An Introduction
I will use this blog to record reflections during my psychoanalytic training at the William Alanson White Institute — mainly, I expect, on the reading that I do. I began this training last year in the Institute’s Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program (IPPP), and I regret not having kept any consistent record of my impressions. Ideally, this blog will motivate me to clarify my reactions to this ongoing experience, both for my own reference and for the benefit of anyone kind enough to visit my site. I am not an expert here. My PhD is in the history of philosophy, and while I’ve long been curious about psychoanalysis, I am now reading much of the “canon” for the first time. Perhaps this is an advantage for readers approaching this same material from similar backgrounds or levels: likely they are struggling with similar difficulties, questions about the same texts, and may profit from the example of someone working out tentative solutions on his own. Readers who know more about psychoanalysis than I do, who have had greater experience in this “world” — both clinicians and scholars — are invited to correct my mistakes and fill in any gaps. With your help I won’t mislead myself or others too badly in my efforts to grasp a discourse with a reputation for difficulty.
The White Institute is the originator and contemporary home of interpersonal psychoanalysis, and so I expect that the better part of my reading diet will tilt in this direction, or at least won’t deviate too far from it. Certainly, most of the writing to which IPPP students are exposed falls squarely within these parameters, and I imagine the current track will reflect more continuity than discontinuity. Nonetheless, I will also post my reactions to works that do not connect in any obvious way, or connect only problematically, to the interpersonal tradition.
Finally, I want to append an intellectual-autobiographical note, by way of explanation for my enrollment at this particular institute. What, after all, has drawn me to interpersonal psychoanalysis and the White Institute, rather than the traditions represented at the various other institutes in NYC alone? As I make plain on other parts of this website, my main interests as an academic, my intellectual center of gravity, have been the great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and that collection of thinkers now usually glossed with the phrases “Frankfurt School” and “critical theory.” In fact, there are compelling connections between each of these interests and what is now called interpersonal psychoanalysis.
The first is a true elective affinity, rather than a matter of direct or indirect influence. For many of the themes, preoccupations, and claims most characteristic of this tradition received early, systematic attention from Hegel, who among philosophers is now appreciated as the quintessential thinker of “recognition,” “intersubjectivity,” and “sociality” more generally. The second connection — the path from critical theory to the White Institute — is more direct: one of the best known Frankfurt School thinkers, Erich Fromm, was a founder of this Institute. In light of this association, it is unsurprising to find interpersonal psychoanalysis echoing the Frankfurt School premise that an irrational or “sick” culture will undermine the psychological needs of its members.
I hope to post around once a week, usually on Sundays.