Tag: Psychoanalyst

On This Day … 22 April

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People (Births)

  • 1884 – Otto Rank, Austrian-American psychologist and academic (d. 1939).

Otto Rank

Otto Rank (22 April 1884 to 31 October 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and teacher.

Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud’s closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, editor of the two leading analytic journals of the era, managing director of Freud’s publishing house, and a creative theorist and therapist.

In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.

What is Lacanianism?

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Introduction

Lacanianism is the study of, and development of, the ideas and theories of the dissident French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Beginning as a commentary on the writings of Freud, Lacanianism developed into a new psychoanalytic theory of humankind, and spawned a worldwide movement of its own.

Fredric Jameson argued that “Lacan’s work must be read as presupposing the entire content of classical Freudianism, otherwise it would simply be another philosophy or intellectual system”.

Lacanianism began as a philosophical/linguistic re-interpretation of Freud’s original teachings. How far it subsequently became an independent body of thought has been, and remains, a matter of debate. Lacan himself famously informed his followers “It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish. I am a Freudian”.

The wide extent of Lacan’s evolving intellectual stances, and his inability to find a settled institutional framework for his work, has meant that over time the Lacanian movement has been subject to numerous schisms and continuing divisions.

Development of Lacan’s Thought

Lacan considered the human psyche to be framed within the three orders of The Imaginary, The Symbolic and The Real (RSI). The three divisions in their varying emphases also correspond roughly to the development of Lacan’s thought. As he himself put it in Seminar XXII, “I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic…and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real”.

Early Lacan

Lacan’s early psychoanalytic period spans the 1930s and 1940s. His contributions from this period centred on the questions of image, identification and unconscious fantasy. Developing Henri Wallon’s concept of infant mirroring, he used the idea of the mirror stage to demonstrate the imaginary nature of the ego, in opposition to the views of ego psychology.

Structuralist Lacan

In the fifties, the focus of Lacan’s interest shifted to the symbolic order of kinship, culture, social structure and roles – all mediated by the acquisition of language – into which each one of us is born and with which we all have to come to terms.

The focus of therapy became that of dealing with disruptions on the part of the Imaginary of the structuring role played by the signifier/Other/Symbolic Order.

Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis created a dialectic between Freud’s thinking and that of both Structuralist thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as with Heidegger, Hegel and other continental philosophers.

The Real: Poststructuralism

The sixties saw Lacan’s attention increasingly focused on what he termed the Real – not external consensual reality, but rather that unconscious element in the personality, linked to trauma, dream and the drive, which resists signification.

The Real was what was lacking or absent from every totalising structural theory; and in the form of jouissance, and the persistence of the symptom or synthome, marked Lacan’s shifting of psychoanalysis from modernity to postmodernity.

Then Real, together with the Imaginary and the Symbolic came to form a triad of “elementary registers.” Lacan believed these three concepts were inseparably intertwined, and by the 1970s they were an integral part of his thought.

Lacanianisms

Lacan’s thinking was intimately geared not only to the work of Freud but to that of the most prominent of his psychoanalytic successors – Heinz Hartmann, Melanie Klein, Michael Balint, D.W. Winnicott and more. With Lacan’s break with official psychoanalysis in 1963-1964, however, a tendency developed to look for a pure, self-contained Lacanianism, without psychoanalytic trappings. Jacques-Alain Miller’s index to Ecrits had already written of “the Lacanian epistemology…the analytic experience (in its Lacanian definition…)”; and where the old guard of first-generation disciples like Serge Leclaire continued to stress the importance of the re-reading of Freud, the new recruits of the sixties and seventies favoured instead an ahistorical Lacan, systematised after the event into a rigorous if over-simplified theoretical whole.

Three main phases may be identified in Lacan’s mature work: his Fifties exploration of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; his concern with the Real and the lost object of desire, the objet petit a, during the Sixties; and a final phase highlighting jouissance and the mathematical formulation of psychoanalytic teaching.

As the fifties Lacan developed a distinctive style of teaching based on a linguistic reading of Freud, so too he built up a substantial following within the Société Française de Psychanalyse [SFP], with Serge Leclaire only the first of many French “Lacanians”. It was this phase of his teaching that was memorialised in Écrits, and which first found its way into the English-speaking world, where more Lacanians were thus to be found in English or Philosophy Departments than in clinical practice.

However the very extent of Lacan’s following raised serious criticisms: he was accused both of abusing the positive transference to tie his analysands to himself, and of magnifying their numbers by the use of shortened analytic sessions. The questionable nature of his following was one of the reasons for his failure to gain recognition for his teaching from the International Psychoanalytical Association recognition for the French form of Freudianism that was “Lacanianism” – a failure that led to his founding the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964. Many of his closest and most creative followers, such as Jean Laplanche, chose the IPA over Lacan at this point, in the first of many subsequent Lacanian schisms.

Outside France

Lacan’s 1973 Letter to the Italians, nominated Muriel Drazien, Giacomo Contri and Armando Verdiglione to carry his teaching in Italy.

As a body of thought, Lacanianism began to make its way into the English-speaking world from the sixties onwards, influencing film theory, feminist thought, queer theory, and psychoanalytic criticism, as well as politics and social sciences, primarily through the concepts of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As the role of the real and of jouissance in opposing structure became more widely recognised, however, so too Lacanianism developed as a tool for the exploration of the divided subject of postmodernity.

Since Lacan’s death, however, much of the public attention focused on his work began to decline. Lacan had always been criticised for an obscurantist writing style; and many of his disciples simply replicated the mystificatory elements in his work (in a sort of transferential identification) without his freshness.

Where interest in Lacanianism did revive in the 21st century, it was in large part the work of figures like Slavoj Žižek who have been able to use Lacan’s thought for their own intellectual ends, without the sometimes stifling orthodoxy of many of the formal Lacanian traditions. The continued influence of Lacanianism is thus paradoxically strongest in those who seem to have embraced Malcolm Bowie’s recommendation: “learn to unlearn the Lacanian idiom in the way Lacan unlearns the Freudian idiom”.

Lacanian Movement

During Lacan’s Lifetime

Élisabeth Roudinesco has suggested that, after the founding of the EFP “the history of psychoanalysis in France became subordinate to that of Lacanianism…the Lacanian movement occupied thereafter the motor position in relation to which the other movements were obliged to determine their course'”. There was certainly a large expansion in the numbers of the school, if arguably at the expense of quantity over quality, as a flood of psychologists submerged the analysts who had come with him from the SFP. Protests against the new regime reached a head with the introduction of the self-certifying ‘passe’ to analytic status, and old comrades such as François Perrier broke away in the bitter schism of 1968 to found the Quatrieme Groupe.

However, major divisions remained within the EDF underwent another painful split over the question of analytic qualifications. There remained within the movement a broad division between the old guard of first generation Lacanians’, focused on the symbolic – on the study of Freud through the structural linguistic tools of the fifties – and the younger group of mathematicians and philosophers centred on Jacques-Alain Miller, who favoured a self-contained Lacanianism, formalised and free of its Freudian roots.

As the seventies Lacan spoke of the mathematicisation of psychoanalysis and coined the term ‘matheme’ to describe its formulaic abstraction, so Leclaire brusquely dismissed the new formulas as “graffiti” Nevertheless, despite these and other tensions, the EDF held together under the charisma of their Master, until (despairing of his followers) Lacan himself dissolved the school in 1980 the year before his death.

Criticism

Frederick Crews writes that when Deleuze and Guattari “indicted Lacanian psychoanalysis as a capitalist disorder” and “pilloried analysts as the most sinister priest-manipulators of a psychotic society” in Anti-Oedipus, their “demonstration was widely regarded as unanswerable” and “devastated the already shrinking Lacanian camp in Paris.”

Post-Lacan

The start of the eighties saw the Lacanian movement dissolve into a plethora of new organisations, of which the Millerite Ecole de la Cause freudienne (ECF, 273 members) and the Centre de formation et de recherches psychoanalytiques (CFRP, 390 members) are perhaps the most important. By 1993 another fourteen associations had grown out of the former EDF; nor did the process stop there. Early resignations and splits from the ECF were followed in the late 1990s by a massive exodus of analysts worldwide from Miller’s organisation under allegations of misuse of authority.

Attempts were made to re-unite the various factions, Leclaire arguing that Lacanianism was “becoming ossifed, stiffening into a kind of war of religion, into theoretical debates that no longer contribute anything new”. But with French Lacanianism (in particular) haunted by a past of betrayals and conflict – by faction after faction claiming their segment of Lacanian thought as the only genuine one – reunification of any kind has proven very problematic; and Roudinesco was perhaps correct to conclude that “‘Lacanianism, born of subversion and a wish to transgress, is essentially doomed to fragility and dispersal”.

Topology

Three main divisions can be made in contemporary Lacanianism.

  • In one form, the academic reading of a de-clinicalised Lacan has become a pursuit in itself.
  • The (self-styled) legitimatism of the ECF, developed into an international movement with strong Spanish support as well as Latin American roots, set itself up as a rival challenge to the IPA.
  • The third form is a plural Lacanianism, best epitomised in the moderate CFRP, with its abandonment of the passe and openness to traditional psychoanalysis, and (after the 1995 dissolution) in its two successors.

Attempts to rejoin the IPA remain problematic, however, not least due to the persistence of the ‘short session’ and of Lacan’s rejection of countertransference as a therapeutic tool.

On This Day … 14 April

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People (Deaths)

  • 2010 – Alice Miller, Polish-French psychologist and author (b. 1923).

Alice Miller

Alice Miller, born as Alicija Englard (12 January 1923 to 14 April 2010), was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual.

Her book The Drama of the Gifted Child caused a sensation and became an international bestseller upon the English publication in 1981. Her views on the consequences of child abuse became highly influential. In her books she departed from psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies.

Life

Miller was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland into a Jewish family. She was the oldest daughter of Gutta and Meylech Englard and had a sister, Irena, who was five years younger. From 1931 to 1933 the family lived in Berlin, where nine-year-old Alicija learned the German language. Due to the National Socialists’ seizure of power in Germany in 1933 the family turned back to Piotrków Trybunalski. As a young woman, Miller managed to escape the Jewish Ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski, where all Jewish inhabitants were interned since October 1939, and survived World War II in Warsaw under the assumed name of Alicja Rostowska. While she was able to smuggle her mother and sister out, in 1941, her father died in the ghetto.

She retained her assumed name Alice Rostovska when she moved to Switzerland in 1946, where she had won a scholarship to the University of Basel.

In 1949 she married Swiss sociologist Andreas Miller, originally a Polish Catholic, with whom she had moved from Poland to Switzerland as students. They divorced in 1973. They had two children, Martin (born 1950) and Julika (born 1956). Shortly after his mother’s death Martin Miller stated in an interview with Der Spiegel that he had been beaten by his authoritarian father during his childhood – in the presence of his mother. Miller first stated that his mother intervened, but later that she did not intervene. These events happened decades before Alice Miller’s awakening about the dangers of such childrearing methods. Martin also mentioned that his mother was unable to talk with him, despite numerous lengthy conversations, about her wartime experiences, as she was severely burdened by them.

In 1953 Miller gained her doctorate in philosophy, psychology and sociology. Between 1953 and 1960, Miller studied psychoanalysis and practiced it between 1960 and 1980 in Zürich.

In 1980, after having worked as a psychoanalyst and an analyst trainer for 20 years, Miller “stopped practicing and teaching psychoanalysis in order to explore childhood systematically.” She became critical of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Her first three books originated from research she took upon herself as a response to what she felt were major blind spots in her field. However, by the time her fourth book was published, she no longer believed that psychoanalysis was viable in any respect.

In 1985 Miller wrote about the research from her time as a psychoanalyst: “For twenty years I observed people denying their childhood traumas, idealising their parents and resisting the truth about their childhood by any means.” In 1985 she left Switzerland and moved to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in Southern France.

In 1986, she was awarded the Janusz Korczak Literary Award for her book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child.

In April 1987 Miller announced in an interview with the German magazine Psychologie Heute (Psychology Today) her rejection of psychoanalysis. The following year she cancelled her memberships in both the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association, because she felt that psychoanalytic theory and practice made it impossible for former victims of child abuse to recognise the violations inflicted on them and to resolve the consequences of the abuse, as they “remained in the old tradition of blaming the child and protecting the parents”.

One of Miller’s last books, Bilder meines Lebens (“Pictures of My Life”), was published in 2006. It is an informal autobiography in which the writer explores her emotional process from painful childhood, through the development of her theories and later insights, told via the display and discussion of 66 of her original paintings, painted in the years 1973-2005.

Between 2005 and her death in 2010, she answered hundreds of readers’ letters on her website, where there are also published articles, flyers and interviews in three languages. Days before her death Alice Miller wrote: “These letters will stay as an important witness also after my death under my copyright”.

Miller died on 14 April 2010, at the age of 87, at her home in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence by suicide after severe illness and diagnosis of advanced stage of pancreatic cancer.

Work

Miller extended the trauma model to include all forms of child abuse, including those that were commonly accepted (such as spanking), which she called poisonous pedagogy, a non-literal translation of Katharina Rutschky’s Schwarze Pädagogik (black or dark pedagogy/imprinting).

Drawing upon the work of psychohistory, Miller analysed writers Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and others to find links between their childhood traumas and the course and outcome of their lives.

The introduction of Miller’s first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, contains a line that summarises her core views:

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.

In the 1990s, Miller strongly supported a new method developed by Konrad Stettbacher, who himself was later charged with incidents of sexual abuse. Miller came to know about Stettbacher and his method from a book by Mariella Mehr titled Steinzeit (Stone Age). Having been strongly impressed by the book, Miller contacted Mehr in order to get the name of the therapist. From that time forward, Miller refused to make therapist or method recommendations. In open letters, Miller explained her decision and how she originally became Stettbacher’s disciple, but in the end she distanced herself from him and his regressive therapies.

In her writings, Miller is careful to clarify that by “abuse” she does not only mean physical violence or sexual abuse, she is also concerned with psychological abuse perpetrated by one or both parents on their child; this is difficult to identify and deal with because the abused person is likely to conceal it from themselves and may not be aware of it until some event, or the onset of depression, requires it to be treated. Miller blamed psychologically abusive parents for the majority of neuroses and psychoses. She maintained that all instances of mental illness, addiction, crime and cultism were ultimately caused by suppressed rage and pain as a result of subconscious childhood trauma that was not resolved emotionally, assisted by a helper, which she came to term an “enlightened witness.” In all cultures, “sparing the parents is our supreme law,” wrote Miller. Even psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists were unconsciously afraid to blame parents for the mental disorders of their clients, she contended. According to Miller, mental health professionals were also creatures of the poisonous pedagogy internalised in their own childhood. This explained why the Commandment “Honour thy parents” was one of the main targets in Miller’s school of psychology.

Miller called electroconvulsive therapy “a campaign against the act of remembering”. In her book Abbruch der Schweigemauer (The Demolition of Silence), she also criticised psychotherapists’ advice to clients to forgive their abusive parents, arguing that this could only hinder recovery through remembering and feeling childhood pain. It was her contention that the majority of therapists fear this truth and that they work under the influence of interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness by the once-mistreated child. She believed that forgiveness did not resolve hatred, but covered it in a dangerous way in the grown adult: displacement on scapegoats, as she discussed in her psycho-biographies of Adolf Hitler and Jürgen Bartsch, both of whom she described as having suffered severe parental abuse.

A common denominator in Miller’s writings is her explanation of why human beings prefer not to know about their own victimisation during childhood: to avoid unbearable pain. She believed that the unconscious command of the individual, not to be aware of how he or she was treated in childhood, led to displacement: the irresistible drive to repeat abusive parenting in the next generation of children or direct unconsciously the unresolved trauma against others (war, terrorism, delinquency), or against him or herself (eating disorders, drug addiction, depression).

The Roots of Violence

According to Alice Miller, worldwide violence has its roots in the fact that children are beaten all over the world, especially during their first years of life, when their brains become structured. She said that the damage caused by this practice is devastating, but unfortunately hardly noticed by society. She argued that as children are forbidden to defend themselves against the violence inflicted on them, they must suppress the natural reactions like rage and fear, and they discharge these strong emotions later as adults against their own children or whole peoples: “child abuse like beating and humiliating not only produces unhappy and confused children, not only destructive teenagers and abusive parents, but thus also a confused, irrationally functioning society”. Miller stated that only through becoming aware of this dynamic can we break the chain of violence.

On This Day … 13 April

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People (Births)

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (13 April 1901 to 09 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called “the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud”.

Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan’s work has marked the French and international intellectual landscape, having made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory as well as on psychoanalysis itself.

Lacan took up and discussed the whole range of Freudian concepts emphasising the philosophical dimension of Freud’s thought and applying concepts derived from structuralism in linguistics and anthropology to its development in his own work which he would further augment by employing formulae from mathematical logic and topology. Taking this new direction, and introducing controversial innovations in clinical practice, led to expulsion for Lacan and his followers from the International Psychoanalytic Association. In consequence Lacan went on to establish new psychoanalytic institutions to promote and develop his work which he declared to be a “return to Freud” in opposition to prevalent trends in psychoanalysis collusive of adaptation to social norms.

What is the International Psychoanalytical Association?

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Introduction

The International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) is an association including 12,000 psychoanalysts as members and works with 70 constituent organisations.

It was founded in 1910 by Sigmund Freud, from an idea proposed by Sándor Ferenczi.

Brief History

In 1902, Sigmund Freud started to meet every week with colleagues to discuss his work, thus establishing the Psychological Wednesday Society. By 1908 there were 14 regular members and some guests including Max Eitingon, Carl Jung, Karl Abraham, and Ernest Jones, all future Presidents of the IPA. The Society became the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society.

In 1907 Jones suggested to Jung that an international meeting should be arranged. Freud welcomed the proposal. The meeting took place in Salzburg on April 27, 1908. Jung named it the “First Congress for Freudian Psychology”. It is later reckoned to be the first International Psychoanalytical Congress. Even so, the IPA had not yet been founded.

The IPA was established at the next Congress held at Nuremberg in March 1910. Its first President was Carl Jung, and its first Secretary was Otto Rank. Sigmund Freud considered an international organisation to be essential to advance his ideas. In 1914 Freud published a paper entitled The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement.

The IPA is the international accrediting and regulatory body for member organisations. The IPA’s aims include creating new psychoanalytic groups, conducting research, developing training policies and establishing links with other bodies. It organises a biennial Congress.

Regional Organisations

There is a Regional Organisation for each of the IPA’s 3 regions:

  • Europe:
    • European Psychoanalytical Federation (or EPF), which also includes Australia, India, Israel, Lebanon, South Africa and Turkey.
    • The IPA is incorporated in England, where it is a company limited by guarantee and also a registered charity.
    • Its administrative offices are at The Lexicon in Central London.
  • Latin America:
    • Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies of Latin America (or FEPAL).
  • North America:
    • North American Psychoanalytic Confederation (or NAPSAC), which also includes Japan and Korea.

Each of these three bodies consists of Constituent Organisations and Study Groups that are part of that IPA region. The IPA has a close working relationship with each of these independent organisations, but they are not officially or legally part of the IPA.

Constituent Organisations

The IPA’s members qualify for membership by being a member of a “constituent organisation” (or the sole regional association).

  • Argentine Psychoanalytic Association.
  • Argentine Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Australian Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Belgian Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Belgrade Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Brasília Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of Rio de Janeiro.
  • Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of São Paulo.
  • Brazilian Psychoanalytical Society of Porto Alegre.
  • Brazilian Psychoanalytical Society of Ribeirão Preto.
  • British Psychoanalytic Association.
  • British Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association.
  • Canadian Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Caracas Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Chilean Psychoanalytic Association.
  • Colombian Psychoanalytic Association.
  • Colombian Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Contemporary Freudian Society.
  • Cordoba Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Croatian Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Czech Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Danish Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Dutch Psychoanalytical Association.
  • Dutch Psychoanalytical Group.
  • Dutch Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Finnish Psychoanalytical Society.
  • French Psychoanalytical Association.
  • Freudian Psychoanalytical Society of Colombia.
  • German Psychoanalytical Association.
  • German Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Hellenic Psycho-Analytical Society.
  • Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Indian Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
  • Israel Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Italian Psychoanalytical Association.
  • Italian Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Japan Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies.
  • Madrid Psychoanalytical Association.
  • Mato Grosso do Sul Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Mendoza Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Mexican Assn for Psychoanalytic Practice, Training & Research.
  • Mexican Psychoanalytic Association.
  • Monterrey Psychoanalytic Association.
  • Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Paris Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Pelotas Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Peru Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Polish Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Porto Alegre Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Portuguese Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Psychoanalytic Centre of California.
  • Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.
  • Psychoanalytic Society of Mexico.
  • Psychoanalytical Association of The State of Rio de Janeiro.
  • Recife Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Rio de Janeiro Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Romanian Psychoanalytic Society.
  • Rosario Psychoanalytic Association.
  • Spanish Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Swedish Psychoanalytical Association.
  • Swiss Psychoanalytical Society.
  • Uruguayan Psychoanalytical Association.
  • Venezuelan Psychoanalytic Association.
  • Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Provisional Societies

  • Guadalajara Psychoanalytic Association (Provisional Society).
  • Moscow Psychoanalytic Society (Provisional Society).
  • Psychoanalytic Society for Research and Training (Provisional Society).
  • Vienna Psychoanalytic Association.

Regional Associations

  • American Psychoanalytic Association (“APsaA”):
    • This is a body which has in membership societies which cover around 75% of psychoanalysts in the United States of America.
    • The remainder are members of “independent” societies which are in direct relationship with the IPA.

IPA Study Groups

“Study Groups” are bodies of analysts which have not yet developed sufficiently to be a freestanding society, but that is their aim.

  • Campinas Psychoanalytical Study Group.
  • Centre for Psychoanalytic Education and Research.
  • Croatian Psychoanalytic Study Group.
  • Fortaleza Psychoanalytic Group.
  • Goiania Psychoanalytic Nucleus.
  • Korean Psychoanalytic Study Group.
  • Latvia and Estonia Psychoanalytic Study Group.
  • Lebanese Association for the Development of Psychoanalysis.
  • Minas Gerais Psychoanalytical Study Group.
  • Portuguese Nucleus of Psychoanalysis.
  • Psychoanalytical Association of Asuncion SG.
  • South African Psychoanalytic Association.
  • Study Group of Turkey: Psike Istanbul.
  • Turkish Psychoanalytical Group.
  • Vermont Psychoanalytic Study Group.
  • Vilnius Society of Psychoanalysts.

Allied Centres

“Allied Centres” are groups of people with an interest in psychoanalysis, in places where there are not already societies or study groups.

  • Korean Psychoanalytic Allied Centre.
  • Psychoanalysis Studying Centre in China.
  • Taiwan Centre for The Development of Psychoanalysis.
  • The Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies of Panama.

International Congresses

The first 23 Congresses of IPA did not have a specific theme.

  • 1965: Psychoanalytic Treatment of the Obsessional Neurosis.
  • 1967: On Acting Out and its Role in the Psychoanalytic Process.
  • 1969: New Developments in Psychoanalysis.
  • 1971: The Psychoanalytical Concept of Aggression.
  • 1973: Transference and Hysteria Today.
  • 1975: Changes in Psychoanalytic Practice and Experience.
  • 1977: Affects and the Psychoanalytic Situation.
  • 1979: Clinical Issues in Psychoanalysis.
  • 1981: Early Psychic Development as Reflected in the Psychoanalytic Process.
  • 1983: The Psychoanalyst at Work.
  • 1985: Identification and its Vicissitudes.
  • 1987: Analysis Terminable and Interminable – 50 Years Later.
  • 1989: Common Ground in Psychoanalysis.
  • 1991: Psychic Change.
  • 1993: The Psychoanalyst’s Mind – From Listening to Interpretation.
  • 1995: Psychic Reality – Its Impact on the Analyst and Patient Today.
  • 1997: Psychoanalysis and Sexuality.
  • 1999: Affect in Theory and Practice.
  • 2001: Psychoanalysis – Method and Application.
  • 2003: Working at the Frontiers.
  • 2005: Trauma: New Developments in Psychoanalysis.
  • 2007: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in Psychoanalysis & Culture Today.
  • 2009: Psychoanalytic Practice – Convergences and Divergences.
  • 2011: Exploring Core Concepts: Sexuality, Dreams and the Unconscious.
  • 2013: Facing the Pain: Clinical Experience and the Development of Psychoanalytic Knowledge.
  • 2015: Changing World: the shape and use of psychoanalytic tools today.
  • 2017: Intimacy.
  • 2019: The Feminine.
  • 2021: The Infantile: Its Multiple Dimensions.

Criticism

In 1975, Erich Fromm questioned this organization and found that the psychoanalytic association was “organized according to standards rather dictatorial”.

In 1999, Elisabeth Roudinesco noted that the IPA’s attempts to professionalize psychoanalysis had become “a machine to manufacture significance”. She also said that in France, “Lacanian colleagues looked upon the IPA as bureaucrats who had betrayed psychoanalysis in favour of an adaptive psychology in the service of triumphant capitalism”. She wrote of the “IPA[‘s] Legitimist Freudianism, as mistakenly called “orthodox” “. Among Roudinesco’s other criticisms, was her reference to “homophobia” in the IPA, considered a “disgrace of psychoanalysis.

On the other hand, most criticisms laid against the IPA tend to come from a 1950s Lacanian point of view, unaware of recent developments, and of the variety of schools and training models within the association in recent decades. One of the three training models in the IPA (the French Model), is mostly due to Lacan’s ideas and their perspectives regarding the training.

On This Day … 01 April

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People (Births)

  • 1908 – Abraham Maslow, American psychologist and academic (d. 1970).

People (Deaths)

  • 1922 – Hermann Rorschach, Swiss psychologist and author (b. 1884).

Abraham Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow (01 April 1908 to 08 June 1970) was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualisation.

Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University.

He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a “bag of symptoms”.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Hermann Rorschach

Hermann Rorschach (08 November 1884 to 02 April 1922) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

His education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. His method has come to be referred to as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders.

Rorschach continued to refine the test until his premature death at age 37.

On This Day … 17 March

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People (Births)

  • 1877 – Otto Gross, Austrian-German psychoanalyst and philosopher (d. 1920).
  • 1922 – Patrick Suppes, American psychologist and philosopher (d. 2014).

Otto Gross

Otto Hans Adolf Gross (17 March 1877 to 13 February 1920) was an Austrian psychoanalyst. A maverick early disciple of Sigmund Freud, he later became an anarchist and joined the utopian Ascona community.

His father Hans Gross was a judge turned pioneering criminologist. Otto initially collaborated with him, and then turned against his determinist ideas on character.

A champion of an early form of anti-psychiatry and sexual liberation, he also developed an anarchist form of depth psychology (which rejected the civilising necessity of psychological repression proposed by Freud). He adopted a modified form of the proto-feminist and neo-pagan theories of Johann Jakob Bachofen, with which he attempted to return civilisation to a ‘golden age’ of non-hierarchy. Gross was ostracised from the larger psychoanalytic movement, and was not included in histories of the psychoanalytic and psychiatric establishments. He died in poverty.

Greatly influenced by the philosophy of Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche and the political theories of Peter Kropotkin, he in turn influenced D.H. Lawrence (through Gross’s affair with Frieda von Richthofen), Franz Kafka and other artists, including Franz Jung and other founders of Berlin Dada. His influence on psychology was more limited. Carl Jung claimed his entire worldview changed when he attempted to analyse Gross and partially had the tables turned on him.

He became addicted to drugs in South America where he served as a naval doctor. He was hospitalised several times for drug addiction, sometimes losing his guardianship of himself to his father in the process. As a Bohemian drug user from youth, as well as an advocate of free love, he is sometimes credited as a founding grandfather of 20th-century counterculture.

Patrick Suppes

Patrick Colonel Suppes (17 March 1922 to 17 November 2014) was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology and educational technology. He was the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and until January 2010 was the Director of the Education Program for Gifted Youth also at Stanford.

Early Life and Career

Suppes was born on 17 March 1922, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He grew up as an only child, later with a half brother George who was born in 1943 after Patrick had entered the army. His grandfather, C.E. Suppes, had moved to Oklahoma from Ohio. Suppes’ father and grandfather were independent oil men. His mother died when he was a young boy. He was raised by his stepmother, who married his father before he was six years old. His parents did not have much formal education.

Suppes began college at the University of Oklahoma in 1939, but transferred to the University of Chicago in his second year, citing boredom with intellectual life in Oklahoma as his primary motivation. In his third year, at the insistence of his family, Suppes attended the University of Tulsa, majoring in physics, before entering the Army Reserves in 1942. In 1943 he returned to the University of Chicago and graduated with a B.S. in meteorology, and was stationed shortly thereafter at the Solomon Islands to serve during World War II.

Suppes was discharged from the US Army Air Force in 1946. In January 1947 he entered Columbia University as a graduate student in philosophy as a student of Ernest Nagel and received a PhD in 1950. In 1952 he went to Stanford University, and from 1959 to 1992 he was the director of the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences (IMSSS). He would subsequently become the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Stanford.

Computer-Aided Learning

In the 1960s Suppes and Richard C. Atkinson (the future president of the University of California) conducted experiments in using computers to teach math and reading to school children in the Palo Alto area. Stanford’s Education Programme for Gifted Youth and Computer Curriculum Corporation (CCC, now named Pearson Education Technologies) are indirect descendants of those early experiments. At Stanford, Suppes was instrumental in encouraging the development of high-technology companies that were springing up in the field of educational software up into the 1990s, (such as Bien Logic).

One computer used in Suppes and Atkinson’s Computer-assisted Instruction (CAI) experiments was the specialized IBM 1500 Instructional System. Seeded by a research grant in 1964 from the US Department of Education to the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, the IBM 1500 CAI system was initially prototyped at the Brentwood Elementary School (Ravenswood City School District) in East Palo Alto, California by Suppes. The students first used the system in 1966.

Suppes’ Dial-a-Drill programme was a touchtone phone interface for CAI. Ten schools around Manhattan were involved in the programme which delivered three lessons per week by telephone. Dial-a-Drill adjusted the routine for students who answered two questions incorrectly. The system went online in March 1969. Touchtone telephones were installed in the homes of children participating in the programme. Field workers educated parents on the benefits of the programme and collected feedback.

Decision Theory

During the 1950s and 1960s Suppes collaborated with Donald Davidson on decision theory, at Stanford. Their initial work followed lines of thinking which had been anticipated in 1926 by Frank P. Ramsey, and involved experimental testing of their theories, culminating in the 1957 monograph Decision Making: An Experimental Approach. Such commentators as Kirk Ludwig trace the origins of Davidson’s theory of radical interpretation to his formative work with Suppes.

On This Day … 21 February

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People (Births)

  • 1892 – Harry Stack Sullivan, American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (d. 1949).
  • 1914 – Jean Tatlock, American psychiatrist and physician (d. 1944).
  • 1961 – Elliot Hirshman, American psychologist and academic.

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.

Jean Tatlock

Jean Frances Tatlock (21 February 1914 to 04 January 1944) was an American psychiatrist and physician. She was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and was a reporter and writer for the party’s publication Western Worker. She is most widely known for her romantic relationship with Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.

The daughter of John Strong Perry Tatlock, a prominent Old English philologist and an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer, Tatlock was a graduate of Vassar College and the Stanford Medical School, where she studied to become a psychiatrist. Tatlock began seeing Oppenheimer in 1936, when she was a graduate student at Stanford and Oppenheimer was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. As a result of their relationship and her membership of the Communist Party, she was placed under surveillance by the FBI and her phone was tapped.

She suffered from clinical depression and committed suicide on 04 January 1944.

Elliot Hirshman

Elliot Lee Hirshman (21 February 1961) is an American psychologist and academic who is the president of Stevenson University in Owings Mills, Maryland since 03 July 2017. Prior to Stevenson University he served as president at San Diego State University and served as the provost and senior vice president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

On This Day … 11 February

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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, best known as 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.

Early Life

Virginia Johnson was born in Springfield, Missouri, the daughter of Edna (née Evans) and Hershel “Harry” Eshelman, a farmer. Her paternal grandparents were members of the LDS Church, and her father had Hessian ancestry. When she was five, her family moved to Palo Alto, California, where her father worked as a groundskeeper for a hospital. The family later returned to Missouri and farming. Virginia enrolled at her hometown’s Drury College at age 16, but dropped out and spent four years working in the Missouri state insurance office. She eventually returned to school, studying at the University of Missouri and the Kansas City Conservatory of Music, and during World War II began a music career as a band singer. She sang country music for radio station KWTO in Springfield, where she adopted the stage name Virginia Gibson.

Johnson moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she became a business writer for the St. Louis Daily Record. Eschewing a singing career, Johnson enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, intending to earn a degree in sociology but never attaining one.

Sexological Works

Johnson met William H. Masters in 1957 when he hired her as a research assistant at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University in St. Louis. Masters trained her in medical terminology, therapy, and research during the years she worked as his assistant. Together they developed polygraph-like instruments that were designed to measure sexual arousal in humans. Using these tools, Masters and Johnson observed and measured about 700 men and women who agreed to engage in sexual activity with other participants or masturbate in Masters’ laboratory. By observing these subjects, Johnson helped Masters identify the four stages of sexual response. This came to be known as the human sexual response cycle. The cycle consists of the excitement phase, plateau phase, orgasmic phase, and resolution phase. In 1964, Masters and Johnson established their own independent non-profit research institution in St. Louis called the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation. The centre was renamed the Masters and Johnson Institute in 1978.

In April 2009, Thomas Maier reported in Scientific American that Johnson had serious reservations about the Masters and Johnson Institute’s programme to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, a programme which ran from 1968 to 1977.

Personal Life

By her early 20s, Johnson had married a Missouri politician; the marriage lasted two days. She then married a much older attorney, whom she also divorced. In 1950, Johnson married bandleader George Johnson, with whom she had a boy and a girl, before divorcing in 1956. In 1971, Johnson married William Masters after he divorced his first wife. They were divorced in 1993, though they continued to collaborate professionally. Johnson died in July 2013 “of complications from several illnesses”.

Masters, who married again after his divorce from Johnson, died in 2001.

In Popular Culture

The American cable network Showtime debuted Masters of Sex, a dramatic television series based on the 2009 biography of the same name, on September 29, 2013. The series stars Lizzy Caplan as Johnson.

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.

Early Career

After obtaining his medical degrees, Jones specialised in neurology and took a number of posts in London hospitals. It was through his association with the surgeon Wilfred Trotter that Jones first heard of Freud’s work. Having worked together as surgeons at University College Hospital, he and Trotter became close friends, with Trotter taking the role of mentor and confidant to his younger colleague. They had in common a wide-ranging interest in philosophy and literature, as well as a growing interest in Continental psychiatric literature and the new forms of clinical therapy it surveyed. By 1905 they were sharing accommodation above Harley Street consulting rooms with Jones’s sister, Elizabeth, installed as housekeeper. Trotter and Elizabeth Jones later married. Appalled by the treatment of the mentally ill in institutions, Jones began experimenting with hypnotic techniques in his clinical work.

Jones first encountered Freud’s writings directly in 1905, in a German psychiatric journal in which Freud published the famous Dora case-history. It was thus he formed “the deep impression of there being a man in Vienna who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him…a revolutionary difference from the attitude of previous physicians…”

Jones’s early attempts to combine his interest in Freud’s ideas with his clinical work with children resulted in adverse effects on his career. In 1906 he was arrested and charged with two counts of indecent assault on two adolescent girls whom he had interviewed in his capacity as an inspector of schools for “mentally defective” children. At the court hearing Jones maintained his innocence, claiming the girls were fantasising about any inappropriate actions by him. The magistrate concluded that no jury would believe the testimony of such children and Jones was acquitted. In 1908, employed as a pathologist at a London hospital, Jones accepted a colleague’s challenge to demonstrate the repressed sexual memory underlying the hysterical paralysis of a young girl’s arm. Jones duly obliged but, before conducting the interview, he omitted to inform the girl’s consultant or arrange for a chaperone. Subsequently, he faced complaints from the girl’s parents over the nature of the interview and he was forced to resign his hospital post.

Psychoanalytical Career

Whilst attending a congress of neurologists in Amsterdam in 1907, Jones met Carl Jung, from whom he received a first-hand account of the work of Freud and his circle in Vienna. Confirmed in his judgement of the importance of Freud’s work, Jones joined Jung in Zurich to plan the inaugural Psychoanalytical Congress. This was held in 1908 in Salzburg, where Jones met Freud for the first time. Jones travelled to Vienna for further discussions with Freud and introductions to the members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Thus began a personal and professional relationship which, to the acknowledged benefit of both, would survive the many dissensions and rivalries which marked the first decades of the psychoanalytic movement, and would last until Freud’s death in 1939.

With his career prospects in Britain in serious difficulty, Jones sought refuge in Canada in 1908. He took up teaching duties in the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Toronto (from 1911, as Associate Professor of Psychiatry). In addition to building a private psychoanalytic practice, he worked as pathologist to the Toronto Asylum and Director of its psychiatric outpatient clinic. Following further meetings with Freud in 1909 at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Freud gave a series of lectures on psychoanalysis, and in the Netherlands the following year, Jones set about forging strong working relationships with the nascent American psychoanalytic movement. He gave some 20 papers or addresses to American professional societies at venues ranging from Boston, to Washington and Chicago. In 1910 he co-founded the American Psychopathological Association and the following year the American Psychoanalytic Association, serving as its first Secretary until 1913.

Jones undertook an intensive programme of writing and research, which produced the first of what were to be many significant contributions to psychoanalytic literature, notably monographs on Hamlet and On the Nightmare. A number of these were published in German in the main psychoanalytic periodicals published in Vienna; these secured his status in Freud’s inner circle during the period of the latter’s increasing estrangement from Jung. In this context in 1912 Jones initiated, with Freud’s agreement, the formation of a Committee of loyalists charged with safeguarding the theoretical and institutional legacy of the psychoanalytic movement. This development also served the more immediate purpose of isolating Jung and, with Jones in strategic control, eventually manoeuvring him out of the Presidency of the International Psychoanalytical Association, a post he had held since its inception. When Jung’s resignation came in 1914, it was only the outbreak of the Great War that prevented Jones from taking his place.

Returning to London in 1913, Jones set up in practice as a psychoanalyst, founded the London Psychoanalytic Society, and continued to write and lecture on psychoanalytic theory. A collection of his papers was published as Papers on Psychoanalysis, the first account of psychoanalytic theory and practice by a practising analyst in the English language.

By 1919, the year he founded the British Psychoanalytical Society, Jones could report proudly to Freud that psychoanalysis in Britain “stands in the forefront of medical, literary and psychological interest” (letter 27 January 1919 (Paskauskas 1993)). As President of the Society – a post he would hold until 1944 – Jones secured funding for and supervised the establishment in London of a Clinic offering subsidised fees, and an Institute of Psychoanalysis, which provided administrative, publishing and training facilities for the growing network of professional psychoanalysts.

Jones went on to serve two periods as President of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1920 to 1924 and 1932 to 1949, where he had significant influence. In 1920 he founded the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, serving as its editor until 1939. The following year he established the International Psychoanalytic Library, which published some 50 books under his editorship. Jones soon obtained from Freud rights to the English translation of his work. In 1924 the first two volumes of Freud’s Collected Papers was published in translations edited by Jones and supervised by Joan Riviere, his former analysand and, at one stage, ardent suitor. After a period in analysis with Freud, Riviere worked with Jones as the translation editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She then was part of a working group Jones set up to plan and deliver James Strachey’s translations for the standard edition of Freud’s work. Largely through Jones’ energetic advocacy, the British Medical Association officially recognised psychoanalysis in 1929. The BBC subsequently removed him from a list of speakers declared to be dangerous to public morality. In the 1930s Jones and his colleagues made a series of radio broadcasts on psychoanalysis.

After Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, Jones helped many displaced and endangered Jewish analysts to resettle in England and other countries. Following the Anschluss of March 1938, Jones flew into Vienna at considerable personal risk to play a crucial role in negotiating and organising the emigration of Freud and his circle to London.

The Jones-Freud Controversy

Jones’s early published work on psychoanalysis had been devoted to expositions of the fundamentals of Freudian theory, an elaboration of its theory of symbolism, and its application to the analysis of religion, mythology, folklore and literary and artistic works. Under the influence of Melanie Klein, Jones’ work took a new direction.

Klein had made an impact in Berlin in the new field of child analysis and had impressed Jones in 1925 when he attended her series of lectures to the British Society in London. At Jones’s invitation she moved to London the following year; she soon acquired a number of devoted and influential followers. Her work had a dramatic effect on the British Society, polarising its members into rival factions as it became clear that her approach to child analysis was seriously at odds with that of Anna Freud, as set out in her 1927 book An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis. The disagreement centred around the clinical approach to the pre-Oedipal child; Klein argued for play as an equivalent to free association in adult analyses. Anna Freud opposed any such equivalence, proposing an educative intervention with the child until an appropriate level of ego development was reached at the Oedipal stage. Klein held this to be a collusive inhibition of analytical work with the child.

Influenced by Klein, and initiating what became known as the Jones-Freud controversy, Jones set out to explore a range of interlinked topics in the theory of early psychic development. These included the structure and genesis of the superego and the nature of the feminine castration complex. He coined the term phallocentrism in a critique of Freud’s account of sexual difference. He argued together with Klein and her Berlin colleague, Karen Horney, for a primary femininity, saying that penis envy arose as a defensive formation rather than arising from the fact, or “injury”, of biological asymmetry. In a corresponding reformulation of the castration complex, Jones introduced the concept of “aphanisis” to refer to the fear of “the permanent extinction of the capacity (including opportunity) for sexual enjoyment”.

These departures from orthodoxy were noted in Vienna and were topics that were featured in the regular Freud-Jones correspondence, the tone of which became increasingly fractious. Faced with accusations from Freud of orchestrating a campaign against him and his daughter, Jones sought to allay Freud’s concerns without abandoning his new critical standpoint. Eventually, following a series of exchange lectures between the Vienna and London societies, which Jones arranged with Anna Freud, Freud and Jones resumed their usual cordial exchanges.

With the arrival in Britain of refugee German and Viennese analysts in the 1930s, including Anna Freud in 1938, the hostility between the orthodox Freudians and Kleinians in the British Society grew more intense. Jones chaired a number of “extraordinary business meetings” with the aim of defusing the conflict, and these continued into the war years. The meetings, which became known as the controversial discussions, were established on a more regular basis from 1942. By that time, Jones had removed himself from direct participation, owing to ill health and the difficulties of war-time travel from his home in Elsted, West Sussex. He resigned from the presidency of the British Society in 1944, the year in which, under the presidency of Sylvia Payne, there finally emerged a compromise agreement which established parallel training courses providing options to satisfy the concerns of the rival groups that had formed: followers of Anna Freud, followers of Melanie Klein and a non-aligned group of Middle or Independent Group analysts. It was agreed further that all the key policy making committees of the BPS should have representatives from the three groups.

Later Life

After the end of the war, Jones gradually relinquished his many official posts whilst continuing his psychoanalytic practice, writings and lecturing. The major undertaking of his final years was his monumental account of Freud’s life and work, published to widespread acclaim in three volumes between 1953 and 1957. In this he was ably assisted by his German-speaking wife, who translated much of Freud’s early correspondence and other archive documentation made available by Anna Freud. His uncompleted autobiography, Free Associations, was published posthumously in 1959.

Jones was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP) in 1942, Honorary President of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1949, and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree at Swansea University (Wales) in 1954.

Jones died in London on 11 February 1958, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. His ashes were buried in the grave of the oldest of his four children in the churchyard of St Cadoc’s Cheriton on the Gower Peninsula.

On This Day … 28 January

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People (Deaths)

  • 1971 – Donald Winnicott, English paediatrician and psychoanalyst (b. 1896).

Donald Winnicott

Donald Woods Winnicott FRCP (07 April 1896 to 25 January 1971) was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory and developmental psychology. He was a leading member of the British Independent Group of the British Psychoanalytical Society, President of the British Psychoanalytical Society twice (1956-1959 and 1965-1968), and a close associate of Marion Milner.

Winnicott is best known for his ideas on the true self and false self, the “good enough” parent, and borrowed from his second wife, Clare Winnicott, arguably his chief professional collaborator, the notion of the transitional object. He wrote several books, including Playing and Reality, and over 200 papers.

Career

Winnicott completed his medical studies in 1920, and in 1923, the same year as his marriage to the artist Alice Buxton Winnicott (born Taylor). She was a potter and they married on 07 July 1923 in St Mary’s Church, Frensham. Alice had “severe psychological difficulties” and Winnicott arranged for her, and his own therapy, to address the difficulties this condition created. He obtained a post as physician at the Paddington Green Children’s Hospital in London, where he was to work as a paediatrician and child psychoanalyst for 40 years. In 1923 he began a ten-year psychoanalysis with James Strachey, and in 1927 he began training as an analytic candidate. Strachey discussed Winnicott’s case with his wife Alix Strachey, apparently reporting that Winnicott’s sex life was affected by his anxieties. Winnicott’s second analysis, beginning in 1936, was with Joan Riviere.

Winnicott rose to prominence as a psychoanalyst just as the followers of Anna Freud were in conflict with those of Melanie Klein for the right to be called Sigmund Freud’s “true intellectual heirs”. Out of the Controversial discussions during World War II, a compromise was reached with three more-or-less amicable groups within the psychoanalytic movement: the “Freudians”, the “Kleinians”, and the “Middle Group” of the British Psychoanalytical Society (the latter being called the “Independent Group”), to which Winnicott belonged, along with Ronald Fairbairn, Michael Balint, Masud Khan, John Bowlby, Marion Milner, and Margaret Little.

During the Second World War, Winnicott served as consultant paediatrician to the children’s evacuation programme. During the war, he met and worked with Clare Britton, a psychiatric social worker who became his colleague in treating children displaced from their homes by wartime evacuation. Winnicott was lecturing after the war and Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie of the BBC asked him to give over sixty talks on the radio between 1943 and 1966. His first series of talks in 1943 was titled “Happy Children.” As a result of the success of these talks, Quigley offered him total control over the content of his talks but this soon became more consultative as Quigley advised him on the correct pitch.

After the war, he also saw patients in his private practice. Among contemporaries influenced by Winnicott was R.D. Laing, who wrote to Winnicott in 1958 acknowledging his help.

Winnicott divorced his first wife in 1949 and married Clare Britton (1907-1984) in 1951. A keen observer of children as a social worker and a psychoanalyst in her own right, she had an important influence on the development of his theories and likely acted as midwife to his prolific publications after they met.

Except for one book published in 1931 (Clinical Notes on Disorders of Childhood), all of Winnicott’s books were published after 1944, including The Ordinary Devoted Mother and Her Baby (1949), The Child and the Family (1957), Playing and Reality (1971), and Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis (1986).

Winnicott died on 25 January 1971, following the last of a series of heart attacks and was cremated in London. Clare Winnicott oversaw the posthumous publication of several of his works.