After trauma.... a new essay

AFTER TRAUMA, HIDDEN OR OBVIOUS: POSSIBILITIES FOR TREATMENT.

Johanna Krout Tabin, Ph.D. ABPP

Note: These papers were presented at the Section V Panel, APA, New Orleans, LA, August, 2006. (They are also online as downloadable pdfs on the Section II link on the Division 39 home page .)

An important part of the mission of Section V is to keep abreast of innovation in psychoanalysis. The papers which follow offer ground-breaking applications of psychoanalytic understanding in trying to help victims of trauma. Marvin Hurvich contributes a theoretically grounded but clinically practical exploration of annihilation fantasies. Sharon Farber speaks in the same way to the use of cutting and other self-harming mechanisms. She shows the clinical importance of recognizing the adaptive function of such behaviors.



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Withholding APA dues in protest over policy on torture

Ghislaine Boulanger writes:

Should we withhold our 2007 dues to the American Psychological Association?

There has been a lot of discussion recently about whether to withhold dues from the APA in light of the continuing use of psychologists in Guantanamo and other sites in which 'enemy combatants' are being tortured. Some have been categorically opposed to withholding dues, arguing that it is better to stay within the organization and work from there, saying that not paying dues is poor strategy; others have urged a wait and see attitude. For some of us this is not a question of strategy, it is a question of conscience. Which is not to say that sometimes acts of conscience cannot also be strategic. Be that as it may, let me speak for myself, I simply cannot in good conscience continue paying dues to an organization whose ethics code supports the use of psychologists in facilities that do not observe international human rights law.


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A QUESTION

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

Register, and log in if you'd like to comment.

Also, general comments and questions are most welcome. Send them to:
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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