modern psychoanalysis
American Sniper
When asked to write an entry on the BGSP blog site about the film American Sniper memories of my time in the service, unexpectedly, came back to me. I recalled the moment I was handed my M1 rifle and how the drill instructor shouted a chant we all had to repeat. “This is my rifle this is my gun, one is for killing the other for fun” and then the Rifleman’s Creed.
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will…
My rifle and I know that what counts in war are not the rounds we fire, the noise of neither our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit…
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will…
Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace!
That creed, a powerful prayer-like chant is one of the first experiences a young marine has and it is followed by many such injunctions and testaments to a new way of life. Yet, no matter how many others follow the rifleman’s creed, the rifle gets embedded into one like nothing else.
In the Marine Corps, no matter what eventual MOS (military occupation specialty) you draw, at heart you are a rifleman. On the sands of Iwo Jima during the Second World War, a veteran of that invasion told me that his duty as a supply sergeant made no difference as Japanese fighters attacked; he was called to be part of a defensive effort that had him firing his rifle all through the night till the attack was repelled.
In boot camp, once you are issued your rifle it goes everywhere with you and cannot be more than 12 inches from where you sleep. Sometimes, if you messed up in training, those 12 inches would disappear and it became your bunkmate.
BiRDMAN or THE UNEXPECTED ViRTUE OF iGNORANCE
Once in a while a film comes along that seems as interesting and layered as a psychoanalytic dialogue. Birdman is such a one. From the many Hollywood and Broadway in- jokes, through the Raymond Carver story serving as the play within the play, all the way back through Greek mythology to classical Buddhism, abundant points of symbolic reference serve to deepen and enrich the meaning. Ironies and ambiguities draw us in further and unanswerable questions inspire. Finally a complex and beautiful pattern appears. At least, that is the way it is in my viewing, and this is a film that grants an unexpected degree of authorship to its viewers.
Birdman fully rewards Freud’s method of dream analysis. We are presented with a wealth of disguised wishes in conflict, and although they start as our hero’s desires, they blink in and out of view in the other characters, shoot into the wider culture, and eventually light up the viewers’ struggles as well. (As evidence of this I take the unprecedented number of passionate post-film conversations in the seats and the lobbies and the bathrooms each time and in each location where I saw the film.) The much-noted camera work (by Emmanuel Lubezki), rendered as if in a single uninterrupted take, feels like free association, taking us seamlessly into the mind of the driven, let’s say virtigiphilic hero, his belligerent Birdman alter ego, the characters from the Carver story whom he directs and plays on stage, and the parts of himself we see echoed in the other people in the film such as his actors, his crew, his loyal friend, his recently rehabbed daughter and his forbearing ex-wife. Taken as a whole, it widens from a small look at the impulses toward both flight and fall of an individual actor who could easily be called narcissistic, manic depressive, suicidal, perhaps delusional, through a nuanced examination of the nature of Love and its close cousin, Art, all the way to riffs on Reality and hints at Enlightenment.
As in many psychoanalyses, the symbol set and inter-texts are introduced at the very beginning. Before anything else, we see a quote from Raymond Carver (from A New Path to the Waterfall):
“And did you get what you wanted from this life even so?”
“I did”.
“And what did you want?”
“To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
The letters appear first as separate points, gradually coming together to form words, like stars in a constellation.
Next, although it takes a while to realize it, we are met with images signaling the subtext of the myth of Icarus: A ball of light soaring and falling from high in the sky and below it something ambiguous, drowned in the receded sea. Next we see our hero, Riggan Thompson (played brilliantly by Michael Keaton), in his underwear, in lotus position, levitating slightly, looking out the window of his dressing room and being addressed by the growling voice of his former role as Birdman, a movie superhero he is trying ever to rise above. What makes this funny is the fact that Keaton himself left behind his famous role in the Batman movie series, declining, as his fictional character does here, to do further episodes despite the assurance of further fame. His path serves now as a kind of “reality pre-quel” to the film, especially given his many recent awards and pending nominations. (Indeed, a synopsis of the situation might now go like this: An old actor becomes newly famous for playing a superhero becoming a real actor after famously declining to continue to be famous for playing a superhero.)
Things We Can Learn from Birds
Recently a surprising thing happened as my analysand was talking about whether he could trust his assessments of new emotional experiences. He wondered, did I know what he was 
talking about? Had I had similar experiences? How do we really know that the way we are interpreting an event- a motive of our friend or boss, an insight, even a perception – is true? We could just be complimenting or castigating ourselves, after all, with our own made-up view. Surely the other person would see it differently, with themselves as the protagonist or the villain. Suddenly he saw a bright green bird high in the magnolia tree that nearly fills the area outside my large picture window. It appeared at a perfect time in the session to highlight the questions he had just been asking. These questions quickly attached themselves to the sighting: Was it real? Imagined? Hallucinated?
Google suggested that the tiny green bird might be a rare sighting of a migrating orange-crested warbler, touching down briefly on its journey. Or was it just a trick of light, the lush dark green of the leaves casting a green glow on another little bird? In a session with another analysand, the hour before this patient was due to arrive for his next session, I saw the brightest cardinal I thought I had ever seen. It stood on a twig for what seemed like a long time, cocking its uncannily bright head and seeming intent on studying us indoors in our glassed-in world. What was going on in my tree? Something about the light? Or do we attend to things selectively for purposes we only discover later (if at all) or because they seem to fit in a stream of associations simply because we, ourselves, have gathered them into it in ways that help us understand and communicate with each other?
Luckily, it is such questions themselves, rather than their answers, that propel an analysis, or indeed any other form of the examined life. Luckily, many questions do not have totally satisfying answers, since if they did, that would be the end of the exploration.
Mara Wagner, Psya.D., Cert.Psya.
Sneak Peek at Our New Website!
The entire BGSP administrative team has been hard at work pulling together ideas and new material for the School’s NEW website. We hope to launch the site near the beginning of the Fall semester! In the meantime, we wanted to give you a little “sneak peek” at the new design and content that will be included on the website! Enjoy…
What Your Therapist Thinks of You: A Letter to the Editor
As social media creeps into more and more previously private parts of our lives, it is understandable that even clinicians in the mental health field would be tempted to join in.
In “What the Therapist Thinks About You” (July 7, 2014) Jan Hoffman presents examples of taking the process of treatment out of the office and into the domain of the internet, including posting session notes and diagnoses. He refers to one study showing that patients reading their therapist’s comments “became more involved in their care.”
Considering that mental health patients fall within the very wide continuum from psychotic to neurotic illness, it is difficult to evaluate such experiments with a general conclusion.
The office is the sanctuary where the patient is free to reveal everything. Today’s technological wonders bring the understandable temptation of instantaneous gratification through communication outside of the office. But the slow and deliberate analytic process is jeopardized when the client moves from the session to an untutored reading of the therapist’s notes or diagnosis.
Posting the notes amounts to an analytic intervention and, like all interventions, should be aimed at moving the process of treatment to new and/or deeper places. If a sharing of communication outside the office is intended to resolve a resistance I am all for it, but it concerns me that in the sped up world too many are moving too fast.
Theodore Laquercia, PhD
NY State Licensed Psychoanalyst
President
Society of Modern Psychoanalysts
Emeritus of Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis
Read the full article, “What The Therapist Thinks About You” here.
Psychoanalysis at Work in the Community | Easing the Pain of the Most Vulnerable
Vincent Panetta, Ph.D., decided early in his career that if his patients would not come to him, he would go to them.
Now director of outreach services for South Shore Mental Health in Plymouth, Massachusetts, he reports that he and his staff have stopped that “revolving door that is so typical of mental health services,” working with a very challenging population of children, adolescents, and families, mostly in their homes and other community settings. “Eventually, you want your patients to come to the office, of course,” Dr. Panetta says, “but I immediately observed when I worked as a psychotherapist in my first outpatient clinic in Boston how much need there was for home visits.”
Dr. Panetta developed an outreach program at a counseling service south of Boston. It was so successful that when he moved the whole staff to South Shore Mental Health in 1999, all of the patients followed. They now see around 300 people a week, including referrals from the state Department of Mental Health, the Department of Children and Families, and the Department of Developmental Services. Their patients include many children from foster homes, developmentally disabled adults, and patients from group homes and workshops.
Dr. Panetta and several of his clinicians have studied at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis (BGSP), where he is now on the faculty. He considers his training at the school essential in his work with difficult cases. “We see young children who have already lived two lifetimes, in terms of abuse, loss, and emotional damage,” he explains. “Some of our patients are flagrantly psychotic, paranoid, or bipolar. We have kids who have been in and out of DYS (Department of Youth Services) and suffer from oppositional defiant disorders and explosive disorder.”
“Without my psychoanalytic knowledge, this would be like operating in the dark, knee-deep in the mud. What I got from BGSP provides that guiding light and the tools I need to work with these kids.”
“Psychoanalysis teaches you that human emotions are very contagious. When you are working with kids who have a good reason to be angry, self-destructive, and aggressive, you quickly become infected with those feelings. My training at BGSP helps me navigate those feelings, to study them until I have enough information to make an intervention. It’s like a puzzle. I intervene based on what I feel, know, study, and observe.”
“Without this kind of training clinicians often get burned out,” he adds. “They get tangled in their own emotions and the emotions of the patient.”
The proof is in the results, Dr. Panetta points out. “We hold onto our patients, he says. “Before working with us, some had been to several therapists, were periodically hospitalized, medicated, living in group homes without jobs. They weren’t making any progress. Today some of our kids have graduated from college, hold jobs, are living independently, and are off medication. Thanks to my BGSP training and our outreach program, we have really been able to help our patients.”
Where’s My Sanity? Applied Concepts about Work
On Wednesday, June 18th, the last of the “Where’s My Sanity?” series at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis featured discussion about emotions at work. In this workshop, Claudia Luiz laid out the foundation of how to excel at 
work, with a detailed formula for how to progress by developing communication, leadership and confidence skills. Then, she illustrated how emotions can interfere with advancement in each area.
Through group discussion, stories were told that illustrated a wide range of emotional obstacles to advancement, like having a conflict, regressing, getting induced with powerful feelings and having unresolved feelings.
The evening then progressed to analyzing which feelings can and can’t be worked with. Participants were helped to use their feelings to understand the difference between emotions that can be addressed and worked with, versus dynamics that are unconscious and can’t be successfully addressed.
Techniques were then laid forth, including how to tolerate emotions better, join and explore, that would be best suited for both conscious and unconscious obstacles to progressing at work. These techniques included how to explore and process your own feelings, as well as help other people with them. Many dynamics were discussed, including hopelessness, resentment, the need for respect, problems with authority and more.
As usual for a discussion at BGSP, a diverse set of stories and experiences contributed to a rich discussion about how to scratch the surface of behaviors to get underneath why progress can be so elusive, and what to do and not do about it. The evening ending with a comment by one of the participants that when you start talking and learning about emotional dynamics, you realize how much there is to learn.
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