Living Large: My Expanded Life as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist

By Teresa Rose, Ph.D.

Pondering what it means to be a psychoanalytic psychotherapist has prompted a great deal of free association and deep thinking. It touches me in many profound ways, and to try and tease out the meanings has been a challenge, albeit an exciting one. Overall, my analytic identity is so tightly entwined with my personality that it is hard to separate them. The more I learn and study, the more I apply analytic concepts to most aspects of my life, not just in my practice. In fact it is impossible not to do so. Writing about this topic, I found it difficult to focus on any one area of my life, so I gave up, and embraced all the ways it affects me.


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The Perils (and Joys) of Living as a Psychoanalytic Therapist

By Dora Ghetie

It is 7 p.m. on a Friday night. I am sitting at the bar, in one of my favorite restaurants, waiting for my date. This is my first date with Andrew. Normally I would be nervous but I have been on so many first dates lately, I feel totally confident. Being on a first date is strangely similar to conducting an intake. I cannot help it-as a fifth year doctoral student, soon to become full-fledged psychologist, I am immersed in therapy: doing therapy, being in therapy, and reading about therapy. This is my life. My fondness for psychoanalytic therapy is a further problem. All day long I listen for what is not being said and I try to look for patterns and how they show up in the transference. I cannot turn it off. So before long I ask my dates: tell me about your family. What's your earliest memory? What kind of relationships have you had? Do you dream? Just like an intake. Hmmm…maybe that's why there have been so few second dates.


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Etudes on Loss

By Jill Salberg, Ph.D.

For many first and second generation American Jews the Holocaust stands as the defining event in their lives. Much like the list recited at Yom Kippur: Who escaped, who didn't, who went to Palestine, who to South America, who was hidden, who was revealed. The list could go on and on but the fundamental event defines it all: who lived and who died. For me the story is more ephemeral, about what was lost, sacrificed in order to live. And this story started thirty years before, while the seeds of the Shoah were growing, during the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. This era brought thousands of Jewish immigrants to America while the doors still remained opened. I always felt I was one of the fortunate ones, my grandparents left long before Hitler, long before an Anschluss, a final solution. I have only begun to fully comprehend that their good fortune was mixed with great separations, hardships and loss.


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Fugue on a Figured Bass...and other duets

By Fern W. Cohen, Ph.D.

Some time ago, in the midst of revising an article under consideration by a psychoanalytic journal, I had reluctantly agreed to relinquish a musical metaphor in the concluding paragraph that compared the role of the analyst in the psychoanalytic process to that of a figured bass. It was, the editors had written, a striking analogy, but they believed that it introduced a "discordant" note in an otherwise "mellifluous" paper. In their suggestions for "fine-tuning," they felt that the rather obscure technical term would require explanation in an already longish paper and they encouraged me to end on a different "note." If the bad news was that they stood firm on their editorial ground, the good news was that they had accepted my article for a forthcoming issue of the journal. Furthermore. Since I had been "beating the drum" for my conclusion, perhaps I could come up with another paper and expand on it there?


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Group Artistic Creation as a Lived Experience of the Unconscious

by The Unconscious Collective

The Unconscious Collective is a group of ten Duquesne University first year psychology graduate students who have joined together to study and experience "the unconscious", free of constructs or theoretical abstractions. We are clinicians in training, bringing with us influences ranging from psychoanalysis, humanism, existentialism, and phenomenology, to cultural, political, and historical theory. We come from four continents, bear different skin colors, were raised into diverse faiths, and speak different languages as our mother tongues. We have not come together to identify the best theoretical approach for understanding the unconscious, or to synthesize a bridge across the diverse theories that inspire us. Rather, we cultivate the diversity of our backgrounds in order to enrich our exploration of the phenomenon that most intrigues us: the ineffable mystery which is the unconscious.

In this short piece, we would like to introduce people to our questions and method of investigation. Our purpose is to inspire other training therapists to hold similar events and reflect on their experiences in ways that will deepen psychological praxis, as well as engender personal insight.


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