Tag: Psychoanalyst

On This Day … 12 February [2023]

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People (Births)

  • 1861 – Lou Andreas-Salomé, Russian-German psychoanalyst and author (d. 1937)
  • 1918 – Norman Farberow, American psychologist and academic (d. 2015)

Lou Andreas-Salome

Lou Andreas-Salomé (born either Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé or Lioulia von Salomé, Russian: Луиза Густавовна Саломе; 12 February 1861 to 05 February 1937) was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a well-travelled author, narrator, and essayist from a French Huguenot-German family. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Paul Rée, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Norman Farberow

Norman Louis Farberow (12 February 1918 to 10 September 2015) was an American psychologist, and one of the founding fathers of modern suicidology. He was among the three founders in 1958 of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Centre, which became a base of research into the causes and prevention of suicide.

On This Day … 11 February [2023]

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People (Births)

  • 1925 – Virginia E. Johnson, American psychologist and academic (d. 2013)

People (Deaths)

  • 1958 – Ernest Jones, Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst (b. 1879)

Virginia E. Johnson

Virginia E. Johnson (born Mary Virginia Eshelman; 11 February 1925 to 24 July 2013) was an American sexologist and a member of the Masters and Johnson sexuality research team. Along with her partner, William H. Masters, she pioneered research into the nature of human sexual response and the diagnosis and treatment of sexual dysfunctions and disorders from 1957 until the 1990s.

Ernest Jones

Alfred Ernest Jones FRCP MRCS (01 January 1879 to 11 February 1958) was a Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst. A lifelong friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud from their first meeting in 1908, he became his official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world. As President of both the International Psychoanalytical Association and the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the 1920s and 1930s, Jones exercised a formative influence in the establishment of their organisations, institutions and publications.

Who was Thomas Forrest Main?

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Introduction

Thomas Forrest Main (1911-1990) was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who coined the term ‘therapeutic community’. He is particularly remembered for his often cited paper, The Ailment (1957).

Refer to British Journal of Medical Psychology for The Ailment.

Life

Thomas Main was born on 25 February 1911 in Johannesburg, where his father was a mine manager who had emigrated there from England. At the start of World War I his mother returned to England with Thomas and his two sisters Isabella and Mary, while his father joined the South African Army. Main was educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle-upon-Tyne before studying medicine at Durham University, graduating in 1933 and becoming a doctor in 1938. Specialising in psychiatry, he gained a Diploma in Psychological Medicine from Dublin in 1936. In 1937 he married Agnes Mary (Molly) McHaffie who also graduated in medicine at Durham University and who also became a psychoanalyst. They had three daughters and a son, Jennifer (Johns), Deborah (Hutchinson), Ursula (Kretzschmar) and Andrew.

Main worked as superintendent at Gateshead Mental Hospital. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as an adviser in psychiatry, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel and working at the Northfield Army Hospital (aka Hollymoor Hospital) for the treatment of war neuroses. The work conducted at Northfield is considered by many psychiatrists to have been the first example of an intentional therapeutic community. The principles developed at Northfield were also developed and adapted at Civil Resettlement Units established at the end of the war to help returning prisoners of war to adapt back to civilian society and for civilians to adapt to having these men back amongst them.

The term “therapeutic community” was coined by Main in his 1946 paper, “The hospital as a therapeutic institution”, and subsequently developed by others including Maxwell Jones, R.D. Laing at the Philadelphia Association, David Cooper, and by Joshua Bierer.

After the war Main joined the Cassel Hospital, as medical director in 1946 and continued working there for the next thirty years.

Training as a psychoanalyst under Michael Balint, he was supervised by Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Paula Heimann. In 1974 he co-founded with Michael Balint the charitable Institute of Psychosexual Medicine in London. He served as its Life President. He also served as vice-president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and was a co-editor of the British Journal of Medical Psychology. He died in Barnes, London on 29 May 1990, aged 79.

His papers are held in the Archive of the British Psychoanalytic Society, whose member he was for many years.

Works

  • The hospital as a therapeutic institution.
  • The Ailment and other Psycho-Analytical Essays, ed. Jennifer Johns, London: Free Association Books, 1989. ISBN 1-85343-105-2. The noted essay, The Ailment, is a report of Main’s detailed study of the feelings aroused in a team of nurses caring for a group of psychiatric patients with low potential for recovery. He found that a sedative would be used in the management of a patient “only at the moment when the nurse had reached the limit of her human resources and was no longer able to stand the patient’s problems without anxiety, impatience, guilt, anger or despair”.
  • Mothers with children on a psychiatric unit.
  • A fragment on mothering.
  • Meanings of madness: psychiatry comes of age.

Reference

Main, T.F. (1957) The Ailment. British Journal of Medical Psychology. 30(3), pp.129-145. https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8341.1957.tb01193.x.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Main >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

On This Day … 05 February [2023]

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People (Deaths)

  • 1937 – Lou Andreas-Salomé, Russian-German psychoanalyst and author (b. 1861)

Lou Andreas-Salome

Lou Andreas-Salomé (born either Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé or Lioulia von Salomé, Russian: Луиза Густавовна Саломе; 12 February 1861 to 05 February 1937) was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a well-traveled author, narrator, and essayist from a Russian-German family.

Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Paul Rée, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

On This Day … 22 January [2023]

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People (Births)

  • 1913 – Henry Bauchau, Belgian psychoanalyst and author (d. 2012).
  • 1932 – Berthold Grünfeld, Norwegian psychiatrist and academic (d. 2007).

Henry Bauchau

Henry Bauchau (22 January 1913 to 21 September 2012) was a Belgian psychoanalyst, lawyer, and author of French prose and poetry.

Berthold Grunfeld

Berthold Grünfeld (22 January 1932 to 20 August 2007) was a Norwegian psychiatrist, sexologist, and professor of social medicine at the University of Oslo. He was also a recognised expert in forensic psychiatry, often employed by Norwegian courts to examine insanity defense pleas.

On This Day … 14 January [2023]

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People (Deaths)

  • 1949 – Harry Stack Sullivan, American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (b. 1892).

Harry Stack Sullivan

Herbert “Harry” Stack Sullivan (21 February 1892 to 14 January 1949) was an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who held that “personality can never be isolated from the complex interpersonal relationships in which [a] person lives” and that “[t]he field of psychiatry is the field of interpersonal relations under any and all circumstances in which [such] relations exist”. Having studied therapists Sigmund Freud, Adolf Meyer, and William Alanson White, he devoted years of clinical and research work to helping people with psychotic illness.

On This Day … 06 January [2023]

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People (Births)

  • 1915 – John C. Lilly, American psychoanalyst, physician, and philosopher (d. 2001).

People (Deaths)

  • 2014 – Julian Rotter, American psychologist and academic (b. 1916).

John C. Lilly

John Cunningham Lilly (06 January 1915 to 30 September 2001) was an American physician, neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, psychonaut, philosopher, writer and inventor. He was a member of a generation of counterculture scientists and thinkers that included Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and Werner Erhard, all frequent visitors to the Lilly home. He often stirred controversy, especially among mainstream scientists.

Lilly conducted high-altitude research during World War II and later trained as a psychoanalyst. He gained renown in the 1950s after developing the isolation tank. He saw the tanks, in which users are isolated from almost all external stimuli, as a means to explore the nature of human consciousness. He later combined that work with his efforts to communicate with dolphins. He began studying how bottlenose dolphins vocalise, establishing centres in the US Virgin Islands, and later San Francisco, to study dolphins. A decade later, he began experimenting with psychedelics, including LSD, often while floating in isolation. His work inspired two Hollywood movies, The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Altered States (1980), as well as the videogame series Ecco the Dolphin.

Julian Rotter

Julian B. Rotter (22 October 1916 to 06 January 2014) was an American psychologist known for developing social learning theory and research into locus of control. He was a faculty member at Ohio State University and then the University of Connecticut. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rotter as the 64th most eminent and 18th most widely cited psychologist of the 20th century. A 2014 study published in 2014 placed at #54 among psychologists whose careers spanned the post-World War II era.

On This Day … 25 December [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1875 – Francis Aveling, Canadian psychologist and priest (d. 1941).

People (Deaths)

  • 1925 – Karl Abraham, German psychoanalyst and author (b. 1877).

Francis Aveling

Francis Arthur Powell Aveling MC ComC (25 December 1875 to 06 March 1941) was a Canadian psychologist and Catholic priest. In 1910, Aveling obtained a doctor of philosophy degree at the age of 35 from the University of Louvain (his advisor was Albert Michotte), and in 1912 he was recipient of a doctor of science degree from the University of London, and received the Carpenter Medal following his work On the Consciousness of the Universal and the Individual: A Contribution to the Phenomenology of the Thought Process. Subsequently, Aveling received his doctor of letters degree from the University of London.

Karl Abraham

Karl Abraham (03 May 1877 to 25 December 1925) was an influential German psychoanalyst, and a collaborator of Sigmund Freud, who called him his ‘best pupil’.

On This Day … 15 December [2022]

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Events

People (Births)

  • 1911 – Nicholas P. Dallis, American psychiatrist and illustrator (d. 1991).

People (Deaths)

  • 2010 – Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, American psychoanalyst and theorist (b. 1940).

Nicholas P. Dallis

Nicholas Peter Dallis (15 December 1911 to 06 July 1991), was an American psychiatrist turned comic strip writer, creator of the soap opera-style strips Rex Morgan, M.D., Judge Parker and Apartment 3-G. Separating his comics career from his medical practice, he wrote under pseudonyms, Dal Curtis for Rex Morgan, M.D. and Paul Nichols for Judge Parker.

Born in New York City, Nick Dallis grew up on Long Island. He graduated from Washington & Jefferson College in 1933 and from Temple University’s medical school in 1938 and married a nurse, Sarah Luddy. He decided to specialise in psychiatry, and after World War II, started a practice in Toledo, Ohio. Allen Saunders was chair at the time of the local mental hygiene centre that invited him there, and in his autobiography, he recalled that Dallis approached him, as a well-known comics writer (Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Mary Worth), about “his desire to write a comic strip, one tracing the history of medicine. I told him that, commendable as his idea was, such a feature would not succeed. Readers want entertainment, not enlightenment. But a story about a handsome young doctor’s involvement with his patients might be a winner.”

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein (09 July 1940 to 15 December 2010) was an American social theorist, practicing psychoanalyst, and a professor of political science at University of California, Los Angeles.

Who was Trigant Burrow?

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Introduction

Nicholas Trigant Burrow (07 September 1875 to 24 May 1950) was an American psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, psychologist, and, alongside Joseph H. Pratt and Paul Schilder, founder of group analysis in the United States.

He was the inventor of the concept of neurodynamics.

Life

Trigant Burrow was the youngest of four children in a well-off family of French origin. His father was an educated Protestant freethinker, his mother, however, was a practicing Catholic. He initially studied Literature at the Fordham University, Medicine at the University of Virginia, receiving his M.D. in 1900, and eventually Psychology at Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D., 1909). While working at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, he had the opportunity to attend a theatre performance, during which he was introduced to two European doctors who were on a lecture tour in the United States: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The same year Burrow travelled with his family to Zurich in order to undergo a year-long Freudian analysis by Jung., He would later help to popularise Freud and Jung’s ideas on images in particular. Upon his return to the United States he practiced as a psychoanalyst in Baltimore until 1926. The American Psychoanalytic Association was founded in 1911, and he acted as the president in 1924 and 1925, though he was later expelled from it in 1932.

In 1926 Burrow founded the Lifwynn Foundation for Laboratory Research in Analytic and Social Psychiatry and published his first major work, The Social Basis of Consciousness. Until his death Burrow acted as the research director for the foundation and devoted particular attention to the physiological substructures of harmonious and rivalling participants within groups and societies, but also between states. His methods for measuring the electrical activity of the brain in connection with specific eye movements has led some to call him the father of trauma therapy [Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)].

Founder of Group Analysis

In 1921, Burrow was challenged by one of his analysands, Clarence Shields, with regard to the inherently authoritarian role of the psychoanalyst. The student criticised the perceivable difference in authority during the analysis and demanded his teacher be more forthright. It came as a shock to Burrow when he realized, “that, in individual application, analytical attitude and authoritarian attitude can not be separated.” Experimenting with reversing the roles of analyser and patient, as well as with mutual analysis, Burrow and Shield became convinced that both displayed blind spots, adherence to social conventions and considerable utilisation of defence mechanisms. In Trigant Burrow’s eyes acknowledging this distortion of the analytical endeavour is indispensable to restoring relationships to normality. To Burrow and Shields, clarifying and ultimately diminishing the neurotic dislocation of emotions and cognition seemed possible only in a group setting. Both invited previous patients, relatives, and colleagues, including the Swiss Psychiatrist, Hans Syz, to sit in on some group sessions. Trigant Burrow coined the term group therapy and wrote three fundamental texts which were released between 1924 and 1927.

While Burrow considered his work a legitimate extension of Freudian thinking, Freud himself did not accept it as such. Burrow’s innovations led to a breach with orthodox psychoanalysis, Otto Fenichel for example criticising as repressive/inspirational “the work of Burrow who, by ‘phyloanalysis,’ tries to bring his patients to a reconsideration of their natural ways of functioning”. In retrospect however, he can be seen as pioneering investigations into such phenomena as countertransference, and intersubjective psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis as a Social Science

Under the impression that psychoanalysis should be further developed with more emphasis on the group, Burrow devised the concept of psychoanalysis as a social science. His criticism of the modern cult of individuality, and of the civilised preference for social over biological needs, led him to stress the communal elements in man’s thinking and consciousness.

Important Publications

The Social Basis of Consciousness, London 1927.
The Structure of Insanity, London, 1932.
The Biology of Human Conflict, New York 1937.
The Neurosis of Man, London 1949.
Science and Man’s Behavior, New York 1953.
Preconscious Foundations of Human Experiences, New York, London 1964.
Das Fundament der Gruppenanalyse oder die Analyse der Reaktionen von normalen und neurotischen Menschen, Lucifer-Amor: 21. 104-113.
Paolo Migone, Le origini della gruppoanalisi: una nota su Trigant Burrow. Rivista Sperimentale di Freniatria, 1995, CXIX, 3: 512-217.
Edi Gatti Pertegato & Giorgio Orghe Pertegato (editors), From Psychoanalysis to Group Analysis. The Pioneering Work of Trigant Burrow. Forewords by Malcolm Pines, Alfreda Sill Galt and Lloyd Gilden. London: Karnac, 2013 (expanded edition from the Italian book: Dalla psicoanalisi alla fondazione della gruppoanalisi. Patologia della normalità, conflitto individuale e sociale. Vimodrone [Milan]: IPOC, 2010, Second edition [First edition: 2009]).

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigant_Burrow >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.