The IPI Blog

International Psychotherapy Institute blog, issues relating to psychodynamic psychotherapy, object relations theory and technique, psychoanalysis.

Our Man in Haiti, Part VII

By Kent Ravenscroft, M.D. IPI Emeritus Faculty Tuesday 3/23 Mirogoane:  Rendezvous with the Past Today I go to Mirogoane again. But first I need to bring you up to date on something.  When I returned the Iridium phone to Stephanie after the Platon beach party, I was about to leave when she said, “Oh, Kent, …

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Our Man in Haiti, Part VI

By Kent Ravenscroft, M.D. IPI Emeritus Faculty The Mirogane Clinic Stephanie, my IMG Director, mentioned that we’d be switching my beloved mobile mental health clinics in the countryside back into the Notre Dame Hospital right in the middle of Petit Goave. To her surprise, I went off like a sky rocket, ranting about how these …

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Our Man In Haiti, Part V

By Kent Ravenscroft, M.D. IPI Emeritus Faculty I was in a narrow muddy rutted road between tents when I saw a green steamroller, or maybe one of those big, bug-like French street sweepers, coming straight at me.  Nowhere to hide.  So I quickly rolled over to the side in a panic.  Then I awoke.  It …

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Our Man in Haiti, Part IV

By Kent Ravenscroft, M.D. IPI Emeritus Faculty Saturday came around fast. I had to stand up in front of local Haitian IMC clinic doctors and nurses, and talk for 5 hours about the psychosocial impact of what they and their patients had been through.  As I’ve said, public speaking and lectures are not my favorite …

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Our Man In Haiti, Part III

By Kent Ravenscroft, M.D. IPI Emeritus Faculty Fifty years ago when I was 20 I did my anthropology fieldwork in Masson, named for the remains of an old French plantation. I would periodically take a break, hop on a brightly colored Tap Tap or small camionette, and head back to Port-au-Prince to join the Richardot …

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Our Man in Haiti, Parts I and II

By Kent Ravenscroft MD IPI Emeritus Faculty Part 1 Haiti is an amazing country. It is devastated by yet another disaster, yet the strength and spirit of Haitians is stunning.   I know it well.  I spent time there as a young man learning Creole and writing my thesis on possession and its link to dissociation.  …

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A Group Dynamics Approach to Understanding America’s Current “Collapse”

By Charles Ashbach, Ph.D. In 1921 Sigmund Freud published his famous monograph Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Driven by the madness, savagery and destruction of the First World War, he set about expanding psychoanalytic principles to explain the dynamics of social cohesion. It’s worthwhile that the original German title of the work …

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Russia Letter

By David E. Scharff, M.D. October, 2008 Our invitation to Russia came from one of our International Psychotherapy Institute Fellows, Patrizia Pallaro, who returned from teaching in Moscow to inform us that two of our books were being translated. Did we know about that? Several months of discussion later, royalties and permissions arranged in medias …

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Faith and Prejudice, Part Two: Identity

By Michael Stadter, Ph.D. In my previous posting, I described a remarkable trip that I took a year ago to the Middle East in the company of Christian seminarians of various denominations. The trip stimulated many personal reflections on faith and prejudice and I wrote about some of them. In this blog, I look at …

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Faith and Prejudice, Part I

By Michael Stadter, Ph.D. “Now we hope that none of you will be slain but we wish you to know that the Kingdom of Heaven will be given as a reward to those who shall be killed in this war [against Muslims].” (Pope Leo IV, 9th century CE) “The martyr [referring to suicide bombers], if …

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