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PRESIDENT'S
COLUMN Behold I do not give
lectures or a little charity
What do we as psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic therapists have to offer people in need who will never cross the threshold of our consulting rooms? I ask this question partly in response to APA's community service proposal, which asks each psychologist attending the 2000 APA convention to give two hours of pro bono work in Washington, DC and each psychologist/graduate student not attending the convention to do the same in his/her home town. The APA Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct encourages psychologists "to contribute a potion of their professional time for little or no personal advantage." Helping out wherever and however one can is laudable. Giving a few hours of ones time to the needy in Washington, DC has the potential to be helpful, but I must admit I think there are other ways that we, particularly with our psychoanalytic expertise, can be more helpful. In thinking about these issues I was reminded of George Miller's APA Presidential Address, "Psychology as a Means of Promoting Human Welfare" (Miller, 1969). Miller advocated "giving psychology away," that is, finding ways to make what we know about human nature and human behavior understandable to the public so that they can apply that understanding to their individual lives and society as a whole. Miller cited the impact that Freudian psychology has had on Western society, saying "The impact of Freud's thought has been due far less to the instrumentalities he provided than to the changed conception of ourselves that he inspired." In my first President's column I wrote "the future of psychoanalysis rests in the relevancy of psychoanalysis to the lives of individuals and the life of society as a whole." Psychoanalytic thought explains things about people and relationships that can be helpful to people on a daily basis. We must find ways to share the foundation of psychoanalytic principles with all people. This can be done in big and small ways in many different settings and with many different people. As Miller writes, "When ideas are made sufficiently concrete and explicit, the scientific foundations of psychology can be grasped by sixth grade children." It is our challenge as psychoanalysts to make our ideas relevant and understandable to people across our society and culture. Division 39 members are involved in a number of pro bono projects which demonstrate what we can offer individuals and groups who are suffering, in need, and have no access to our services and expertise via the private or public sector. I want to highlight a few of these projects, give the individuals involved credit for their work, encourage others to join them in their projects and, at the same time, encourage others to think about what they might do in their own communities. Toni Heineman started the Children Psychotherapy Project in San Francisco eight years ago. This project provides long-term, psychoanalytically informed therapy to foster children, who know little to nothing of long-term relationships. The project now has 70 volunteers, all mental health professionals. Younger clinicians are asked to provide weekly individual therapy to a child for as long as it takes. The "as long as it takes part" is what makes it remarkable, both in the world of foster children and the world of volunteerism. Senior clinicians serve as consultants, doing weekly consultation groups with four or five of the clinicians seeing the children. Dr. Heineman notes, "The inclusion of consultation groups as part of the therapeutic environment has been one of the most important modifications and perhaps essential to the therapists' being able to maintain the capacity for empathy, internal stability and actual reliability that sustains a therapeutic environment for these children." Grant money now provides for an administrator, allows children or their parents to be seen for a second weekly visit when needed, and allows the therapist to be paid a partial fee for that second visit. The children come to the therapists' offices, providing the children with the comfort of a private practice office and the therapists the comfort of practicing in their office and not adding travel time to their pro-bono work. Many of the volunteers are members of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology, a local chapter of Division 39. The Children's Psychotherapy Project gives foster children, with their attachment and separation problems, the opportunity to have psychoanalytically oriented therapy with continuity of care. The clinicians who volunteer have formed a community that sustains them within the community they have created to sustain the children. Toni Heineman, DMH, can be reached at 415/474-8454 or at tvh@itsa.ucsf.com. Dr. Heineman is now beginning to think about ways to obtain funding for "seed" money to assist psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic therapists in other communities with starting similar projects. Elizabeth Kandall first heard about the Children's Psychotherapy Project while in graduate school in northern California. Now in New York City she started the Children's Psychotherapy Project, New York about a year ago, working with a small group of clinicians, among them Neil Altman, President of Section IX, Psychoanalysts for Social Responsibility. This core group is using the San Francisco project as a model and is committed to creating both a therapeutic environment for foster children as well as a community of service for clinicians. They have now started their second consultation group. They are forging links with the Association for Children's Services and with some private contract agencies and finding out how the New York system differs from that in San Francisco. At this point they are interested in clinicians willing to volunteer their time and expertise. Elizabeth Kandall, PhD, can be reached at 212/255-8895 or Ejkandall@aol.com. Jean Henry, a member of the Philadelphia Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology, founded the Saturday Program for Mothers and Children Living in Shelters. With a PhD in art history and a LCSW, Dr. Henry's dual interests in art and psychoanalysis combined to create this program at a university museum where she was the director. The program lasted two years, eventually involved five shelters and served mothers and children in both long-term homeless shelters and thirty day abuse shelters. On any given Saturday 40-70 mothers and children participated in the program. This program was psychoanalytically informed and based on the work of Anna Freud and others who studied children suffering from the trauma of displacement. The program did not provide treatment, but rather trained volunteers (non-clinicians) to provide a safe place to transfer grief and anger into creative arts. In Dr. Henry's words, "The program was designed to stimulate a sense of empowerment, self worth and respect for self and others, and to explore options and alternatives, as well as creative capabilities. The activities were designed to engage the participants' imagination, dissipate anger and frustration and encourage new ways of thinking about themselves and acting on those thoughts." The program ended when the university closed the museum, but Dr. Henry still receives inquiries about it. This was an innovative program which linked psychoanalysis, the arts and the needs of homeless women and children. Dr. Henry is presenting a paper on this program as part of a symposium at the APA Convention entitled: "New Challenges to Parenting - How Can Psychoanalytic Thinking Help?" Ian Miller, through his association with Doctors of the World, evaluates victims of torture from other countries who are applying for asylum in the United States. Dr. Miller first became involved about two years ago and now has expanded his pro bono work to also include supervision of other psychologists doing evaluations and training, often involving case studies in psychiatric asylum. The evaluations involve an extensive psychological work-up, including a narrative, or life history, of the applicant. Dr. Miller writes an affidavit, which is then used in the application for asylum. Dr. Miller finds the work intellectually challenging in that he has to determine what the applicant's premorbid functioning was relative to what he/she is presenting with now and to distinguish and understand elaborations based on the desire for asylum. He finds the work both emotionally rewarding and challenging. Dr. Miller conducts these evaluations from an interpersonally informed perspective, with particular sensitivity to the issues of transference and countertransference. From an analytic perspective, he finds it most rewarding when he is able to make links in a person's history that give the applicant something to understand and think about him/herself. Others in the New York-New Jersey area interested in volunteering with Doctors of the World can contact Dr. Miller at 212/877-9038. Nina Thomas has made two trips to Bosnia, in 1997 and 1999, to train mental health professionals who are faced with treating the traumatic effects of war and its sequelae. Working through Catholic Relief Services Dr. Thomas conducted workshops in group therapy with multi-disciplinary professionals. With each visit she gave nine workshops in three weeks. Dr. Thomas found that the mental health professionals were often ill equipped to manage the magnitude of the problems facing the people of Bosnia. Additionally, the professionals themselves had been traumatized by their own and their families' experiences of war, loss, displacement and survival. Dr. Thomas found that she did not have to establish her credibility as an expert, but rather "the question of my credibility revolved around whether I could understand the difficulty of the situations they face, not only in the trauma of their own lives, but in the degree of despair and destitution faced both by their clients and themselves." Dr. Thomas's work in Bosnia continues and she is currently looking for a group of 20-30 experienced group therapists interested in spending three weeks in Bosnia providing training and supervision at different mental health centers, family counseling centers, clinics and schools in and around Sarajevo. Housing and a modest per diem will be provided, but participants pay their own travel expenses and will be traveling to Bosnia in groups of two. Dr. Thomas will provide pre-travel training and post-travel debriefing in the United States. Dr. Thomas can be contacted at 2373 Broadway, Suite 1421, New York, NY 10024, phone 212/877-7282 or doctornina@aol.com. The pro-bono work of all these individuals and the programs they have established, or with whom they are associated, are examples of what psychoanalysts can offer people in need, both in this country and abroad. I hope their work inspires you. At the same time I believe there are others in our organization who are also giving of themselves, both as human beings and psychoanalysts. Please write me (lbwagner@flash.net) or our Newsletter editor (MacGroove@aol.com) and share your volunteer experiences and programs with all of us. Reference Miller, G.A. (1969) Psychology as a means of promoting human welfare. American Psychologist, 24(12), 1063-1075. |
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