Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch Harvey Schwartz MD

"From such accounts [of Polish atrocities] we can see how incredibly emotional and how incredibly pleasurable it could be on the social level, not only for the people involved, but for the whole group, and we can really see how violence on others becomes the core of social identity, of the national identity. We tend to think about committing violence as anti-social, and that Eros  is the only force that brings us together.  We can’t see here how eroticized violence or sexualized violence might do it as well. After so many years of research, we don't really have to ask the question: how is it that people can do such things, or how can people become murderers on a social level, on a group level?  I'd say that the more interesting question we may ask is how did the murderers stay people and stay citizens? How could after committing such crimes in plain sight of the whole group, how could that group remain a stable group? How could a community of murderers and bystanders to the violence - what is the social glue that brings them all together? I would say that eroticized violence is one of the main aspects, one of the main elements of creating a closed identity based on denial of humanity of the other.” 
 
Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the phenomena of bystanding in the presence of extreme violence. The slaughter of neighbors by neighbors notoriously occurred in the Rwandan genocide and in the Polish Holocaust, which is the focus of Jan's research. He posits that the psychoanalytic concept of perversion best captures the denial and split-off excitement that characterizes bystanding - 'one eye open, one eye closed'. He challenges the possibility of observer's indifference, documents the ever-present knowledge that neighbors have of the history of their neighbors, and discusses the experience of 'ghosts' inhabiting the homes of forgotten/remembered neighbors. We distinguish between being a bystander and a witness, and the state of mind “We will not forgive you for what we did to you.” We close with our sharing the difficulty of listening to this material and how he managed this over the years of his research.
 
Our Guest: Jan Borowicz, PhD, is a certified psychotherapist and candidate in psychoanalytic training in Polish Psychoanalytic Society (IPA). He is a Member of Holocaust Remembrance Research Group in the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Poland.  He is interested in cultural memory, psychoanalytic theory, and Holocaust studies. He published two books in Polish on history and memory of the Holocaust. Recently, he published his first book in English, Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders (2024), in which he explores the deep implications of witnessing mass violence and extermination. 
 
Recommended Readings:
Jessica Benjamin, "A relational psychoanalysis perspective on the necessity of acknowledging failure in order to restore the facilitating and containing features of the intersubjective relationship (the shared third)", International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 9, iss. 3, 2009.
 
Jan Borowicz, Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders, trans. Mikołaj Golubiewski, Routledge: London and New York, 2024.
 
Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.
 
Samuel Gerson, "When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning, and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust", International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 9, iss. 6, 2009.
 
Grzegorz Niziołek, Polish Theatre of the Holocaust, trans. Ursula Phillips, London: Bloomsbury Publishing and Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego, 2021.
 
Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, eds. Christina Morina, Krijn Thijs, New York: Berghan Books, 2019.
 
Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: Studies in Psychoana

My conversation with Sudhir Kakar took place five weeks before his untimely death on April 22nd. 
“Freud obviously is very brave and courageous to accept that the world is inadequate and that my desires will never be sufficiently fulfilled. My question - is this in fact the case? I think that everyone has had some kind of spiritual experience, some more than others and in many different contexts, not just religious ones. Spiritual experiences contradict Freud’s notion of common unhappiness and the idea of the world as inadequate. What reason do we have to assume that all such common experiences are simply false, that they are based on some kind of false consciousness? Rather, I believe that the inadequacy lies in our own awareness rather than with the world. The world allows for many experiences that would be highly adequate yet we block them - what we call the mundane world is much more enchanted than we think it is." 
 
Episode Description: We begin by considering the embodiment of one's cultural imagination - "one's mental representation of culture" - into one's unconscious mind. Sudhir describes different early child-rearing practices and invites the question about their influence on our later inner lives. He shares with us his early idealization of Freudian/Western ways of thinking and his later development, which returned to the enchanting aspects of his Hindu youth. We discuss the similarities and differences between a Judeo-Christian-based psychoanalysis and one founded on a Hindu imagination. We consider the different notions of God, ritual, and illusion. He distinguishes an 'autonomous person' from a 'communitarian person' and describes the pleasures and burdens of each. We close with his sharing his lovely psychoanalytic origin story connected to his meeting Erik Erikson and discovering "I want to be like him."
 
Our Guest: Sudhir Kakar was a psychoanalyst, scholar, and writer. He had been a Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Chicago, McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii, and Vienna, Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study, Princeton, Berlin, and Cologne, and was on the board of Freud Archives. He had received the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, Tagore-Merck Award, McArthur Research Fellowship, and Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. `As ‘the psychoanalyst of civilizations’, the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur listed Kakar in 2005 as one of the world’s 25 major thinkers. Sudhir was the author/editor of 20 books of non-fiction and six novels. His books have been translated into 22 languages.
 
Recommended Readings:
Kakar, Sudhir -
The Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations, Karnac. June 2024
 
The Capacious Freud, in F. Busch and N. Delgado eds.The Ego and the
Id 100 years Later. London: Routledge 2023
 
Re-reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion in Hindu India, in O'neill  &  S.Akhtar.eds.On Freud's the Future of an Illusion. London: Routledge, 2018
 
The  Analyst and the Mystic Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992
 
Psychoanalysis and Eastern Spiritual Healing Traditions, J. of
Analytical Psychology,48(5).
 
Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological inquiry into India
and its Healing Traditions. New York: A. Knopf, 1982.
 
Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World. Chicago: U. of
Chicago Press, 2009

"Psychoanalysis landed in Finland in the 50s; before the Second World War there were one or two persons familiar with psychoanalysis. In the 50s, psychoanalysis got a lot of interest in Finland but then there was no possibility of training in Finland. The pioneers went abroad, some to Sweden and some to Switzerland. They picked up the theoretical preferences in the new countries and new institutes - the IPA Associations mainly were from people studying in Sweden and coming back to Finland and creating the IPA association. The Therapeia Institute consisted mainly of people studying in Switzerland and got a lot of influence from existential psychoanalysis and Jungian psychoanalysis… I tend to side with Lee Grossman [link below]; I guess the theoretical theories reflect more the character - when you listen to a case presentation of course people present them differently depending on their theoretical background, but in the consulting room I am not sure there is that much difference." 
 
Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the value of meeting and learning from analyst colleagues from around the world.  We discover both similarities and differences in both the challenges and pleasures of this work. In Finland there was a government-mandated change in the structure of training in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis starting in 2012.  The anticipatory anxieties were considerable. There was input from the university on issues of curricula, research opportunities, and improved pedagogy. The fears of loss of meaningful autonomy proved to be mostly fears - not realized. We also discuss the origins and current state of psychoanalysis in Finland. We close with a few words of the pervasive role of sauna in Finnish life and the ways it manifests in analyses.
 
Linked Episode:
Episode 135: Technique is Character Rationalized with Lee Grossman, MD (Oakland, Ca.) – IPA Off the Couch
 
Our Guest: Jan Johansson is a psychologist and a training and supervising analyst at the Therapeia Institute in Helsinki, Finland. Currently, he’s working as a psychoanalyst in private practice in Helsinki. In addition, he supervises psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. He has been interested in issues concerning psychoanalytic training for the last decade and a half. Currently he is the chair of the board of the Institute, while also being a member of board of the Therapeia Society. He also was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies 2014 - 2022. He is interested in promoting the multitude of psychoanalytic voices; while being trained within an object-relational frame, he doesn’t identify exclusively with any particular theoretical frame of reference.
He lives in Espoo, a neighbor city of Helsinki with his wife. After languishing in the darkness of the Finnish winter from October to mid-March, in the summer they enjoy the light and the white nights at their summer-house at the seaside, heating their sauna everyday and swimming in the Finnish Gulf.
 
Linked Episode: 
Episode 135: Technique is Character Rationalized with Lee Grossman, MD (Oakland, Ca.)
  
Recommended Readings:
Grossman, L. (2023): The psychoanalytic encounter and the misuse of theory. New York: Routledge.
 
Kernberg, O.F. (2016). Psychoanalytic education at the crossroads: Reformation, change and the future of psychoanalytic training. New York: Routledge
 
Reeder, J. (2004). Hate and love in psychoanalytic institutions: The dilemmas of a profession. New York: Other Press.
 
Tuckett, D. (2005). Does anything go? Towards a framework for the more transparent assessment of psychoanalytic competence. Int J Psychoanal. 86: 31–49.
 
Tuckett, D., Amati Mehler, J., Collins, S., Diercks, M., Flynn, D., Franck, C., Millar, C., Skale, E., Wagtmann, A-M. (2020): Psychoanalytic education in the Eitingon model and its controversies: A way forward. Int J Psychoanal. 101: 1106 – 1135.
 

“My interest is to rather than continue with the psychoanalytic tilt which has tended to try to find the words - to find the areas of the analyst that has words to engage with these states and then help the patient transform these states into something thinkable and communicable. [In contrast] my interest has been to take the patient where they are; it’s kind of a radical way of saying ‘meeting the patient where they are’, and find our way and lend ourselves to engaging with them in their own idiom, using Bollas’s term, in their own way of being and to find ways to be with them that don’t necessarily rely on talking about things and making things known.”
 
Episode Description: We begin by considering patient's non-represented mental states and their manifestation in somatic and motoric registers. Robert describes his understanding and approach to clinically engage those who "barely experience continuity of the self or subjectivity in themselves or others." He recommends 'companioning' with them. This entails not trying to "move the patient out of these regressed areas into greater relatedness ...but to welcome these other dimensions and their full expression within the analytic space." We consider the role of enactive engagements, the non-verbal vs the pre-verbal and 'radical neutrality'. He presents a case where the patient and analyst shared music, food and not discussed emotional intimacy between them that he felt was vital to enable the patient to emerge as a 'real person'. We close with speaking of Robert's professional history of working early on with psychotic individuals and finding that his approach enabled them, often to their surprise, to feel heard. He also describes his attunement to the experience of being an 'other' that emerged from his growing up as an 'other' - a Jew in London.  
 
 
Our Guest: 
Robert Grossmark, Ph.D., ABPP, is a psychoanalyst in New York City. He works with individuals, groups, and couples. He is on the teaching and supervising faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, The National Institute for the Psychotherapies Program in Adult Psychoanalysis, The National Training Program in Psychoanalysis, National Faculty Member, the Florida Psychoanalytic Center and lectures at other psychoanalytic institutes and clinical psychology training programs nationally and internationally. He is an Associate Editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is the author of The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning and co-edited The One and the Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy and Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory. 
 
 
Recommended Readings:
Grossmark, R. (2024) The Untelling, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. In press.
 
Grossmark, R. (2019) The anguish of fatherhood, Psychoanalytic Perspectives,  16 (3), 316-325.
Grossmark, R. (2023) A child is being murdered: A contemporary psychoanalytic treatment of a compulsion to child pornography, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 40: 25-30
 
Bach, S. (2011) Chimeras: Immunity, interpenetration and t he true self. Psychoanalytic Review, 98(1): 39-56
 
Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Fear of breakdown. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1(1-2), 103–107.
 
Bollas, C. (2011) Character and interformality. In C. Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader (p. 238-248)
 
Ogden, T.O. (2017) Dreaming the analytic session: A clinical essay. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 86: 1-20.
 
Stern, D.B. (2022) On coming into possession of oneself: Witnessing and the formulation of experience. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91: 639-667
 
Symington, N. (2012) The Essence of psychoanalysis as opposed to what is secondary. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 22, 4, 395-409

"The first line treatment for adolescents with anorexia now is family-based therapy typically, which involves helping the parents facilitate the refeeding of the adolescent. So, I was working with the patient in that way and found it to be helpful and useful, but was consistently struck by the neglect of the patient’s inner life, and found, at least based on my experience with many patients, that while you could get some symptomatic relief, if you didn't, in some way, address the deeper dynamics, the aspects of the patient's personality organization that drove the disorder, that were implicated at the disorder, there was a way that the patient would snap back to their old behaviors over time, that deeper change and a deeper understanding of what was going on was really necessary; and so that's been kind of evolution from my work over the past ten years from  my first book, which was about anorexia in males, and tried to present a kind of Integrative understanding of that phenomena, increasingly over time I've become more and more interested in the deeper kind of analytic thinking that we can bring to bear on this kind of suffering.” 
 
Episode Description: 
We begin with a description of the common contertransferential pull to intervene behaviorally in the face of repetitive self-destructive eating disorder symptoms. This intention can inform but not compel the clinical decision as to the indicated treatment of choice for someone at any particular moment. Behavioral and pharmacologic treatments can be important in softening the pressure of eating disorder symptoms. They do not, however, give an individual access to their interoceptive life, from which these disturbing self-preoccupations emerge. We discuss the challenges of working with those who have limited capacities for mentalisation and as a result, live out their inner lives somatically and motorically. Immersive treatment leads the clinician to experience these proto-affects in one's own body and in one's own ruminations. Tom discusses alexithymia, typical family structures, and the presence of the 'abject' experience in the lives of these patients. He presents a disguised case of a patient who was able to work through both the early struggles and later neurotic aspects of these conflicts analytically. We close with his sharing with us his vision for the future which includes more integration between the dynamic and adynamic approaches to these challenging patients.
 
Our Guest: Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, is Chair in the Department of Psychology at Golden Gate University as well as a psychoanalyst and board-certified, licensed psychologist. His first book, Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males, was published in 2016. His second book, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak, an edited volume in the Relational Perspectives Book Series, was published in 2018. His third book, Eating Disorders (New Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis), was released in 2022.  His fourth book, co-edited with Burke, Michaels, and Muhr, is entitled Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation: Rehumanizing Mental Health Policy and Practice. He has also written a novel about the process of psychotherapy, Ghosts of the Unremembered Past, additionally released as an audiobook. He is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute for Northern California and a Training Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He is on the Scientific Advisory Council of the National Eating Disorders Association, Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP), the William Alanson White Institute’s Eating Disorders, Compulsions, and Addictions program, and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and has a private practice in Berkeley, CA.
 
 
Recommended Readings:
 
Williams, G. (1997). Reflections On Some Dyn

"The ability to play means we can indulge in a kind of illusion, not delusion, and make a distinction. It always amazes me that when the patient arrives, they like the routine of an analysis; nobody breaks that, it's an illusion; it is a piece of theater every time. We open the door to our patients and they lie on the couch, and yet there is something enormously gratifying as the patient works out their sense of  reality from that illusory field. I think it is exactly what the mother is able to bring to the infant - this capacity to play and this capacity to continue to evolve beyond the analysis as an internalization of that experience of being listened to and being with someone. The details of that is related to an intrapsychic surviving and non- surviving object in the analyst  who continues to think and feel and be with the patient in the consulting room.”
 
Episode Description: Joel begins his conversation with Jan around Winnicott's conceptualization of aggression in development and in the analytic encounter. She noted that he had a very sophisticated developmental theory of aggression which culminated with the role that the destruction of the object plays in constituting reality. Jan explains that she has elaborated Winnicott’s late theory of aggression with her notion of the ‘surviving object'. She distinguishes the 'surviving object' from the 'good object', especially as it stands apart from a moralizing position. She considers its internalization as an essential condition for healthy development. They discussed the role that insight continued to play for Winnicott after he emphasized the importance of the patient’s experience in the analytic process. They also consider the ‘fear of woman’ as a root of misogyny. After discussing the uniqueness of the analytic setting to facilitate play, fantasy, and “magic which is not psychosis,” Jan concludes by emphasizing the importance of in-person treatment in order to have an in vivo experience of the non-retaliatory analyst.
 
Linked Episode:
Episode 144: Why Winnicott? Joel Whitebook, PhD
 
Our Interviewer and Guest:
Joel Whitebook, PhD is a philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is on the Faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and was the founding Director of the University’s Psychoanalytic Studies Program. In addition to many articles on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and critical theory, Dr. Whitebook is also the author of Perversion and Utopia (MIT) and Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge).
Jan Abram, PhD is a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and in private practice in London. She is a Visiting Professor of the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London and is currently Vice President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation for the Annual Conferences. She is President-Elect for the EPF to start her term in March 2024. She is a Visiting Lecturer and supervisor at the Tavistock Clinic in London. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Kyoto, Japan, where she resided for a writing sabbatical. Jan Abram has published several books and articles notably The Language of Winnicott, Donald Winnicott Today (2013), The Clinical Paradigms of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott: Comparisons and Dialogues (co-authored with R.D. Hinshelwood 2018); The Surviving Object: psychoanalytic clinical essays on psychic survival-of-the-object (2022) and her second book with R.D. Hinshelwood: The Clinical Paradigms of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion: Comparisons and Dialogues (2023).
 
 
Recommended Readings:
ben
Abram, J. (2022) The Surviving Object: Psychoanalytic Clinical Essays on Psychic survival-of-the-object New Library of Psychoanalysis Routledge
 
Abram, J. (2023) Holding and Containing: on the specificity of Winnicott's object relations theory Holding und Containing: Zur spezifischen Natur der Objektbeziehungen bei Winnicott. P