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9 March 2011
Dear Colleagues, Supporters, and Members of Section V:
There are a number of items to which I would like to turn my attention in this letter. As you are well-aware, Section V [Psychologist-Psychoanalyst Clinicians] of the Division of Psychoanalysis [39] has dedicated itself to the broadest and most inclusive definitions of psychoanalysis, so as to offer a much-needed forum for inter-disciplinary and collegial interchange; dialogue; and scholarship. With the recent 'Critical Discussions' that have been part of the electronic-mail exchanges of late on the Division 39 List-serve in mind, it is instructive to consider the on-going relevance of Section V in light of such important psychoanalytical dialogues.
As such, with an eye toward maintaining Section V as an inclusive and significant voice within the Division; and its overall governance, I would like to encourage you to renew your membership, and send in your dues. We hope that you have been taken with the good works of Section V, and have benefitted from its programming and projects. Please note that many of its functions: the Web-site [including access to its archived papers, participation in on-line dialogues, etc], the Invited Panels, the Receptions, and more, are all open to any member of Division 39. We are pleased to be able to offer, this coming April, in New York City, the Invited Panel for Section V, entitled, Psychoanalysis in the World: The Political, the Traumatized, & the Activist. This important and highly relevant panel will be chaired by Section V Board member Ghislaine Boulanger. In addition to contributing a paper [Psychoanalytic Witnessing: Professional Obligation or Moral Imperative?], she will preside over provocative works by, Leanh Nguyen [The Psychoanalytic in Activism: Finding Human Staying Human], and Mary-Joan Gerson [Psychoanalytic Activism: Historical Perspectives & Subjective Conundrums].
Additionally, we wish to invite you to our Section V Community Meeting/Reception, Friday of the Conference, from 6:30 to 8:00. I say 'Community Meeting', as the Board has expressed a desire to have a brief overview of the Section's history and achievements, but more importantly, to provide a forum wherein people in attendance can meet the members of the Board. Toward this end, it is our desire to encourage greater involvement of our membership in the actual functioning of the Section – including the Board and its Committees – and thus, more fully actualising the democratic ethos of Section V, including the invitation to bring new ideas sponsored by new colleagues to bear on our good works – which will hopefully continue for a considerable period of time! The potential list of interests and agendas is limited only by the imagination. We are expecting a typically generous Section V attendance, accompanied by a delightful selection of hors d'oeuvres.
On behalf of the Board of Section V, we look forward to seeing you at these meetings, announced in the Program Catalogue!
PLEASE NOTE that Section V collects dues on a calendar-year basis independently of the Division and APA dues. If you have not paid Section V directly for 2011, then you have not renewed or established your membership in our Section. Please send your dues to: Administrator, Section V, 333 West 57th Street, Suite 103, New York, New York 10019-3115. Please find, attached, a membership form to complete and send in with your check along with an envelope.
Many thanks, in advance, for your kind attention to these important matters,
David L Downing, PsyD, ABPP, President, Section V, & David Lichtenberg, PhD, ABPP, Membership Chair
PLEASE NOTE THIS SITE IS IN PROCESS OF BEING RENOVATED. WE WILL ATTEMPT TO KEEP THE NEWS PAGE CURRENT.
Our New Name
Please note our new name. The Sphinx is an enigmatic character: sometimes woman sometimes man, part human part beast, neither silent nor discursive. The Sphinx poses a question. Like the psychoanalyst the Sphinx is not the one who knows but the one who may provide the condition for new knowledge. This is the spirit of The Sphinx as a site of inquiry on the web, a site where psychoanalytic inquiry takes place. We invite you to engage The Sphinx. Post your inquiries. Submit your hypotheses, half formed queries, and open questions. This site is open to all to read and to respond. All members of Division 39 may join: click 'register' and you are then free to enter into discussions and post replies.
Please note: Your user name and password will be sent to you automatically when you register. If you don't see it in your email inbox check to see if it went into your spam folder. If you have any questions or problems registering, please contact us directly.
OPEN QUESTION
Today's Open Question:
Why is the Unconscious known by what it is not?
Mother Tongue?
I've been working with Willy, a man in his 80's and a refugee (in his childhood and along with his mother, father and younger brother) from Hitler's Europe. Our psychotherapy has focussed largely on Willy's fraught relationship with his wife of many years--herself a holocaust survivor--around their difficulties with each other, with their children and their grandchildren.
A year or so ago, his oldest daughter died. I had come back from a vacation to his numbness and literally unexpressible grief. It's his inability to experience his grief--and what it took for him to move forward--that I want us to think about.
His daughter's death had not been unexpected. She had had advanced liver disease--the consequence of intravenous drug use earlier in her life, and the consequence, Willy himself had acknowledged many times, of a life of promiscuity and drug abuse. "I lost my daughter many years ago," he would say.
But now he was also saying, "There must be something wrong with me. I can't cry. I can't mourn...." "I don't know, doc," he would say, "What's wrong with me?" Over the weeks that followed he would lapse into a numb silence and then into his repetitive questioning and fruitless self-examination. I sat with him, I felt for him, I tried to give him a way to think about himself--in all the ways psychoanalytic clinicians do: how he might feel; how I might feel, what it all might mean: the frustrated anger with his daughter, the disappointment, his self-protective distancing from his own feelings.... All to no avail.
Then in a session some months after the event, Willy was talking about his wife and their early relationship. He was remembering the early sweetness of married life, how much his wife had wanted a baby girl, a little "meidlele," he said in Yiddish, and how when the baby was born, he said, "We had our little meidlele," and at that his voice broke and he cried!
There was nothing I needed to say at that moment; I offered him the box of tissues; I took one myself.
So the question: What happened there? Why did the word in Yiddish, and his saying it aloud, allow things to move forward--forward with the emotional process of grieving, and, subsequently, forward with the interpretative process as well?
Surely there's something to say about this question from a range of psychoanalytic prespectives. My own feeling is that what is most interesting here is the nature and power of early language--how we talk to ourselves in our intimate and ungarded moments--but I'm eager to hear what others might think.
--Henry Seiden
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