A QUESTION

Board member and editor David Lichtenstein starts off our Open Forum with this question:

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Henry M. Seiden
Secretary

Are psychoanalysis and psychology different disciplines?

The discipline that is concerned with the formations of subjective identity, with its rigidities and its fragilities, its illusions and its functions, seems to be a discipline that is particularly susceptible to the vagaries of its own collective identity. This has been the story of psychoanalysis. We all know the history of excommunications, of debates on the one true way, of wrangles about membership played out, and still playing out, in our professional organizations as well as outside of them in the legal domain.


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On Licensing Psychoanalysts

With the passage of a law in NY State that establishes the licensing of psychoanalysts, and with movement toward similar laws taking place in various other states, questions about the formal status of the profession: how credentials are established, what the standards of training should be, who should decide such matters, etc., are once again in the air. Now that there is a new political and social meaning to be given to the term "psychoanalyst" as an independent licensed profession, it would seem that even those who practice psychoanalysis under the rubric of their own licensed profession, such as the majority of the members of Division 39, must take account of the changing status that their profession will have in the public sphere.


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Is The Unconscious Necessary?

By Victor P. Iannuzzi, PhD
New York, NY

This essay shared shared Section V's 2006 Morton A. Schillinger Prize

Among psychoanalysts, the postulate that there is such a thing as the "unconscious" at all is a stance that originally and most directly derives from Freud. Freud's realization that human mentation proceeds predominantly from outside of subjective awareness stands as his most valuable contribution, surpassing even his comprehensive methodological approach to investigating the nature and effects of unconscious mentation (Gedo, 1999). The idea of an "unconscious," of one form or another, has remained central to psychoanalysis throughout its evolution. The "unconscious," it seems, was not only the de facto invention of psychoanalysis (de facto because the idea of automatism had been around for about 50 years before Freud) but, for a good part of the past 100 years, it seems to have been an almost constant preoccupation. It has been exhaustively surveyed and studied by psychoanalytic historians and cognitive psychologists (Ellenberger, 1970; Kihlstrom, 1987, 1995, 1998, 1999a, b; Kihlstrom, J.F., Mulvaney, S., Tobias, B.A., & Tobis, I.P., 2000; Westen, 1998a, b, 1999), apparently received not one but three "new looks" followed by "another new look" (Bruner, 1992; Greenwald, 1992), and at one time was considered to have been found, lost and regained (Kihlstrom, Barnhardt, & Tataryn, 1992). On at least one occasion, the specific question posed in this essay was asked and answered (Shevrin & Dickman, 1980); yet we continue to ask the question, revealing something of the remarkable metamorphosis that continues to take place in the discipline of psychoanalysis.


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On the 21st-Century Necessity of the Unconscious

This essay shared Section V's 2006 Morton A. Schillinger Prize

By Todd Essig, Ph.D.

Although some current versions of the posthuman point to the antihuman and the apocalyptic, we can craft others that will be conducive to the long-range survival of humans and the other life-forms, biological and artifical, with whom we share the planet and ourselves.
(Hayles, 1999, p. 291)

In 1953, at the birth of the information age during the interdisciplinary "Macy Conferences," Warren McCulloch, the noted neuropsychiatrist and researcher, and Lawrence Kubie, the noted psychoanalyst, had a fight. Fifty or so years later, during a treatment that radically changed course when digital communications devices entered a patient's life, I had a similar fight, albeit with myself. A closer look at these two clashes between psychoanalysis and the information age, which this essay endeavors to provide, shows how issues first contested in that infrequently cited episode of intellectual history were also present many years later in my own internal struggles as I worked through a 21st-century clinical challenge. Taken together, these similar issues speak directly to the necessity of the unconscious.


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Some Thoughts on the Loss of a Spouse: A Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist's Perspective

By Sally Bloom Feshbach, Ph.D.

Emerging from a taxi in front of the radiology center, I naively stepped into the waiting arms of my handsome leather-jacket clad husband. "Honey," he said, enclosing me in his strong arms, "what I am about to tell you will change your life forever. I'm so sorry!" Those words, harbingers of his mortality, ushered in our new life, and from that day forth, this paper began germinating. How do two therapists, long-time best friends and students of separation and loss, prepare themselves for death?


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