“2+2=5”: Reason and Empathy in a Post-Factual Era
Today marks exactly two months since the Women’s March on Washington, one of the largest protests the capitol and the country have ever witnessed. We asked BPSI member and Social Awareness Chair Dr. Deborah Choate for her thoughts on how our new political reality affects human relationships, both in the realm of psychoanalysis and in the “real” world. Deborah Choate, MD “Alternative facts.” The Orwellian chill of that phrase from a Presidential spokesperson stuns. The denial of the objective reality of...
read more“Alms for Oblivion” : Memory, Desire and Mortality in 20TH CENTURY WOMEN
On January 17th, 2017, BPSI screened 20th Century Women at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. The film went on to receive the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The following essay is adapted from remarks delivered after the screening. Harold J. Bursztajn, M.D. Mike Mills’s semi-autobiographical film, 20th Century Women, is about more than the gender and time period suggested by the title. It tells the story of a teenage boy being raised by a single mother, two oddball tenants (a young woman facing the threat of cervical cancer and a man...
read moreOn Freud’s ”Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning”
This book, edited by Gabriela Legorreta and Lawrence J. Brown and published by Karnac in 2016, is a collection of papers by leading contemporary psychoanalysts who comment on the continuing important relevance of Freud’s (1911) paper, Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. The contributors gathered here represent current European, Latin American, and North American perspectives that elaborate the continuing value of Two Principles for present-day psychoanalytic thinking. Each author examines Freud’s paper through a personal...
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