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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An Eleven-Year-Old Boy's Reaction to the World Trade Center Disaster

By Richard Zuckerberg, Ph.D.
Brooklyn, NY

On the morning of Sept. 13, 2001 I received a consultation request from the Pediatrics Department of the hospital where I am a psychologist. I called the inpatient unit and spoke with Dr. Gray who told me that an 11 yr. old boy was admitted to pediatrics from the ER on the night of Sept. 11, after being brought to the hospital's ER by his grandmother. He told me that the boy presented with the following symptoms: he had a choking sensation in his throat, he was not able to talk, he indicated by gesture that he had chest pains, and responded to questions only by writing his responses. His written responses were simple, his spelling was poor, and his penmanship looked poor as well. In addition, his right leg had a tremor, and both his arms were experienced as "heavy" by the boy and he appeared to have problems lifting his arms in front of him. He had a difficult time breathing as well, and the grandmother reported to the ER staff that he had chronic asthma. Based on what they saw, the ER physicians suspected that he might have had a seizure, or some other neurological problem. The boy was worked up neurologically, was given a CT scan of the head, an EEG, and an MRI. Over the next two days all findings were found to be negative.


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