Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

"I feel as a psychoanalyst one has to respond to the world. We can’t just simply remain in our consulting rooms although that has always been vitally important for my identity and thinking. We can’t turn a blind eye to what is going on in the world. There are a lot of awful things going on - a lot of genocides, a lot of similar kinds of processes that were seen in the Holocaust, that were seen in slavery, and they are continuing. We need to stand up, we need to say what’s going on, we need to tell people ‘Look, these are the elements.’ In America they came close to disaster with what happened with the capitol riots. We came close with populous movements here, but luckily our democratic structures have been fairly resilient. We have been able to stand up, with all this skepticism one may have, to some of these destructive forces. But other places are not so able to. It was a sense of I can’t simply keep quiet.”    Episode Description: We begin with Roger's definition of evil, which references the destruction of the subjectivity of the 'other’. We consider the mutual influences of individual psychology and group forces that permit and encourage the degradation and annihilation of the scapegoated. The two examples that he addresses in his book are the Holocaust and British-American Slavery, acknowledging the similarities and differences between them. Roger considers the capacity to provide a "home for otherness" as a vital alternative to evil. We discuss the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France as an example of those who collectively provided such a home for Jews in World War II. We conclude with his sharing his personal and family story with the Holocaust, which informs his life's work as well as the origin of his last name.    Our Guest: Dr. Roger Kennedy is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and an adult psychoanalyst. He was an NHS consultant in charge of the Family Unit at the Cassel Hospital for nearly thirty years before going into private practice twelve years ago. He was chair of the Child and Family Practice in Bloomsbury and is still a director there.  His work includes being a training analyst and seeing adults for analysis and therapy, as well as children, families, and parents at his clinic. He is a past president of the British Psychoanalytical Society and is a frequent expert witness in the family courts. He has written fourteen books published on psychoanalysis, interdisciplinary studies, and child, family, and court work, as well as many papers. His previous IPA podcast on music is at http://ipaoffthecouch.org/2020/11/22/episode-72-the-musicality-of-psychoanalysis-and-the-psychoanalysis-of-music-with-roger-kennedy-md/    Film: Getting Away with Murder(s)  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5078614/  Recommended Readings:  Bohleber, W. (2010). Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma. London: Routledge.  Browning, C. (1992). Ordinary Men. New York: Harper.  Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1990). Reflections of a Psychoanalyst Upon the Nazi Biocracy and Genocide. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 17: 22 167–176.  Hyatt-Williams, A. (1998). Cruelty, Violence, and Murder. Northvale, NJ:  Jason Aronson.  Kennedy, R. (2022), The Evil Imagination, Understanding and Resisting Destructive Forces. London: Phoenix Books.  Mitscherlich, A., & Mitscherlich, M. (1967). The Inability to Mourn. B. Placzek (Trans.). New York: Grove, 1975.  Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard  University Press.  Thomas, L. M. (1993). Vessels of Evil. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University  Press.    Warnock, B. (2020). Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust. London: Weiner Holocaust Library. 

"Psychoanalysis is a translation of what I call in Spanish, Psicoanalisis Criollo, which means that we are hybrid cultures in Latin America, and that is something that we should never forget. We have been acting in the Psychoanalytical Society for so long as if we were living in some big modern city of the first world, like London, Paris, San Francisco, New York.  I think that this ignoring or even denial of the fact that we are not there, we live in societies which are in many ways different than societies from the first world and we have to take that into account."     Episode Description: We begin with a description of ‘Psicoanalisis Criollo  - hybrid psychoanalysis,’ "psychoanalysis by and for Latin Americans." We discuss the ways that the analyst’s awareness of cultural factors impacts the clinical approach to deepening the patient’s self-awareness. Jorge presents vignettes where the appearance of socially defined similarities and differences were important elements to address in the treatment. He highlights the delicacy of our culturally colored countertransferences. He shares with us details about his 28-year weekly newspaper column as well as his 330,000 Twitter followers (@jotabruce). We close with his recounting his early history and its contribution to his current interests.       Our Guest: Jorge Bruce, Licensed in Humanities and Psychology by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. DEA (Master’s degree) by the University of Paris. Member of the Peruvian Society of Psychoanalysis – SPP. Author of several books - the most recent was the new edition of Nos Habíamos Choleado Tanto: Psicoanálisis y Racismo, (2019). Weekly columnist of the national newspaper La República. Former member of the IPA Board (2 periods). Former member of the IPA Executive Committee. Former chair of CAPSA. Former chair of the scientific committee for the IPA Congress on The Infantile. Currant chair of the liaison committee of a Mexican provisional society (ING).  Jorge Bruce will be a Keynote Speaker at the July 2023 IPA Meetings in Cartagena. Further details at www.ipa.world/cartagena    Recommended Readings:  Las Partes en Conflicto: Psicoanálisis, Conflicto y Alteridad. (2015)USMP. Lima, Bruce, Jorge.  Penser/rêver 21 (2012). Le substitut de Dieu. Pp. 171 – 184. Editions de l’Olivier. Paris.  Nos habíamos choleado tanto. Psicoanálisis y Racismo, Bruce Jorge. Penguin Random House (Taurus).(2019). Lima.    Delirio Americano: Una historia cultural y política de América Latina.Granés, C. (2022).  Penguin Random House (Taurus).  Psychoanalytic views from afar. Lemlij, M. (2022).  Cauces.  Aires de familia: Cultura y sociedad en América Latina. Monsiváis, C. (2002).ANAGRAMA.  Freud and the Non-European. Said, E. (2003). Verso. London. 

“Unconsciously, or sometimes just without really focusing on it, we’re always responding to the musicality of the patient’s voice. I think that careful listening and study of opera really hones our ability to do that. We pay more attention to it and we can potentially make not just unconscious use of it but also conscious use of it. As we listen to how the music itself is conveying the story that the patient is telling, it’s not necessarily the same story as the words are telling. What is often interesting is that the musicality of the voice, whether in opera or in the consulting room, often is at variance with the spoken text and that opens up interesting opportunities for generating meaning.” – S.G.      “The tendency is first to think that the text that is being sung is all important and that the melody and the orchestration behind it are supporting the purpose of the aria. That is generally true in popular Italian operas where the music for the orchestra and the melody seems to support the overall message. Because of Wagner’s influence in wanting to have an orchestration that actually comments on the action on stage as a second opinion, you get into more complex music where often the orchestra is playing something that reminds the listener of a previous theme, a motif, that complexifies the actual aria being sung.” – L.R.      Episode Description: Our conversation revolves around the idea that appreciating opera can “correct the historical tilt towards the verbal text” that often simplifies analytic listening. Steve and Lee use opera to understand universal unconscious themes that are often represented in opera. They suggest as well that it can alert the analytic listener to multiple levels of meanings that can be represented in the orchestration and melodies in addition to the manifest libretto. The ‘case example’ is The Magic Flute where the trajectory of male development is demonstrated through the evolution of maternal and paternal imagoes over the course of the storyline. They use musical excerpts to demonstrate different character’s affect states that enable the listener to experience their increasing complexity. We close with Steve and Lee sharing some of their own life journeys that have brought them to a place of finding great pleasure in this art form.      Our Guests:    Steven Goldberg, M.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He is currently an Associate Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and has for many years co-chaired Opera on the Couch, a collaboration between the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Opera. He has published on a variety of theoretical and technical issues in psychoanalysis as well as on psychoanalytic approaches to opera.      Lee Rather, Ph.D. is on the faculties of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, where he is also a personal and supervising analyst. He has published and presented on a wide range of topics including the integration of psychoanalytic theories, the existential dynamics of desire, mourning, and acceptance, and the unconscious aspects of creativity in drama, literature, and music. He is in private practice in San Francisco.      Recommended Readings:      Bollas, C. (1999). Figures and their functions. In The mystery of things (pp. 35-46). New York: Routledge.  Britton, R. (1989). The missing link: Parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex. InJ. Steiner (Ed.), The Oedipus complex today: Clinical implications. London: Karnac.  Chailey, J. (1992). The Magic Flute Unveiled: Esoteric symbolism in Mozart’s Masonic Opera. Vermont: Inner Traditions International.  Goldberg, S. (2011). Love, loss, and transformation in Wagner's Die Walkure. Fort Da 17:53-60  Grier, F. (2019). Musicality in the consulting room. International Journal of  Psychoanalysis,100: 827-885.  Frattaroli, E. J. (1987). On the Validity of Treating Shakespeare's Characters as if They Were Real People. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Volume 10(3):407-437.  Freud, S. (1914). The Moses of Michelangelo. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.) The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, (Vol 13 pp. 210-241).  Freud, S. (1928). Dostoevsky and Parricide. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.) The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, (Vol21, pp. 175-198).  Knoblauch, S. (2000). The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue. Hillside, N.J. and London: The Analytic Press.  Nagel, J. (2013). Melodies of the mind: Connections between psychoanalysis and music. New York: Routledge.  Purcell, S. (2019). Psychic Song and Dance: Dissociation and Duets in the analysis of trauma. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 88: 315-34  Rather, L. (2008). Reuniting the psychic couple in analytic training and practice: Theoretical reflections. Psychoanalytic Psychology. Vol 25, Number 1, pp. 99-109. 

"The psychoanalytic frame I have built in myself helps me to find a way to not go too near and not be too distant to a person. It is other than what we learn when we learn to be psychoanalysts. Then we have the opportunity to feel in a room where we are not in danger - it’s more the patient that feels in danger. He is coming and he has fears - but we, knowing our room, our couch, we don’t have many fears. But if you work as I did in an open field, in different houses, in different hospitals, in different orphanages, you are first full of fear and at the same time very curious about what happens and what can happen. It's not the same as if you are in your own practice. One of the most important things I had was my psychoanalytic setting in myself - in myself, not in the room in which I work. I can find a way that doesn’t bring too much fear to the patient and at the same time finds some way to get nearer to him, to his inner problems than if I was just a friend or a religious woman."   Episode Description: We begin by discussing the depth of human pain that Barbara encountered in her work in the poorest areas of Eastern Africa. She describes how essential her psychoanalytic sensibility was to enable her attunement to the closeness/distance space that was so important for mutual safety and understanding. She gives examples of the all-encompassing role of the Koran in those with whom she worked as well as the lack of a subjective self in many of the individuals she encountered. We learn of the effects of genital mutilation and the various reactions she had in seeing such suffering. We close with her sharing with us a bit of her personal story that has led her to this work.   Our Guest: Dr. phil. Barbara Saegesser is a training analyst with the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the IPA. She is president of the commission treating ethical problems in the Swiss Society of Psychoanalysis. Since 2005 she has worked part-time in Eastern Islamic African cities: Alexandria, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Hawassa, Djibouti, Kampala, and Zanzibar. Her work has been in orphanages, with street boys, in baby shelters, psychiatric hospitals, and maternity wards for genitally mutilated women.

“When I first started teaching it was most often done through theory, and teaching these complicated words with hard-to-understand concepts. It never made sense to me, to be honest, as a student myself. So, when I began teaching, I would tell stories whether they were about my own life or about my children as a way to express the idea of whatever the concept was. I found that the students became so engaged and interested, and it made sense to them. I think it also made it less frightening when they heard these diagnoses and different terms that scared them. Whatever the concept was I wanted to normalize it and let everyone know that these are experiences we all have. I think it works well for teaching and it’s been fun when I run into a student even 25 years later who says: ‘Oh! I remember that story.” – KM    “Students are overwhelmed with how much they are learning; they want to know what to say - looking for a kind of formula for that. I think the stories help to show how many different kinds of situations one can encounter with the work and what is happening in the course of a day and how spontaneous an intervention might be. When you are talking about learning to play a musical instrument rather than the theory, we are also learning to listen to the music. I think the stories offer a way of learning how to listen in the layers that an analyst does.” – AA    Episode Description: We begin by outlining the challenges we face in teaching an affective process while focusing on conceptual abstractions. It's akin to teaching how to play a musical instrument by studying music theory - both are important, but theory won't teach musicality. Kerry and Anne use storytelling as a vehicle to demonstrate the dynamic process as it lives in our everyday lives. We learn from the lessons in the stories as well as from learning to listen to the melodies. They each read their stories and we consider the presence of manifest and latent meanings in what we hear. We are also alerted to the essential role of the therapist's personal responses to the clinical material and with that the childhood memories that are often evoked. We close with their sharing with us something of their backgrounds that have led them to this work as well their involvement in the New Directions in Writing program.     Our Guests: Anne Adelman, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and Training Analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and the Contemporary Freudian Society. She is the co-editor of the JAPA book review section and launched a feature column called 'Why I write’. She is co-chair of the New Directions in Writing program and maintains a private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland.  Her books include Psychoanalytic Reflections on Parenting Teens and Young Adults: Changing Patterns of Modern Love, Loss, and Longing (2018), The Therapist in Mourning: From Faraway Nearby with Kerry Malawista (2013) and Wearing my Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories, with Kerry Malawista and Catherine Anderson (2011), When the Garden Isn’t Eden (2022).    Kerry L. Malawista, Ph.D. is a training and supervising analyst at the Contemporary Freudian Society and a Board Member at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She is co-chair of New Directions in Writing and founder of the recent project The Things They Carry – offering virtual writing workshops for healthcare and frontline workers across the country. She is permanent faculty at the Contemporary Freudian Society and teaches widely. Her essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and The Boston Globe, to name a few. She is the co-author of The Therapist in Mourning: From Faraway Nearby with Kerry Malawista (2013), Wearing my Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories,(2011), When the Garden Isn’t Eden (2022), and Who’s Behind the Couch (2017,). Her first novel Meet the Moon was released in September 2022. 

"It seemed to me in my training, also in my scholarly pursuits, that desire did not have conceptual status in most analytic clinical theory. Most traditions did not have a way of talking about the analyst’s motivations with the exception of the well-worn ideas about the analyst’s ‘blind spots’. But in terms of specific motivations, we just didn’t have a way to think about them. Yet it seemed to me that over and over again, especially around the thorny problem of clinical impasses and iatrogenic resistances caused by the analyst’s activity, that the analyst’s intention and desire was directly at play in those impasses. But we have no way to talk about it."     Episode Description: We begin by discussing Mitchell's notion of the analyst's desire. We consider its relation to wishes and healing which leads us to consider analytic listening. He embraces the metaphor of the innkeeper who asks, “What brings you here?” Mitchell shares his thoughts on reverie and projective identification which he feels are overvalued as dependable sources of information on the inner life of a patient. We discuss the usefulness of behavior change preceding insight and Lacan's notion of dual-relation resistance. We close with his chapter on termination and with his sharing poignant aspects of his childhood that open the book in Chapter One.    Our Guest: Mitchell Wilson, MD is a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, writer, editor and teacher. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Wilson has published fiction, literary criticism, and papers on the history of American psychiatry and the DSM. He has practiced and taught psychoanalysis in the Bay Area since 1990. His psychoanalytic writings have cohered around a theory of ethics, desire, and the psychoanalytic process. His book, The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice, was published in 2020. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He is in private practice and leads study groups in Berkeley, California.    Recommended Readings:    Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond Doer and Done to: an Intersubjective View of Third-ness. Psychoanal. Q., 73:5-46.      Chetrit-Vatine, V. (2014). The Ethical Seduction of the Analytic Situation: The Feminine-Maternal Origins of Responsibility for the Other. London: Karnac.      Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter. New York: Norton.      Lear, J. (2003). The Idea of a Moral Psychology: The Impact of Psychoanalysis on Philosophy in Britain. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84:1351–1361.    Wilson, M. (2020). The Analyst's Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice. Bloomsbury Academic Press.    JAPA Section: Ethical Implications of the Analyst as Person—December 2016    –– Kite, J.V. The Fundamental Ethical Ambiguity of the Analyst as Person.    –– Morris, H. The Analyst’s Offer.    –– Wilson, M. The Ethical Foundation of Analytic Action.    –– Kattlove, S. Acknowledging the ‘Analyst as Person’: a Developmental Achievement.    –– Moss, D. Me Here, You There––Now what? Commentary on Kite, Morris, Wilson, and Kattlove. 

"During the treatment they start to think about their family, they want to understand what really happened to their parents that made them such monsters towards their own children? They start to look for the origins of their family and the history of the family and they found transgenerational traumas from both sides - family members who were victims and family members who were persecutors. This is something on the personal level we have to live with all the time. When you can read the memoirs of different people you can also find both sides - the people who realize that in their family were the secrets connected with the fact that they were Jews and they had to hide their identity and until now they are afraid to speak openly about it. And the part of completely delayed history, like what happened to the properties of the family, how the family got this house after the Second World War."     Episode Description: We begin with a conversation on the current status of the Polish Psychoanalytic Society. Edyta shares with us encouraging information on the recent increase in analytic candidates and the abundance of patients. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she describes the awakening of historical trauma from Poland's history of being invaded. We learn of the arrival of 7 million Ukrainian refugees into Poland with over 3 million staying. She feels that the spirit of reparation for past destructiveness has contributed to the considerable generosity that Poles have shown to those in need despite a history of cruelty between Poland and Ukraine. We discuss the presence in patients' minds of secretive pasts from World War II - that of victims and persecutors. She uses the image of the Dybbuk to characterize a common mysterious experience of being possessed by the ghosts of the dead. We conclude optimistically that perhaps we are seeing for this moment in Polish history an improved trajectory of human decency.    Our Guest: Edyta Biernacka is a psychoanalyst, vice-president of the Polish Psychoanalytical Society, supervisor and training psychotherapist for Polish Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy Society, therapist and supervisor of Personality Disorders’ Treatment Ward in Psychiatric Babinski Clinic in Krakow where she works with adults in private practice.  

"Aren't these daughters of Persia retelling that myth [Shahnameh] as we speak - they put their hair down, Rudabeh put her hair down. This time maybe from this union there will now be a baby girl that will be born. This new epic female hero will transform this land. Something has happened - it’s an event, and whether we like it or not there is going to be a before and after. We observe the best of Rudabeh’s daughter in every single one of these girls. We know in psychoanalysis that these things are not something that can just happen - that the birth of the subject is a process and this birth of Rudabeh’s daughter has been long overdue. It has been a long time in the making, and I am sorry…I get very emotional, but I look forward to her becoming."       Episode Description: We begin by acknowledging the political turmoil currently surrounding and impacting our conversation about psychoanalysis in Iran. We discuss the nature of foreignness both as a geographical entity and an intrapsychic experience. Gohar recognizes the essential subversive spirit of discovering one's authentic voice and challenges efforts to homogenize one's identity in an artificial search for sameness. Tolerating discomfort is for her a hallmark of analytic maturation. We discuss the Blues which contain sorrow and promise -"it lives on the edge of falling into melancholy." We learn that Freud was translated into Farsi as early as 1906 and that Gohar was a founder of the Freudian Group of Tehran. We close with hopes for a future inspired by the courage of the young women of today with conversations freed from concerns about safety.    Our Guest: Gohar Homayounpour, PsyD is a psychoanalyst and author. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Italian Psychoanalytical society, and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. She is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, of which she is also the founder and past president. She is also a member of the scientific board at the Freud Museum in Vienna, and of the IPA group Geographies of Psychoanalysis.  Her first book, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (2012) won the Gradiva award and has been translated into many languages including French, German, Italian, Turkish, and Spanish. Her latest book is titled Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning (2022).    Recommended Readings:    Homayounpour, Gohar.  Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,2012).    Dislocated Subject, edited by Preta, Lorena (ed.), Geographies of Psychoanalysis, Mimesis International, 2018    Geographies of Psychoanalysis (Encounters Between Cultures In Tehran), edited by Preta, Lorena (ed.), Mimesis International, 2015.    Busch, Fred. A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique, selected papers on Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 2021.    Bolognini, Stefano. Vital Flows between the Self and Non-Self: The Interpsychic. Routledge, 2022. 

"I started with an analyst right as I was ending residency and starting the fellowship in Behavioral Neurology and Movement Disorders. It was right in this transition time, and over time it transitioned into a psychoanalysis, and I think it served a number of functions. There was something about the way of exploring what was going on, trying to get to the bottom of it, trying to understand it, trying to understand oneself with another person, that I think was closer to what I was trying to get to originally. There was also something about him, my analyst, that seem so…calm… but it’s not quite calm, something related to satisfied that I thought I was missing. What I was doing was good, and we can all work hard and do a lot of things, and there are a lot of things you could do. But somehow the fit wasn’t right - I was forcing a fit of some kind or trying to turn something into something that would be a better fit and working pretty hard at that. There was something about his way that made me feel like ‘maybe I could feel like that in my career.’" — RG  "I went to therapy because I thought I needed help. It was with a psychoanalyst, and we met two sessions a week, so it wasn’t psychoanalysis yet. The thing that I found most exciting with him was that it was a different kind of thinking. I remember sitting in a session and realized that he was thinking totally different from me, and it was so exciting, so overwhelming, a little frightening but something that I actually found an inclination to think like that. I remember that in one of the sessions I had the image of memory as bits on a line, and I understood that he didn’t think like that. For him, memory fragments are a conglomerate of these bits together, like grapes together, it was not linear. I was really amazed and excited by this. During the years when I really started the analysis, I found out that this kind of thinking can really be influential and make a change in my life as a patient and in my life as a therapist." — IB    Episode Description: Iftah and Rachel share their pre-medicine life stories and describe those factors that contributed to their pursuing medicine and neurology. They both trained in Behavioral Neurology in an effort to reach more deeply into the personal experiences of their patients. Informed by their own analytic treatments they concluded that they were seeking something deeper than neurology could offer them. Training in psychoanalysis allowed them to integrate their studies of the mind with their prior work with the brain - an integration that had its limitations as well as insights. We discuss the challenges of having differing perspectives on how to encounter clinical phenomena. We close with their sharing with us how they bring their analytic minds back to neurology in leading Balint-type groups for neurology residents - a lovely application of analysis off the couch.    Our Guests: Iftah Biran, MD, a psychiatrist, and a neurologist with a subspecialty in Behavioral Neurology. He recently finished his training in psychoanalysis and joined the Israeli Psychoanalytic Association as a member. He works part-time in his private practice where he mainly practices analysis. In the last years, he’s been working in the department of Neurology at Tel Aviv Medical Center, a tertiary hospital, as a liaison psychiatrist – neuropsychiatrist, and behavioral neurologist. There Dr. Biran mostly takes care of patients with conversion disorders. He’s the co-editor of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis. Dr. Biran is now completing a bachelor's degree in philosophy and literature at the Open University of Israel.    Rachel Gross, MD. Prior to becoming a psychoanalyst, Dr. Gross began her career as a neurologist. As a member of the neurology faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, she specialized in the care of patients with Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and other neurodegenerative conditions. She also served as co-director of the Penn neurology residency training program. Dr. Gross has a private practice in Philadelphia where she provides psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and medication management. She enjoys teaching, mentoring, and supervising trainees in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy. She also facilitates a group to support the emotional well-being and professional development of neurology residents at the University of Pennsylvania. 

"I feel very often that I can detect when people are doing case presentations, this ubiquitous tendency to not bother about the body. At a very superficial level it is accepted that we run around in bodies. What is actually a slightly deeper idea is that we run around in bodies, but our minds couldn’t have any function at all if our other parts of our functional systems weren’t also working, So the body and the mind of course are deeply interconnected. We do know that too, that’s not news, but it constantly becomes eliminated."     Episode Description: We begin with an overview of Rosemary's longstanding interest in the role of bodies and how they make their presence and meaning known in the clinical encounter. She discusses the analytic scotoma when it comes to the woman's body especially when it involves pregnancy and childbirth. We consider conflicts over being aware of and speaking freely about the analyst's body and what that is like for both parties. She shares her deep pleasure in the writings and person of Hans Loewald and what it has meant to her to be a physician. We consider how the sublimated role of a father's sexual arousal serves as an aid in his child's individuation. We close with Rosemary sharing her view of our field's past and some aspects of her personal journey.      Our Guest: Rosemary H. Balsam F.R.C.Psych (London), M.R. C. P. (Edinboro), (originally from Belfast, N. Ireland), is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in Yale Medical School; staff psychiatrist in the Yale Department of Student Mental Health and Counseling, and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, New Haven, Conn. Her special interests are female gender developments; young adulthoods; the body in psychic life; the work of Hans Loewald. Dr. Balsam is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Quarterly and Imago and is a past co-editor of the Book Review Section of JAPA with her husband, Paul Schwaber. Her most recent book is Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis (2012, Routledge); and her latest book review (2021) At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva by Alice Jardine. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 102:629-634. She is on the executive board of the newly inaugurated “Loewald Center,” a joint organization between IPTAR and the WNEIP. Her honors include 2018, winning the Sigourney Award for excellence in the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (she was the first woman in the USA to receive this prize.)    Recommended Readings:    Balsam, R.M (2012) Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis London, New York Routledge  Balsam, R. H (2013) (Re)membering the Female Body in Psychoanalysis: Childbirth JAPA Volume 61: 3 pp. 446 - 470.    Balsam, R.H. ((2015) The War on Women in Psychoanalytic Theory Building: Past to Present Psychoanal Study Child 69, 83-107. 2015.    Balsam, R.H. (2019) The Natal Body and its Confusing Place in Mental Life: J,Amer.Psyoanal.Assn 67.1 pp.15- 36    Balsam, R.H. (2017) Modern Gender Flexibility: Pronoun Changes and the Body’s Activities. Ch 4 In Vaia Tsolas and C. Anzieu Premmeurer (eds.) A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World: On The Body London, New York Routledge.    Kristeva J. (1980) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez New York: Columbia University Press 1980).    Toronto, E, Ponder, J, Davisson, K, KellyM.(eds) (2017) A Womb of Her Own: Women’s Struggle for Sexual and Reproductive Autonomy, London, New York Routledge.