In this Internet age, APsaA is aware of the importance of outreach to its members and the outside world via computers and other devices which access the World Wide Web.
Under a grant from the International Psychoanalytical Association's Developing Psychoanalytic Practice and Training Program APsaA's new Education Division has initiated the Teen Web Site Project, which is creating a Web site for teens on sex, dreams, and how it helps to think about life through a self-reflective, psychoanalytic lens. The effort is an exciting collaboration among APsaA analysts, non-analyst members of the Education Division Liaison to Schools Committee, and high school students, their teachers, and in some cases the clinician parents of students.
The development of this partnership is an example of how the Education Division is reaching out and partnering with institutions at every level of the American education system.
Two important participants in the Teen Web Site Project are APsaA Educator Associates who come from the Education Division's Liaison to Schools Committee. They are Tillie Garfinkel, the committee chair and a public school principal with a longstanding interest in, and extensive knowledge of, the ways psychoanalytic understanding can be useful in the school environment; and Dan Frank, a member of the committee, a student of human development with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (where his mentor was the distinguished analyst, Bert Cohler), and the principal of the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago.
In order to make the Web site a possibility it was clear at the start that a primary site where analysts and students could interact in an ongoing way had to be identified. Dan Frank was approached, and he proposed a Francis W. Parker-APsaA partnership. His vision for Web site planning was that Parker students would discuss sex and dreams with analysts and identify areas where analytic thinking could be helpful to them. Frank also emphasized that students and analysts would have to engage in a conversation through which analytic sensibility could be defined in a way which made sense to high school students and form the foundation for conversations which would eventually appear on the Web site. He also recognized that Parker teachers would have to be involved, because interaction between students and their teachers would also be an important dimension of the developing Internet site. Finally, seeing Parker as a learning community which included the families of its students, Frank believed that mental health professional parents should participate in the project.
In September, 2008, a think tank meeting was held at Parker, in which Frank led a group composed of analysts Cynthia Carlson, Bert Cohler, Robert Galatzer-Levy, Prudy Gourguechon, Jim Hansell, and me. In another category was Colin Pereira-Weber, who is not only an analyst, but a Parker parent, and two psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist parents, Evelina Pereira-Weber and Shira Saville. Parker teachers included Theresa Collins, Mike Mahany, and Kate Tabor of the English Department, Marty Moran and Julie Schumacher of the History Department, Ray Llanes, who teaches Web page design, Gary Childrey, a teacher of psychology and the school counselor, and Duane Freeman, another school counselor. Paul Erb, of the Information Services Institute, participated by telephone at the invitation of Frank. In addition, two Parker students attended the think tank, Nicole Hunter and Joey Schullo.
As a result of the think tank the central goal of the Web site was established: to create an informative, interactive site dealing with sex and dreams, which would answer the questions teens have, while promoting awareness of psychoanalytic sensibilities and values.
The project manager's position has been assumed by Kate Tabor. Tabor was instrumental in introducing the think tank participants to a wiki, an Internet space where students, teachers, and analysts have interacted through postings. An interesting series of wiki contributions are the dream poems of students in Mahaney's English class. These are poems based on dreams the students have remembered upon awakening. The poems will soon be discussed by the analysts working on the project, and their responses will be vetted by Garfinkel, who will work with these analysts to craft their comments to the needs of teens using the Web site.
Next steps, under Tabor's management, will involve working with Parker teachers, and
Stephen Sonnenberg, M.D., is Education Division coordinator; clinical professor of psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas; adjunct professor of psychiatry, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland; and training and supervising analyst, Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute.
students, as well as analysts, to implement the transfer of material from the wiki to the Web site. This will include writing scripts and outlines for tapings of conversations between students and analysts, which correspond to the main questions students want answered. These tapings will take place next September.
The Teen Web Site Project is innovative because it blends the perspectives of APsaA analysts, high school teachers and parents, and high school students, in the construction of an Internet site to be used by teens. This model of analysts working together with these groups to create an educational vehicle which offers accurate, psychoanalytically informed and sensitive information is an exciting example of what is possible as APsaA actualizes its commitment to finding its place in the arena of public discourse.