Glen Gabbard: I think first of all the comment that psychoanalysis is flourishing in humanities departments is a little misleading. As you know, a lot of my writing has been in an interdisciplinary area involving film and psychoanalysis, so I follow that literature. Interdisciplinary studies in psychoanalysis are a far cry from clinical psychoanalysis. We’re really talking about two different entities when we talk about psychoanalysis in the academy and clinical psychoanalysis. It’s not just the Lacanian influence. It’s a way of thinking about analytic ideas that is completely disembodied from a person sitting in an office. The other thing I would say about interdisciplinary psychoanalysis is that it’s rarely a collaborative, mutual collaboration between two disciplines. It’s more of a sadomasochistic coupling, in which one discipline is subjugated by another discipline. The kind of psychoanalytic writing going on in the academy has a whole set of problems associated with it. Having said that, it’s still better than having no psychoanalytic presence in the academy.

AC: As for debates in the field, I know that you’re a proponent of an inclusive theoretical stance. But there still seems to be a divide, at least in what I’ve experienced of supervisors from different institutes in New York, and I wonder how the broader psychoanalytic community could be convinced to take a more integrative approach.

GG: It’s a real challenge. Right now we’re planning the International Psychoanalytic meeting for July of 2009 in Chicago. We’re trying to base the meeting on dialogue between different psychoanalytic cultures about that, trying to say, “Can we be open to different perspectives with the idea that it might enrich clinical work if you have something outside your own narrow view and have a broader picture?” Now that’s difficult to do because of all the identifications, the loyalties, and the kind of securities that certain theories provide, like a drowning man in a life raft. However, I would say pluralism has gotten to be more and more of the predominant view in many places, and it’s no longer considered idiotic to be pluralistic as it once was. There’s no party line in American psychoanalysis now. Ego psychology is definitely on the wane. In the UK, the contemporary Freudians are really dying out in the three group structure, and the Kleinians are by far the most popular group. I think that various kinds of relational and object relations approaches are holding sway in most areas, and in most of the relational and object relations views, there’s a fairly broad base of what constitutes analytic work and a fair degree of open-mindedness. I think that maybe we’re in an era now when what Joe Sandler said 20 or 30 years ago is true: people are developing their own private mixed models, and now they’re just a little more willing to speak openly about them, like Fred Pine did when he wrote his book. I imagine that was always true, that people said one thing and did another. I think a big problem is that much of the psychoanalytic clinical literature has been fiction, where people wrote about, “This is what I wish I had said, or wish I had done.” And trying to get real clinical material that comes alive with all the messiness in it hasn’t really been around all that long, and probably the relational influence has been very important in that regard, that there has been more of a willingness to expose oneself in the writing. So now I think we see more of that private mixed model approach coming out in clinical accounts.

AC: How important is it to validate empirically psychoanalytic ideas and techniques?

GG: I think it’s important, although very, very difficult. When Kernberg was president of IPA, he said, “Without research, we are dead.” That might be a slight exaggeration, but not too much. We’re in the marketplace with all kinds of research-based treatments, and we are starting to get some randomized, controlled trials of psychoanalytic therapy that’s long-term, like the Cornell study on borderline personality disorder. It is possible to do it. It’s expensive and time-consuming, but we can do it. I think that we’ve got to have those kinds of studies. For formal analysis, it’s so difficult to think about how you would randomly assign someone to analysis versus another treatment. I’m not sure we can quite carry that off. The STOPPP project in Scandinavia tried to do that, and the random assignment just didn’t take, so they had to change their methodology a bit. There’s something very, very important about how an analytic patient finds his or her analyst, so that random assignment is almost anathema to analytic work. I suppose you could get by in the analytic therapy studies, such as the Clarkin and Ken Levy project.

AC: Do you mean analytically informed, manualized treatments, like TFP?

GG: Exactly. You can do that with borderline patients who are going to get that treatment or another one. But analysis itself would be harder to randomize versus something else because the way people seek out an analyst. You know from living in New York that, when someone wants to find an analyst, they talk to everybody and his brother about who the good people are, what kind of approach people have, and it’s very personalized.

AC: What do you think of these manualized therapies that take advantage of certain psychodynamic principles but deploy them in the context of an integrative approach, like DBT? Linehan uses a lot of psychoanalytic thought and doesn’t necessarily say so. Mentalization-based therapy is another one.

GG: It’s everywhere. I’m always interested in watching cognitive therapy tapes, and I sit there thinking, “I do that all the time.” I think that dynamic ideas have influenced all the therapies, although it’s often not given any credit. It’s pervasive, and it’s not going to die out because the influence is everywhere. Even when the manual is for a dynamic therapy like TFP, you make compromises. It’s not exactly what would happen if you were sitting in the room with a patient working naturalistically. But I think it’s essential that, in the current marketplace, we do studies like that, even with the compromises.

AC: What do you think of mentalization-based therapy?

GG: Well, we know for sure from the research that it works, so that’s very important. I’ve worked here with Peter Fonagy, who comes here on a regular basis – he used to come to Topeka and now he still comes to Baylor – I’ve gotten good exposure to it from him and Anthony Bateman. I’ve tried variations on mentalization-based therapy with patients and found it to be helpful. I’m too much of a skeptic to take any pure form of therapy and apply it without using “a little bit of this and a little bit of that” in my own private mixed model. I haven’t tried a pure approach to mentalization-based therapy, but I’d say it seems helpful for many borderline and some narcissistic patients. On the other hand, we also know that TFP works for borderlines, as well as supportive therapy, schema-focused therapy, and DBT. And I think that there’s an inescapable conclusion here that, like much of the psychotherapy research suggests, the therapeutic relationship is probably going to be the most powerful predictor of outcome, regardless of theory or technique. The other thing, I think, is that borderline personality disordered patients want some kind of structure, some kind of conceptual model to make sense of their experience, and a number of different models probably help them get better because it can help them make sense of the chaotic inner world. So mentalization, TFP, DBT, all of those have some value.

AC: I noticed that you and Fonagy had a debate about using transference interpretation with borderline patients. What are your thoughts on that?

GG: Well, see, this is a good example of what I’m talking about. In the writing of Fonagy and Bateman, they don’t do the kind of transference interpretation that TFP adherents do. And yet they do look at the transference relationship, and I think we get into a bit of hair-splitting. It goes back to what you said, Alex. I think that if we did videotapes of a well-trained mentalization-based therapy and a well-trained TFP therapist, you’d hear many of the same kinds of comments, but I think it’s an example of what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences.” People exaggerate the differences between the two approaches to make the point about how they’re different. But I’m always much more impressed with the similarities, and I think that transference interventions in both therapies are used, maybe more judiciously in mentalization based therapy, but I think that it wouldn’t be accurate to say that one is transference-focused and the other isn’t. I think that Peter and Anthony, in their letter in the American Journal of Psychiatry, were kind of saying, “Well, we do use transference,” but they just have a broader definition.

AC: What I’ve found to be so worthwhile about studying psychoanalysis, is that it’s something that never leaves you. Even if you end up doing CBT later, it’s still going to help you understand your relationship with your patient.

GG: You know, all the good therapists know that. One time, Tim Beck was buying a book of mine on countertransference. I said, “What are you buying a countertransference book for? You’re a cognitive therapist. You’re the father of cognitive therapy!” And he said, “Well, I’m having some countertransference problems with my patient, and I wanted to get a little help.” That’s the kind of guy he is. He is an open-minded guy who is not narrowly confined to one view, but admits he’s having some countertransference issues. I think the good cognitive therapists definitely think about transference and countertransference. I’ve talked to them. And they may have different labels for it, or whatever…

AC: Even if they firmly deny that they would ever talk about it that way.

GG: See, that’s true within psychoanalysis. You might see an ego psychologist who might firmly deny he’s been influenced by Kohut’s ideas in any way whatsoever, but then you would see him working with somebody, he is empathically validating and using Kohut-type interventions, so that his private mixed model has some of that, even if he’s publicly saying something different. Same with cognitive therapy.

AC: How do you account for psychoanalysis being marginalized in certain ways and yet having such a strong presence in popular culture?

GG: I think it’s a reflection of the ambivalence about analysis. We are simultaneously viewed with a certain degree of awe, like we’re mindreaders, and yet we’re devalued as buffoons who don’t know anything about data or research, who are far behind the times and just do wild speculation. You know, I’ve studied analysts in movies, and that’s a great way to get a read on how popular culture views analysts, and most of the time they’re pompous, jargon-speaking buffoons who really don’t add anything to common sense. I think this is a popular view, that the analyst is crazier, or as crazy, as the patient. And that, I think, is a way of devaluing something that is a little bit mysterious and disturbing. “Gee, there’s nothing to worry about here, these people are frauds!”

AC: I would love to know what you think of the end of Tony Soprano’s therapy.

GG: Well, you know I wrote a book on the Sopranos, so I’m a big fan, but I was very disappointed in the way they ended his therapy. To me, the writing took a serious misstep at that point. Up until then, Dr. Melfi’s interventions seemed to grow organically out of who she was and they made sense. This ending seemed like a plot device: “Let’s get him kicked out of therapy so he’ll be all isolated and alone at the end of the series.” Perhaps the most unbelievable aspect about it is that something that she would have learned in her first year of residency, namely that psychopaths can manipulate the therapist for their own ends, seemed to be brand new information. So that, at the age of 45 or 50, Melfi thinks, “Oh, really, an antisocial patient can misuse psychotherapy? I’d better look this up and read about it!” So she reads about it, and then she says, “I’ve been mistreated and used, I’d better kick his ass out of therapy!” Oh please! It’s like the writers had to figure a way to get him out. But what they did doesn’t make sense either from her psychology or from the psychotherapeutic process that we watched for six or seven seasons.

AC: What would have been a better way for them to do that?

GG: Well, probably a more realistic way would be to have them reassess their progress. As the show went on, it looked more and more like it wasn’t really helping him much, and on that basis, they should have come to a mutual agreement that it probably didn’t make sense to continue.

AC: It seemed to be a pretty good representation of therapy for a long time, and then…

GG: Exactly. That spoiled it. But while we’re on the topic, on January 28, HBO starts a new series, “In Treatment,” Which is based on an Israeli series that was the most popular television show ever in Israel. I’ve seen the advance episodes, and it is superb. Most of the series takes place in therapy sessions with different patients, and it’s very impressive. So I’m just putting in a plug for it.

AC: I’ll be looking forward to that. I want to move on and ask you what you’re working on these days in terms of your writing.

GG: Right now I’m co-authoring a paper with Tom Ogden, and we’re writing about the process of becoming an analyst, and how the analyst struggles with finding who he or she is after training. After qualifying as an analyst, one then spends a while developing a sense of authenticity in one’s own voice, one’s own style, and we’re kind of working with that idea and collaborating on that.

AC: I wonder if you could give a global perspective on the state of psychoanalysis, having been the editor of the International Journal. What sort of life does it have currently in other countries?

GG: In other countries, the state of psychoanalysis is highly variable. As Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, I visited South America and Europe frequently, and in some places, like Argentina, for example, there is a great deal of interest in psychoanalysis, though it is much like once or twice-weekly therapy. Also, there are all kinds of psychoanalytic institutes in Buenos Aires that are basically like a cult, where a charismatic analyst develops his own institute and analyzes and supervises everyone. There are some very good IPA approved institutes in Argentina, but what I am saying is that what we would consider as a reasonable psychoanalytic training setting is very different in other countries.

In Brazil, psychoanalysis is flourishing. In the Francophone culture, analysis is very different than what we think of as analysis in the United States. So it’s flourishing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have the same ideas about analysis. I’ll tell you a funny story. One time, at the European Psychoanalytic Federation, Peter Fonagy presented one session of a case, and Paul Denis from Paris was his discussant. Paul edits the French psychoanalytic journal- very nice guy, very clever. After Peter presented the case, Paul said, “Peter, you gave more interpretations in one session than I received in my entire analysis!” Again, it’s a very different kind of approach. In Italy, psychoanalysis seems to be thriving. In the UK, they seem to be having trouble getting cases, and they’re more beleaguered there. One other encouraging thing is that there’s a real enthusiasm for it in Eastern Europe and Russia, and they’re starting to form small study groups there.

AC: What does the future hold for psychoanalysis as a clinical approach?

GG: I frankly feel like psychoanalysis is never going to die off, despite all of the repeated Tiresias-like predictions of doom for the field. There’s a comfort in psychoanalysis being a discipline always on the periphery. It’s subversive. It takes people where they don’t want to go. It has radical ideas about how little control we have over ourselves. The unconscious is terribly threatening to people. It’s always been subversive. It was in Freud’s day. In the 1950s, when everyone in Hollywood was lining up to lie down on the couch, it was still thought of as a subversive activity, and that was kind of the appeal of it. So I think we’ll always be somewhat marginalized, and yet that’s where we ought to be.

I certainly think it will continue to be taught in some a small number of graduate schools in clinical psychology, in residencies in psychiatry and social work programs. I think that there’s such wisdom in it, and it has such clinical utility that it won’t die out. I think that it will be offered to a smaller number of students than it has been in the past, but I also anticipate a bit of a swinging back of the pendulum to the middle. The empirically-based therapies are very limited in their indications. So many people don’t come for a symptom of depression or panic or whatever it might be. They want a more thoroughgoing exploration of who they are. They come with issues of feeling dead inside and wanting to feel alive, issues of authenticity, issues of mourning certain developmental passages that they’re going through. Those kinds of issues aren’t going to be adequately dealt with in some kind of empirically validated therapy. So there’s always going to be a place for psychoanalysis, and in the next twenty years I think we might see a bit of a swing of the pendulum back.

AC: Do you have any advice for young, psychodynamically-inclined clinicians coming out of graduate school?

GG: I think you’re swimming upstream, but it’s definitely worth the effort. Another bit of advice I might have is that you may take a hit in terms of your income by pursuing that kind of work, but that it’s worth it because the quality of your day-to-day work with patients is so much richer, so much more intellectually stimulating. A problem that therapists have, as they get into their middle years, is that a sense of existential despair sets in if they don’t have the kind of richness of the psychoanalytic model, to see the complexity, the uniqueness of everyone. If you’re applying a kind of empirically-based system over and over again to patients, one after another, it gets tedious, and you start to feel a little bit like Sisyphus. You see an infinite variety and uniqueness to all of your patients when you’re using a psychoanalytic model. So even if you get less money, I think you’ll find your practice much more enjoyable and you’ll look forward to getting up each morning and going to the office.

There is a joke that the great American photographer Garry Winogrand used to tell. One afternoon in the park, some passers-by stop to compliment a baby in a stroller. The baby is very cute and sweet, but when they express their admiration to his grandmother, she replies dryly, “That’s nothing. You should see his picture.”

These photographs have accumulated over a number of years. They were mostly taken in London, but several were taken in Greece. Apart from that, I haven't much to say about them. They should stand (or fall) on their own. After all, that’s the point with pictures. They are not bearers of one truth that can be put into words. They are not reality, but reality photographed, which is a different thing altogether. As such, they may convey different meanings to different people. I wouldn’t want to burden you or the photographs with my own thoughts and feelings about what they may or may not express, intend, or represent. I wouldn’t want to direct or curb your own projections.

I would hope that the children in my pictures don’t come across as cute, or at least, as not just cute. Childhood is much more than that. I hope these images manage to convey something of the multidimensional character of that period of our lives.

They just had a lecture by a psychoanalyst, Catherine Millot, who was analyzed by Lacan, on a French mystic whose complete works (all 42 volumes of which are in the New York Public Library) were written right after she tried to cut out her own tongue- an act of castration commanded by God in a vision. Likewise I just attended a seminar held by David Lichtenstein focusing on Lacan’s seminar whose title is a pun: ‘les non/nom du pere’ (the no/name of the father) and ‘les non dupes errent’ (the person who refuses to be a dupe will make a mistake). This pun wound its way toward an understanding of the termination of analysis centered around affirmation, being a dupe, certain kinds of failure and loving one’s unconscious. A strange amalgamation I agree, but it made sense in the end in that particular way that one only gets when they’ve sloughed through pages of Lacan together with others. For the timid, if I was at first extremely intimidated, I am, almost five years later, perhaps equally intimidated but with enthusiasm. Understanding so little for so long is like learning to sit with patients- the first encounter, the muddle of the transference, and eventually, momentary flashes of insight. And so Apres-Coup has been a lesson for me in listening.

After all is said and done, my experience permits that I can say, with little equivocation, that they seriously consider sexuality, gender, the phallus, the body, fantasy, drive. They read Freud carefully and closely, they traverse dense Lacanian texts with ease and clarity, bring up the import of semiotics, logic, philosophy, art, the history of science, politics, and, above all, constitute a work that is profoundly clinical. As much as I can poke fun, I am deeply reverent.

This spring semester, a lot of great people are coming to speak- and, as I have admitted to insoluble crankiness, I must also admit to being an unapologetic proselytizer. As such, I think it would be wonderful if one or many of you would venture downtown to one or many of these meetings. My affections run in both directions, and I can’t think of anything else that would benefit myself, City, and Apres-coup more than an influx of our students. I will gladly hold myself responsible for the repercussions.

All meetings are held at the School of Visual Arts- 214 East 21st Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue) and you can always check their website at www.apres-coup.org.

Listed below are a few of their larger meetings:

Alba Flesler
Saturday, May 13, 2006 10:30 A.M.–2:00 P.M.
"The Times of the Subject and the Place of the Parents in Child Analysis"

Psychoanalysis was characterized from the start by a focus on adults’ neuroses. Work with patients who don’t fit that category invites us to reconsider the limits and scope of the analytic act. In addressing the question of subjectivity, this workshop will map out the coordinates characteristic of the analyst’s interventions in a child analysis. Special attention will be paid to the specific requirements imposed by the “times” of childhood.

The Reading Freud Series focusing on The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

David Lichtenstein
Saturday, March 11, 2006 10:30 A.M.–2:00 P.M.
How Is It Possible to Slip?

Claude Rabant
Friday, March 17, 2006 6:30 P.M.–9:00 P.M. and
Saturday, March 18, 2006 10:30 A.M.–2:00 P.M.
Reading Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Names Proper and Foreign: Chance, Coincidence, and the Unconscious in Everyday Life

Leo Bersani
Friday April 7 6:30-9:00
Going Bareback and Being American

Daniel Lemler
Saturday, April 29, 2006 10:30 A.M.–2:00 P.M.
Agieren, A Play in Five Acts

Other upcoming events

Jean-Michel RabatéFriday May 5 6:30-9:00
How to Begin Reading Joyce’s Ulysses

Isidoro Vegh
Friday May 12 6:30- 9:00
Our Fellow Man: Knotting and Unknotting Jouissance

Martine Aniel
Date TBA
Paranoia/Obsessional Neurosis: Differential Diagnosis, a Case Presentation

By Joe Reynoso
Eight months into my internship, and it feels like a good time to dig myself out from under the treatment plans, testing reports and process notes to check in with everyone at City.

Depending on where you end up doing your internship, it can feel like a year of both continuity and change. For me, continuity is being in an internship program with a psychodynamic focus. Concretely this translates into psychodynamically-oriented supervisors and a long-term treatment emphasis when needed. More substantially, the psychodynamic nature of the internship involves a general commitment to thinking about clinical work and the lives of our patients in complex ways that appreciate the importance of unconscious conflict, transference-countertransference dynamics, and the ever-presence of the past in present-day life.

Being a member of an internship group is also a familiar experience. Quite frankly, it resembles the feeling, though more concentrated at times, of being a member of your class at City. I mean that with all of its plusses and minuses. While you are considered an individual staff member at the hospital, you are also part of this collective. People relate to you as you are, but also as “an intern,” which leads to all kinds of transference phenomena (both positive and negative). While you don’t travel as a part of an amoeba-like group like in first year, you do have to co-exist and find ways of working around differences.

It is a transitional year. There are times when I feel like a full-fledged professional. A grown-up psychologist, you might say. These are not just the times when a random patient in the hospital passes me, and sees the shirt-and-tie and the pseudo-confident look on my face, and says “Hey doc.” These are also the times when I’m sitting across from a patient in the midst of a transference enactment and I know it’s a transference enactment. And the time I’m asked to consult on the case of a mentally retarded inpatient I tested, who is now driving the staff crazy with his spitting and impulse control problems.

On the other hand, there are the times when I feel like I novice, not to psychology or clinical practice, but to the ways of “the real world” can work out there. This is the world of hospital-based treatment. This brings up the complications and competing priorities of being in an internship program, within a larger behavioral health department, within the larger culture of the hospital. The divides between psychology’s “talking therapy,” psychiatry’s biologically-driven pharmacological solutions, and hospital management’s cost efficiency agendas can seem vast. Another task of developing your professional identity then becomes learning about your ability to negotiate these tensions. Something tells me, though, that resolving this task does not get completed during internship year.

Coming from City, you will feel comfortable with conceptualizing the richness of patients’ difficulties. You may also be well-equipped to handle the chaos and sometimes disorganized structure of internship life at a hospital. What I lacked in possibly more practical aspects of training (certain test administrations, DSM fluency, cognitive-behavioral techniques) I was more than able to learn and integrate into the solid core of dynamic thinking that City provided. Our City training clearly helps instill a quality of deep thinking about clinical matters that internship cannot provide, but requires.

Internship year is challenging, both on a psychological level and on a practical one. Depending on your internship, you may find yourself wistfully longing for the days of consistently getting six hours of sleep and having the caseloads of fewer than five patients. You may also have more supervisors in one year, like in my case, than you had during your whole time at City—each with their own idiosyncratic way of working and particular theoretical orientation. At times you will be expected to perform as a professional psychologist, and not a student. And you know what, you will find that you are able to successfully answer that call. You will more often than not prove to yourself that you actually remember everything you thought you wouldn’t from your training at City.

In closing, one of the most important things that I think I have come to realize eight months into my one-year internship is just that—it’s just one year. I remember people telling me this while I was applying, and it didn’t seem to register with me. Application year feels so intense and stressful that internship year seemed like it had to be this momentous life changing event. If it wasn’t then why the heck was I obsessively tallying my estimated hours of charting time for my application and pondering the differences between whether my orientation was psychoanalytic or psychodynamic? However, now as I near the end of my year, internship feels like one year in the process of becoming a psychologist.

Fortunately, I did have some of this insight when I ranked my internship sites and factored in quality of life issues. You see I like having some free time and having a personal life in order to treat myself well. I mean, this is hard work we’re doing. I’ll tell you that I would be less capable to be as available and present as I have to be for patients if I couldn’t come home at a reasonable hour, have a drink and watch a Nets basketball game.

So those are just some of my thoughts about internship year. Now back to the paperwork and finishing that dissertation (which is almost impossible to work on while on internship). One bad thing about internship being only one year is that before you know it, you have to start thinking about life after internship and "what’s next?" Anyone hear of any job openings?

Teaching Psychodynamic Material in an Often Non-Psychodynamic World

Telling the story, even to myself, always brings tears to my eyes, tears of warmth and the bittersweetness of loss and connection and reunion. I briefly described the moment at my father’s funeral service and at my eldest son’s bar mitzvah in June 2000. I’ve portrayed the event three or four other times to friends and colleagues. It’s such a compelling snapshot of some of the best aspects of my father and of our tie to each other, our culture and our heritage.

New and broader meanings of this experience with my father were created in the period 1998-2001, during my third three-year term as Director of the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at City College/CUNY, and in the context of a struggle with the American Psychological Association’s accreditation committee. Our dance, in turn, had a dramatic impact on my response to how APA was viewing our clinical program. Was our program too "old school," an antiquated, narrow, non-empirically-validated relic of an earlier era, maybe like my old school father? Or did it have an integrity, a substance that simply had to be better translated to fit APA’s notion of what good training should be?

I’d like to turn now to a description of City’s program, the substance and process of it, and then return to describe the circumstances of the dance itself. I will then link these seemingly disparate phenomena in the hope of giving you a fuller appreciation of their overlap. I hope that this personal/professional dialectic will have some interesting implications for the training of graduate students in a psychodynamically-oriented clinical and scholarly manner during a time when such an approach is often thought of, disparagingly, as old school.

The Ph.D. training program in clinical psychology at City is primarily psychodynamic in orientation. That is to say, we’re not just old school, we’re a disappearing school. In a recent (1998) survey of the Council of University Directors of Clinical Psychology, only 8% of the clinical programs listed psychodynamic/psychoanalytic/ego-analytic as their primary theoretical orientation. There are over 150 clinical programs that are members of this organization. Despite the apparent flourishing of Division 39, this remarkably small number of psychodynamic programs raises some important concerns. Should a dynamic clinical psychology be taught at all on a pre-doctoral level? Is there more to be gained by leaving such training to post-doctoral analytic institutes? To the present audience, the decline in the number of psychodynamic pre-doctoral programs would, I presume, lead to a feeling of dismay. But to a world in which over 75% of all programs deem themselves cognitive-behavioral, the question might well be, what are these eight or so irrelevant dinosaurs actually doing? I’m going to describe what we are doing. Perhaps, to an outsider this is merely an attempt to document our existence before we become better suited to a study in paleontology. I’m a believer that what we do is alive and well and should be maintained at a pre-doctoral level.

The Program began in the mid 1960s, and the first two evaluations by APA in the 1970s were striking for their almost entirely complimentary comments. Clearly, our psychodynamic emphasis matched the orientation of our reviewers and was consonant with a sizable minority of like-minded programs. The reviews of 1982, 1987 and even 1992 were quite different in nature. We were again lauded for what we did, especially the quality of our clinical training, but now there were the increasingly strong comments that although what we did was fine, as far as it went, we were too narrow in our psychodynamic focus. We did too little empirical research too late in our training, and our theory courses were overly psychoanalytic. Crucially, the “as far as it went” comment was secondary to the full approval of what we did do. We received full re-accreditation each time. In hindsight, these positive reevaluations were remarkable for their tolerance of our distinctiveness from the now overwhelmingly non-psychodynamic orientation of most Clinical Psychology Ph.D. programs. It may have also been an artifact of our site visitors’ cohort groups whereby they may have trained in an era where programs like ours were more plentiful.

This live and let live approach, as far as it went, changed dramatically by the time we applied for re-accreditation in 1997. When I reviewed changes made in our Program during the period 1992-1997, which include a second doctoral exam integrating research and practice; the broadening of our research emphasis from one fourth-year course to five courses distributed over the life of the Program; and the creation of sequences in neuropsychology and multicultural issues, we naively thought we had preserved our core emphasis on an old school depth psychology and indeed made it broader and deeper than it had been previously.

Imagine our chagrin when we received word that a decision on our re-accreditation status was deferred not once but twice until finally, in 1999, we were placed on probation by the APA! There are many ways to understand APA’s decision. For the purpose of this paper and its provocative title, I’d like to address the impact of this decision via my father and his dance with me 31 years ago. (Talk about old school narcissism and self-absorption!)

The first feeling I had upon hearing of our probationary status was one of paranoid confirmation. “Ah ha!” I dejectedly cried, I knew they (the oppressors, the insiders) would want to convert or oppress us outsiders! Immediately, my father’s history came to sit on my shoulder. Born to abject poverty and malnourishment in Lithuania, my father grew up knowing of his father’s 20 years in Siberia for failing to renounce his Judaism as required by an edict from Czar Nicholas I in the 1860s. At age 14, on 24 hours notice, my father and his parents were told of a new edict by Nicholas II that all Jews in the region must evacuate their homes near the coast or else face the Cossacks (the ultimate group of insiders). My grandfather had a stroke and died in the wagon pulling their meager belongings away from their shtetl, leaving my teenage father and his mother to fend for themselves.

This story of ethnic oppression, so endemic to humanity and its history, left its paranoid, traumatized core in my father: you must always assume that a pogrom will rear its malignant head eventually. The trick became how to live in enough denial to (a) avoid its malignancy (b) appreciate each day of freedom that miraculously occurs and (c) advance yourself and your family through education to develop an illusion that you can be exempt from the persecution when it, inevitably, reoccurs.

APA probation quickly became the inevitable pogrom for me. I have a passionate love and respect for the Clinical Program at City. I think its courses attempt to do justice to the complexity of the human spirit. I think its courses grab at the phenomenology of our actual experience and all the non-linear ways it doesn’t add up. It asks tough, impossible questions about our impossible profession. And, most importantly, its students honor the best and most humane aspects of our goals and objectives. Thus, my love for the program easily converted to my horror at the unjustified attack by its latest czar.

An important aside. It concerns one of the very blessings of a belief in a psychodynamic depth psychology. The heuristic value of the belief in the interplay of conscious and unconscious processes is easily a blessing when we use it to try and understand intrapsychic, interpersonal and/or cultural phenomena. The heralding of development as an inherently reciprocal, increasingly differentiating process of establishing self vis-à-vis others is equally compelling in its phenomenological eloquence. Yet it leaves us easily cursed by our smugness that it is not just the royal road, but the only road to being of use to another.

Thus, my horror at APA’s pogrom was quickly matched by my demeaning and dehumanizing of my oppressor. It reminded me of the way my father could denigrate his oppressors by the epithet of “goyim” (gentiles) or “goyische kup” (gentile, read as inferior, mind). In reality, the APA’s wish to have the program create highly specific and hence more measurable goals and objectives is both utterly benign and absolutely necessary. Indeed their desire for specificity speaks directly to the age-old criticism of psychodynamic theory and practice that our work may be brilliantly presented anecdotally or idiographically, but it doesn’t sufficiently document a methodology or results that can be empirically validated.

I’d now like to tell you about my father’s dance. It took place on April 15th, 1971. We had recently moved on up to the projects in Coney Island. The house where we had lived "down the side street" from the projects (in my memory, it was the only house still standing on the block after nearly a decade of arson) had been condemned to build a public school. For the first time in the six years since my father’s retirement in 1965, both my parents were not home when I came home from school that day. They had gone to downtown Brooklyn to sign the official papers turning over their house to the City. April 15th was also the day I heard from the colleges I had applied to and, much to my astonishment and pleasure, I had received a scholarship to an Ivy League school! Knowing the almost mythical importance my parents placed on education and knowing the fantasy my father held of how an Ivy League education was both simultaneously impossible and yet could (hopefully!) provide ample cover during the next pogrom, I knew he’d be delighted at my achievement. Being given the money to attend such a school, moreover, was simply beyond his or my capacity to believe in the oppressors' generosity.

So while I waited impatiently for their return home, I expected shock or even wary disbelief to be his first response. When he and my mom came in the door, I rushed to them with my news of both the acceptance and of the scholarship that accompanied it. Instantly, my father took my hand with one hand and my mother’s hand with his other hand. Singing an unrecognized chant in Yiddish, he literally bounded around and around the room for what seemed like hours but was probably only a brief minute or two. The whimsical, excited look on his face, the way the room looked, the delight in my mother’s eyes... well, it doesn’t get any better than that!

So in the midst of my horror, my indignation, even my shame at the probationary response from APA, I remembered this dance. Where, where did my father find this seemingly newly born capacity for delight? How had this never-before-seen paroxysm of joy been protected, preserved despite pogroms, malnutrition, violence and other forms of trauma? Was it a kernel of “good enough” mothering that endured untainted, waiting for the proper, even if once in a lifetime, moment to be expressed? Was it created far later from the hopes and dreams we harbor for and in our children despite or even because of our defects and limitations? Certainly as a father now, I can see that in ways I could never have imagined when I was a participant in that dance.

Suffice it to say, this delight of my father’s has warmed me many times over. The gift that just keeps on giving! In connection with APA, however, it made me treasure the value and integrity of City’s program more than ever. For his delight could only begin to be understood by me as a validation of how complex is the human personality. How it defies linear predictability. How we are capable of flights of lightness and airiness when there should be no way for us to get off the ground. Just as we are capable of profoundly sadistic, demeaning and all-too-human cruelty that can exist glibly and side by side with our light and truth.

In the years following City's probation, we eventually were wonderfully successful in reversing APA’s decision. We provided clear, measurable goals and objectives with measurable outcomes that documented the great achievements of our students and graduates. We received the longest possible re-accreditation, 7 years, by APA. My father’s dance helped sustain me through that process. In fact, I just knew we would succeed while simultaneously being convinced we were doomed. (Some things never change, I guess!)

I am forever indebted to my father for showing me this part of himself, this joyful oasis in a painful desert. I hope that this presentation of him to this very worldly audience would give him delight as well.

“Invisible Minds” and “Silenced” were two exhibits inspired by my experience working as a volunteer with abandoned children in a public hospital in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. “Invisible Minds” consisted of an installation of a series of color photographs of some of the children I met while working there. “Silenced,” which I created two years after “Invisible Minds,” was an installation of more than a hundred etchings of drawings of children’s skeletons and bones.

"Invisible Minds” was installed for the first time in TJaden gallery at Cornell University, and four years later at The Centro Cultural de España (Spanish Cultural Center) in Santo Domingo. The photographs are intimate portraits that confront the viewer through a personal interaction with the images. The exhibit offered the viewer moments of reflection about his/her own mental state in contrast to those of the children portrayed in the images. Between images, I installed mirrors the same size as the photographs, providing viewers with the experience of seeing their reflections before and after looking at a photograph. With the placement of the mirrors, I intended to make spectators aware of themselves in relation to each image.

These children spent most of their time inside their cribs with people coming by and observing them. With my camera, I became one more observer, another viewer of their reality. I composed most of the photographs leaving the white bars of the child’s crib between him/her and me, thus suggesting imprisonment. I manipulated the color balance of the photographs with a focus on blue tones to emphasize the cold reality of the rooms where the children lived.

This exhibit was an experiment to explore the power as well as the limitations that visual images have in provoking a reaction in the viewer. The installation initiated my interest in the different psychological mechanisms that people use when presented with artwork that is confrontational.

Click to view "Silenced" slideshow

ABUSED, RAPED, MURDERED, FORGOTTEN, VIOLATED, POWERLESS, INJURED, LEFT IN SOLITUDE, BATTERED, ABANDONNED, MALTREATED, DECAPITATED, EXPLOITED, MADE INVISIBLE, DISREGARDED, HELPLESS, OPPRESSED, HARMED, ISOLATED, UNPROTECTED, HUMILIATED, DRIVEN TO SUICIDE, DEPRESSED, CONDEMNED, DESPERATE, UNDIGNIFIED, MUTED, HOPELESS, BEATEN, ASSAULTED, USED, WRETCHED, TRASHED, MOLESTED, MANIPULATED, DISCRIMINATED, DEFENSELESS, SILENCED…

These are words that attempt to describe the lives of millions of children around the world who are victims of violence every day. “Silenced” is a project that emerged from my exploration of different art mediums to voice my concern about the detrimental conditions in which many children live.

“Silenced” was conceived as a multi-sensory installation of more than one hundred etchings printed in translucent sheets of vellum. The images are of children’s skeletons drawn and printed in black ink. The prints were hung in four rows across the gallery space, and visitors could walk around them. On the back wall, at the end of the rows of prints, the viewer was left to witness a series of small prints of children’s body parts depicted as if they were anthropological objects.

The artist Brian Sure, who was my supervisor and critic of the exhibit, wrote the following about the exhibit:

“The installation of 'Silenced' was carefully calculated to engage and transform the viewer. This presentation shifts emphasis from the meticulous care with which each image was skillfully produced to the cumulative effect of these haunting shadows. Using a brush loaded with strong acid, [Alba’s] sensitively rendered skeletons of infants were drawn directly onto the surface of each prepared copper printing plate. The images were drawn and redrawn, proofed, adjusted and re-proofed until each took on a distinctive and convincing persona.

Then, by exploiting the possibility of multiple impressions from the print matrix the delicate beauty of each image is magnified by repetition until the critical mass of silent, simple images explode into an overwhelmingly powerful statement of pathos that cannot be forgotten. Once printed, the sections of translucent sheets of vellum, in some cases too large to be printed in a single run through the press, were taped together to produce the completed images. The skeletons are strung up across the gallery, arranged like rows of hospital cribs in a pauper’s ward, displayed like stained bed-sheets transformed into miraculous multiple shrouds of Turin. You are drawn to make your way to the other end of the room by glimpses between the rows of prints to a group of smaller images hanging on the far wall. Quiet sounds become audible as one adjusts to the unfamiliar light flickering through the hanging prints. The sounds of children, soft and vague, become just clear enough to encourage concentration. The children’s voices mix with the sound of the paper rattling in the current you stir up walking between the prints, and the images, viewed from unfamiliar angles in movement, mix in your mind with the sounds, and together they block out the cares you brought into the room, so that by the time you reach the far wall you are able to fully concentrate on the blood-red, x-ray like images of hands and arms and skulls and unfamiliar bones arranged asymmetrically in a disparate haunting group. Having read Alba’s statement, and the adjectives she has formed into a devastating list, you have become a different person by the time you retrace your steps back through the prints (2001).”

“Silenced” presents a fatalistic view of human nature, a view through which I ultimately attempt to provoke reactions and emotions that are life reaffirming. I wanted this exhibit to offer a commentary on the anonymity of these children. In “Silenced” the human figure becomes a haunting absence, and you can only imagine, by looking at each print, the realities of the child who have ceased to exist.

“Silenced” beautifies suffering and sublimates pain. The delicate quality of the prints contrasts with the crude subject matter. To work on the images of “Silenced,” I went through dissociative-like mental states as a way to detach myself from the subject matter. Perhaps, it is also through intermittent states of dissociation that viewers can cope with the contrasting emotions that “Silenced” evokes.

Each print is a cue for recalling and/or creating a new memory in your mind. It is in this process that I hope to make you actively confront this social reality and not become complacent and detached from it as you leave the gallery space and return to your everyday life.

As the temperatures climb, head to those beautiful bastions of free a/c for a look at four stellar offerings.

"Lee Friedlander" Through August 29th
In its desire to retell, assess, and physically display an artist’s oeuvre, any retrospective can quickly become a curatorial, Stephen Dedalus-type nightmare. When successful, it is the result of a delicate, ineffable balance born of countless choices of inclusion, omission, and who knows what else. With more than 500 photographs included, one word immediately comes to mind to describe the Lee Friedlander retrospective now on view at MOMA: “exhaustive,” with the pun very much intended. As one of America’s foremost living photographers, Friedlander’s prolific career spans four decades, more than twenty published artist books, and what I can only presume is enough 35mm film to circle the world at least several times. The curators have certainly erred on the side of inclusion, but if Friedlander’s images are so utterly captivating and singular that this exhibition evades the nightmarish, overburdened quality that retrospectives of this scale often suffer from. Instead, it shines like the powerful July sun.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART - 11 W 53rd St. - 212.708.9400 - http://www.moma.org

"Greater New York 2005" Through September 26th
Five years ago, I watched closely the artists in the first Greater New York exhibition bask in the new light of art world recognition—and my, what an after-party did that opening have. Now, from the sober sidelines of an altogether different professional life, I find myself still drawn to the appeal of this type of show. The organizers’ self-professed goal was to capture the specific spirit of the last five years of art-making in New York City, contemplate its themes and forms, and wrestle with its implications—and do so with the help of the artists themselves. So, like its predecessor five years ago, the application process was opened to any artist who lived and worked in the New York City environs during the time period. Two thousand artists responded to the invitation. The final exhibition list carries a hearty 160 names and has provoked both disdain for its unoriginality and excitement over the never-before-seen talent. Neither is in short supply. Not surprisingly, the show takes over the entirety of P.S. 1’s gargantuan converted public school space, all 45,000 square feet of it.

P.S. 1 - 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue - Long Island City, Queens - 718.784.2084 - http://www.ps1.org

"Ancestry and Innovation: African American Art from the Collection" Through September 4th
After the wildly successful museum tour of “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” who could blame the American Folk Art Museum for organizing a similarly themed show from their own holdings? Luckily for them (and for us), the AFAM’s collection of black vernacular art is as good as it gets. In addition to displaying those beloved quilts, the exhibition reveals the cross-pollination of themes and techniques from an array of mediums, including painting, works on paper, and sculpture.
AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM - 45 W. 53rd St. - New York NY 10019 - 212.265.1040 - http://www.folkartmuseum.org

Some of you may recall a list of local dining recommendations that I circulated on Psychocommunity a while back.

As I’ve had a few requests recently to redistribute the recommendations, I have reconstructed the list. Below you’ll find the Chowhound recommendations I circulated earlier, as well as the results of a more recent posting, and a couple of recommendations from within our own ranks. It occurs to me that the OE would be an ideal place to begin an exchange of culinary wisdom, and so I encourage the food-minded among you to share your own CCNY-area culinary finds and updates. Post them on the comment board at the end of this article. Because, while the majority of us plan to spend far fewer than 20 years at City, tuna wraps get old pretty darn quick.

Floridita
Floridita at 127th and Broadway. Open and sunny, friendly and all kinds of good food, including the range from bacon and eggs to ropa vieja, rice and beans, and great cafe con leche. –Arietta (Oct. 29, 2003)

The Greeks
“The Greeks” at 139th and Amsterdam. It’s no culinary hotspot, but they do have a nice roasted piece of meat daily that makes a good sandwich. I think Tuesday is fresh turkey and Friday corned beef, with various other daily specials. No, it’s not Katz’s, but it is good, for the neighborhood. Say hello to George for me and maybe he'll throw on an extra pickle. –Chowhound.com (Oct. 28, 2003)

“Jamaican place at 144th and Amsterdam”I had very good oxtails at the Jamaican place at 144th and Amsterdam last Thursday. I don’t know the name, but it is on the east side, with tables set up outside. The beef stew is also good, and the jerk chicken is not bad. –Chowhound.com (May 6, 2005)

Java’s Brewin’
Java’s Brewin’ at 141st and Amsterdam serves a nice cup of Joe, as well as muffins, croissants, pastries, salads and sandwiches. The staff is friendly and will gladly let you read your favorite psychoanalytic text for hours on end. –Melissa J. (May 6, 2005)

La Flor de Broadway
At 138th and Broadway. La Flor de Broadway has a nice Caldo Gallego and some pretty good cuban sandwiches. You have to stand, but it’s cheap. –Chowhound.com (Oct. 28, 2003)

La Flor de Broadway has very good Cubanos for $2.50 at 138 and Broadway. Makes a wonderful lunch. –Chowhound.com (May 6, 2005)

La Valle Restaurant
At 135th and Broadway, just north of the northeast corner – on Bway. Hispanic spot, get the quarter chicken - great with some rice. Real authentic, some of the best chicken in the city. Also cold Heinekens. –Chowhound.com (Oct. 28, 2003)

Mexico Dos
On Amsterdam just north of 145th on the west side of the street is a place called Mexico Dos which is pretty good and not too expensive. –Chowhound.com (Oct. 28, 2003)

Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too
Check out Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too on 138th & Lenox. Really good food, laid back and unpretentious atmosphere. Another branch called Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too is on 110th across from St. John's the Divine. The one on 138th is supposed to be better. I’ve never been to the 110 St. one, but can vouch for the 138th St. restaurant. The ribs were great, and the black-eyed peas and collard greens were outstanding. –Chowhound.com (Oct. 28, 2003)

Sunshine Jamaican Kitchen
145th and St Nick has Sunshine Jamaican Kitchen and the fish and chips place. Sunshine has good roti, jerk chicken, etc. Both of these options are take-out only, unfortunately. –Chowhound.com (Oct. 28, 2003)

By Beth Zick

You are now part of the intellectual elite. Along with your Sunday New York Times, your affinity for post-modern foreign films, your subscription to Harper’s, your WNYC tote bag, and your plastic-frame glasses, you need to know where to buy all of the books that will line your shelves and inspire awe in your intellectually inferior friends.

Since many of the journals at the CCNY library seem to only be current through the mid-1970s, it is wise to know what other resources are available. All of the following are in Manhattan:

Baruch College (151 East 25th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenues): Though Baruch is a business college, they have many current subscriptions to psychoanalytic and psychotherapy journals. And, because it’s part of the CUNY system, we can get in without a problem. They seem to have internet hook-ups for those of us with laptops, and I’ve heard that there are computers for general use on the top floor, though I have never personally seen them. The library is comfortable, quiet, and beautiful.

Columbia Psychology Library (409 Schermerhorn building, inside the Morningside Heights campus, on Amsterdam and roughly West 117th Street): They have a decent collection of journals and books from all branches of psychology. Though, technically, you are not allowed to use the library unless you are affiliated with Columbia, I have never been asked once by any of the lethargic undergrads manning the door to produce identification. But you have been warned.

The New York Psychoanalytic Institute (247 East 82nd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues): Referred to by many as “The Institute,” the building houses an extensive and current library of, you guessed it, psychoanalytic journals and books, and a very helpful and knowledgeable librarian. It is open to members of the public who have good use for it.

New York Public Library (5th Avenue and 42nd Street): Just a hop, skip, and a jump from the Graduate Center, you can find pretty much anything at this, the epicenter of the NYPL, the city’s main research venue. You can’t take anything out of here, and you need some sort of identification to check out books and journals on reserve, but if you’re into one-stop-shopping, this is your place. And you can always have a “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” moment there, which I always find helps me get through the week.

http://nyfreudian.org/abstracts: Though not a physical library per se, this is like Cliffs Notes for Freud, if you will. The New York Freudian Society has compiled and summarized all of the volumes of the Standard Edition at this wondrous site. Not that I endorse cheating or skimming of any sort, but sometimes it helps to get a good overview, especially when you’re wet behind the ears.

You might want to hang on to some of the books you find more important and interesting, so here are some places in Manhattan to get a good deal:

The Strand (828 Broadway at 12th Street; 95 Fulton Street between William and Gold Streets): If you’ve never been here, shame on you! When Other Books closed a few years ago, they sold their overstock to the Strand, so they have a lot of good psychology books for cheap. Also, it seems like when analysts are cleaning out their offices, they sell their books to the Strand, so there are some great old crusty books here too. They don’t always have what you’re looking for, but it’s a good place to start, and to check back periodically.

Addall.com (your computer): I would not have been able to get though graduate school without this site (I’m not done yet, so maybe I shouldn’t say that). You enter a title or an author, and it compares prices for the book in question at every other book-selling site you can think of (Amazon, Powell’s, etc.). Simply amazing.

The Last Word Bookstore (1181 Amsterdam Avenue at West 118th Street): This is a smaller bookstore with a great selection of used psychological and psychoanalytic books. Another place the analysts go when they clean out their offices (and some professors too, it seems).

Labyrinth Books (536 West 112th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue): No used books here, but one minute in this place will make you proud to be in academia. They have possibly the best selection of psychology and psychoanalytic books around, though it ain’t cheap. But if you buy from here you’re supporting an independent bookstore, so your wallet will be a little bit lighter, but you can feel good about where your money is going.

Barnes & Noble (105 5th Avenue at 18th Street): And speaking of independent bookstores, here is the exact opposite. Of course, this branch has an excellent psychology section and better prices than Labyrinth, but it’s up to you if your soul is worth 7% off the cost of Therapeutic Communication.

And as long as you’re in the Columbia area buying books and checking out journals, you’re going to need a place to read all of this stimulating literature. You might as well go to my favorite café, The Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue at 111th Street to grab a cup of joe. Come on, after all of this intellectual toil you deserve some strong coffee and an apricot hamentashen.

By Joe Reynoso

Stop and go back now! Stay at City, where it’s comfortably psychodynamic, treatment is long-term, and Exner is the name we dare not speak.

Nevertheless, applying to internship is uniquely difficult. Unlike anything else I faced at City (second docs, the dissertation proposal defense, the silence of program meetings, Steve’s first diagnostic write-up), I think this process was harder than I thought it would be. We have all applied for things such as jobs, loans, college and graduate school. One rather uncomfortable wrinkle in this application process is that you will be applying with people you know. On the one hand, it can be incredibly helpful to depend on your friends and colleagues in the program. You will be able to trade information, answer each other’s questions, and just freak out together, knowing that everyone has a good idea of what you’re going through. On the negative side, do you really want to hear about your friends getting interviews at places that didn’t offer you one? Do you want to listen to the person who completed the application essays in one week, while you’ve been stuck at your first sentence of, “There are many reasons why this internship is ideal for me…” for four weeks now?

What I am trying to say is that there are ways that the internship application process can breed feelings of envy, competition and anxiety between people who consciously like each other and usually don’t feel like avoiding each other in the lounge. Applying to graduate school, we were competing with an anonymous mass of people. This time around, you and your friends will be competing for limited placements at the same six coveted internships around New York City.

I hear it usually works out. Our program has a good track record of students landing one of their top three choices, and by the end of the internship process, applicants develop different personal preferences, anyway. By the end of the journey, you will find yourself thinking about matching at these sites in ways you didn’t when you started. So while Site X may have a good reputation, a child inpatient unit, and a history of liking City students, you might have had a certain gut feeling about Site Y upon visiting it. This is the kind of intangible and immeasurable factor that makes you say, “I can see myself working there.”

I may be focusing too much on the more angst-ridden aspects of internship application year. Let me mention a few positives. As opposed to graduate school applications, this time around, there is basically no application cost (though there is a general registration fee). Also, I did get kind of a proud feeling totaling up all my clinical hours that should be noted and appreciated (graduate school is damn hard work). And don’t forget that applying to internship means you’re getting close to the prize, the Ph.D. (if only the dissertation would write itself). The essays are a pain, though I did enjoy the personal statement, which gave me a chance to be creative.

Now that I got that off my chest, I wouldn’t be my ardently pessimistic self if I didn’t return to some of the more negative things about the process. Definitely the least enjoyable aspect of applying to internships, for me, was the interview process. Depending on how many places you apply to, you may find yourself going on anywhere from six to twenty interviews. I had seven myself, and I do have a few thoughts for those applying in the future. First, it is important to be yourself, since I do think that directors and staff at these sites want to get a sense of who you are as a person. They will have to work with you for a year, often in close proximity. Frankly, they would probably prefer accepting interns who are not certifiable, whom they like as people and wouldn’t mind being around. Let your wonderful personal characteristics shine through in a genuine way. Be yourself, unless “yourself” means coping with anxiety by using inappropriate humor or some other outrageous thing that presumably would have kept you from making it through the City interview in the first place.

While I am making a plea for genuineness, please do remember that it wouldn’t hurt being part salesperson in there. As in any job interview, you’re selling yourself in a way, and you have to assume that the 300 or so applicants to each site are also qualified. I felt it was important in my interviews to not seem cocky, but also to be proud of presenting the experiences and credentials I’ve accumulated through graduate school.

These interviews are tough because, as opposed to the interviews for graduate school, it is no longer sufficient to just present yourself as a dedicated, hard-working person who is eager to learn and help people. After four years plus of graduate school, you will be tested during these interviews. I’m not just talking about your patience. Remember, these sites, while providing you with a degree of training, are also expecting you to function as a fairly independent clinician who can hit the ground running on an inpatient ward or a psychiatric emergency room. You may be asked to review a clinical vignette or watch a videotaped encounter and relate your diagnostic impressions or treatment recommendations. While stressful, this aspect of the interviews is what we are trained for at City. I have confidence that anyone from our program will be able to speak about clinical material richly and complexly. The only difficulties I had were related to differential diagnosis.

You will, of course, be questioned about anything you included in your application, including your essays. So if you wrote about losing your shoe in that gigantic snow pile when you were seven, be prepared to talk about the feelings you had as you stood up there not knowing whether you should come down without the shoe, or continue digging on top of the mound in search of it. More related to your graduate training, be prepared to address the awfully popular (and obnoxious) question: “So what’s the deal with you City people not knowing how to score Exner, and what do you plan to do about it?” Occasionally during these interviews I imagined being the subject of a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing (not for the present administration, of course).

The kicker is that you are being interviewed by clinical psychologists, so don’t expect much feedback or facial cues that say how much they like you. While I think you can know when you completely screw up during an interview (and you can always recover), I think it is very difficult to gauge how well you did. No matter what feeling I had coming out of an interview, I reminded myself that I didn’t see any other applicant’s interview, and that it would be hard for me to presume that I did any better or worse than anyone else.

Once interviews are over, the match game begins. There were many variables that led to my ranking of sites. You can make pro and con lists, which are helpful, but I also think that it is important not to discount that gut feeling you have about a certain place. In the end, this intuitive sense helped me decide why Site X was a better place for me than Site Y. And again, with rankings, it is best to base them on where you want to go, rather than how you thought each site liked you. If you have been on the City admissions committee, you know how idiosyncratic these selection processes can be.

I leave you with a few other pieces of advice:

Talk to former and present interns from a site you are interested in during all steps of the process. That’s where I got most of my dependable information. Seriously, most ex-City interns were helpful and more than happy to speak to me. They remember how difficult this process is and are willing to help out. Since I can’t vouch for everyone, rest assured that you can call me when the time comes.

On the personal statement essay, like Steve’s first-year diagnostics project, you shouldn’t dabble with creativity unless you’re sure can bring it all home.

Remember, internship is only a year, and your life and career do not rest with this one decision. Since it is only a year, you should also consider quality-of-life factors as you rank sites.

Finally, you are capable and have a lot to offer. What we do well at City is think about patients complexly, richly, and dynamically. Internship sites know that about us and love us for that.

Right now, I am in the limbo waiting period after submitting my final rankings and waiting for match day. Another one of the joys of the process, this two week waiting period is worse than the two-week build-up in anticipation of the Super Bowl. It is hard to know what to do with yourself during this time, as all delusions of power over your application finally dissolve. It is out of your hands as you wait to find out if you got matched to one of your top sites, if the “clearinghouse” is in your future (this is the purgatory for those who don’t match to any of their sites and must scramble to apply to places with vacancies), or if you’ll decide to swallow hard and re-apply the next year.

When I’m sick, I’m not a good patient, and when I am asked to wait, I’m not a good waiter. I have many hours of irrational worry ahead, during which I will wonder why I didn’t wear my lucky red tie to all seven interviews, I’ll punitively rethink my answer to that question about vacation destinations, and I’ll fantasize about my never-ventured career as a chef. By the time this write-up comes out, I will already know my fate for next year.

Retroactively wish me luck, as I wish future applicants all the best.

2/8/05

I used to read one book at a time, cover to cover, but once I started at City, I found that I didn’t have the mental energy for that any more.

A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., and Richard Lannon, M.D. (2000).

This book is not about love per se, but rather the neurobiological, physiological, and evolutionary underpinnings of our affiliative needs and attachment behaviors. There are two major problems with this book that were obvious to me within the first ten pages, and they were each frustrating enough to make me want to throw the book across the room and never return. The first is their use of overly poetic language, with statements such as, “Love fits with gliding ease into the heart of the troubadour’s croon or a poet’s couplet." The second shortcoming has to do with the authors’ use of Freud as a straw man: they present simplistic and caricatured readings of his theories in order to knock them over and advance their own arguments. What is frustrating about this is not that the authors are hostile toward Freud, but that they are unaware of how compatible their own ideas are with psychodynamic thinking. The authors describe how, through development and into adulthood, we use social contact and proximity to loved ones to provide a regulating function for our limbic systems. They explore not only the implications of deprivation and inconsistency of social relatedness in childhood for psychopathology, but also how nonverbal regulation plays a profound role in change through psychotherapy. Without ever using these words, they provide a neurobiological model for understanding intersubjectivity, transference and countertransference, and the internalization of object representations. While I didn’t agree with many of the arguments in this book, I feel that the type of work these authors are doing is important to the future of psychoanalysis in that they provide another kind of evidence for analytic theories of psychological processes and treatment.

A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn (1980).

A classic historical account of our country told from the perspective of poor, disenfranchised, and oppressed Americans. This book is not a light read, a fact that will become obvious in the first seven pages as he describes the frequently overlooked story of Columbus’s conquests resulting in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of native peoples. As I have now slogged through the first third of this very thick book, I have been continually surprised to learn about shocking events in our history about which I had previously only had a glimmer of awareness. Zinn makes the point that history is always told from the perspective of the victor, and as a result the story of the oppressed is often left untold. His intention is not to judge these victors, but to question the assumption that atrocities committed during the rise of our power were a necessary price to pay for the development of the nation. His descriptions of how, throughout history, the people of power have mobilized lower-class energy to their own advantage sound eerily contemporary. While at times this book becomes weighed down by its many sources, his arguments are well researched, clearly stated, and appeal to the bleeding-heart liberal in all of us.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2003).

Not in the mood for harrowing accounts of oppression and slaughter? Maybe you’d prefer this light, very quick, and enjoyable read. This book is a mystery told from the perspective of an autistic savant child who investigates the murder of his neighbor’s dog. The author, who had worked with autistic children before writing the book, has an amazing ability to imagine the experience of someone with autism. He portrays with vivid detail the subjective experience of being unable to process social cues, and the rigidity and literalness in interpreting another person’s communications that results. This was illustrated particularly well through his character’s explication of what is supposed to have made a particular joke funny while commenting on his inability to see the humor in it. As I began reading this book I was concerned that the author’s telling of the story from the perspective of an autistic child would become either gimmicky or sentimental, but to his credit it was neither. All this in a book that can be read in three hours – not bad.

White Noise by Don DeLillo (1984).

One of my favorites, I just read this book for the second time. I like to go back to a book sometimes when I say that it is one of my favorites but it’s been too many years to remember why, and this one didn’t disappoint the second time around. This book is told from the perspective of a professor of Hitler Studies in a small college town, who is consumed by fear of his own death. His wife and children also grapple with a fear of dying in their own ways. Sounds heavy? It’s really not. The book’s satire and black humor ensure that it never gets bogged down by its dark subject matter. The dialogue rarely sounds the way people actually talk, but it’s hard to resist the characters’ absurdly postmodern observations about our culture, such as how the buzz of consumerism creates a white noise that allows us to obscure facing our own mortality.

By Teresa López-Castro

The obvious is sometimes worth stating: there is a tremendous amount of art to see this spring in New York.

I have listed museum website addresses and urge anyone planning a visit to confirm show dates and museum hours. It was only after my fourth visit to the Whitney on a Tuesday that I finally learned that it’s closed that day (and Mondays, too).

Finally, seeing art in the particular institutional setting of a museum is altogether different from experiencing it in a commercial gallery, in a personal studio, or on the street. Don’t let my focus here on museums dissuade you from exploring the over two hundred galleries in Chelsea—all free—or checking out the open studios being hosted by Parsons, School of Visual Arts, and Columbia this April and May.

At the Jewish Museum this spring is an eclectic trio of exhibitions: a look at the 19th century salon culture and the women who hosted them, a retrospective of the beloved illustrator/author Maurice Sendak, and three short video pieces by contemporary Israeli artists (all under ten minutes). Finding an intelligent and succinct connection between these three very different shows is presently beyond me, but I recommend paying a visit to this beautiful museum-in-a-mansion and reporting back with any leads.

“Body Politic: Recent Video by Israeli Artists” Through June 30
“The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons” Through July 10
“Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak” April 15 through August 14

THE JEWISH MUSEUM
1109 Fifth Avenue (at 92nd St.)
New York, NY 10128
212.423.3200
http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/

Looking for the sleeper hits of the season? Search no further than SMA’s two spring offerings. Chris Ofili’s “Afro Muses” is an exceptional opportunity to see the artist’s ten-year output of watercolors all under one roof. Perhaps recognized more for his sculptures—remember Ofili’s controversial mixing of the scatological and the sacred at the Brooklyn Museum’s 1999 Sensation show?—this collection of over one hundred of his works on paper brings Ofili’s more intimate, whimsical side into focus.

“Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse” is the first traveling exhibition devoted to the lives and works of two seminal twentieth century African-American artists. Commonly termed “outsider/folk” artists because of their lack of formal art training (Traylor was born a slave in 1854 and picked up the pencil at the age of eighty-three; a destitute Edmundson began collecting discarded stones and creating sculptures in his sixties), this show seeks to re-contextualize their work within the early twentieth century’s American and European modernist traditions.

“Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse” April 27 through July 3
“Chris Ofili Afro Muses” April 27 through July 3

THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM
144 West 125th Street (between Lenox Ave. & Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd.)
New York, New York 10027
212.864.4500
http://www.studiomuseum.org/

“New York is Modern Again.” Does anyone else bear extreme animosity towards the MoMa’s pompous re-opening media campaign? I swore it would take an important show—certainly something more riveting than a multinational corporation’s collection of primarily male, oil on canvas objects to bring me to the MoMa in 2005 (I’m referring here to the other show up at the MoMa this spring, which I am not encouraging you to see).

Well, the Thomas Demand exhibit has brought my boycott to a premature end. The first American museum retrospective for this German photographer is likely to be one of my favorite exhibitions of the year. Demand, once a sculptor, first utilized the camera as a means of recording his three-dimensional pieces. By 1993, he had made the practice of photographing his paper sculptures his central concern; once photographed, the life-size paper models of seemingly everyday scenes are always destroyed. Demand takes as his starting point media images fraught with history—Saddam Hussein’s office, Jeffrey Dahmer’s hallway—and creates life-size reconstructions with what eerily appears to be some industrial size version of children’s construction paper. Demand’s meditations on reality’s transformation at the hands of the media, photography, and the artist are utterly haunting. Very modern indeed.

“Thomas Demand” Through May 30

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
11 W. 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
212.708.9431
http://www.moma.org

Not sure what to make of anime, manga, or Otaku culture? Not confident you could define any of the three if pressed? The Japan Society’s voluminous “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture” is apparently here to change all of that (complete with its own suite of educational programs and film series). Curated by the Japanese art-star Takashi Murakami, the collaborative efforts of the Japan Society and the Public Art Fund provide an extensive, multi-faceted look at the subculture of Otaku and its connection to Japan’s mainstream cultural fascination with childhood cuteness, the apocalypse, and superhuman powers.

“Cool Japan: Otaku Strikes!” Spring 2005
* Be sure to visit the Japan Society’s website for a calendar of events, program descriptions, and venues
JAPAN SOCIETY
333 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017
212.832.1155
http://www.japansociety.org

Just a couple of blocks down Fifth Avenue you’ll find the perfect companion show to the Jewish Museum’s “The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salon.” The Neue Galerie’s “Portraits of an Age: Photography in Germany and Austria, 1900-1938” consists of more than 100 photographs from both private and public collections. Now that I think of it, it’s not the prospect of forty years of German photography, but wandering through the old Vanderbilt mansion that I’m looking forward to. “If I had this salon, who would I have over for my weekly soirees....” After you’ve mused to your heart’s content, re-energize in the museum’s Café Sabarsky—the best Linzertorte this side of the Rhine.

“Portraits of an Age: Photography in Germany and Austria, 1900-1938” Through June 6
NEUE GALERIE
1048 Fifth Avenue (at 86th Street)
New York, NY 10028
212.628.6200
http://www.neuegalerie.org

Without a doubt, Tim Hawkinson’s retrospective at the Whitney is the kid-friendly pick of the season. I have always been struck by the youthfulnes of his larger-than-life sculptures. Hawkinson’s works are generally big and loud, conveying the curiosity and inventiveness of a Peter Pan exploring what it means to be a body in space. Pick an off day at the Whitney to visit the exhibition and have the luxury of getting to know Hawkinson’s sculptures up close.

“Tim Hawkinson” Through May 29

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF ART
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
Tel. 212.570.3633
http://www.whitney.org

I recall seeing Kids (1996) in the movie theater and leaving stunned, disturbed, and secretly, a little dismayed that I hadn’t experienced my teens in a grittier town than the South Florida suburbs. For the past thirty-five years, Larry Clark has unflinchingly portrayed the lives of America’s youth—including the pivotal roles played by violence, sex, and drugs that most of America would rather ignore. (A personal favorite is Clark’s first monograph, Tulsa, from 1971.) This exhibition displays more than 200 of his photographs, many for the first time. Several of Clark’s feature-length films will also be screened.

“Larry Clark” Through June 5

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036
212 857 0000
http://www.icp.org