Nancy J. Chodorow’s Interview with New Books in Psychoanalysis
Nancy J. Chodorow, PhD, a BPSI training analyst, lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and professor emerita of sociology at University of California, Berkeley, was recently interviewed by Sebastian Thrul, a psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland, about her new book The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye Toward an American Independent Tradition (Routledge, 2019). The interview was recorded for, and published by, the New Books in Psychoanalysis (NBiP) webcast series. Click on the player to...
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Struggling with Kids and the Pandemic? Look for the “Magic Moments”
The following piece was originally published on Alexandra Harrison’s blog entitled Supporting Child Caregivers in May 2020, which can be found here. During this time of social isolation and being cooped up with young children in small spaces, many parents describe their struggle to find an ever-elusive balance between working from home and childcare. Parents feel guilty about doing an inadequate job for their employers and feel guilty about not paying enough attention to their children. Co-parenting has also become more challenging—the...
read moreResponse to: Medicine and the Mind – The Consequences of Psychiatry’s Identity Crisis
By Caleb Gardner, MD. Referenced article originally published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Last fall I co-authored an article “Medicine and the Mind: The Consequences of Psychiatry’s Identity Crisis”, in which, among other things, I hoped to express some concern that American psychiatry might, in effect, be neglecting nuance and psychological complexity and losing touch with certain fundamental insights about the mind. In the article, we suggest that the practically exclusive emphasis of contemporary academic and clinical...
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Cancelled: Early Childhood Conference
It is an extraordinary time, as we learn and adjust to the new personal and professional implications of the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. At a time, when you would have received registration information about the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute’s 2020 Annual Early Childhood Conference: The Impact of Child Abuse and Neglect: How Early Childhood Educators Can Respond with Brenda Jones-Harden, we are sorry to let you know that we must cancel this year’s program. BPSI is already making plans to resume the Conference next spring, 2021....
read moreWhy A Traumatized Nation Is Having Trouble Staying Home
This opinion piece by Benjamin Herbstman, MD, MHS and Holly Blatman, MD was first published on April 7, 2020 in The Boston Globe. The potential consequences of noncompliance are being outweighed by the human desire to find comfort from loneliness and feelings of helplessness by gathering in groups. Given the current wartime reality in health care facilities battling COVID-19, it can be difficult to understand why all of us are not taking social distancing and stay-at-home measures more seriously. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo...
read moreOlder Kids and Teens in “Lockdown”
The following piece was originally published on Alexandra Harrison’s blog entitled Supporting Child Caregivers in April 2020, which can be found here. We have talked about infants and young children in the time of COVID. It is important now to talk about the experience of school children and adolescents. These kids have some of the same problems we have discussed in relation to younger children, and they have some different problems. The particular challenges faced by older children include school and academic work, friendships, screens, and...
read moreDefinitely Not Business as Usual: Especially in Families of Young Children
The following piece was originally published on Alexandra Harrison’s blog entitled Supporting Child Caregivers in April 2020, which can be found here. Talking to parents the past couple of weeks has impressed upon me in full force the stress we are all under. It is clear that it is not “business as usual” on the home front. The stresses are mounting. Parents are worried about poor work performance or even losing their jobs. They are stuck at home with their kids. Both parents and kids have lost the supervised time away from home that...
read moreCoping with COVID19
The following piece was originally published on Alexandra Harrison’s blog entitled Supporting Child Caregivers in March 2020, which can be found here. The World is a Different Place I just received an email from a colleague notifying me of the cancelation of a professional meeting that we had been scheduled to participate in. He said, “The world is a different place,” and I was struck by how true that was. As all of you, I have been watching and listening to the news dominated by the pandemic. There is a lot of redundancy in the advice...
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