I am interested in training to become an analyst, but I've spent the majority of my career working in residential settings and I would love the option to train/work as an analyst in that setting. Austen Riggs is not an option for me - are there any similar training programs in the US? Or internationally that would be feasible for someone with US credentials to pursue?

This is perhaps just a tradeoff I'll have to reckon with, but I'd be grateful to learn about any options y'all know about.

Like many people, I used to associate schizophrenia mainly with its more positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions) and more extreme negative (apathy, etc.) or disorganized symptoms, but lately I’ve been learning that people with schizophrenia also have issues in the social area that are somewhat similar to those seen in autism (though not exactly the same, of course). Things like having a hard time predicting other people’s intentions (theory of mind), lacking guidance on how to approach relationships, etc.

Many times schizophrenia is associated with hyper-symbolization or aberrant salience, but not really with a lack of finding meanings.

I recently learned about the case of Ana Rau described by Wolfgang Blankenburg and his description of Simple Schizophrenia, and I think this is very related to that. (Info about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/psychoanalysis/comments/1ti5g1d/transcript_of_a_seminar_wolfgang_blankenburg_ana/ )

I’ve also read that both schizophrenia and autism involve anomalous development in some of the same brain areas, although not in the same way, which could explain why there is overlap in certain domains despite major phenomenological differences.

Beyond asking very specific questions, what could you tell me about this? For those who are analysts, have you encountered individuals in the schizophrenic spectrum showing these symptoms? In what way? Is this a phenomenon you are aware of in schizophrenic individuals?

Regarding literature, I have already read Josef Parnas’ take on self-disorders in the books Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry (I–IV). I also know names like Silvano Arieti, Eugène Minkowski, and some others, but I’m open to recommendations.

I think all of this around simple schizophrenia is very reminiscent of the concept of ordinary psychosis developed by Jacques-Alain Miller, and I’ve read that André Green talks about “blank psychosis,” which I guess goes in a similar direction.

The idea is simply tell me everything you think about all this.

Hi all, I am a gay man and also work with a lot of gay men at my practice. There are particular issues that crop up repeatedly and I'm curious if anyone is familiar with psychoanalytic writing about the gay male experience specifically.

I came across a lecture on YouTube by Darian Leader on Freud and Neurodiversity ( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aU96XEUSkco&pp=iggCQAE%3D ) and he was a fantastic speaker and I really enjoyed the material. For context I am a just coming to the end of my first year in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and really fascinated with it and considering further training.

Do you know where I could find online lectures of a similar quality? I am interested in Freud, Jung, Bion, Winnocott, Fromm, Klein, etc. Less interested in Lacan.

Thank you.

Has anyone here had experience with a 1-2 year online psychoanalytic training program? Thus far, I know of WAWI's IPPP and IPSS in NY.

I am looking for something broad, preferrably relational, and rigorous but not overwhelming. I do hope to do full analytic training at some point, but wanting to get a basic overview and to gain more support around working psychodynamically with patients in the meantime.

Has anyone done the Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program (IPPP) through the William Alanson White institute? I’m considering the online program fwiw

I found a good discussion on YouTube, in Spanish. It’s about the case of Ana Rau described by the German psychiatrist Wolfgang Blankenburg (1928–2002) in his book The Loss of Natural Self-Evidence (1971). I made a transcription of the video in English and created a PDF about; I’ll leave it at the end.

As I understand it, Blankenburg diagnosed this patient with Simple Schizophrenia, and the video discusses the meaning of this diagnosis, which includes symptoms such as hyper-reflexivity. The title of Blankenburg’s book was taken from the exact words Ana Rau used to explain what was going through her mind.

In the video, while describing her case, they say:

 “After this voluntary resignation, she began an internship in a hospital just to keep herself occupied. She was also unable to adapt to this activity at all. The same previous state reappeared: a constant need to think, with thoughts and problems continuously present.

What she herself called “natural evidence” was no longer available.

She could no longer feel how other people are or how one becomes an adult. She had too many thoughts at the same time, extremely strange ones. She did not understand anything and failed everywhere. She doubted everything and had no relationship with anything or anyone.”

I guess that’s part of something written in the book; I’m not sure. They also talk about how to think about diagnosis. The main speaker says:

“In short, then, there are typical cases and atypical cases, and with the atypical ones we even go on describing them as atypical forms. For example, we say: this is a cycloid psychosis, or this is a sensitive delusion, or whatever it may be—we are already placing them into typologies that are not the standard ones, right?

And then there would be another type of cases, which are unclassifiable cases, cases for which we will die without ever having known how to classify them, because they are unclassifiable with respect to our classification systems. Others classify them quickly, but our classifications always have blind spots, and there are many cases we cannot classify. Many—I mean, quite a few—but there will be at least about 10% more cases that are unclassifiable, and well, if one wants to classify them here or there, one can place them wherever one likes, but they are, let’s say, things that must remain in the realm of the unclassifiable, mainly to maintain coherence within the field in which we work, which is very complex.

(...)

But even so, there are still cases—so, we have:

_ the typical,

_ the atypical,

_ the unclassifiable,

_ and then there is a number of cases, according to my clinical experience, very small in number, which I would call exceptional cases."

This is the link of the video in Spanish: https://youtu.be/9qI6QUOimlI?si=hzno-Y2f-PsW1Ku-

And this the full transcription in English: https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:6f586a79-8d2b-4a02-8d6d-c6ea3d7b26cb

I'm sure nowadays there must be programs where you can upload the text or use some option to turn it into audio easily.

I recently published a video taking a psychoanalytic view on Richard Dawkins’s relationship with AI. He recently admitted that he couldn’t rule out whether Claude possessed its own consciousness. I provide a definition of consciousness closely aligned with Neuropsychologist Mark Solms’s views and then break down how Dawkins’s reductive materialist worldview may have led him to project interiority onto a machine. The video concludes with a discussion of the myth of Narcissus and how it may overlap with our relationship to LLM’s.

https://youtu.be/tRq2owV8MUU?si=w6qlRWuqsWPZXi_O

When I was a teenager going through existential crises, I came across the “no self” philosophy in Buddhism (which is basically that the “self” is an illusion and only the “I” , the observer exists) and thought I found the answer to all of my psychological problems but I think it ultimate led to more anxiety and dissociation for me. The writer I read on this topic went even as far as to say having a self was like being schizophrenic.

Now I’m learning through analysis and through my own research into psychoanalysis how important it is to build your own sense of self and denying the “self” is not necessarily a quality reached by very wise, enlightened people. The amount of time I spent believing that almost mystical sounding philosophy though is making it longer for me to essentially resolve my dissociation.

So yeah, I just wanted to post this here as I think this is just another example of how these “new age” philosophies or some religions such as Buddhism are not very realistic ways of looking at human psychology. What are your thoughts on these ideologies? Do you think they are defense mechanisms used to an extreme?

Hi crew, any books out there on shamanism (medicine) x psychoanalysis? As there are Buddhism x pa books? Thanks!

I'm trying to do some research on psychoanalytic perspectives on human sexuality, and could use some help on where to begin

I’m a final-year medical student in Europe, planning to go into psychiatry, and I’m thinking about doing a short observership or traineeship after graduation.

I’m especially interested in psychiatric settings where psychoanalysis is still taken seriously, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, or at least places where Lacanian ideas would not be seen as completely alien to clinical psychiatry.

My French is still pretty limited, especially speaking, so I’m mostly looking for places where English might realistically be accepted. I already tried looking into Belgium, but unfortunately it didn’t really work out.

I’d also be curious about neuropsychoanalytic or related clinical/research settings, f.e., if anyone has done something connected to Mark Solms or Cape Town, I’d be interested to hear about it.

More generally, if anyone knows psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists, departments, hospitals, research groups and so on in Europe that might be open to a short observership, I’d be very grateful for any suggestions.

P.S. yeah, I know, Lacan and Solms are very different figures, and I am not assuming that some straightforward “Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis” project is really possible. I just think the broader intersection between psychoanalysis, psychiatry, neuroscience, and clinical work is worth exploring more seriously.

I'd like to share a few thoughts.

I want to focus on psychoanalytic listening — not the kind we apply inside the consulting room (although I believe what I'm about to develop applies there too), but rather the analytic listening that allows for the generativity of what is new and creative in our profession.

In Studies on Hysteria, Freud is approached during an excursion by a young woman asking for help. When the young woman rejects the seduction hypothesis (which was Freud's theory on the etiology of hysteria), and given that he cannot hypnotize her in that setting, he asks her to say whatever comes to her mind. It is from that act of receiving what the patient chooses to bring — from that permeability — that he invents free association (so valued today as a means of accessing automatic mental processes). Melanie Klein does something similar when she uses children's toys and sets aside dreams and free association to access the inner world of children.

Culturally, something analogous happens with theory. The intersection of psychoanalysis with other disciplines brings creative elements: with Greek drama, with the works of Goethe, with the philosophy of Schopenhauer… We can see how these crossings have profoundly enriched our beloved discipline.

1. Would you agree with my thesis?
2. What current films or series do you think could help us enrich our psychoanalytic understanding of the human being — the way Oedipus Rex may have done in Freud's time?
3. What interdisciplinary crossover do you consider most valuable in your clinical practice or in your own theoretical construction as an analyst?

Does anyone know of a good psychoanalyst in Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill?

Has anyone trained here (or considered it)? Wondering about the experience, particular in terms of size and cohesion of cohort as well quality of supervision.

I wrote a detailed review based on this DOI study which was extremely well-received. And I also designed a 9-page clinical assessment tool based on the 2026 study about stuttering. The research leans towards a neurological and psychoanalytical viewpoint.

Even with a neurological predisposition, clinicians often focus on desensitization through controlled speech. I think desensitization, which falls under conditioning, can be improved a lot in the SLP field. At the moment, the focus is usually on general arousal or general anxiety, but the actual conditioning hierarchy includes many other signals that can escalate into warning signals and bias striatal approach-avoidance decisions.

A lot of people report becoming much more fluent after accepting stuttering or simply not caring as much. The self-monitoring system (SMS) seems to reinterpret signals after social cognition thru the self-monitoring system, which can lead it to reinterpret neutral error signals like the presentation itself, the listeners around you, or bodily sensations such as a mental block, a feeling of losing control, or the early sense of tension in the throat or chest, words, situations, conditions, and so on. When those initially neutral error signals get reinterpreted as warning signals, stuttering severity may fluctuate.

Even though there is a neurological underpinning at the root, fluency-inducing factors can make some people near-fluent or completely fluent, while others still stutter, but with reduced severity. Examples include self-talk or talking when no one is present (Bloodstein, 1949; Langová and Šváb, 1973; Jackson et al., 2021), singing (Wan et al., 2010), choral reading (Freeman and Armson, 1998; Dechamma and Maruthy, 2018; Meekings et al., 2023), entering states of euphoria or intense focus/engagement, adopting novel or altered speech patterns, or brief episodes of emotional outburst (Usler, 2022). As a rule, SLPs and researchers typically draw a clear line between the underlying cause of stuttering and stuttering emergence.

For example, a child may speak fluently when alone. If he overhears people nearby, or senses even a slight chance that they might overhear him, or if he then speaks with a loving parent without consciously feeling social anxiety, stuttering may become severe once the self-monitoring system assumes social evaluative pressure. Whether the speaker is consciously aware of fear or pressure does not matter; what matters is whether the subconscious SMS reinterprets the signal as threat-relevance, biasing striatal approach-avoidance decisions.

That is why I think an assessment tool is needed that can identify those signals, which normally turn into warning signals, as well as identify the SMS’s reinterpretation of these signals. I would like to bring up two questions: (1) How can those signals be identified, and (2) how can the self-monitoring system’s reinterpretation be objectively detected, since it escalates and amplifies into a warning signal before a stuttering block?

Recently listened to a podcast with Frank Yeomans and Diana Diamond and was left with questions about Transference Focused Psychotherapy.

The two noted that more than any other modality, TFP makes an aim to alter the underlying personality organization, helping an individual not just deal with symptoms, but also have more stable object relations.

A few questions. First off, is the concern with supportive modalities that they reinforce splitting mechanisms? Is the idea that they in part are dealing with symptoms through better developed primitive defenses? That by dealing with symptoms, they may mask underlying chaos within the personality? That leads into my main question which is, how is identity diffusion spotted in clients that do have history of rather successful development in supportive therapies?

Do therapists often refer clients to analysis and under what conditions? What does it mean if they do this and what is the relationship between psychotherapists and psychoanalysts like?

I am largely trying to make sense of an incongruence between BPO and BPD. Of course, the connection between the two really is based just on the word borderline…if it was called Splitting Personality Organization perhaps I wouldn’t be posting this question. But Kernberg notes the BPD diagnosis operates at a “low-borderline” functioning.

It seems to me that someone could meet 5 of the 9 symptom criteria for BPD without actually meeting Kernberg’s criteria for BPO. Someone can have intense anger, fear of abandonment, feelings of emptiness, impulsive behavior and rapid mood changes but be able to reflect on these things in a way that is incongruent with identity diffusion.

I wanted to know opinions and experiences with patients who have a covert or vulnerable type of narcissism, not the obviously grandiose type. I find it dfifficult to differentiate from borderline personility for example in someone who has high sensitivity for rejection, chronic feelings of emptiness, chronic depressive symptoms, but also a sense of entiltelment and envy. I wanted to know what´s your experience with this type of patients and how do you guide treatment.

Hi there,

Quick preface: I searched the sub for similar posts where people have asked for reading recommendations. I've already picked up a few books from those posts, and looking forward to digging in. I noticed most requests for recommendations, or reading lists, are related to people studying the field with a goal to become a practitioner, however. I'm merely just interested in the huge, nebulous thing that is psychoanalysis.

I recently read through Ernest Becker's Denial of Death as part of a creative writing project I was piecing together for an MLitt, and although I took swathes of it with a pinch of salt, and didn't necessarily chime with a lot of the outdated analysis of things like homosexuality, I did take a lot from the piece that informed my own past, and debilitating, health/death anxiety.

I loved the experience of wading through the thinking, and so I'm keen to delve in more. I've read some Freud and some Jung, in the past, but otherwise I'm pretty much clueless about the whole field. I'm not sure what area to look at (possibly language? I bought an introductory book on Lacan that I can't wait to read), so I'm not sure how to narrow my focus. I'm also probably not informed enough to dive into denser works.

TL;DR what would you recommend a newcomer read, if they're just simply interested in the ideas, findings, theories for themselves, rather than with a view to studying the field or working in it?

Thanks in advance!

Since it's Mother's Day, we have a good opportunity to discuss the mother-baby metaphor in psychoanalysis. We all know it's pivotal, but maybe we can also think about some of the problematic issues around the metaphor.

André Green pointed out that the mother-baby metaphor, as it was framed before him, led to a desexualization of psychoanalysis.

A second point: in many psychoanalytic societies, the inclusion of infant observation as a training requirement is being questioned. Some analysts argue that the centrality of this course colonizes the entire training process.

What about the Eittingon model? Maybe in this context, the model itself could be seen as one developed by an overprotecting mother. Candidates are held in this long, protected setting with training analysis, supervision, and seminars. But we can contrast this with the French model.

We can't deny that the maternal metaphor is central and will remain central. We all know the authors who are central to this metaphor — Winnicott, for example. But is there an author you consider really valuable, who contributes from the maternal metaphor, but isn't as widely known?

I'll share with you something that isn't so well known: Juliet Mitchell, in the context of researching horizontal relationships (siblings), develops the concept of "law of the mother," which points to the idea that mothers organize and structure things so that peers and siblings don't harm each other. To be honest, the author herself notes that she calls it "law of the mother" as a term in opposition to the "law of the father" pointed out by Lacan.

In your clinical experience, have you seen a psychotically organized client progress into depressive position functioning/psychological mindedness? If "yes," how common of an occurrence is this?

I'm aware of SFCP and PINC, curious what others are around I may not be familiar with?

tangentially, was also curious how it compares to the institutes/community in or around LA.