 37: 38-42.

Frankfeldt, V. (2002). Complex Problems Require Complex Solutions: Donnie: A Life Apart, Harm Reduction Psychotherapy: A New Treatment for Drug and Alcohol Problems. A. Tatarsky, Ed., NY: Jason Aronson, pp. 137-159.

Emily Damron, LCSW is a graduate of Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is a supervisor and is on the faculty at Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center, where she also founded the Committee on Psychoanalysis and Addictions Treatment. Ms. Damron is in private practice in Chelsea and Park Slope. She also provides individual and group consultations.

Click here to learn more about the 4-Week Seminar Series offered by the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis.

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The Whole is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: The Complexity of Couple Therapy

By Wendy Greenspun, Ph.D.

How do we understand the complex nature of problems in romantic relationships? And what theoretical framework can help us navigate our clinical work with couples? In couple therapy, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Eric Fromm (1956) aptly stated that in a romantic relationship, one plus one equals three, similarly suggesting that basic mathematical assumptions don’t apply when examining couples. Couple treatment requires knowledge of how to understand each member of the dyad, with his or her unique history and internal world, as well as the complex system that they co-create and are embedded in together.

Classical psychoanalysts look at the couple relationship as a receptacle of ongoing transference experiences, with each individual distorting his or her perception of the partner in a manner consistent with the drama of early family life. For example, in my work with a (composite) married, same-sex couple I will call Joan and Joelle, Joan complained that Joelle was needy and dependent. Joan had grown up the only child of a single mother, who turned to Joan to meet her emotional needs. Such a parallel provided fertile ground for exploring how she responded to her partner based on childhood experiences. Elucidation of such distortions is often a necessary component of change, but not sufficient to address all relationship difficulties.

Family systems theorists, utilizing principles gleaned from biology, describe couples and families as forming their own unique systems. Along with structural components, such as boundaries, hierarchies and alliances, they elucidate ways that an individual can carry out certain functions for the system, and how partners mutually influence each other’s behavior. The systemic concept of circularity describes the vicious cycles seen in this mutually-determined process: Joan retreats because Joelle wants closer contact; Joelle wants closer contact because Joan retreats. Seeing how an individual’s behavior inadvertently brings about the unwanted response in the partner can open up new possibilities for intervention. Systems theorists also describe the notion of complementarity in couples: the more Joan is strict in parenting their son, the more Joelle compensates by becoming lenient. In its most extreme form, complementarity can lead to the polarization often seen in intractable relationship conflicts. Helping each member of the couple soften their stance can facilitate both moving closer to the middle. Yet a family systems approach fails to address the complex recreation of an individual’s internalized past within their current relationship.

The relational turn in psychoanalysis has allowed us to bridge the internal, unconscious focus of classical psychoanalysis with the external, behavioral focus of family systems theory by looking at the various ways a dyad co-creates a shared emotional system. Through this more comprehensive understanding, contemporary psychoanalytic theories allow us to address the myriad influences on relational functioning.

Unconscious mechanisms that recreate internalized object relations have been delineated by both object relations and attachment theories. Early object relations theorists who studied marital interactions (see Dicks, 1967) recognized ways that symptoms could be carried by one partner for the other. They began to explicate how the sharing or volleying of symptoms occurs via the process of projective identification, where an individual’s unwanted internal objects are projected into the other, stimulating the partner to behave in a manner consistent with the ejected object. In the case of my couple, Joelle expressed a lack of sexual desire at the start of treatment, but as soon as her sexual interest returned, Joan became anorgasmic for the first time. Understanding the nature of the projections and helping both partners better contain or metabolize the unwanted aspects of self provides a useful way to approach these often confusing dynamics. Attachment theorists describe how early parent-child experiences lead to an internal working model of relational security, which then becomes the blueprint for what individuals expect and respond to with their adult partners. Particularly relevant when attachment injuries, such as betrayals and losses, occur within a romantic relationship, the impact of the rupture can be understood with the exploration of early attachment experiences. For my couple, an episode of Joan leaving suddenly on a business trip led to an increase in Joelle’s clinging protests, an exaggeration of her insecure attachment behavior; conversely, Joan exhibited her avoidant style whenever she sensed distress in their connection.

Interpersonal analytic theorists posit less about specific unconscious mechanisms, but instead look at how early relational expectations get recreated interpersonally. Through a process of selectively attending to cues from the partner that conform to early relational experiences, then continuing to interpret as well as to subtly influence the partner to behave in ways that are consistent with those experiences, each member of the couple lives out her internal object world in the present interpersonal context (Goldklank, 2009.) With my couple, Joan was keenly attuned to any way that Joelle seemed dependent, and subtly questioned Joelle’s more autonomous actions, leading the dynamic between them to closely mirror Joan’s relationship with her mother. In a complementary manner, Joelle attended most to ways that Joan was dominant and critical like her father, and may have unconsciously invited such negative scrutiny through presenting herself as helpless or incapable. Interpersonal analysts may also look at ways individuals often choose a partner who embodies some important aspect of a familiar internal struggle.

Further developments in contemporary analytic theories have broadened our understanding of the complexities within relationships. Relational psychoanalysis has explicated the role of dissociative mechanisms in individual and couple functioning. Understanding the amalgam of self-states that each individual may bring to his or her romantic partnership can help each person make sense of seemingly disjunctive emotional reactions in self and other (Ringstrom, 2014). When Joelle felt unwanted by Joan, she became like an inconsolable child, consistent with her emotional experience following the early death of her mother. Recognition of this child self-state helped Joan react less negatively to Joelle at these moments.

Findings in neurobiology have supported the analytic notion of a shared emotional system in couples. Mirror neurons point to the ways we are wired to be responsive to others. Neuroscientists have also noted that the release of the hormone oxytocin during close physical contact in intimate relationships can provide an emotional regulatory function for both members of a couple. This knowledge helped Joan and Joelle learn to calm each other at the start of arguments by holding hands, utilizing this shared capacity for affect management.

We’ve also learned that one plus one often adds up to more than three. Extending the interpersonal and relational understanding of co-created systems to the larger social environment within which the couple is embedded helps to contextualize certain relational struggles. In my couple, delving into Joan and Joelle’s religious differences, as well the impact of being lesbian in a heteronormative culture, helped to deepen our understanding of factors that were adding stress to their partnership.

Indeed, the whole is significantly larger than the sum of its parts. Working with couples exposes us to the panoply of influences, past and present, internal and external, which inform dyadic functioning. With the relational turn in psychoanalysis, we have the theoretical framework and concomitant tools that allow us address the inherent complexities of treating romantic pairs.

Dicks, H. (1967). Marital tensions: Clinical studies towards a psychological theory of interaction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. NY: Harper and Row.

Goldklank, S. (2009). The shoop-shoop song: A guide to psychoanalytic-systemic couple therapy. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 45(1), 3-25.

Ringstrom, P. (2014). A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Therapy. NY: Routledge.

Wendy Greenspun, Ph.D. is on the faculty of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis Certificate Program, the Adelphi University Postgraduate program in Marriage and Couple Therapy, and at the Training Institute for Mental Health. She is a graduate of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis Certificate Program in Psychoanalysis, and also trained at the Ackerman Institute for the Family. She is couple therapy supervisor at Columbia University Counseling and Psychological Services. She has published and presented extensively on couple treatment and violence in couples and families, and is in private practice in NYC.

Wendy will be teaching a course on couple therapy for the analytically-oriented clinician as part of MIP’s 4-week seminar series. This seminar provides 6 CE credit hours.

Click below to register for Wendy’s course “One Plus One Equals Three: Couple Therapy for the Analytically-Oriented Clinician.”

To register and pay click here.  Candidates click here.  Proof of institute affiliation required.

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Lama Khouri, candidate at Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, reflects on the idea of personal narrative and the formation of our identities, relationships, and experiences.

Whose Narrative Is It, Anyway?

By Lama Z. Khouri CAPC, LMSW, MS

Sullivan is quoted as saying “we have as many selves as we have relationships” (Lionells, 1995). As I think about contemporary psychoanalytic theory, these relationships could be with our parents, siblings, and teachers, as well as with cultural, social, and state structures, policies, media, ideology, and many other dynamics that create the landscape of our lives. When we live day in and day out within this landscape we begin to develop our own narratives and monologues (Kirmayer, 2006). Based on such narratives we write our own stories that become central in the formation of our identity, interpersonal relationships, and intersubjective experiences, and, in doing so, they create the multiple selves Sullivan and other interpersonalists described.

Thirty years ago I moved out of my country Jordan and headed west. Initially, I wanted to dissociate from my own narratives and monologues because the reality of them was too dangerous to own. It wasn’t until I began to work with other Arab immigrants that I began to become aware of these narratives and the selves they created.

My first experience took place twenty years after my arrival. It was an experience that changed me forever (Khouri, 2012) At the time I was working with five adolescent immigrant boys who came from the same country. I used to hold the meetings at the school where the boys studied. The goal of treatment was to help them adjust to life in the United States. The group often ostracized one of the boys, whom I will call Basem. Basem had an accent; he didn’t look “cool.” He didn’t know hip-hop or rap. He came from a rural society when all the other boys came from urban areas. Basem came to the US with his father, and left his mother and siblings back home. His father used to travel often. Consequently, Basem lived with his adult male cousins who barely took care of him, leaving him to fend for himself. Basem was alone. And because of his aloneness, he would try to connect with others by intruding into their spaces, often rubbing them the wrong way. As a result, he was visible in the school, and not for good reasons.

In the beginning of my work with the group, I dreaded the sessions. The boys came on time but could barely sit still. I would spend most of the session trying to keep them in their seats, stop them from hurting each other, and deal with the sexually tinged remarks that were flying all over the place. The anxiety in the room was palpable. I attributed my lack of enthusiasm to the difficulty in managing the group, but there was more to the picture than meets the eye.

One day, the principal of the school dropped by. He seemed to just want to help himself to the snacks and chat.  But in his chat he singled out Basem. The principal said that although Basem was working hard he was misbehaving. He added: “Basem is not behaving like a man. Manhood is important in your culture, isn’t that so? In fact, I think men are given special privileges over women just because they are born male.” That comment made me feel small, demeaned, judged and disregarded. I felt his comment stripped me of my status as the adult in the room—after all I am an Arab female among Arab males.

Judging by the boys’ reaction after the principal left, I believe his comment reminded them of their stigma, their separateness, and the dangers that come with being an Arab. The boys went on to instruct Basem on how to behave appropriately. He symbolized everything they wanted to deny. They were talking to him with such intensity that it felt as if they wanted to beat into him traits an American teenager should have.

One of the boys who had been standing, and whom I will call Tamer, leaned over the table, faced me, and said in a frightened, angry tone: “We are Arab adolescent boys. We need to be careful!” I understood him to say: “We are Arabs and we cannot afford to stand out.”

As the boys fired fear filled stories about unfair arrests, deportations and misfortunes besetting Arab immigrants, I went into a reverie about my own fears of being visible and arrested. I recalled what a harrowing ordeal it is to go through customs at JFK Airport. Often I would be riddled with anxiety and guilt when no crime had been committed.

Following the session and on my way to my next appointment, I found myself wondering if I were on some FBI list somewhere. Am I safe? Am I being followed? I reflected further on the boys’ reaction to Basem and the principal, and realized I related to the group the way the group related to Basem—I wanted to discredit them because they were making me aware of parts of myself that were too hard and painful to own. Gradually, as I began to become aware of the fear of being an Arab in a western world, my relationship to the boys shifted. I was no longer different. I understood their anxiety, and mine.

My work with the group lasted for three years. For our last session, in addition to the usual snacks, I brought bandanas. I thought they were a somewhat masculine item that the boys could sign for each other and keep as a memento of the group. When Tamer saw them, he said, “This could kill you.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Gang members might suspect you belong to a gang that is competing with them.” Anxiously I replied, “I didn’t realize that. Please don’t wear them publically!” “Don’t worry, Miss Lama, this will be our sign as a family and not a gang,” another boy said. “Let’s call it the Tamer’s gang,” said Tamer—as if challenging us to have strength from being together. They signed each other’s bandanas, and when it was time to say goodbye, their farewell was a nonchalant “See ya!”(Khouri, 2012)

Lionells, M. (1995). The Interpersonal Self, Uniqueness, Will and Intentionality. In M. Lionells, J. Fiscalini, C. Mann, & D. Stern (Eds.) Handbook of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 31-63.

Kirmayer, L. J. (2006). Beyond the New Cross-Cultural Psychiatry: Cultural Biology, Discursive Psychology and the Ironies of Globalization. Transcultural Psychiatry, 43: 126–44.

Khouri, Lama Z. (2012). Immigrant’s Neverland: Commuting from Amman to Brooklyn. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 48 (2), 213–37.

Lama Z. Khouri CAPC, LMSW, MS is a psychoanalytic candidate at Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, Executive Director of Circle OASIS LLC, and student and researcher at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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E.O. WILSON: OF ANTS AND MEN

Thoughts on the Childhood Roots of Greatness

By Sue Erikson Bloland, LCSW

I recently tuned in, quite by accident, to the PBS broadcast of the film “E.O. Wilson: Of Ants and Men” (9/29/15). I was soon transfixed by the unfolding story of Edmund Wilson as a boy, aged seven, whose parents were in the process of divorcing (at a time when that was most uncommon), and whose reaction to this personal catastrophe was to immerse himself in the study of the natural world around him. Already, at the age of seven, Wilson was spending long hours alone in nature, where he felt more of a sense of belonging, it seems, than he felt at home.

In fact, in the same year that his parents were divorcing, Wilson had quite a terrible accident while fishing, and did not bother to go home to be cared for. A fish he pulled abruptly from the water hit him in the face, damaging his right eye. It is reported that “he suffered for hours, but he continued fishing…because he was anxious to stay outdoors.” The suggestion is strong that he sought refuge from a home life that promised little comfort, and his greatest solace came from just being in nature, even when he was hurt.

Shortly thereafter, Wilson was sent away to a military academy for boys, an institution which he remembers as a “carefully planned nightmare.” He returned to his study of nature when brought to live eventually with his father and stepmother

The fishing accident cost Wilson the sight in his right eye, and this loss of stereoscopic vision was to determine the focus of his life-long career as a naturalist. Unable to see animals or birds at a distance, he could, nevertheless, focus very clearly on small insects. He soon became completely enthralled with the social behavior of ants, admiring their ability to develop highly complex societies, and to function so harmoniously in doing so. (Harmony was likely in short supply in his own family life.)

Wilson knew by the time he was nine that he wanted to become a biologist, and he eventually propelled his obsession with insects into a distinguished career at Harvard, where he studied, taught and wrote about, not only the social behavior of ants, but the profound insights that the study of ant behavior offered for the understanding of human behavior–its essential nature and its origins. Along the way, he stirred up enormous intellectual controversy (with his assertions about the genetic origins of human social behavior), won two Pulitzer prizes, and, his colleagues agree, “changed the way all of us view the world.” It is no exaggeration to say that Wilson has been one of the most important thinkers of our time. And I believe his story is indicative of a pattern in the lives of many great achievers in human history.

In his book entitled Greatness: Who Makes History and Why (1994), the psychologist Dean Keith Simonton comes to a profound conclusion about the nature of genius. Ultimately, he proclaims, what distinguishes geniuses from their colleagues of lesser achievement is the “huge motivational forces” that drive their work, and that far eclipse the efforts of others. (P. 140) Most essentially, they share a “monomaniacal preoccupation” with their chosen pursuits. Simonton does not claim to understand the source of the “huge motivational forces” he has identified. This, he suggests, “is one of the great mysteries of psychology.” (140)

I don’t think Edmund Wilson would be at all offended at the suggestion that his obsession with ant social behavior has been “monomaniacal.” And I would suggest that the childhood he describes in “Of Ants and Men” is typical in some major respects of the kind of childhood that has promoted a “monomaniacal” devotion to work in many extreme achievers.   Clearly, one avenue of solace for children who suffer parental loss, neglect or abuse (what we would call “relational trauma”) is the adoption of an obsessive interest or activity which provides distraction and relief from emotional pain as well as an escape from demoralizing family circumstances. Functioning in some ways as a substitute for a more nourishing connection with parents, these preoccupations take on an enormous emotional intensity that lasts a lifetime. They are life saving. At the same time, the isolation of the desperate child provides an opportunity for intensive “practicing” of the skills needed to pursue his or her interest with exceptional success.

Wilson, of course, began very early to study ants. Napoleon was sent away from his family home in Corsica to a military school in France when he was nine. Alone and very lonely in France, he buried himself in books, reading voraciously about military history.  Mikhail Baryshnikov threw himself into an obsessive study of dance at the age of ten, when his mother committed suicide, leaving him alone in the care of an abusive father. He spent every free hour of his remaining youth in the dance studio relentlessly practicing his art.  Ansel Adams retreated from an intolerable family drama into the darkroom, becoming remarkably skilled at the development of photographs by the age of 14.

Clearly, some kinds of childhood trauma are more likely to have a disorganizing and debilitating effect on the functioning of a child than they are to have a motivating effect, so there is still much to be understood about the circumstances under which early relational trauma has the potential to trigger an exceptionally focused and driven pursuit of a passionate interest.

Two recently released films, “Listen to me Marlon,” about Marlon Brando, and “Pawn Sacrifice,” about Bobby Fischer, illustrate beautifully the delicate psychological balance involved in the childhood scenario I have described. In both films, we see the connection between childhood trauma and the genius that was fueled by it, but the emotional damage has been too great for either of these tortured men to be able to live stable, gratifying lives.

Perhaps one of the most moving and uplifting aspects of “E.O. Wilson: Of Ants and Men” is the impression we get that Wilson has led a deeply satisfying (though at times embattled) life as he continues–into old age—to pursue his childhood obsession. He describes himself as a “happy man” who has lived in a disastrous century (referring primarily to the destruction of the earth’s biosphere) without losing his optimism. At the end of the film he sits looking out over the recently restored Gorongosa Park in Mozambique, and his boyish delight in that primordial natural setting is touching, indeed. “We pursue dreams that go back to childhood,” he says. “Mine was simple. I look for lost worlds.” He is referring to the vast, hidden world of insects, which has fascinated him all his life, but I could not help thinking about the world that was lost to him when he was seven.

Sue Erikson Bloland, LCSW, is faculty and Co-Director of Admissions at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanaysis. Her memoir, In the Shadow of Fame, was published by Viking Penguin in 2005, and she has published articles on the connection between childhood trauma and fame, or the achievement of “greatness,” in The Atlantic Monthly, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Psychoanalytic Inquiry.

Click here to learn more about Sue’s course Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Fame.

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