Erik Erikson and his problematic identity.

In his psychohistorical biographies of Luther and Gandhi, Erik Erikson proposed that great issues of a particular time and place, as experienced by sensitive and creative individuals who are working to resolve their inner conflicts within these contexts, could find solutions that transcend themselves and yield conceptualizations that transform the world. Although Erikson was able to create a conceptualization of the adolescent task of establishing a coherent identity, one that gave voice to the aspirations and frustrations of the rebellious student movements of the 1960s, he was never able, over his lifetime, to resolve his own identity issues. Was he Dane or German, American or Scandinavian, Jew or Christian or both? His lifelong back-and-forths on this struggle are chronicled.

Will psychoanalysis fulfill its promise?

Although Freud had aspirations of a university structure for psychoanalytic education the sociopolitical structure of the Austro-Hungarian empire precluded this, and psychoanalysis developed by default in the central European heartland within a part-time, private-practice educational structure. With its rapid spread in the post-World-War-II United States, and its ready penetration of American academic psychiatry, a counter educational structure arose in some quarters: the department-of-psychiatry-affiliated institute within the medical school. This article outlines beyond these other, more ambitious, academic vistas (the David Shakow model, the Anna Freud model, the Menninger Foundation, Emory University (USA), AP de BA (Argentina)); conceptions even closer to the ideal (idealized) goal of full-time placement within the university, with strong links to medicine, to the behavioral sciences and to the humanities. The putative advantages of such a structure are presented.

Psychoanalysis in the university: the natural home for education and research.

Psychoanalysis as a theory of human mental functioning and a derived therapeutic for disturbed functioning would have its natural home in the university, and Freud gave evidence of harboring such an ambition. But the sociopolitical structure of the early 20th century Austro-Hungarian Empire precluded this, and analysis developed, by default, its part-time, private practice-based educational structure. Psychoanalytic penetration of academic psychiatry in the United States after World War II made possible a counter-educational structure, the department of psychiatry-affiliated psychoanalytic institute within the country's medical schools. This paper outlines, beyond these, other more ambitious vistas (David Shakow, Anna Freud, The Menninger Foundation, Emory University [US], APdeBA [Argentina]), conceptions even closer to the ideal (idealized) goal of full-time placement within the university with strong links to medicine, to the behavioral sciences, and to the humanities.

The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM): rationale, conception, and structure.

The declaredly atheoretical DSM-III (and its successors), the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association, was created to enhance diagnostic reliability for research, epidemiological survey, and governmental and insurance categorization and reimbursement purposes. It has, however, exhibited many inadequacies for psychodynamic diagnosis and case formulation for treatment planning and outcome assessment, and its claimed diagnostic reliability has turned out to be less than originally projected. The psychoanalytically sponsored Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM) marks a return to a theoretically (psychoanalytically) based diagnostic frame and was created as a supplement to, or replacement for, DSM (depending on the precise clinical need), for use in psychodynamic diagnosis and treatment planning.

Psychoanalysis in the university: a full-time vision.

Psychoanalysis may be unique among scholarly disciplines and professions in having grown as an educational enterprise in a private part-time setting, outside the university. Freud would have liked it to be otherwise, but in Central Europe, when it was created, university placement was not possible. In America, after World War II, the concept of the medical school department of psychiatry psychoanalytic institute was established in some psychoanalytic training centers but it could only partly overcome the educational and research inadequacies of traditional psychoanalytic training. The possibilities for a true university-based full-time training structure are explored.

What kind of research in psychoanalytic science?

The kind of science that psychoanalysis is (can be), and the kind of research appropriate to it, qualitative and/or quantitative, have been divisive issues from the very inception of the discipline. I explore in detail the complexity of these issues, definitional and semantic, as well as methodological and substantive. A plea is made for the application of qualitative (idiographic)and quantitative (nomothetic) research methods, each to the extent that is appropriate, separately or in conjunction, across the entire spectrum of research domains in psychoanalysis, empirical, clinical, conceptual, historical, and interdisciplinary.

Review of Polarities of experience: Relatedness and self-definition in personality development, psychopathology, and the therapeutic process and Relatedness, self-definition and mental representation: Essays in honor of Sidney J. Blatt.

Reviews the books, Polarities of experience: Relatedness and self-definition in personality development, psychopathology, and the therapeutic process by Sidney J. Blatt (see record 2008-01813-000) and Relatedness, self-definition and mental representation: Essays in honor of Sidney J. Blatt edited by John S. Auerbach, Kenneth N. Levy, and Carrie E. Schaffer (2005). These two volumes present a most impressive and fitting capstone to Sidney Blatt's very productive lifetime of almost unmatched threefold integration of (a) clinical experience, beginning with his astute observation of the strikingly different thematic preoccupations of two otherwise very similarly depressed patients whom Blatt was analyzing during his psychoanalytic training; (b) the theoretic conceptualization stemming from these clinical observations, which became the basic fabric of his lifetime major addition to our psychological explanatory universe; and (c) the painstaking systematic empirical data gathering, together with the creation of necessary-and truly appropriate-measures and instruments that, in ensemble, provide such strong data-based support for Blatt's clinically inspired theoretic harvesting. In the book Polarities of experience: Relatedness and self-definition in personality development, psychopathology, and the therapeutic process, Blatt draws upon a vast literature review of his own work with his collaborating authors-as well as a seemingly exhaustive list of contributors in all the linked and related areas. Blatt has organized his volume sequentially (after defining and describing his fundamental polarity of experience) into three logically following sections on personality development, personality organization and psychopathology, and lastly, the therapeutic process. Relatedness, self-definition and mental representation: Essays in honor of Sidney J. Blatt is put together by three of Blatt's former students, and now collaborating partners, although published 3 years earlier (2005), is best read as a supplement to, and a complement of, Blatt's own account. There are 18 chapters, about half of them by Blatt's former students who became working colleagues, and they are all well represented in Blatt's own volume as well as having ample references to papers by, and with, Blatt in their own chapters here (anywhere from a dozen references to their work together, and on up, per chapter). The other half are by eminent colleagues, at Yale University and elsewhere, contemporaries of Blatt, with shared or related interests, and some of their chapters are based on that shared interest, though usually approached from a differing perspective, and some are expositions of their own work, with only tangentially shared themes. This half is a set of most distinguished psychological colleagues, all joined in paying tribute to their admired colleague. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

The optimal structure for psychoanalytic education today: a feasible proposal?

Our psychoanalytic training system, close to a century old, has been subjected to increasing criticism, starting shortly after its creation, for failing to properly fulfill its avowed purposes. The most intense critiques have centered around the authoritarian power lodged in a self-selected training analyst elite, the inadequate development of a psychoanalytic research tradition, and the isolation of our educational structure from cognate disciplines concerned with human mental life, owing to its private and part-time nature, apart from the university with its spectrum of biological and human sciences. Efforts to reform this system, including the establishment of psychoanalytic institutes within medical school departments of psychiatry, and the further call for their autonomous placement within the university at large, with full-time students and faculty, have been only partially successful and have not become widespread. The values of the newly emerging multifaceted psychoanalytic center as the best currently achievable fundamental reform are presented.

¿Será el pluralismo psicoanalítico un estado duradero de nuestra disciplina? / Will psychoanalytic pluralism be anenduring state of our discipline?

El autor en sus dos discursos dados en los congresos de la Asociación Psicoanalítica Internacional (IPA), celebrados en Montreal en 1987 y en Roma en 1989, se centra en el tema del pluralismo teórico reinante y en descubrir el terreno común que puede existir en una disciplina psicoanalítica compartida. Se basa en Freud y en el empeño que este puso para mantener el psicoanálisis como una estructura teórica unitaria y unificada, y en cómo esta visión no puede sostenerse (pasando por la metapsicología Kleniana, Bioniana, Lacaniana, Kohutiana y las actuales corrientes relacionales. Dentro de este pluralismo internacional, que abarcaba y definía la praxis psicoanalítica, su preocupación fue averiguar qué podían tener en común que los definiera a todos como psicoanalistas y los diferenciara de otras disciplinas. En tres importantes presentaciones clínicas formuladas en el marco de tres perspectivas teóricas diferentes, encontró intervenciones comunes en la forma de abordar tres diferentes pacientes. Y finalmente explicita que en la última década ha habido señales de convergencias evidentes en el plano clínico de la técnica, incluso entre personas que adherían a perspectivas teóricas muy dispares, habitualmente consideradas antitéticas.

¿Diálogo o ilusión? ¿y cómo seguimos a partir de aquí?: respuesta a André Green / Dialogue or illusion? How do we go from here? Response to André Green

Luego de responder puntualmente a algunos argumentos circunstanciales presentes en la respuesta de Green, Wallerstein pasa a responder a los argumentos que él considera como los que más aportan tanto al esclarecimiento de las diferencias como a los puntos de coincidencia más esenciales entre ambos en cuanto a la índole del psicoanálisis como disciplina. Green ve al psicoanálisis como una disciplina sui generis, que no es “ni una ciencia ni una rama de la hermenéutica, sino una práctica basada en el pensamiento clínico que da origen a hipótesis teóricas y que no tiene conexiones con otras disciplinas. En esto difiere la postura de Wallerstein quien si bien considera al psicoanálisis como una disciplina independiente que tiene sus raíces en la exploración del funcionamiento de los procesos psíquicos inconcientes tiene también puntos de conexión con toda una gama de disciplinas que estudian la conducta humana, desde la filosofía y la lingüística hasta la psicología cognitiva y las neurociencias modernas. Sin embargo ambos autores consideran que cualquier disciplina que pretenda alcanzar status científico no tolera dentro de sí estructuras teóricas incompatibles. Green habla de caos teórico y propone que el único procedimiento válido es indicar de que manera, cierto material clínico consistente y basado en la exposición de una secuencia de sesiones y en un proceso psicoanalítico de suficiente extensión pueda demostrar el parentesco entre dos teorías distintas que se fundan en diferentes técnicas e interpretaciones. Wallerstein considera que esto es exactamente lo que él mismo siempre quiso significar cuando se refiere a la investigación empírica necesaria sobre la cual debe descansar la construcción gradual del conocimiento psicoanalítico. La acumulación de investigaciones empíricas hará crecer pruebas sobre un terreno común, dando origen a una teoría clínica unificada de manera coherente y por ende a una metapsicología psicoanalítica cada vez más unificada.

¿Será el pluralismo psicoanalítico un estado duradero de nuestra disciplina? / Will psychoanalytic pluralism be anenduring state of our discipline?

El autor en sus dos discursos dados en los congresos de la Asociación Psicoanalítica Internacional (IPA), celebrados en Montreal en 1987 y en Roma en 1989, se centra en el tema del pluralismo teórico reinante y en descubrir el terreno común que puede existir en una disciplina psicoanalítica compartida. Se basa en Freud y en el empeño que este puso para mantener el psicoanálisis como una estructura teórica unitaria y unificada, y en cómo esta visión no puede sostenerse (pasando por la metapsicología Kleniana, Bioniana, Lacaniana, Kohutiana y las actuales corrientes relacionales. Dentro de este pluralismo internacional, que abarcaba y definía la praxis psicoanalítica, su preocupación fue averiguar qué podían tener en común que los definiera a todos como psicoanalistas y los diferenciara de otras disciplinas. En tres importantes presentaciones clínicas formuladas en el marco de tres perspectivas teóricas diferentes, encontró intervenciones comunes en la forma de abordar tres diferentes pacientes. Y finalmente explicita que en la última década ha habido señales de convergencias evidentes en el plano clínico de la técnica, incluso entre personas que adherían a perspectivas teóricas muy dispares, habitualmente consideradas antitéticas. (AU)

¿Diálogo o ilusión? ¿y cómo seguimos a partir de aquí?: respuesta a André Green / Dialogue or illusion? How do we go from here? Response to André Green

Luego de responder puntualmente a algunos argumentos circunstanciales presentes en la respuesta de Green, Wallerstein pasa a responder a los argumentos que él considera como los que más aportan tanto al esclarecimiento de las diferencias como a los puntos de coincidencia más esenciales entre ambos en cuanto a la índole del psicoanálisis como disciplina. Green ve al psicoanálisis como una disciplina sui generis, que no es ¶ni una ciencia ni una rama de la hermenéutica, sino una práctica basada en el pensamiento clínico que da origen a hipótesis teóricas y que no tiene conexiones con otras disciplinas. En esto difiere la postura de Wallerstein quien si bien considera al psicoanálisis como una disciplina independiente que tiene sus raíces en la exploración del funcionamiento de los procesos psíquicos inconcientes tiene también puntos de conexión con toda una gama de disciplinas que estudian la conducta humana, desde la filosofía y la ling³ística hasta la psicología cognitiva y las neurociencias modernas. Sin embargo ambos autores consideran que cualquier disciplina que pretenda alcanzar status científico no tolera dentro de sí estructuras teóricas incompatibles. Green habla de caos teórico y propone que el único procedimiento válido es indicar de que manera, cierto material clínico consistente y basado en la exposición de una secuencia de sesiones y en un proceso psicoanalítico de suficiente extensión pueda demostrar el parentesco entre dos teorías distintas que se fundan en diferentes técnicas e interpretaciones. Wallerstein considera que esto es exactamente lo que él mismo siempre quiso significar cuando se refiere a la investigación empírica necesaria sobre la cual debe descansar la construcción gradual del conocimiento psicoanalítico. La acumulación de investigaciones empíricas hará crecer pruebas sobre un terreno común, dando origen a una teoría clínica unificada de manera coherente y por ende a una metapsicología psicoanalítica cada vez más unificada. (AU)