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PRESIDENT'S
COLUMN October 2002 Freud Abuse Elsewhere in this newsletter you will find a letter authorized by the Executive Committee and the Board of Directors of Division 39 regarding the website of the Freud Museum in London. That letter is self-explanatory. I encourage you to read it and, as the letter suggests, to view the website for yourself and form your own judgment about its contents. The web pages can be found at: http://www.freud.org.uk (See section on “Freud Toaday”). In addition to the issues raised in the Board’s letter, the material found on this website raises larger questions about our way of thinking about Freud, about his role in our discipline, and about the future of psychoanalysis that I would like to address here. A. Freud as Icon and Prophet: In addition to his directly psychoanalytic writing, Freud concerned himself with many matters outside of the clinical realm. In an odd effort to try to be relevant in today’s times, the Freud Museum website tries to use Freud’s thoughts and musings seventy and eighty years ago to comment on current events. Even if these comments did not contain a covert political perspective, which, as the Board letter notes, we believe they do, we ought to ask what purpose is served by trying to link them—in tortured and convoluted reasoning—to something Freud uttered so long ago? Can it be truly useful to furthering critical psychoanalytic thought to frame Freud as though he were a prophet speaking today? In my view this kind of thinking is a set up, and Freud is the victim. Instead of portraying Freud as a historical figure, with views that related to his time and his own personal perspective, writing like this creates him as an oracle, able to make pronouncements through the ages This “iconization” of Freud can serve only to freeze psychoanalysis as a discipline, anchoring it concretely in ideas that achieve their legitimacy not by their ability to persuade, but by their relationship to an exalted authority. This is a disservice to our ability to realistically appreciate Freud’s genius, the real nature of his contribution, as well as the human limitations of his efforts. If psychoanalysis is to be truly relevant, it must be an evolving discipline which builds upon the work of our founding thinkers, but does not become enslaved to it. Validity and legitimacy do not emanate from a sophomoric application of standardized theories whose major feature is its fidelity to what one believes has been said by the “master.” B. Psychobabble and authoritarian knowing in psychoanalysis: The extent of the difficulties in the Freud Museum web pages have to be seen to be fully appreciated. It is a sad example of how simplistic, boilerplate interpretations can be applied to current, serious and heartbreaking political events and human conflicts. Drained of its complexity, psychoanalysis is represented as a banal and screwball set of ideas applied in a wild and far fetched way. No Hollywood film could make a better mockery. I know we tread a fine line here. On the one hand, the ability to hypothesize, to speculate, to think far out thoughts, is essential to science and to the advancement of human knowledge. What is far fetched for one generation can be as plain as day for another. Indeed, psychoanalysis as a discipline rests in part on the idea that we are trying to understand things that we cannot directly see from the limited data of what we can, or think we can, see. The important variable here is what we “think” we can see. In struggling to advance what is clearly an interpretive discipline, we owe it to ourselves, to our patients, and to our field to put forward our thoughts and interpretations with all reasonable humility and readiness to be, as Freud often counseled, taken by surprise. When superficial “oedipal” interpretations, or interpretations about aggression, sadism, sexuality, paranoid or depressive positions—or whatever are the catch terms of the day—are applied to complex situations in a stereotyped , all knowing, authoritarian way, without clarifying the speculative and uncertain nature of our thinking, we discredit our field and ill serve the public and our patients. The excesses of the Freud Museum are an important lesson for how we think about our own relationship to Freud as the founding thinker in our field, and how we use, or abuse, his preeminence, his authority, and his ideas. The same challenges hold true for other outstanding contributors. If our founding thinkers inspire us to creativity and originality in our own thinking, to a critical disputation with them about the complex issues in our field, and if, especially, we approach questions with a readiness to embrace and live with uncertainty, our relationship with them will have served us well. But if our task is to turn them into prophets and seers, or icons whose form and shape must go unquestioned and unchallenged, our understanding will be marked by the kind of fatuous writing found on some of the Freud Museum web pages. We can do better. We can especially do better in Division 39. As psychologists we can bring to psychoanalysis the best of what psychology should be: the demand for rigor and the capacity to challenge speculation, even the insistence on something observable. We know that psychology has its own problematic processes that can lead to trivializations of human experience. But in seeing where psychology has gone wrong, we can also understand where psychology, and its proper alliance with science, has gone right. Just as we hope that as psychoanalytic psychologists we can bring depth and complexity to psychology, so can the methods of psychology help us insist that psychoanalysis not get mired in a stultifying iconography. Where We Are This is the final column I will be writing as President and I am happy to say that we got a lot done this year. I am grateful for the head start on many of our initiatives that were begun during the term of Maureen Murphy. A brief listing of just some things that highlighted the year, most of which are first steps in an ongoing process: 1. The Graduate Student Committee (Joe Schwartz and Karen Rosica, chairs) has conducted a great deal of outreach to the graduate student community, sponsored some of our most interesting programs (many thanks to Sera Morelli for organizing such a successful program at the recent APA meetings) and will soon establish a special web forum for graduate students. In addition, we have succeeded in placing graduate students on all major Divisional committees. This is a big accomplishment. 2. The Education and Training Committee (Spyros Orfanos, chair) has begun examining curricula in undergraduate and graduate psychology programs and is preparing model curricula for teaching psychoanalysis on an undergraduate and graduate level. The committee will continue holding workshops, as it did quite successfully at the recent APA meeting, on teaching psychoanalysis in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum and in trying to get aspects of these model curricula incorporated in psychology textbooks. 3. The Committee on Sexual Identity and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Issues (Dennis Debiak, chair) is off the ground and has already gone a long way in representing psychoanalysis in the APA as it is today, a discipline that is open to thinking in new ways about the human experience and about human intimacy. 4. The ACPE (Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education) has been established after we reached agreement with the other members of the Psychoanalytic Consortium on common educational standards for the accreditation of psychoanalytic training programs. Much thanks needs to be given to Laurie Wagner who has led our Consortium efforts so effectively and to our other Consortium Committee members Nat Stockhamer, Maureen Murphy and Jaine Darwin. 5. The Public Information Committee (Margaret Fulton and Gemma Ainslee, chairs) has been reorganized and will shortly be bringing to the membership materials to help us think about representing psychoanalysis to the public and the media. 6. By the time you get this newsletter our newly redesigned web page (and online directory) should be nearly ready (www.division39.org). Larry Zelnick, chair of the Internet Committee, has done an outstanding job of shepherding this through. 7. Out latest directory was issued in a timely way and with the fewest complaints yet, thanks to the efforts of Joe Couch and the Membership Committee. Soon we will have a continuously updated online directory. And the committee is hard at work on membership recruitment and retention. 8. Special thanks to Nancy McWilliams and the Publications Committee in overseeing the many publications that come as a benefit of membership and in dealing with the complex issues of distribution that have come up. If you are not getting the journal, Psychoanalytic Abstracts or the newsletter in a timely way let Ruth Helein at our central office know (div39@namgmt.com). Appreciation There is always a risk when one thanks individuals by name. So many people devote time and energy to the Division and I do not intend to overlook them. The people who are involved do it because they believe in our goals and they deserve to be thanked. There is a spirit in the Division that has been growing in recent years of our being a diverse but deeply unified group. This atmospheric change is clearly found in the Board and in the Executive Committee which has been enormously supportive of all of my initiatives. I am grateful to all of the Executive Committee and Board members who have served with me this year, for the solid financial advice of our outgoing Treasurer, David Ramirez, and the wonderful organizational abilities and diplomatic skills of our Secretary, Marilyn Jacobs. Our professional staff have been equally superb. Special thanks to Ruth Helene for dealing so well with presidential demands! Natalie Shear and Jen Grudza have been absolutely essential in helping us to put together well-organized and financially sound programs. My last words of appreciation go to those graduate students who I called late at night and implored them to serve on committee. They were willing to do so despite the demands of their studies. Their energy, creativity and service insures our future. And to the membership, my appreciation for the privilege of serving as President a second time. I enjoyed it and hope we accomplished some useful things. Jonathan H. Slavin, Ph.D. Jonathan H. Slavin, Ph.D.,
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