What is meant by Trump’s narcissism? In this article from the Los Angeles Review of Books, BPSI Faculty and Member, and Harvard historian Elizabeth Lunbeck unpacks the president’s appeal to his constituents, finding a capability where others find a pathological diagnosis. Exploring the popular and medical definitions of the term, Lunbeck provocatively also suggests its flipside–the charm and charisma that often gets political...

Dr. Michele Baker is a graduate and psychoanalyst member of BPSI. Her remarks below originally appeared in the Fall-Winter 2017 issue of the BPSI Bulletin. My husband is a rabbi. He was raised Episcopalian and converted, so he is Jewish, but not exactly in the same way I am. He didn’t have Jewish grandparents who paid him to eat the three cardinal food groups: milk, eggs, and bananas. He didn’t go to Jewish summer camp. And he wasn’t raised to...

Two of our members, Nancy Chodorow and Jane Kite, have recently given interviews to Robert Winer and Kerry L. Malawista for a publication in Who’s Behind the Couch?  The Heart and Mind of the Psychoanalyst (Karnac, 2017). The book explores the analyst’s mind at work, not so much from a theoretical perspective, but rather from the complexities and richness inherent in every moment-to-moment clinical encounter. Other notable interviewees...

Below are the remarks from the March 20, 2018 “Off the Couch” viewing of The Death of Stalin with Alistair McKnight, PsyaD, LMHC , Member of BPSI. “Off the Couch” is part of a decades-long collaboration between The Coolidge Cinema and BPSI. The one-liners fly as fast as political fortunes fall in this uproarious, wickedly irreverent satire from Armando Iannucci (Veep, In the Loop). Moscow, 1953: when tyrannical dictator Joseph Stalin drops...

The following piece was originally printed in the Fall/Winter 2017 edition of the BPSI Bulletin, which can be read here. She seems to hide in the white collar of her pink wool coat as she enters the office, head down, shoulders scrunched. A copy of Sylvia Plath poetry sticks out of her bag. Everything about her tells me she has not had a good night’s sleep. She probably hasn’t eaten either. I do not mention these things. Instead, I say a big...

Below are the remarks from the January 16, 2018 “Off the Couch” viewing of Phantom Thread with Randall Paulsen, MD, Psychoanalyst Member of BPSI.  “Off the Couch” is part of a decades long collaboration between The Coolidge Cinema and BPSI. Phantom Thread is set in the glamour of 1950’s post-war London. Renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) are at the center of British fashion, dressing...