Discovering Child Abuse

By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Author's note: The Kalinkowitz Memorial Lecture that I gave for the NYU Post-doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis on March 14, 2003, was based upon the text below. This text is part of a longer work in progress, and it should not be read as a finished piece. Please do not cite it or circulate it in its present form. Thank you, EYB

Part 1: "Child abuse and neglect" (CAN)


Child abuse had to be discovered. People have always known, of course, that some adults beat or rape or starve children; and that some societies have explicitly sanctioned injurious acts and violence against children, even institutionalizing corporeal punishments, child labor or child prostitution, infanticide. Although most of the harm done to children was taken for granted, some of it was condemned or prosecuted even before child abuse was discovered. In the mid-18th century, for example, almost a quarter of the capital rape cases prosecuted at the Old Bailey in London involved victims of less than ten years of age; while three quarters of the men charged with rape in mid-19th century France were accused of raping children. But these actions were prosecuted as rape, not as "child abuse and neglect." That designation had to exist before crimes against children were clearly and consistently distinguished as crimes against children. But even then there was not a concept explicitly indicating that a group—children—was being targeted and attacked when a child was raped as a child. There was not a concept like the concept sexism, which indicates that women are targeted and attacked when a woman is raped as a woman. Maltreatment of people of color existed long before such maltreatment was marked with the word "racism" and understood as prejudice against a group called "Negroid."


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Love Is Unmistakeably Relational

An appreciation of Stephen A. Mitchell in the form of a book review

by R.G. Kainer

Art pushes back the void. The sudden death of Stephen Mitchell left a great void, and his posthumous book Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time consoles us. It is the bittersweet fruit of his labors that made him so highly regarded in our contemporary analytic world; one he helped shape through his open mind and his generous spirit. From his now classic book on object relations theory (co-authored with Jay Geeenberg) to this final one, he left a rich intellectual legacy.


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A Dream Manifesto

By Paul Lippmann, Ph.D.

(This article is adapted from the Bernard Kalinkowitz Memorial Lecture delivered on Novermber 16, 2001.)

From the beginning, dreams and psychoanalysis were made for each other. Freud brought the magic of dreams into the materialism of modern times and rooted his infant science along the royal road to the unconscious. Thus, dreams were born into the 20th Century on the wings of psychoanalysis and to return the favor, psychoanalysis was born into the 20th Century on the wings of dreams.


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Letter to Our American Colleagues

By Paola Mieli


In 2001, four major—American psychoanalytic associations, grouped together under the umbrella designation of The Psychoanalytic Consortium, formally drafted and ratified a document titled "Standards of Psychoanalytic Education." These four organizations are: the American Psychoanalytic Association, the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, the National Membership Committee on Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work, and Division 39 of the American Psychological Association. In her official presentation of the "Standards of Psychoanalytic Education," Dr. Laurel Bass Wagner explains that this document is the fruit of compromise among the different opinions of the organizations that ratified it—a process that took roughly two years and, to some extent, left everyone involved dissatisfied. It nevertheless represents, in the words of Dr. Bass Wagner, "an enormous achievement." In support of this document, the Consortium has established an entity called the Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education (ACPE), which is seeking official recognition as the national accrediting body for psychoanalytic training institutes. The express goal of this body is to gain authorization from the US Department of Education as the accreditation center for psychoanalytic institutes in the United States.


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The Interpretation of an Architect's Dream: Relational Trauma and Its Prevention

by Elisabeth Young-Breuhl, New York

During the eight months she has been in analysis with me, my patient has often dreamt about our work. We go on journeys together, we build new houses or renovate old ones, we make nice meals for a child—herself. In these dreams, she usually appears both as she is now, a widow in her forties, childless, an architect, and as a child whose age often points us to the developmental meaning of the dream. The dreams both recreate her past and recreate how our work has brought her past newly into her present experience. Several times she has remarked that she doesn't really understand, or really feel, something we have said about her childhood in a session until she dreams about it afterward. The interpretation of dreams is a new discovery for her, a new way of being and being intimate, talking more freely than she can otherwise. "Real life makes me choke up, it's too confusing."


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