How We Heal and Grow: The Power of Facing Your Feelings by Jeffery Smith, M.D.

I was recently asked by my colleague and friend Dr. Jeffrey Smith, to write the Foreword for this new book that he has written. I was pleased to find it an excellent book. He offers a fresh and sensible way to look at how people develop dysfunctional patterns and facing feelings that have been avoided is the pathway to healing growth. He covers the full range of human problems from quirks to serous personality issues. He discussed the work of Freud, Mahler, Kernberg and many others including his own work. Interestingly the book is directed towards the lay public and I am sure will be received. However it really also belongs in the hands of therapists and any mental health professional who is involved with therapy. Dr. Smith has been teaching this subject to psychiatry residents and other psychotherapists for many years and is always very well received. He approaches the subject from a development al point of view. He points out how most of us have pockets of immaturity and how to outgrow them. Dr. Smith  discusses how and why the minds resist change. One of the central themes of Dr. Smith’s explanations is the phenomenon of catharsis where our underlying raw unprocessed feelings emerge and lose their power over us and are transformed when we share them with a therapist in the context of connection and safety. He describes this process and how it brings about an almost immediate change to the pathological emotions. I tend to look at the need for catharsis as something that has to occur over and over again which we often refer to as working through process. We do both agree that catharsis is an ongoing part of therapy. While this therapeutic work does require the empathic presence of the therapist. Dr. Smith also examines how some of this work may be able to done singularly when the person is trained in mindfulness in the Yoga and Buddhist tradition. The range and scope of the book is quite wide. He includes discussion of anxiety symptoms, trauma and depression although I felt he was little light on this latter subject particularly in regard to the role of loss. There is fascinating discussion on the dynamics of Multiple Personality Disorder in which he is a one of the few therapists with significant experience treating patients with this condition. Dr. Smith also brings his rich  experience in treating addiction into the book. He shares where dynamics and developmental experience is important and where the here and now social interaction is crucial. Included in the book is one of the best discussions of conscience and superego that I have ever come across. There is also and excellent section on the narcissistic personality and a description of how to understand a parent who had this condition and how to deal with important people in your life who have it. This is really a unique book that should have great appeal to therapists, students learning therapy and people interested in understanding their own emotional issues as well as those around them. I can also picture how this book may be very useful for people entering therapy, It will alert them to what to look for in themselves. It may very well facilitate the therapeutic process. In fact, I plan to give a copy of it to some patients who enter therapy with me. I am very pleased to conclude that Dr. Smith has made an outstanding contribution to our profession and to the education of the public.

Edward Bibring Photographs the Psychoanalysts of His Time

Edited by Sanford Gifford, Daniel Jacobs & Vivian Goldman

Pub. by The Analytic Press, Psychosozial-Verlag ( 2005), 206 pp.

People who are interested in psychoanalytic theory are usually quite fascinated with the period of time in which these ideas emerged and the people who developed them. Therefore a book of photographs of these people taken by one of them should be a valued treasure. This must have been part of the impetus that led the editors to put together this book which is suppose to be the first of a series of publications by the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute based on material from their archives.

The photographs span the time period between 1932 and 1938. These are photographs taken by Edward Birbring at the 12^th IPA Congress in Wiesbaden in 1932, the 13^th IPA Congress in Lucerne in 1934, the 14^th IPA Congress in Mariendbad in 1936, the Vierlandertagung (which was a meeting of analysts from the four Central European countries) in Budapest in 1937 and the 15^th IPA Congress in Paris in 1938 as well as some miscellaneous photographs. Biebring used a Rolleiflex, which is a small camera that allowed candid pictures. It produced a nearly square format and the pictures in the book are all 4 x 4 ½ inches, in black and white of course.

Individual portraits were not the main theme of the book but there were some excellent head shots of Ernest Jones, Max Eitingon, Abraham A. Brill, Sandor Ferenczi and Sandor Rado at the beginning of the book. There also is a self portrait of Edward Bibring which appears on the cover of the book. It would be quite easy to obtain very good individual pictures of other subjects by editing the pictures where there was more than one person in the photograph.

Most of the photographs are groupings of people. While there are some in which all are smiling at the camera or eating food together, most show the subjects engaged in conversation with each other. Perhaps it is my imagination but it appears that they are intensely involved with their discussions. I wish I could know what Anna Freud and Melanie Klein were talking about (perhaps they were discussing their disagreements about psychoanalytic theory).

There were many excellent photographs of various people with Anna Freud and one of her brother Martin Freud, the eldest son, standing by himself. There were no pictures of Sigmund Freud and I can only assume that he did not attend these meetings although I do not know for sure.

Although I did not do a count, some people were in many more pictures than others. Max Eitingon, President of the 12^th IPA Congress, and Ernest Jones, President of the 13^th and 14^th IPA, were in various photographs with many different people. Marie Bonaparte seemed to get around and was in many pictures. Understandably, Grete Bibring, wife of the photographer and also an analyst was amply represented. There were many other well known names and some of their spouses. They were all dressed in the fashion of the times with many of the men wearing vests and hats and the women in long dresses. There was a particularly endearing picture of Helene Deutsch sipping a tall drink with a straw while Heinz Hartmann sits next to her with his arm draped around her chair, smiling at her with a cigar in his hand.

The last 30 pages of the book were short biographical sketches of many of the subjects in the book. This gave the reader not only a thumbnail view of the individuals but reflected the professional interactions of the times. It was very interesting to also see how the spread of the Nazi regime impacted on the people involved in the psychoanalytic movement.

There were many photographs of a woman named Vilma Kovacs about whom I knew nothing and was not included in the biographical sketches. A good book will often stimulate further thinking and I became curious about the role she may have played. I could not find any reference to her in the Ernest Jones or the Peter Gray biography of Freud where just about everyone else in the analytic movement seems to be listed in the index. I did track down information about her with an Internet search that I will summarize below to give an example of the lives and contributions of the extraordinary people who were photographed in this book.

Vilma Kovács-Prosznitz, the Hungarian psychoanalyst, was born at Szeged in Hungary on October 13, 1883 and died in Budapest in May 1940. She was the third daughter of a provincial bourgeois family and her father died while she was still very young, less than six years old. The family found itself destitute, and Vilma was married at the age of fifteen and against her will to a cousin, Zsigmond Székely, who was 20 years older than she. By the age of 19 she was the mother of three children. Alice, the eldest, later married Michael Balint. Vilma contracted tuberculosis and had to spend prolonged periods in a sanatorium. It was there that she met Frédéric Kovács, an architect, whom she married after a difficult divorce that separated her from her children for several years. A serious case of agoraphobia led Vilma into analysis with Sándor Ferenczi. He was quick to spot his patient’s talents and during the 1920s he trained her as a psychoanalyst, making her one of his closest collaborators.

In 1925, Vilma Kovács became head of the training committee. A highly reputed training analyst, she organized the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association’s clinical seminars and along with Sándor Ferenczi she elaborated the Hungarian training method: the candidate’s analyst supervises the candidate’s first case on the couch. Vilma Kovács’s work related almost totally to training. Practically every Hungarian analyst of her time frequented her clinical seminars at one time or another. More specifically, she analyzed Imre Hermann and Géza Róheim. She published only five articles, but one of them, Training Analysis and Control Analysis (1935), is a classic of psychoanalytic literature and has been translated into several languages. In another article, Examples of the Active Technique, dating from 1928, she provides a remarkably clear presentation of this technique that her mentor, Sándor Ferenczi, had just introduced, illustrating it with several examples. Through her clear-mindedness, her remarkable clinical sense, and her organizational skills, Vilma Kovács left a profound mark on the Hungarian school of psychoanalysis. – Summarized from the Psychoanalysis Dictionary

I have two suggestions for any future editions of this book or similar types of publications of historical photographs. It would be useful to have an index so that particular people of interest could be easily located. Also it would be helpful to have an accompanying DVD of digitalized photographs so that when we write about these people in the future we can to pull up these wonderful photographs and continue to share these images with future generations.