Ruth Reichl: Chef, Food Writer, Memoirist

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Jun 6, 2017
A Conversation with Susan Scheftel, PhD

Chef and food writer Ruth Reichl’s acclaimed memoirs touch on her relationship with her brilliant, ambitious mother, a woman limited by both bipolar illness and pressure to conform with societal ideals of feminine domesticity. Raised in Greenwich Village, the young Ruth ventured through communes in Berkeley and the sexism of the restaurant world to become food critic for the New York Times, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, and winner of four James Beard awards. Her works in include Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, and My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life. In her later memoir (Not Becoming My Mother, renamed For You, Mom. Finally!) Reichl delves into a trove of her mother’s letters and diaries to poignantly reconsider this complex woman from the vantage point of experience and maturity.

Columbia University psychoanalyst Susan Scheftel, Ph.D. explores such themes as the role of food in Reichl’s relationship with her mother, the sublimatory power of cooking and writing, and Reichl’s overdetermined and serendipitous career.

Sandor Rado Lecture

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May 2, 2017
Analytic Thirds in Clinical Psychoanalysis
Nancy Kulish, PhD

The author examines the different notions of thirdness in the psychoanalytic literature and attempts to compare them with, and to differentiate them from, triangular “oedipal” transferences. She focuses upon the conceptualizations of analytic thirds and triangular spaces in the work of Ogden, Benjamin, and Britton as illustrations of how these concepts are used clinically. She presents a case in which the patient concretely constructed a third by drawing a real person – another analyst – into the dyad. In the highly charged drama that ensued, issues of bisexuality, gender identity and erotic fantasies toward both sexes were explored. She offers criteria that characterize oedipal or “persephonal” transferences and counter-transferences and describes interferences from both patient and analyst to working them through.

Dr. Kulish is a training and supervising analyst and past president of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She has published extensively on female sexuality and development, gender, and psychoanalytic process and technique. Dr. Kulish was named the National Psychoanalytic Woman’s Scholar by the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2006.

Learning Objectives: After the lecture, the participant will be able to

  • Compare contemporary theories of the analytic third.
  • Distinguish oedipal/triangular transferences from concepts of the analytic third.
  • Discuss factors in the analyst or patient that may interfere with understanding and working out triangular/oedipal transferences.

Field Theory in Contemporary Psychoanalysis

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April 4, 2017
Lecturer: S. Montana Katz, PhD, co-sponsored with the Columbia Parent Infant Program

In this presentation Montana Katz will describe the motivation for the development of psychoanalytic field theory. She will also discuss the range of different psychoanalytic field theory models as they have developed in different contexts and different parts of the world. One focus of the talk is to explore whether and how psychoanalytic field theory models offer something new and of use to the theory and to the practice of psychoanalysis as well as to other clinical modalities. Another focus of the presentation will be to explore and compare different modes of analytic listening. Clinical examples will be used throughout to vividly distinguish different approaches to clinical situations.

The lecture will be followed by a brief discussion of field theory from a perspective of psychoanalytic parent-infant work by Christine Anzieu Premmereur and Talia Hatzor, directors of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center Parent Infant Psychotherapy Training.

Montana Katz, Ph.D is a psychoanalyst with a practice in New York City. She is the author of the recently published book by Routledge, Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory: Stories, Dreams and Metaphor and is a co-Editor of the recent book also by Routledge Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory. Montana Katz is a founding co-Director of the International Field Theory Association and is a co-Editor of the Routledge Psychoanalytic Field Theory book series. She is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and Psychoanalytic Review.

Liebert Award Lecture: Embodied Readers, Narrative Texts: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives

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March 7, 2017
Anne Golomb Hoffman, PhD
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Fordham University

Recognizing the centrality of narrative to our experience of ourselves in the world, this talk explores some intersections of literary and psychoanalytic experience, with particular attention to representations of the body and to the place of the infantile body in mental life. The discussion considers the impact of unconscious fantasy on literary experience and examines a network of relationships involving writer, text, and reader.

Anne Golomb Hoffman, Ph.D., is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. She is a special member of the APM and on the faculty of the DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.

After the lecture, participants should be able to

  • Describe ways in which representations of the body in writing enter into the network of relationships that link writer to text and to reader.
  • Recognize the significance of unconscious fantasy in considering the intimate relationship of textuality to embodiment.

Working Well With Others: A Panel on Joint Psychoanalytic Treatment with Other Modalities – CBT, DBT and EMDR

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February 7, 2017
Panelists:  Brenda Berger, PhD, Robin Gibbs, PhD, Anna Schwartz, MD, Tiziano Colibazzi,  MD, Lisa Napolitano, PhD
Moderator: Michele Rosenberg, MD

Although they do not always talk about it, psychoanalysts often feel the need to draw upon other treatment techniques to augment their own analytic work. Sometimes they themselves do CBT or DBT with a patient for a period of time or they ask a specialist in those approaches or EMDR to work conjointly with them on a particular issue.  Such a recommendation made during the analysis will itself hold dynamic meaning that may be productively analyzed. This panel will present a few such examples of the amalgamated treatments and illustrate the kinds of symptoms successfully targeted by combining analysis with CBT, DBT and EMDR.  We hope to provide time for active audience participation and pose questions about the benefits and difficulties encountered in the business of trying to work well with other treatment approaches.

Brenda Berger, PhD is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry).  She is on the teaching faculty of Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research where she established the Psychology Externship program and serves as its Director Emerita.

Robin Gibbs, PhD is an EMDRIA Approved Consultant and the Regional Coordinator of EMDR for Westchester County.

Anna Schwartz MD is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and a faculty member at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where she is director of the Adult Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Program.

Lisa Napolitano, PhD is the Founder and Director of CBT/DBT Associates, a psychology practice group specializing in evidence-based treatments. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine.

Tiziano Colibazzi, MD is Assistant Professor in the Division of Translational Imaging in the  Department of Psychiatry of Columbia university and a member of the faculty of the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He also serves as an instructor in the training program in Human Sexuality at NYU.

Michele Rosenberg, MD is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine. She is also a member of the faculty at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

Learning Objectives: After the lecture the participant should be able to

  • Describe clinical indications for augmentation of psychoanalytic therapy with another therapy modality.
  • Manage transference and countertransference responses to the situation of con-joint treatment with another therapist, or alternating therapy modalities.

Sadistic Transference Fantasies in the Wake of 9/11: Clinical Work Across Ethnic, Religious, Racial, and Cultural Boundaries

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December 6, 2016
Lecturer: Aisha Abbasi, MD
Discussant: Susan Vaughan, MD

In this timely lecture, Dr. Abbasi describes how the ethnic difference between her patients and herself became a vehicle through which their feelings of hurt, rage, humiliation and sadism came into the analysis. Dr. Abbasi elaborates on how she was able to more effectively feel and process her patients’ sadistic attacks on her post-9/11, due to her internally increased awareness of her own conflicts regarding rage and sadism during that time. By attending to highly disturbing transference/countertransference pressures, an attitude of deep curiosity could be maintained, so that ethnic differences could be put to use. We might also consider how such clinical psychoanalytic work can be put to use in our broader understanding of racially, culturally and religiously-charged aggression in its various forms.

Dr. Abbasi is a training and supervising analyst at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Her works include “A Very Dangerous Conversation: The Patient’s Internal Conflicts Elaborated Through the Use of Ethnic and Religious Differences between Analyst and Patient, ” IJP, and “Speaking the Unspeakable,” in Blacks and Jews on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Black-Jewish Conflict, A. Helmreich and P. Marcus, eds. Her book, Rupture of Serenity: External Intrusions and Psychoanalytic Technique was published by Karnac in 2014.

Kardiner Award Lecture: Shamanism and Psychoanalysis

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November 1, 2016
Michael Taussig, PhD

Once upon a time medical doctor in psychiatric institutions in England, anthropologist Michael Taussig, made annual visits to the southwest of Colombia to live with an indigenous shaman using hallucinogenic drugs from 1965 to 1997. His description of some of this appears in his book, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man and also in an article, “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic,” which presents a quite alternative view of healing ritual to that put forward by Levi Strauss combining so-called structuralism with the early Freud. This talk shall explore the place of the secret and trickery in healing ritual, psychoanalytic or shamanic, as well as deconstructing the very word and notion of the shamanic.

Dr. Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He revolutionized the field through his radical and creative work in Latin America.  His books include Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror, The Nervous System, Mimesis and Alterity, and The Devil and Commodity Fetishism.

Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind

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October 4, 2016
Lecturer: George Makari, MD
Discussant: Jerome Wakefield, PhD

Accustomed as we are to the debates around the validity of neuro-psychoanalysis, or psychiatry’s pains to integrate (or not integrate) biological and psychosocial models, few of us are familiar with the very particular historical context in which these debates took shape in modern Western history. Soul Machine, Dr. Makari’s critically-acclaimed second book, traces the dramatic clash between philosophers, religious authorities, and scientific revolutionaries as they struggled to define what it means to be human.

Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, Dr. Makari is Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and Adjunct Professor at both Rockefeller University and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. His first book Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, was published in 2008.

Dr. Wakefield is University Professor, Professor of Social Work, Professor of Psychiatry, Honorary Faculty at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education, and affiliate faculty in Bioethics and in the Center for Ancient Studies, at New York University, and coauthor of “The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder” (Oxford), named best psychology book of 2007 by the Association of Professional and Scholarly Publishers; he is currently completing a book reexamining Freud’s case of Little Hans from philosophy-of-science and Foucauldian perspectives, to be published by Routledge.

Learning Objectives: After the lecture the participant should be able to

  • Describe the role of the French and English Enlightenment in challenging religious/Aristotelian conceptualizations of the relationship between the soul and the body.
  • Evaluate the impact of this history on contemporary scientific and psychoanalytic debates about the nature of the human mind.