Ferro said that in the few days of this weekend conference he had not tried to convey concepts.  He is grateful for all the models he has learned over the years (Bion, Klein, Winnicott, Ogden), but what matters to him most is the democracy of models; for instance, Ogden’s “the analytic third” can be thought of as being a concentration …

Having studied the analytic process as one in which the Beta elements are represented in images (pictograms) and then in narrative form, we moved on to look at the process that occurs in reverse, in Frederico Fellini’s dream book.  Fellini had a daily habit of writing down his dreams and then drawing the image that …

Ferro showed us how to think of the history as a collection of facts or as a dream dreamt by the presenter of the case history. When a patient describes an avoidant attachment to a withdrawn and unresponsive mother, we can think of her as a dead mother. The patient may react by feeling dead …

Distinguished analyst Antonino Ferro, president of the Italia Psychoanalytic Association, opened our April Weekend Conference by presenting his unique approach to the clinical situation as a waking dream. The therapist receives unmetabolized proto-emotions generated in the here-and-now of the therapeutic relationship and contains them, first as a pictogram (image), until he/she can present them as …

 Couple and Family Psychoanalysis Around the World Monica Vorchheimer (BA), Mary Morgan (UK), Elizabeth Palacios (Madrid), Félix Velasco Alva (Mexico); John Zinner (Washington); Karen Proner (New York), Lin Tao (London and Beijing); and Susana Muszkat (San Paulo) who participate in an IPA working group chaired by David Scharff came to join IPI faculty and guests …

Scharff, J. S. (2013).  Book review of Shrink Rap.  In Psychodynamic Psychiatry 41(3): 473-477. Posted by permission of Guilford Press.  Shrink Rap, by Dinah Miller, Annette Hanson, and Steven Roy Daviss, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2011, 255 pp. As a psychoanalyst, I was not drawn to the title of this book, Shrink Rap, or to its focus …

Jill Scharff, Caroline Sehon, Janine Wanlass The International Psychotherapy Institute  (IPI) and Westminster College are the proud recipients of a research grant award from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in support of our jointly conceived Research Grant Proposal on Teleanalysis.  This proposal, written by Janine Wanlass, Principal Investigator, was submitted to the IPA by Caroline …

This recent article in the New York Times is an important admission by the psychiatric community that the notion of having the biological answer to mental illness is a myth.  What biological psychiatry is still missing is the important biological evidence that is revealed in affective neuroscience and developmental psychology about the underpinnings of the …

CNN has recently posted a very interesting article about psychoanalysis in Argentina and how it is thriving there.  If you would like to see the article follow this link:http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/28/health/argentina-psychology-therapists/index.html.  A very interesting cultural difference in attitudes to the analytic therapies.