In 2021, I taught a postgraduate seminar called “Trans-Gender Psychoanalysis” as part of the curriculum of the Adult Psychoanalytic Training Program and Fellowship in Hospital-Based Psychotherapy at the Austen Riggs Center. Teaching this seminar meant a lot to me personally, and I am making the syllabus available publicly to provide a resource for other people looking to teach or learn about trans identities in psychoanalysis. (Image credit: Ted Eytan [CC BY-SA 2.0])
Psychoanalysis has somewhat neglected the study of substance use disorders—frequently seeing them as a symptom of “the real problem” and hence not attending closely to addiction and substance use in and of themselves. This post documents a syllabus for a postgraduate seminar I taught on contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives on addiction.
Many authors quote Freud as saying “If I had my life to live over again I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis.” However, Freud did not exactly say this, and was not as ardent a supporter of the occult as some would like to believe. And do we really need him to be? Do we even want colonial, materialist science to incorporate the occult?
Conventional wisdom holds that avoiding your emotions cuts you off from important data about yourself, but did you know that habitually flinching from feeling can also lead to severe distortions of social cognition, conceptual coherence, and reality testing? In this post, I explore this idea and draw out some of the relational implications of the intimate connection between thinking, self-coherence, and affect.
In this post, I outline and use Jung’s basic principles to: (1) define Jung’s four function types of sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling; (2) elaborate how the functions interact with extraversion and introversion to move us from two basic types to eight; and (3) describe how the functions are organized within a person to bring us from 8 types to 16.
Extraversion and introversion are well-known concepts, but their originator, Carl Jung, used them very differently than we do. Jung focused not on how outgoing or socially skilled someone is, but rather on the basic operations of the psyche. Personality was therefore not a high-level averaging of our behavior, but rather a consequence of our fundamental way of being in and orienting to the world.
Psychoanalysis emerged during a high tide of interest among scientists and laypeople alike in psychical research and spiritualism. Freud and subsequent psychoanalysts held conflicting, ambivalent attitudes toward the occult. In this post, I explore some of the historical attitudes held toward the occult and divination within the field of psychoanalysis.