Jazz pianist and radio host Marian McPartland died last night

This week Marian McPartland died at the age of 95. Until two years ago she had hosted Piano Jazz, the longest running cultural show –more than thirty years—on National Public Radio, and had interviewed and performed with all the major jazz musicians of the time. Moving from her native Great Britain with her American soldier (and musician) husband to the United States, she eventually moved to NYC where she sought out her idol, bebop pianist Mary Lou Williams. Her biographer Paul de Barros wrote that McPartland, instead of competitiveness, had a ‘we’re in this together’ attitude, and she brought this camaraderie to her radio program. The improvised conversations with guests, she said, were like jazz itself, “spontaneous and free-flowing.”  She spoke of how concerts communicated this freedom (in part, I suppose, by modeling it, being with it) to audiences.

In addition to improvisation, McPartland’s Piano Jazz and contemporary psychoanalysis shared many things. For example, McPartland made her show about her guests, not just about herself. She was open hearted and inclusive, admiring and accepting.  Quoting from NPR, “[S]he reminded listeners every week that we’re all in this together.” I have to smile to myself when I remember McPartland’s throaty voice, but today I smile thinking of how jazz and improve itself (think Phil Ringstrom) can so inform an analytic attitude. I smile to myself when I imagine sharing with McPartland the camaraderie of how we both feel about our respective career paths.  She said, “You have to love what you do.” 

Implicit Communication and Musical Performances

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition this morning reported that Chia-Jung Tsay, a classical pianist and a psychologist at University College, London recently published a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that amateur and professional musicians could best predict the winner of classical piano competitions when they could only see, but not hear, the competitors performances, better able to predict than even both those who either only heard the performance, or, surprisingly, both saw and heard it. NPR said, “Incredibly, the volunteers were better able to identify the winners when they couldn't hear the music at all,” suggesting that the original judges “heavily over-weighted visual information…” 

Since good looks did not seem to be a factor, Tsay concluded, ‘There is something about visual information that is better able to convey cues such as passion or involvement or creativity. These elements are very much a part of high-quality performance.’  This ability to predict winners has also been shown to apply to voters predicting winners of elections when they watched videos of the political candidates with the sound off. Both Tsay and the reporter seemed to intimate that people actually do judge a book by its cover, but I saw Tsay’s finding to be commensurate with what neurobiology has shown about the power of implicit communication.

Because there is joy in the communion of shared emotional experience, and as we are hardwired to read the intentions of others through implicit cues (gestures, facial expressions, prosody, etc), and, furthermore, as these cues are more important in understanding another than even the spoken word (or, musical note, as it turns out), then it makes sense that visual cues about the musician during a musical performance heavily contribute to the enjoyment of the experience beyond just what is pleasurable to the ear.  As it turns out, Tsay’s experiment adds to the growing body of knowledge that the contribution of implicit cues is more heavily weighted by the human brain.  She says so herself when she states that visual information better conveys passion, involvement and creativity. I can’t think of a greater joy than being caught up in a shared experience of passion and creativity, be it in dance, debate, music, making love, or delighting in a toddler’s joy at discovering an acorn can roll down the sidewalk.

Sympathy for the Devil

Wounded Monster: Hitler's Path from Trauma to Malevolence by Theo L. Dorpat

Next month on September 18 TBIPS resumes classes, including the first year course “Introduction to Psychoanalytic Concepts.” While the privileging of left brain narrative (e.g. free association) and insight (understanding via verbal interpretation) have long been emphasized by traditional training programs, TBIPS starts its instruction on the being with patients. What is an open attitude that invites possibility into the treatment room? An exercise to foster an open and accepting attitude includes having the clinician student imagine all the ways s/he might empathize with the most unacceptable of human creatures, such as the murderer, the homophobe, the pedophile.

Such is the call to stretch the limits of empathy in Theo L. Dorpat’s book Wounded Monster, which pointedly, and poignantly, describes consequences of chronic childhood trauma— occurring without comfort and secure attachment to mitigate it—specifically regarding its most egregious of outcomes, that which helped produce the likes of Adolf Hitler. Adolf’s father Alois dominated and abused Adolf and his mother Klara, both physically and emotionally. Like many children who must submit to abuse at the hands of those who are meant to protect and nurture them, Adolf developed impairment in emotional regulation, antisocial behavior, and did poorly in school. His depressed mother Klara, having lost three infants before Adolf was born, alternated between withdrawal and overindulging and overprotecting him. Stop the presses! Dorpat surmises that Klara was unable to provide a secure base for, or consistently nurture and attune to Adolf. Playfulness was absent in his childhood and he failed to develop interpersonal skills, withdrawing from or bullying others. It is speculated (perhaps reductionistic) that Hitler’s hatred of his father (whom he sometimes suspected was part Jewish)and wish to protect his mother was enacted in his hatred of Jews and his mega-maniacal wish to bolster supreme his motherland.

Dorpat’s book on Hitler is a smorgasbord on child development and on attachment and trauma research, as well as outlines what is essential to a healthy psyche capable of personal and interpersonal success. Dorpat applies “contemporary trauma theory …to explain …Hitler’s psychiatric disorders and personality malformations, especially his malevolence.” That Dorpat frames this knowledge in the context of Hitler’s childhood is an expression of Dorpat’s capacity to empathize with even the most heinous of human creatures. Perhaps we might utilize this study to open ourselves to the trauma of even our most “hateful borderline” (Slochower) patients, patients who often see themselves as worth hating.

Candidate praises training

I found TBIPS as I looked on-line for a psychoanalytic community to call home after moving to Jacksonville, FL following my Psy.D. program at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Despite numerous psychoanalytic supervisors, psychoanalytic courses, and personal psychoanalytic psychotherapy while in graduate school, I still felt not quite ripe with my own education and training. I honestly appreciated in myself that nagging feeling of wanting more, intellectually and professionally. The clinicians I’ve admired most have been the ones with endless amounts of training and they paradoxically combined their experience and expertise with humble disclosures of feeling they didn’t know enough and needed to know more.

 My clients have also indirectly nudged me toward getting more training, as their efforts to get better and their “faith” and “belief” in my ability to help them were all taken as hints as “Go get more training, girl!” I was drawn to TBIPS, in part, by its offerings of long distance training via Skype and telephone. I am deeply grateful to TBIPS for being my intellectual home, and an answer to this need for professional sustenance and support. I’m a Filipino American woman, and there’s a saying in Filipino called “utang na loob.” It is translated as “debt of gratitude” and signifies the Filipino cultural trait of “reciprocity” in relationships or the “debt of one’s inner self.” I feel indebted so, and deeply grateful for TBIPS’ psychoanalytic training and for supervision.

Training and supervision at TBIPS have helped me feel more connected to my clients, helped me to express that connection, to be more human with my clients, and to listen in a particular way that makes sense of our clients’ most troubling symptoms. Psychoanalytic supervision has sensitized me to the ways that I may unintentionally shame clients in well-meaning attempts to be helpful, and how to normalize intense feelings and emotions reported by clients and mutually felt by myself as therapist. It has brought the world of psychoanalytic literature to my home, suggesting relevant articles by contemporary relational psychoanalysts, which I feel have connected me with a wider psychoanalytic community that has such a rich history of thinking deeply about common, difficult, tricky clinical scenarios. Ultimately I feel stimulated and nurtured, and much less isolated as I do the day-to-day work of inching towards emotional intimacy and understanding of clients. Clients report feeling understood, accepted, seen, recognized, as we attempt to bear witness to their emotional suffering. The results have been longer patient lengths of treatment due to decreased premature terminations, more spontaneous expressions of gratitude by clients, greater retention and return rates of clients, and lower no-show rates.

Rose Zayco, PsyD

Pussy Riot: Because She is not a sinful creature

Psychoanalysis strives toward increasing freedom to live an increasingly broadened, enriched life. I am glad to be an American citizen, born in the USA, in the country whose Constitution has survived longer than any other. It was hammered out and became the law of the land more than a decade after the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence-- the latter, of course, the event we today celebrate. Last week the Supreme Court broadened our freedoms by striking down DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act which narrowly defined marriage so as to discriminate against homosexual couples). I have long awaited the day when women would be free of their minority status, too. I have wondered why nations don’t rise up in outrage against rape as a weapon of war, against female genital mutilation, glass ceilings, sex slaves, child brides, and other socially sanctioned violence against women.

So I smile when I think of the Feminist - punk rock - protest - performance group Pussy Riot, formed the day Russian President Medvedev announced that power would be handed back to Putin for six more years. Mass protests ensued. Members of Pussy Riot were arrested six months later for their performance on Feb 21, 2012 in Christ the Savior Cathedral. This hooliganism garnered a two year prison sentence for two of its members. Pussy Riot accused Putin of depriving Russia the right to decide its fate. ‘Nadia’ says the alter of the cathedral where the feminists performed was chosen because “a woman should occupy it.” [the altar] “I believe that a woman should be allowed to run services and that a woman should stand at the altar because she is not a sinful creature.” What a concept: egalitarianism in religions.

Called “demons” by those who support the Russian Orthodox Church, Pussy Riot says, “As artists, our goal is to change humanity,…to free society from prejudices and stereotypes, to be the voice of the voiceless….We are jokers, jester, holy fools.” Their offensiveness, to some, was meant to challenge complacency and ask uneasy questions. Psychoanalysts ask uneasy questions, striving not to give offense. Still, I applaud these exuberant, brave, questioning, young women, fundamentally non violent, their guerilla performances, colorfully clad and masked (in balaclava), waving purple flag, fisted as they scream their protest to electric guitar. A favorite is Putin Zassel, written in response to regime troops being sent out to contain anti-Putin demonstrators of Dec 24, 2011. Performed in Red Square Jan 2012:

Lyrics (to Performance No. 4

The masses rise up and move on the Kremlin

Explosions set off at Security headquarters

Bitches piss themselves behind red walls

Riot is here to abort the system

An attack at dawn? Don’t mind if I do

When we’re whipped for our freedom

The Mother of God will learn how to fight

Magdalene the feminist will join the demonstration

Uprising in Russia

The charm of protest

Uprising in Russia

Putin pissed himself

Uprising in Russia

We exist

Uprising in Russia

Riot! Riot!

Take to the streets!

Occupy Red Square

Show them your freedom

A citizen’s anger

Uprising in Russia

Riot! Riot!

Take to the streets

Occupy Red Square!

Show them your freedom

A citizen’s anger

As Egypt struggles to find its way, having ousted Morsi yesterday, perhaps the huddled masses yearning to breathe free will one day no longer need to be on U.S. soil to do so. I hope Egypt strives in its future toward a more inclusive constitution where woman are equal under the law and toward a democracy that does not solve its mistakes with military powers. Do Pussy Riot members Nadia and Masha  smile from their respective jail cells? Thomas Jefferson who, as you know, penned the Declaration of Independence, advocated revolution, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”  

Exuberance and surrender

For me, part of an analytic attitude is to lean into the patient’s point of view and open myself to the logical reasoning to be found in otherwise unfathomable behavior. It is in the transitional space that all is possible. Here we play with the idea of what it would be like were patient and I to be family or friends, enemies or lovers. No affect is banned, no sentiment eschewed. We aspire to unflinchingly explore limitless facets. If only our humanness did not get in the way. Ah, but there it is, to be bumped up against and used as an edge to see where is my beginning and my end, the boundary, the psychological skin.

For me, empathy is finding the good reason in the bad behavior. I want to go there, to be there, with my patients. It is an act of love. Despite its painfulness at times, that attitude usually reminds me of the joyful exuberance in the Angels and Airwaves song “Lifeline” The refrain is

We all make mistakes.
Here's your Lifeline.
If you want it, I want to.

I rephrase:

We all make mistakes.
Here's all I’ve learned.
If you want, I want to.

The song ends with the repeating, resounding

If you want, I want to.

If you want, I want to.

If you want, I want to.

If you want, I want to.

That’s what I want with my patients: if you want me to, I will go there with you.

Justices and Analysts

Today is the birthday of Sonia Sotomayor, the newest member to the U.S. Supreme Court and first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. She is fifty-nine years old.  In My Beloved World (2013) Sotomayor writes “I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down. People can’t understand someone else’s point of view.”  In discussing with Gwen Ifill on the PBS Newshour (Feb 20, 2013) an incident from her adolescence where “people do things without imagining the impact it’s having on the other person” –she is discussing a prank where she saw others, lying about an affair, cause havoc in a home— Sotomayor says, “If you don’t imagine what the person you’re speaking to might be thinking, you can’t anticipate how that person is reacting to you.”  [She is discussing mentalization and the capacity for intersubjectivity.] Sotomayor said she seeks to build bridges where other people see chasms. She looks at ways to connect instead of seeing differences, particularly apropos when seeking solutions. [Sotomayor is describing relationality.]

These words call to mind what contemporary psychoanalysts consider. In our profession we do not seek to overpower others with our point of view, our value system, or a singularly envisioned path. Instead, we strive to consider the other’s point of view, holding it in balance or tension with our own. We hope to keep in mind and imagine the impact we are having on the other, as well as to pay attention to the impact of our words in the moment that follows their having been spoken. We are also striving to be mindful of the impact the other’s words have on us.

Just as analysts are, Sotomayor is aware how her judicial duties call upon her to be self reflective about her personal experiences and biases and how these influence her thinking about a case. She tells Ifill, “We have to know those moments when our personal bias is seeping into our decision making.”  She adds, “It doesn’t mean that our personal experiences can’t permit us, and don’t permit us, to see arguments that others might miss.” She asks, “…When are we listening with an open mind and when has our mind been closed because of a bias?”— a question therapists might ask themselves every moment as well.

Movies: an Opportunity for Empathy

Perhaps the best known film critic of his time, Roger Ebert died this year on April 4, 2013 of thyroid cancer. Had he lived he would have been seventy-one years old today. Writing from the Chicago Sun Times, and syndicated in more than two hundred newspapers, he was the first movie critic to win the Pulitzer Prize. His TV show on public television At the Movies with rival critic Gene Siskel became a template for dialogue for future TV productions.

In 2005 he received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and said this:

Movies are the most powerful empathy machine of all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else’s life. A little bit, for a while, I can walk in somebody else’s shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief. 

I couldn’t help but think how psychoanalytic work allows the same opportunity. Analysts are privileged to hear the inner most workings of the human soul, its lofty spirit and it heinous or heroic reactions to the slings and arrows of misfortune. A lover of film, literature, and theater, I know all these media pale compared to the privileged observer-participant role of the psychoanalyst. Still, I continue to have a love affair with the movies. Thanks, Roger, for adding when I was a girl, the critical dimension to so many beloved movies. I remember you today.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, born June 14, 1811

From her capacity for empathy, when as a young woman she traveled from Cincinnati over the free state border of Ohio into the slave state of Kentucky, Harriet Beecher never forgot seeing the auction block and slave women’s babies wrested from their arms.  She would be tormented by its memory. The death of her own beloved small son Charlie from cholera gave her first hand knowledge of the pain of having a child wrested from your arms. From her grief, and remembering the cries of those slave mothers, Harriett Beecher Stowe was to write her bestselling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published March 20, 1852.

Her vision, in part to come to terms with what lesson her God might teach by such cruelty as taking Charlie from her, was not of Christ on the cross, but of a slave being whipped.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, like Frederick Douglass’ autobiography before it, would acquaint many more Americans with the evils of slavery. It reached an even greater audience when it was adapted into a popular play. Millions of Americans would rethink slavery. Frederick Douglass held it in gratitude. William Lloyd Garrison saw it change previously hardened hearts. The Fugitive Slave Law began to crumble. Abraham Lincoln upon meeting Stowe is purported to have said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

What I find fascinating is how one’s own pain can open up one to an other’s pain. It speaks to an analytic attitude where the therapist must grapple with dissociated parts of her/himself to enlarge the capacity to explore that of the patient’s. Our blind spots may inadvertently foreclose the transitional space into which might have been invited the unspeakable experience of the patient. An analysand of mine once asked if we might find “home” together, by which was meant a relational home, one where recognition of my pain might help us recognize his deeply ensconced pain. Easier said than done.

Hail the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance

This is written to encourage any psychoanalytically oriented therapist, no matter how experienced or confident, to consider volunteering time supervising budding therapists in China via the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance. Sharing the professional life we love, helping it flourish around the globe, and consolidating our own ideas about the work we do are among the many gifts we receive when we give our time to nurturing young professionals in China.

It was intriguing to me that psychoanalysis was being disseminated in China. I thought how exotic Freud might be to many parts of China just as names like Beijing and Shanghai seemed exotic to me.  I thought that no matter how little I might know, I was sure to know more than an entire culture which might never have grown up with id and ego and oedipal complex in its lexicon. I was eager to share what I know, partly because I love psychoanalysis and partly because I am a teacher already at my local psychoanalytic institute. I was excited to meet the young woman who had decided to dedicate herself to training in a culture where her interest would be pioneering. I imagined my supervisee must be heroic, or, at the very least, highly motivated. I might be available to her at 9:30 in the morning, but she saw me at 930pm after a long day. I was moved by her dedication.

We met first by Skype and it took a number of meetings for my ear to acclimate to her accent. I wondered how she was able to hear me, English being foreign to her. She always would have an English to Chinese dictionary on hand.  I always made an effort to enunciate each word carefully. It was sometimes slow going, but in a peaceful and meandering way, like tubing down a shady, spring fed river on a hot summer’s day. Frustration came from the internet Skype connection which too frequently dropped calls, lost video, or had whirring noises which obliterated our conversation. We soldiered on, calling back numerous times, sometimes giving up and confirming by email to meet again next week. It was a privilege to be part of this neophyte’s growth and development and we worked together for almost two years. When the sixty required supervisory sessions were up and she had to move on to a new supervisor, we took a half dozen more sessions for termination. There were tears on both our parts at our final goodbye.

Blossom and I got to know each other. What had drawn us to psychoanalysis? How might she and I make use of our time together? How did she conceive that people benefit from treatment? Blossom was quick to offer that patients, in the presence of the therapist, might better become aware of themselves and their feelings. Blossom hoped to help them face things in their minds and hearts that were difficult to face. There was always an opportunity for me to say something taken as smart as she had so little theory yet on which to rely, compare and contrast. This can be very confidence boosting for the supervisor. And nothing helps us grapple more with our theories than having to teach them. Thus, I highly recommend to all the supervising of a younger colleague.

Sometimes we discussed particular topics like ambivalence or empathy.  I told her empathy was about understanding the good sense of bad behavior, this long before we ever expect the patient to change behavior.  Sometimes Blossom would read papers she had asked me to recommend and we would discuss them. Sometimes she expressed disappointment that many of her patients did not stay in treatment as long as she had hoped.  Sometimes she wondered how to manage the angry and disappointed feelings in her patients who were dissatisfied with their treatments. In other words, Blossom was becoming a therapist, struggling with all the same issues as any American therapist beginning to learn how to be with patients.

Sometimes supervision includes, as it does for the therapist vis a vis the patient, creating together a safe space to discuss one’s fears and fantasies. The medium is the message in supervision too.  The supervisor must create a reliable and accepting space which invites in all possible content. Over the course of Blossom’s work with her patient, Blossom was courageously candid about times when her understanding and empathy flagged, her wish for the patient to hurry up and get better, and about her desire sometimes, such as when the patient did not improve or cancelled sessions, to transfer her patient to a different therapist. We discussed enactments, and managing the therapist’s helplessness and sense of incompetence. Blossom could recognize that her patient’s new struggles indicated a forward edge for the patient, a finding of her own voice. Blossom too was finding a voice and I was gratified to be part of that.

One example of Blossom finding her voice occurred in the tenth month of our supervision when she had to present her case before her coworkers and to the psychiatrist in charge of the clinic. The psychiatrist was somewhat famous, was more experienced, and was very aware of his authority. Nonetheless, Blossom was able to joke with the psychiatrist about his criticisms which she thought misunderstood the case and, to her delight and surprise, the psychiatrist changed his tone and encouraged her to be herself with her patient. Blossom, likewise, reported she was able to be more openly questioning and critical about information presented in her classes. She felt more engaged with the training.

When it came time to say goodbye, Blossom reported that her patient, also reaching termination, had said to Blossom, ‘What else do we need to do? Nothing, so I leave my case material to you as a gift. The only thing I can do for you is to give my private material to you as a gift.’ I acknowledged that it had been a gift to me to work with her in supervision. Blossom noted that she too had received gifts, from me, that would last, as what one gains from therapy lasts, after treatment ends.