Therapeutic Communication in Mental Health Nursing
Therapeutic Communication in Mental Health Nursing: Aesthetic and Metaphoric Processes in the Engagement with Challenging Patients (Routledge, 2017) is a recent publication by a BPSI Fellowship student, Shira Birnbaum, PhD, who is a professor of Education and a psychiatric nurse. Drawing on current writing in cognitive linguistics, philosophy, literary theory, art, music, and child development, the book explores connections between nursing and contemporary theories of metaphor and figurability. The author argues that for some patients who do...
read moreBPSI Off the Couch: The Sense of an Ending
Below are the remarks from the March 21, 2017 “Off the Couch” viewing of The Sense of an Ending with Mary Anderson, PhD, MTS, MFA, Member of BPSI. “Off the Couch” is part of a decades-long collaboration between The Coolidge Cinema and BPSI. Tony Webster leads a reclusive and quiet existence until long buried secrets from his past force him to face the flawed recollections of his younger self, the truth about his first love and the devastating consequences of decisions made a lifetime ago. CBS Films and Lionsgate The Tell and Toll of Time “I’m...
read moreThe Distance From Home
by Daniel Jacobs, MD The Distance from Home (IPBooks, 2019) is a new book and the first work of fiction by Daniel Jacobs, BPSI’s Training and Supervising Analyst and Director of our Library. The novel tells a captivating story of seven friends on a life journey to Nepal. For Hannah Avery, unmarried and 37, the future looks dim. Left by her lover, disparaged by her boss, she wonders whether she can ever be at home in the world. When she joins friends for a trek in Nepal, she finds herself dealing with their precarious marriages while she...
read moreWhen A Parent’s Narcissism Is The Root Of A Child’s Shame
Gil Noam, Ed.D., Dr. Habil is Psychoanalyst Member of BPSI. His remarks originally appeared on Cognoscenti on March 27, 2019 and are reprinted below with permission from WBUR. The full commentary can be read here. Alice Miller, the eminent Swiss psychoanalyst, wrote a bestselling book decades ago, “The Drama of the Gifted Child,” which addressed how parental narcissism holds children back from exploring their own creativity and potential. Children raised to live up to the dreams of narcissistic parents are forced to stifle their own dreams,...
read moreThe Analyst’s Reveries
While the use of the analyst’s own reveries in work with patients has increased in recent times, there has been little critical inquiry into its value, and the problems it may lead to. A new book by our member Fred Busch The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept (Routledge, 2019) finds increasing veneration for the analyst’s use of their reveries, while revealing important differences amongst post-Bionians in how reverie is defined and used clinically. Fred Busch ponders if it has been fully recognized that...
read moreWorking with Immigrant Families with Young Children: Promoting Resiliency in the Face of Trauma, Loss, and Fear (The 2019 Early Childhood Conference)
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Dinner in the Garden
Poems by Steven Luria Ablon, MD Dinner in the Garden, a new book of poetry by our member, Steven Luria Ablon, explores how families interact and evolve and brings to play the deepest feelings. Dr. Ablon is a Training and Supervising Adult and Child Analyst at BPSI and an Associate Clinical Professor of Harvard University Medical School at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Ablon’s earlier books of poems are Tornado Weather (Mellen Press, 1993), Flying Over Tasmania (Fithian Press,...
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Psychoanalysis and Psychological Testing: Reawakening an Historical Relationship (The 2019 Spring Academic Lecture)
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Book Review of Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
Simon & Schuster Shari Thurer, ScD, Psychotherapist Member of BPSI. Her remarks below originally appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of the Hann Sachs Library Newsletter, which can be read here. Review of Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, Simon & Schuster, 2018, 288 pp. “Tell all the truth,” wrote Emily Dickenson, “but tell it slant.” Author Lisa Halliday took her advice. In her much-praised novel Asymmetry, Halliday writes about an affair between elderly Ezra Blazer, a dead ringer for Philip Roth, with whom Halliday...
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