... Contemporary theories of schizophrenia: Review and synthesis. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: A... more ... Contemporary theories of schizophrenia: Review and synthesis. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Shapiro, Sue A. PUBLISHER: McGraw-Hill (New York). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1981. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 007056423X ). VOLUME/EDITION: ...
... influence reads like a Who's Who of interpersonal and relational psychology: Lewis Aron,... more ... influence reads like a Who's Who of interpersonal and relational psychology: Lewis Aron, Roanne Barnett, Tony Bass, Mark Blechner, Barbara Dusansky, Darlene Ehrenberg, Dan Epstein, John Fiscalini, Roberta Held-Weiss, Irwin Hirsch, Irena Klenbort, Phyllis Meshover, Ian ...
In this commentary on Cornell's (this issue) description of his use of the body in hi... more In this commentary on Cornell's (this issue) description of his use of the body in his analytic work with two patients, I consider what is mutative in these treatments. I use this opportunity to briefly review the parallel history of somatic and psychoanalytic therapies. Although I believe bodily experience and nonverbal forms of communication are often foundational to both subjective
... Perhaps our only hope in response to this question is more papers like Hirsch's. ... I a... more ... Perhaps our only hope in response to this question is more papers like Hirsch's. ... I am puzzled by the fact that, in contrast, the young and middle-age women who consult me in treatment express interest in exploring their inhibitions in both love and work. ...
I N ON DEATHS AND ENDINGS: Psychoanalysts' Reflections on Finality, Transformations, andNew B... more I N ON DEATHS AND ENDINGS: Psychoanalysts' Reflections on Finality, Transformations, andNew Beginnings, editors Willock, Bohm. and Curtis offer clinicians an embarrassment of riches. Many of the book's chapters tackle themes that are vastly undertheorized and underreported in the analytic literature. The 24 papers, gleaned from a symposium on the subject, range from intensely moving accounts of direct clinical work with dying patients to theoretical discussions of shifting understandings of the death instinct, metaphoric deadness of significant members of patients' families, and analyses of poetry, myth and film. Reviewing such a collection invariably involves considerable "deciding." Such "deciding," Foster Wallace (2008) points out, "reflects the reviewer's bias as much as the inherent value of any of the chapters in the book" (p. xiv). There's no way to give adequate or equal attention to all the chapters, and the choice that I am making is to focus on those which are about actual death, not metaphoric death. For, as Anna Aragno states at the start of her excellent essay,
(1947), Interaction vs. Transaction; A transaction with Mr. Kahn. Journal of Philosophy, 44:633-6... more (1947), Interaction vs. Transaction; A transaction with Mr. Kahn. Journal of Philosophy, 44:633-636. (1948a), Science and estiietic experience. Columbia Review, 28:20-27. (1948b), Review of J . P. Wynne's Philosophies of Education. Journal of Philosophy 45:220-222. (1949c), Experience and Valuation. New York: Kent Associates. (1949d), Addison Webster Moore: Defender of Instrumentalism. Journal of the History of Ideas, 10:539-566. (1949e), Dewey's theory of human nature. Psychiatry, 12:77-85. (1950a), The meaning of power in scientific inference. Philosophy & Phe nomenological Research, 10:420-425. (1950b), A note on the functional theory of hahit. Journal of the History of Ideas, 11:490-492. (1953a), On a neglected aspect of Freud's psychoanalytic procedures. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Congress of the History of Science. Paris: Hermann, 7:641-646. (1953b), Some comments on the field of psychotherapeutic inquiry. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 7:503-514. (1953c), The romantic Spinoza in America. Journal of the History of Ideas, 14:439-450. (1954a), Transference. New York: Grune & Stiatton. (1954b), The analysis of transference as an inteφersonal process. Ameri can Journal of Psychotherapy, 8:667-678. (1955), Psychoanalysis as the study of transference. Acta Psychotherapeutica, Psychosomatics et Orthopaedegogica, 3:735-742. (1957), Transference and immediate experience. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 11:277-292. (1958), Mysticism and psychoanalysis. In: Progress in Clinical Psychol ogy, ed. D. Brower & L. Abt. New York: Grune and Stiatton, pp. 1 3 8 153. (1959a), Countertransference. New York: Grune & Stiatton. (1959b), The unconscious present in analytic therapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 13:283-297.
Infertility, the failure to conceive after 1 year of trying, is not statistically normal, yet thi... more Infertility, the failure to conceive after 1 year of trying, is not statistically normal, yet this chapter is included here because infertility does affect a significant (15%) proportion of the reproductive population, and its prevalence is increasing. There are now an estimated 10 million infertile Americans, whose inability to have children is a major life crisis both for themselves, their spouses, and their families (Menning, 1977, 1979). The focus in this chapter is on primary infertility as opposed to secondary infertility that couples may experience after successfully having one or more children.
I HAVE TWO MEMORIES of Ruth Moulton. These memories, spanning twenty years, say as much about me,... more I HAVE TWO MEMORIES of Ruth Moulton. These memories, spanning twenty years, say as much about me, my sense of changes in the culture, and the status of women as they do about Ruth Moulton.' As such, they also provide my own starting point for this essay-an inquiry into the evolution of feminist interpersonal psychoanalytic theory and theorists. My first memory is not of a specific moment, but of a cluster of impressions of Dr. Moulton seen from afar in the early 1970s at the William Alanson White Institute. I was a graduate student at the time and would anxiously frequent the Friday night colloquia at the Institute. I always felt a bit out of place then, self-conscious and in awe of the "real," "grown up" analysts who might one day have a say in my future. There weren't many women faculty and supervisors then, although there were certainly more professional women than I was used to seeing collected in one place. I was especially conscious of the women as I scanned the room in search of role models: Anna Antonovsky, Marianne Eckardt, Geneva Goodrich, Anna Gourevich, Janet Jeppson, Ruth Moulton, Natalie Shainess, Rose Spiegel, Alberta Szalita, Ann Ruth Turkel; and from the next generation, Leah Davidson, Harriet Field, Gloria Friedman, Elaine Grimm, Roberta Held-Weiss, Helene Kafka, Marylou Lionells, Carola Mann, Marcia Rosen, Anita Tenzer, Hazel Weinberg. My search was accompanied by a fear that these "real" women might recognize me as an impostor, a girl (cf. Dinnerstein, 1976; Riviere, 1927; Horner, 1972; Horner & Walsh, 1974; Symonds, 1971). I believed that these older female analysts would not be taken in by me, that they could see through me.
Menarche, as a rite of passage, and menstruation, as an ongoing fact of a woman’s life, are centr... more Menarche, as a rite of passage, and menstruation, as an ongoing fact of a woman’s life, are central to women’s experience. The entry into and exit from reproductive capability seem clearly evident to most women. Until reliable birth control became available in the last century, the menstrual cycle governed women’s lives. The phenomenology of the menstrual cycle deserves the attention of psychoanalysts, because of both its presence during 30 to 40 years of women’s lives, and the possible clues it offers in understanding the complex interplay of psyche and soma in the generation of psychological experience.
Families in society-The journal of contemporary social services, Oct 1, 1981
Bertram J. Cohler's and Henry U. Grunebaum's book is testimony to the utility and richnes... more Bertram J. Cohler's and Henry U. Grunebaum's book is testimony to the utility and richness of intensive case studies in social psychological research. Although I have reservations about some of their basic premises, I have nothing but praise for the depth of their case studies and the liveliness and richness of detail with which they present four families. The authors focus on the psychological significance of multigenerational contact and support for the continued development of family members. This book is an effort toward understanding the relationship between the mother of young children and her own mother. The authors attempt to study the effects of this relationship on the mother's care of her own children. The first chapter of the book reviews the major psychological and social constructs relevant to intergenerational relations. A review of the initial empirical study of mothers' attitudes toward childrearing is covered in the second chapter. Four families were selected from this study for intensive research. A chapter on each of the four families, a chapter integrating this data along several dimensions, a chapter on ethnicity, a summary chapter, and a four-year follow-up report complete the book. The women in this study are from working-class, second-generation, Italian-American families. Selecting families with a shared ethnic heritage both controls one source of variance and also serves to add another dimension-that of families in cultural transition. The four families in this study represent a specific subgroup of American family life, tending to be traditional and conservative. The authors state that basically, mothering is learned from one's own mother and they summarize data that support this view. A quantitative study of intergenerational attitudes toward childrearing was the basis for selecting the families for further study: women living with or apart from their own mothers with more or less adaptive attitudes toward closeness. Attitudes toward closeness were assessed by the mother's attitude scale. The initial sample were women who responded to an advertisement and volunteered their own mothers as well. Their test data are compared with the responses of women who did not volunteer their own mothers. According to the authors: "Mothers who bring their own mothers to participate in a psychological study appear to be especially dependent on their own mothers and may have unusual difficulty in differentiating their own needs from those of their own mothers." In addition, this self-selection brought in women who had the time to volunteer for studies and are therefore most likely not the working mothers who comprise over 55 percent of mothers in this country. The investigators set forth their theoretical basis for this study in the early chapters of the book. They review the literature on topics such as socialization, parental attitudes, identity formation, and separation. It is with this section of the book that I have some quarrels. The authors state that having young children creates a sense of chronic emergency leading to more stereotypic sex role performance. They do not seem to appreciate fully the implications of this statement. The turning of a young mother to her own mother in such a critical time may be caused not only by a psychologicalneed to confer with her mother but by society's failure to provide social resources for young parents. In attempting to provide an objective, value-neutral report the authors ignore the blatant political-social dimensions of the behavior that they are studying. It is possible that these women are behaving more pathologically with their mothers and with their children because of the unresponsivenessof society to the demands placed on parents-demands that in the past were balanced by the structures of traditional society but are now supposed to be borne by the nuclear family. Nowhere in this book is the work of Dorothy . Dinnerstein (The Mermaid and the Minotaur [New York: Harper and Row, 1977]) on the pervasive and frequently destructive effects of maternal centered childrearing cited. Dinnerstein's work suggests a powerful psychodynamic explanation
Reviewing Sigmund Freud's essays and correspondence during World War I, we find that ... more Reviewing Sigmund Freud's essays and correspondence during World War I, we find that for the most part he minimized or denied the impact the war was having on him and his patients. Just as Sandor Ferenczi's emphasis on the impact of “real” childhood events and the “real” relationship between patient and analyst was seen as aberrant, so too was Ferenczi's
I am grateful to Donnel Stern for deciding that Clara Thompson’s 1955 talk deserved to be publish... more I am grateful to Donnel Stern for deciding that Clara Thompson’s 1955 talk deserved to be published and for giving me the opportunity to respond to Thompson’s view of the history of the White Institute. As I read Thompson’s talk, I became acutely aware of the limitations of near history, or perhaps the limitations of any single participant’s narrative truth. Each talk and article, each product of human thought, is a reflection of both the creator’s own psychology and the psychosocial historical context in which it was produced. My reading of Thompson’s paper reflects my biases and influences as well as the current historical moment. I have the privilege of a longer and broader perspective on the history described here by Thompson, even if I lack a first-person experience of the events she describes. My perspective is informed by both my earlier research on the history of feminism and interpersonal theory (Shapiro, 2002) as well as by the work of historians of psychoanalysis (Bergmann, 1983, 2011; Cushman, 1995; Eckardt, 1988, 2005; Goggin, Goggin, & Hill, 2004; Hale, 1995; King & Steiner, 1991; Kirsner, 2000; Nathan, 2015), and biographical work (Allen, 1995; Blechner, 2005; Friedman, 2013; Hornstein, 2000; Paris, 1994; Perry, 1982; Quinn, 1987; Shapiro, 1993; Wake, 2008, 2011). Thus, I am conscious not only of the historical forces at play when the White Institute was formed and the personalities involved, but also—given the sea change in attitudes towards women, sexuality in
The current volume, a sequel to The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi edited by Lewis Aron and Adrienne H... more The current volume, a sequel to The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi edited by Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris (1993), is aptly subtitled “From Ghost to Ancestor,” describing as it does how much Ferenczi and his work have become fully part of our shared psychoanalytic history. It’s hard to imagine but, unlike most sequels, this volume exceeds the imagination and generativity of the first edited book. In part this is because that first volume, and the conference it was based on, successfully ushered in a renaissance of interest in Ferenczi. Since its publication, there have been more than 12 books focused on Ferenczi published in English (many more in other languages), as well as numerous reissues of his collected papers, correspondence, and more than 250 articles in psychoanalytic journals. Like its predecessor, the current volume includes both wonderful investigative sleuthing and contemporary expansions of the clinical and theoretical contributions of Ferenczi. It further cements Ferenczi’s place as the original relational psychoanalyst and underscores the trauma of his dismissal from the analytic canon for more than 50 years. The Sandor Ferenczi Society, founded in 1988 in Budapest, has been joined by societies in several countries that are now linked in an International Ferenczi Network. There are annual conferences and issues of psychoanalytic journals devoted to his work, and wide-scale acceptance of his significance in the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The current volume reflects not only the richness of Ferenczian scholarship but also the changes in theory and practice of psychoanalysis over the last two decades. Many of these changes, including the acknowledgment of the frequency of sexual and physical abuse in children
U SUALLY, knowing the ending of a book or a movie does nothing to diminish my enjoyment-I seem to... more U SUALLY, knowing the ending of a book or a movie does nothing to diminish my enjoyment-I seem to keep that information in a different compartment as I immerse myself in the experience. But I had a very different experience with Susie Orbach's book. Knowing the punch line first-that all the patients, or should I say "characters," are made up, and all the rich clinical detail and revealing exploration of her (no, not her) countertransference were fictitious-made this book almost impossible for me to read. I don't generally read fiction. I save it for last, preferring to dip in and out of nonfiction in different disciplines, or reading from the psychoanalytic oeuvre as a particular paper demands. Toward the end of writing this review, I became acquainted with Diderot's (1784) amazing book, Jacques the Fatalist-a novel far ahead of its times, which questions the very narrative coherence of the novel. He challenges the comfort that narrative coherence and finality give people in the face of the messiness and uncertainty of real lives. I found myself having an "aha" experience as I understood that what continues to fascinate me in clinical work is the very uncertainty that is often omitted in the course of creating a "good case history" with a "successful" outcome. Don't get me wrong, I love neat stories, but I go to television for them. When I was less experienced, I felt awed by the neat case studies I read or heard, until the day I experienced the tidying up tendency first hand. I had done a resident a favor and conducted the intake interview in front of a team in exchange for her promise to write this interview up for our morning staff meeting. The intake interview was one of the more distressing-though not that uncommon-experiences of barely contained chaos, intense emotional tension, barely comprehensible psy-
... Elias argues that by virtue of these differences in ordinary behavior we can assume that peop... more ... Elias argues that by virtue of these differences in ordinary behavior we can assume that people in the Middle Ages had a different relationship to one another than we do; theiremotional life had a different structure and was conducted differently. ...
Bertram J. Cohler's and Henry U. Grunebaum's book is testimony to the utility and richnes... more Bertram J. Cohler's and Henry U. Grunebaum's book is testimony to the utility and richness of intensive case studies in social psychological research. Although I have reservations about some of their basic premises, I have nothing but praise for the depth of their case studies and the liveliness and richness of detail with which they present four families. The authors focus on the psychological significance of multigenerational contact and support for the continued development of family members. This book is an effort toward understanding the relationship between the mother of young children and her own mother. The authors attempt to study the effects of this relationship on the mother's care of her own children. The first chapter of the book reviews the major psychological and social constructs relevant to intergenerational relations. A review of the initial empirical study of mothers' attitudes toward childrearing is covered in the second chapter. Four families were selected from this study for intensive research. A chapter on each of the four families, a chapter integrating this data along several dimensions, a chapter on ethnicity, a summary chapter, and a four-year follow-up report complete the book. The women in this study are from working-class, second-generation, Italian-American families. Selecting families with a shared ethnic heritage both controls one source of variance and also serves to add another dimension-that of families in cultural transition. The four families in this study represent a specific subgroup of American family life, tending to be traditional and conservative. The authors state that basically, mothering is learned from one's own mother and they summarize data that support this view. A quantitative study of intergenerational attitudes toward childrearing was the basis for selecting the families for further study: women living with or apart from their own mothers with more or less adaptive attitudes toward closeness. Attitudes toward closeness were assessed by the mother's attitude scale. The initial sample were women who responded to an advertisement and volunteered their own mothers as well. Their test data are compared with the responses of women who did not volunteer their own mothers. According to the authors: "Mothers who bring their own mothers to participate in a psychological study appear to be especially dependent on their own mothers and may have unusual difficulty in differentiating their own needs from those of their own mothers." In addition, this self-selection brought in women who had the time to volunteer for studies and are therefore most likely not the working mothers who comprise over 55 percent of mothers in this country. The investigators set forth their theoretical basis for this study in the early chapters of the book. They review the literature on topics such as socialization, parental attitudes, identity formation, and separation. It is with this section of the book that I have some quarrels. The authors state that having young children creates a sense of chronic emergency leading to more stereotypic sex role performance. They do not seem to appreciate fully the implications of this statement. The turning of a young mother to her own mother in such a critical time may be caused not only by a psychologicalneed to confer with her mother but by society's failure to provide social resources for young parents. In attempting to provide an objective, value-neutral report the authors ignore the blatant political-social dimensions of the behavior that they are studying. It is possible that these women are behaving more pathologically with their mothers and with their children because of the unresponsivenessof society to the demands placed on parents-demands that in the past were balanced by the structures of traditional society but are now supposed to be borne by the nuclear family. Nowhere in this book is the work of Dorothy . Dinnerstein (The Mermaid and the Minotaur [New York: Harper and Row, 1977]) on the pervasive and frequently destructive effects of maternal centered childrearing cited. Dinnerstein's work suggests a powerful psychodynamic explanation
Critical Psychophysical Passages in the Life of a Woman, 1988
Infertility, the failure to conceive after 1 year of trying, is not statistically normal, yet thi... more Infertility, the failure to conceive after 1 year of trying, is not statistically normal, yet this chapter is included here because infertility does affect a significant (15%) proportion of the reproductive population, and its prevalence is increasing. There are now an estimated 10 million infertile Americans, whose inability to have children is a major life crisis both for themselves, their spouses, and their families (Menning, 1977, 1979). The focus in this chapter is on primary infertility as opposed to secondary infertility that couples may experience after successfully having one or more children.
... influence reads like a Who's Who of interpersonal and relational psychology: Lewis Aron,... more ... influence reads like a Who's Who of interpersonal and relational psychology: Lewis Aron, Roanne Barnett, Tony Bass, Mark Blechner, Barbara Dusansky, Darlene Ehrenberg, Dan Epstein, John Fiscalini, Roberta Held-Weiss, Irwin Hirsch, Irena Klenbort, Phyllis Meshover, Ian ...
I N ON DEATHS AND ENDINGS: Psychoanalysts' Reflections on Finality, Transformations, andNew B... more I N ON DEATHS AND ENDINGS: Psychoanalysts' Reflections on Finality, Transformations, andNew Beginnings, editors Willock, Bohm. and Curtis offer clinicians an embarrassment of riches. Many of the book's chapters tackle themes that are vastly undertheorized and underreported in the analytic literature. The 24 papers, gleaned from a symposium on the subject, range from intensely moving accounts of direct clinical work with dying patients to theoretical discussions of shifting understandings of the death instinct, metaphoric deadness of significant members of patients' families, and analyses of poetry, myth and film. Reviewing such a collection invariably involves considerable "deciding." Such "deciding," Foster Wallace (2008) points out, "reflects the reviewer's bias as much as the inherent value of any of the chapters in the book" (p. xiv). There's no way to give adequate or equal attention to all the chapters, and the choice that I am making is to focus on those which are about actual death, not metaphoric death. For, as Anna Aragno states at the start of her excellent essay,
... Contemporary theories of schizophrenia: Review and synthesis. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: A... more ... Contemporary theories of schizophrenia: Review and synthesis. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Shapiro, Sue A. PUBLISHER: McGraw-Hill (New York). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1981. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 007056423X ). VOLUME/EDITION: ...
... influence reads like a Who's Who of interpersonal and relational psychology: Lewis Aron,... more ... influence reads like a Who's Who of interpersonal and relational psychology: Lewis Aron, Roanne Barnett, Tony Bass, Mark Blechner, Barbara Dusansky, Darlene Ehrenberg, Dan Epstein, John Fiscalini, Roberta Held-Weiss, Irwin Hirsch, Irena Klenbort, Phyllis Meshover, Ian ...
In this commentary on Cornell's (this issue) description of his use of the body in hi... more In this commentary on Cornell's (this issue) description of his use of the body in his analytic work with two patients, I consider what is mutative in these treatments. I use this opportunity to briefly review the parallel history of somatic and psychoanalytic therapies. Although I believe bodily experience and nonverbal forms of communication are often foundational to both subjective
... Perhaps our only hope in response to this question is more papers like Hirsch's. ... I a... more ... Perhaps our only hope in response to this question is more papers like Hirsch's. ... I am puzzled by the fact that, in contrast, the young and middle-age women who consult me in treatment express interest in exploring their inhibitions in both love and work. ...
I N ON DEATHS AND ENDINGS: Psychoanalysts' Reflections on Finality, Transformations, andNew B... more I N ON DEATHS AND ENDINGS: Psychoanalysts' Reflections on Finality, Transformations, andNew Beginnings, editors Willock, Bohm. and Curtis offer clinicians an embarrassment of riches. Many of the book's chapters tackle themes that are vastly undertheorized and underreported in the analytic literature. The 24 papers, gleaned from a symposium on the subject, range from intensely moving accounts of direct clinical work with dying patients to theoretical discussions of shifting understandings of the death instinct, metaphoric deadness of significant members of patients' families, and analyses of poetry, myth and film. Reviewing such a collection invariably involves considerable "deciding." Such "deciding," Foster Wallace (2008) points out, "reflects the reviewer's bias as much as the inherent value of any of the chapters in the book" (p. xiv). There's no way to give adequate or equal attention to all the chapters, and the choice that I am making is to focus on those which are about actual death, not metaphoric death. For, as Anna Aragno states at the start of her excellent essay,
(1947), Interaction vs. Transaction; A transaction with Mr. Kahn. Journal of Philosophy, 44:633-6... more (1947), Interaction vs. Transaction; A transaction with Mr. Kahn. Journal of Philosophy, 44:633-636. (1948a), Science and estiietic experience. Columbia Review, 28:20-27. (1948b), Review of J . P. Wynne's Philosophies of Education. Journal of Philosophy 45:220-222. (1949c), Experience and Valuation. New York: Kent Associates. (1949d), Addison Webster Moore: Defender of Instrumentalism. Journal of the History of Ideas, 10:539-566. (1949e), Dewey's theory of human nature. Psychiatry, 12:77-85. (1950a), The meaning of power in scientific inference. Philosophy & Phe nomenological Research, 10:420-425. (1950b), A note on the functional theory of hahit. Journal of the History of Ideas, 11:490-492. (1953a), On a neglected aspect of Freud's psychoanalytic procedures. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Congress of the History of Science. Paris: Hermann, 7:641-646. (1953b), Some comments on the field of psychotherapeutic inquiry. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 7:503-514. (1953c), The romantic Spinoza in America. Journal of the History of Ideas, 14:439-450. (1954a), Transference. New York: Grune & Stiatton. (1954b), The analysis of transference as an inteφersonal process. Ameri can Journal of Psychotherapy, 8:667-678. (1955), Psychoanalysis as the study of transference. Acta Psychotherapeutica, Psychosomatics et Orthopaedegogica, 3:735-742. (1957), Transference and immediate experience. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 11:277-292. (1958), Mysticism and psychoanalysis. In: Progress in Clinical Psychol ogy, ed. D. Brower & L. Abt. New York: Grune and Stiatton, pp. 1 3 8 153. (1959a), Countertransference. New York: Grune & Stiatton. (1959b), The unconscious present in analytic therapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 13:283-297.
Infertility, the failure to conceive after 1 year of trying, is not statistically normal, yet thi... more Infertility, the failure to conceive after 1 year of trying, is not statistically normal, yet this chapter is included here because infertility does affect a significant (15%) proportion of the reproductive population, and its prevalence is increasing. There are now an estimated 10 million infertile Americans, whose inability to have children is a major life crisis both for themselves, their spouses, and their families (Menning, 1977, 1979). The focus in this chapter is on primary infertility as opposed to secondary infertility that couples may experience after successfully having one or more children.
I HAVE TWO MEMORIES of Ruth Moulton. These memories, spanning twenty years, say as much about me,... more I HAVE TWO MEMORIES of Ruth Moulton. These memories, spanning twenty years, say as much about me, my sense of changes in the culture, and the status of women as they do about Ruth Moulton.' As such, they also provide my own starting point for this essay-an inquiry into the evolution of feminist interpersonal psychoanalytic theory and theorists. My first memory is not of a specific moment, but of a cluster of impressions of Dr. Moulton seen from afar in the early 1970s at the William Alanson White Institute. I was a graduate student at the time and would anxiously frequent the Friday night colloquia at the Institute. I always felt a bit out of place then, self-conscious and in awe of the "real," "grown up" analysts who might one day have a say in my future. There weren't many women faculty and supervisors then, although there were certainly more professional women than I was used to seeing collected in one place. I was especially conscious of the women as I scanned the room in search of role models: Anna Antonovsky, Marianne Eckardt, Geneva Goodrich, Anna Gourevich, Janet Jeppson, Ruth Moulton, Natalie Shainess, Rose Spiegel, Alberta Szalita, Ann Ruth Turkel; and from the next generation, Leah Davidson, Harriet Field, Gloria Friedman, Elaine Grimm, Roberta Held-Weiss, Helene Kafka, Marylou Lionells, Carola Mann, Marcia Rosen, Anita Tenzer, Hazel Weinberg. My search was accompanied by a fear that these "real" women might recognize me as an impostor, a girl (cf. Dinnerstein, 1976; Riviere, 1927; Horner, 1972; Horner & Walsh, 1974; Symonds, 1971). I believed that these older female analysts would not be taken in by me, that they could see through me.
Menarche, as a rite of passage, and menstruation, as an ongoing fact of a woman’s life, are centr... more Menarche, as a rite of passage, and menstruation, as an ongoing fact of a woman’s life, are central to women’s experience. The entry into and exit from reproductive capability seem clearly evident to most women. Until reliable birth control became available in the last century, the menstrual cycle governed women’s lives. The phenomenology of the menstrual cycle deserves the attention of psychoanalysts, because of both its presence during 30 to 40 years of women’s lives, and the possible clues it offers in understanding the complex interplay of psyche and soma in the generation of psychological experience.
Families in society-The journal of contemporary social services, Oct 1, 1981
Bertram J. Cohler's and Henry U. Grunebaum's book is testimony to the utility and richnes... more Bertram J. Cohler's and Henry U. Grunebaum's book is testimony to the utility and richness of intensive case studies in social psychological research. Although I have reservations about some of their basic premises, I have nothing but praise for the depth of their case studies and the liveliness and richness of detail with which they present four families. The authors focus on the psychological significance of multigenerational contact and support for the continued development of family members. This book is an effort toward understanding the relationship between the mother of young children and her own mother. The authors attempt to study the effects of this relationship on the mother's care of her own children. The first chapter of the book reviews the major psychological and social constructs relevant to intergenerational relations. A review of the initial empirical study of mothers' attitudes toward childrearing is covered in the second chapter. Four families were selected from this study for intensive research. A chapter on each of the four families, a chapter integrating this data along several dimensions, a chapter on ethnicity, a summary chapter, and a four-year follow-up report complete the book. The women in this study are from working-class, second-generation, Italian-American families. Selecting families with a shared ethnic heritage both controls one source of variance and also serves to add another dimension-that of families in cultural transition. The four families in this study represent a specific subgroup of American family life, tending to be traditional and conservative. The authors state that basically, mothering is learned from one's own mother and they summarize data that support this view. A quantitative study of intergenerational attitudes toward childrearing was the basis for selecting the families for further study: women living with or apart from their own mothers with more or less adaptive attitudes toward closeness. Attitudes toward closeness were assessed by the mother's attitude scale. The initial sample were women who responded to an advertisement and volunteered their own mothers as well. Their test data are compared with the responses of women who did not volunteer their own mothers. According to the authors: "Mothers who bring their own mothers to participate in a psychological study appear to be especially dependent on their own mothers and may have unusual difficulty in differentiating their own needs from those of their own mothers." In addition, this self-selection brought in women who had the time to volunteer for studies and are therefore most likely not the working mothers who comprise over 55 percent of mothers in this country. The investigators set forth their theoretical basis for this study in the early chapters of the book. They review the literature on topics such as socialization, parental attitudes, identity formation, and separation. It is with this section of the book that I have some quarrels. The authors state that having young children creates a sense of chronic emergency leading to more stereotypic sex role performance. They do not seem to appreciate fully the implications of this statement. The turning of a young mother to her own mother in such a critical time may be caused not only by a psychologicalneed to confer with her mother but by society's failure to provide social resources for young parents. In attempting to provide an objective, value-neutral report the authors ignore the blatant political-social dimensions of the behavior that they are studying. It is possible that these women are behaving more pathologically with their mothers and with their children because of the unresponsivenessof society to the demands placed on parents-demands that in the past were balanced by the structures of traditional society but are now supposed to be borne by the nuclear family. Nowhere in this book is the work of Dorothy . Dinnerstein (The Mermaid and the Minotaur [New York: Harper and Row, 1977]) on the pervasive and frequently destructive effects of maternal centered childrearing cited. Dinnerstein's work suggests a powerful psychodynamic explanation
Reviewing Sigmund Freud's essays and correspondence during World War I, we find that ... more Reviewing Sigmund Freud's essays and correspondence during World War I, we find that for the most part he minimized or denied the impact the war was having on him and his patients. Just as Sandor Ferenczi's emphasis on the impact of “real” childhood events and the “real” relationship between patient and analyst was seen as aberrant, so too was Ferenczi's
I am grateful to Donnel Stern for deciding that Clara Thompson’s 1955 talk deserved to be publish... more I am grateful to Donnel Stern for deciding that Clara Thompson’s 1955 talk deserved to be published and for giving me the opportunity to respond to Thompson’s view of the history of the White Institute. As I read Thompson’s talk, I became acutely aware of the limitations of near history, or perhaps the limitations of any single participant’s narrative truth. Each talk and article, each product of human thought, is a reflection of both the creator’s own psychology and the psychosocial historical context in which it was produced. My reading of Thompson’s paper reflects my biases and influences as well as the current historical moment. I have the privilege of a longer and broader perspective on the history described here by Thompson, even if I lack a first-person experience of the events she describes. My perspective is informed by both my earlier research on the history of feminism and interpersonal theory (Shapiro, 2002) as well as by the work of historians of psychoanalysis (Bergmann, 1983, 2011; Cushman, 1995; Eckardt, 1988, 2005; Goggin, Goggin, & Hill, 2004; Hale, 1995; King & Steiner, 1991; Kirsner, 2000; Nathan, 2015), and biographical work (Allen, 1995; Blechner, 2005; Friedman, 2013; Hornstein, 2000; Paris, 1994; Perry, 1982; Quinn, 1987; Shapiro, 1993; Wake, 2008, 2011). Thus, I am conscious not only of the historical forces at play when the White Institute was formed and the personalities involved, but also—given the sea change in attitudes towards women, sexuality in
The current volume, a sequel to The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi edited by Lewis Aron and Adrienne H... more The current volume, a sequel to The Legacy of Sándor Ferenczi edited by Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris (1993), is aptly subtitled “From Ghost to Ancestor,” describing as it does how much Ferenczi and his work have become fully part of our shared psychoanalytic history. It’s hard to imagine but, unlike most sequels, this volume exceeds the imagination and generativity of the first edited book. In part this is because that first volume, and the conference it was based on, successfully ushered in a renaissance of interest in Ferenczi. Since its publication, there have been more than 12 books focused on Ferenczi published in English (many more in other languages), as well as numerous reissues of his collected papers, correspondence, and more than 250 articles in psychoanalytic journals. Like its predecessor, the current volume includes both wonderful investigative sleuthing and contemporary expansions of the clinical and theoretical contributions of Ferenczi. It further cements Ferenczi’s place as the original relational psychoanalyst and underscores the trauma of his dismissal from the analytic canon for more than 50 years. The Sandor Ferenczi Society, founded in 1988 in Budapest, has been joined by societies in several countries that are now linked in an International Ferenczi Network. There are annual conferences and issues of psychoanalytic journals devoted to his work, and wide-scale acceptance of his significance in the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The current volume reflects not only the richness of Ferenczian scholarship but also the changes in theory and practice of psychoanalysis over the last two decades. Many of these changes, including the acknowledgment of the frequency of sexual and physical abuse in children
U SUALLY, knowing the ending of a book or a movie does nothing to diminish my enjoyment-I seem to... more U SUALLY, knowing the ending of a book or a movie does nothing to diminish my enjoyment-I seem to keep that information in a different compartment as I immerse myself in the experience. But I had a very different experience with Susie Orbach's book. Knowing the punch line first-that all the patients, or should I say "characters," are made up, and all the rich clinical detail and revealing exploration of her (no, not her) countertransference were fictitious-made this book almost impossible for me to read. I don't generally read fiction. I save it for last, preferring to dip in and out of nonfiction in different disciplines, or reading from the psychoanalytic oeuvre as a particular paper demands. Toward the end of writing this review, I became acquainted with Diderot's (1784) amazing book, Jacques the Fatalist-a novel far ahead of its times, which questions the very narrative coherence of the novel. He challenges the comfort that narrative coherence and finality give people in the face of the messiness and uncertainty of real lives. I found myself having an "aha" experience as I understood that what continues to fascinate me in clinical work is the very uncertainty that is often omitted in the course of creating a "good case history" with a "successful" outcome. Don't get me wrong, I love neat stories, but I go to television for them. When I was less experienced, I felt awed by the neat case studies I read or heard, until the day I experienced the tidying up tendency first hand. I had done a resident a favor and conducted the intake interview in front of a team in exchange for her promise to write this interview up for our morning staff meeting. The intake interview was one of the more distressing-though not that uncommon-experiences of barely contained chaos, intense emotional tension, barely comprehensible psy-
... Elias argues that by virtue of these differences in ordinary behavior we can assume that peop... more ... Elias argues that by virtue of these differences in ordinary behavior we can assume that people in the Middle Ages had a different relationship to one another than we do; theiremotional life had a different structure and was conducted differently. ...
Bertram J. Cohler's and Henry U. Grunebaum's book is testimony to the utility and richnes... more Bertram J. Cohler's and Henry U. Grunebaum's book is testimony to the utility and richness of intensive case studies in social psychological research. Although I have reservations about some of their basic premises, I have nothing but praise for the depth of their case studies and the liveliness and richness of detail with which they present four families. The authors focus on the psychological significance of multigenerational contact and support for the continued development of family members. This book is an effort toward understanding the relationship between the mother of young children and her own mother. The authors attempt to study the effects of this relationship on the mother's care of her own children. The first chapter of the book reviews the major psychological and social constructs relevant to intergenerational relations. A review of the initial empirical study of mothers' attitudes toward childrearing is covered in the second chapter. Four families were selected from this study for intensive research. A chapter on each of the four families, a chapter integrating this data along several dimensions, a chapter on ethnicity, a summary chapter, and a four-year follow-up report complete the book. The women in this study are from working-class, second-generation, Italian-American families. Selecting families with a shared ethnic heritage both controls one source of variance and also serves to add another dimension-that of families in cultural transition. The four families in this study represent a specific subgroup of American family life, tending to be traditional and conservative. The authors state that basically, mothering is learned from one's own mother and they summarize data that support this view. A quantitative study of intergenerational attitudes toward childrearing was the basis for selecting the families for further study: women living with or apart from their own mothers with more or less adaptive attitudes toward closeness. Attitudes toward closeness were assessed by the mother's attitude scale. The initial sample were women who responded to an advertisement and volunteered their own mothers as well. Their test data are compared with the responses of women who did not volunteer their own mothers. According to the authors: "Mothers who bring their own mothers to participate in a psychological study appear to be especially dependent on their own mothers and may have unusual difficulty in differentiating their own needs from those of their own mothers." In addition, this self-selection brought in women who had the time to volunteer for studies and are therefore most likely not the working mothers who comprise over 55 percent of mothers in this country. The investigators set forth their theoretical basis for this study in the early chapters of the book. They review the literature on topics such as socialization, parental attitudes, identity formation, and separation. It is with this section of the book that I have some quarrels. The authors state that having young children creates a sense of chronic emergency leading to more stereotypic sex role performance. They do not seem to appreciate fully the implications of this statement. The turning of a young mother to her own mother in such a critical time may be caused not only by a psychologicalneed to confer with her mother but by society's failure to provide social resources for young parents. In attempting to provide an objective, value-neutral report the authors ignore the blatant political-social dimensions of the behavior that they are studying. It is possible that these women are behaving more pathologically with their mothers and with their children because of the unresponsivenessof society to the demands placed on parents-demands that in the past were balanced by the structures of traditional society but are now supposed to be borne by the nuclear family. Nowhere in this book is the work of Dorothy . Dinnerstein (The Mermaid and the Minotaur [New York: Harper and Row, 1977]) on the pervasive and frequently destructive effects of maternal centered childrearing cited. Dinnerstein's work suggests a powerful psychodynamic explanation
Critical Psychophysical Passages in the Life of a Woman, 1988
Infertility, the failure to conceive after 1 year of trying, is not statistically normal, yet thi... more Infertility, the failure to conceive after 1 year of trying, is not statistically normal, yet this chapter is included here because infertility does affect a significant (15%) proportion of the reproductive population, and its prevalence is increasing. There are now an estimated 10 million infertile Americans, whose inability to have children is a major life crisis both for themselves, their spouses, and their families (Menning, 1977, 1979). The focus in this chapter is on primary infertility as opposed to secondary infertility that couples may experience after successfully having one or more children.
... influence reads like a Who's Who of interpersonal and relational psychology: Lewis Aron,... more ... influence reads like a Who's Who of interpersonal and relational psychology: Lewis Aron, Roanne Barnett, Tony Bass, Mark Blechner, Barbara Dusansky, Darlene Ehrenberg, Dan Epstein, John Fiscalini, Roberta Held-Weiss, Irwin Hirsch, Irena Klenbort, Phyllis Meshover, Ian ...
I N ON DEATHS AND ENDINGS: Psychoanalysts' Reflections on Finality, Transformations, andNew B... more I N ON DEATHS AND ENDINGS: Psychoanalysts' Reflections on Finality, Transformations, andNew Beginnings, editors Willock, Bohm. and Curtis offer clinicians an embarrassment of riches. Many of the book's chapters tackle themes that are vastly undertheorized and underreported in the analytic literature. The 24 papers, gleaned from a symposium on the subject, range from intensely moving accounts of direct clinical work with dying patients to theoretical discussions of shifting understandings of the death instinct, metaphoric deadness of significant members of patients' families, and analyses of poetry, myth and film. Reviewing such a collection invariably involves considerable "deciding." Such "deciding," Foster Wallace (2008) points out, "reflects the reviewer's bias as much as the inherent value of any of the chapters in the book" (p. xiv). There's no way to give adequate or equal attention to all the chapters, and the choice that I am making is to focus on those which are about actual death, not metaphoric death. For, as Anna Aragno states at the start of her excellent essay,
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