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Date: October 18, 2012
Dr. Lewis Aron, a well-known active contributor to the field of psychoanalysis through multiple articles and books that he has authored and edited, and the various leadership roles he holds, is the Director of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, in which Dr. Karen Starr is a candidate. Dr. Starr, an author herself, is adjunct faculty and supervisor at Long Island University and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The presenters were introduced by Dr. Giselle Galdi, Training and Supervising Analyst of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, who shared a piece of history that started in 1918 with the Budapest Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, where Freud spoke of his dream of a “Psychoanalytic Movement for the people.” She offered details on the Budapest Polyclinic and the Berlin Clinic, precursors to the Karen Horney Clinic in New York, which opened in 1955 all established with the goal to provide low cost psychoanalysis to the people with limited means.
Starr began the presentation by laying out the sociocultural and historical background that gave birth to psychoanalysis identifying them as crucial to understanding its intrinsic elements, structural components and development. Psychoanalysis is always defining itself in relation to an “other,” from hypnosis and suggestion to psychotherapy. The presenters highlighted a series of hierarchical dichotomies that have plagued the history of psychoanalysis: phallic masculinity, penetration, hetero-sexuality and autonomy versus dependence, feminine passivity and relationality, the latter category attributed to therapy.
Freud had witnessed Charcot's discoveries being tainted by suggestion, thus he feared that psychoanalysis would be seen as a Jewish cultural presupposition and that his findings would be considered subjective and specific instead of objective and global. Starr highlighted the polarization of gender roles at the