Letter to the Editors

Dear Editors,

I would like to offer my comments on the recent article by Isaac Tylim (Becoming a Psychoanalyst in the Age of Diminishing Expectations: Psychoanalysis at the United Nations, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies (IJAPA), 2009, 6(1)). I read it as I was putting finishing touches on my paper on West Side Story and just after seeing the revival of this masterwork in New York. While West Side Story is typically publicized to be an updated love story of Romeo and Juliet set on the West side streets of New York City, it is so much more. The 2009 revival of West Side Story comes 52 years after its debut on Broadway in 1957.

In the last eight years alone the world has experienced 9/11, a war in Iraq, suicide bombings in Israel, a terror attack in India, a historic presidential election in America, and a collapse of the international financial markets in fall 2008. Global tensions have expanded New York City west side tensions in ways impossible to anticipate in 1957. There are overlapping multiple messages in the story which are deepened through Leonard Bernstein's evocative music. I am in agreement with Twemlow who sees a major potential leadership role for psychoanalysts in the solution of community and social problems (Twemlow, , p. 93) and with Tylim who advocates for a psychoanalytic attitude toward cultural institutions. The latter maintains that at the turn of the twentieth century, the need for psychoanalytic contribution to the global community has ceased to be considered a violation of analytic neutrality, and applied psychoanalysis is in the process of losing its status as step-child of our disciplines. 9/11 brought the psychoanalysts' couch onto the streets, the piers, and the shelter (p. 95).

Toward this objective, I would bring the couch, i.e. psychoanalytically informed theories of mental functioning, to educators, community organizations, social service agencies, and police departments to assist with the social, educational and