Research & Publications: Freud at Starbucks

Grandma as Analyst How I apply psychoanalytic theory in my everyday life as a grandmother

By Michele Bernstein

My grandson, Sam, born 3 ½ years ago, instantly became the firstborn child of two happily married, successful, professional parents and the first grandchild of a new student of modern psychoanalysis. I looked at him with new eyes, eyes that now saw everything a little differently from before I began my psychoanalytic studies.

A Dangerous Child

Sheila Zaretsky

All children are difficult, meaning they are a lot of trouble and it is very hard work to bring them up. Only a dead child never causes trouble. But what distinguishes a child who moves beyond difficult and becomes a danger to himself or others? What thoughts and feelings might motivate a child to cross the boundary from normal fantasy into behavior that will imperil himself or someone else?

Minding My Mental Hygiene

Sheila Zaretsky

Working on my self-esteem is a daily task, equivalent to showering, exercising, and staying away from sweets. The same way my immune system deals with dangers in my body, my mind manages the thoughts, feelings, and impulses that would otherwise derail me. I view this as taking care of my mental hygiene, and give myself “sessions” in which I give myself doses of understanding and acceptance.

Cracking the Shell of Self-Hatred: Repairing the Intimacy Bond.

Kenneth Cappuccio

It was a cold Russian morning when Josh and Wendy arrived at the orphanage. The meeting with their soon to be first child was filled with mixed feelings of anticipation and uncertainty. The phone calls, the photographs, the delayed plane flight; and now finally here in a foreign country wishing for their dreams to be fulfilled.

The Use of a Joining Technique with a Six Year Old Boy

Susan Saunders

Joey was adopted from a foreign country, where he had been in an orphanage for the first several years of his life. He was not fed properly there and was neglected much of the time. He survived by becoming an oppositional personality. He couldn’t make his caretakers do what he wanted, but he could stubbornly resist doing what they wanted him to do. This was the way he managed to feel some sense of power and hope in his original environment.

About Adolescence

Sheila Zaretsky

Before I start talking I want to do a one-minute commercial. In my practice I work with both children and adults, and what I notice is how quickly children benefit from the psychoanalytic process, that is from getting emotional understanding, compared to adults.

What about me?

Joanna Weber

This is not about how I have been taking care of my mother for the past twenty years, ever since my father died. And it is not about how I fly over to England every other month to do it. My mother is ninety-four now, and my sister and brothers have neither the time nor the inclination to help.

Handling Her Kids A love story furthered by modern psychoanalysis

Kenneth Cappuccio

We were both over forty when we met that spring, established professionals with established lives, yet each of our searches for a life partner had left us with a trail of disappointments dragging us down into hopelessness. Still, almost the moment we met, we sensed it might be different.

Mother Knows Best

Annette Vaccaro

My son is three.  He is in the kitchen and standing on his spoon.  I don’t know why it is but I know that he is angry.  I wonder what I did wrong?  I immediately want to act, to fix and to manipulate him. He’s still small and I could easily pick him up, but I learned it is best to study him so that when he grows too large to move, we will know how to talk to each other.  I’m puzzled and I feel a responsibility to socialize him.

Life and Death in the Body/Mind

Sheila Zaretsky, Ph.D.

How is it that the mind can activate a physical problem? And what occurs on the physical level when it is resolved in psychoanalytic treatment? In my lifetime I have lived through a cultural revolution wherein the old religious concept of the psyche (a weak soul tempted by evil) has been replaced by a scientific one (biochemical machine.) This has aroused my curiosity as to how something experienced as so ephemeral can be deconstructed mechanically.