Ilonka Venier Alexander and Shari Thurer met in our library on June 21, 2016, to discuss The Life and Times of Franz Alexander: From Budapest To California published by Karnac in 2015.  Ilonka’s grandfather, Franz Alexander, was the first graduate of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, the man who turned down Freud’s offer to enter into private practice in Vienna, and the man Freud told to go to America and spread the doctrine of...

Paul Ornstein and Daniel Jacobs met at Dr. Ornstein’s home on February 19, 2016, to talk about his new book “Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst” written with Helen Epstein and published by Plunkett Lake Press in 2015. The book is the unusual memoir of a Holocaust survivor and physician who became prominent in American psychoanalysis and a leader of the psychoanalytic Self Psychology movement. Paul Ornstein, MD, was born...

In this new webcast series, BPSI Authors speak about their recently published books. Stephanie Brody, PsyD, and Daniel Jacobs, MD, met in the library on April 16, 2016, to discuss Dr. Brody’s new book “Entering Night Country: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Loss and Resilience” published by Routledge in December, 2015. The book focuses on the experience of personal loss, illness, aging, or mortality and explores how it...

The newest volume of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (vol. 68) has a section of papers featuring the latest psychoanalytic thinking about the psychotherapeutic and biological treatment of transgendered children. Dr. Claudia Lament introduces the section by discussing the controversies related to treating these children. Dr. Diane Ehrensaft writes about her psychotherapy with gender nonconforming children. Dr. Rona Knight focuses on normal...

As this long, dark New England winter drags on, Harvard psychiatrist Jacqueline Olds has a reminder for a region now three weeks late for work and struggling with a bad bout of seasonal blues: Spring is coming. She also has some advice. In an interview with the Gazette, Olds, an expert on seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and co-founder of a startup that makes devices for tracking personal exposure to bright light, prescribed doses of sun and...

Psychoanalysis and Academia: Present, Past, Future   By Murray Schwartz     When, in The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), Freud sketched his ideal of a “college of psychoanalysis,” he transcended a “Two Cultures” view of psychoanalytic education. By including such disciplines as history, mythology, religion, and “the science of literature,” along with sexuality and “the symptomology of psychiatry,” his vision encompassed science,...