Author Archives: jayEinhorn

Reflections of Varadaraja (V. V.) Raman, On Becoming 80

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Varadajara (“V. V.” to his many friends) Raman is a scientist, religious scholar, teacher, writer, poet, mystic, and no doubt has more accomplishments I don’t know about.  I had the privilege of meeting V. V. at the 2009 conference of the Institute for Religion in an Age of Science (where my daughter remembers him doing a stand-up comedy routine at the talent show).  He sent out this reflection on becoming 80, reposted here with permission.  More on V. V. at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varadaraja_V._Raman/.

Following many ahead of me while others are following my chronological footsteps, by calendrical reckoning I am now an octogenarian: a stage I never consciously contemplated being in or worked towards reaching. This is no personal achievement, but the result of fortunate circumstances that have shaped my physical and mental states. I don’t regret this transition to what could be a stepping stone to senility: the alternative would have denied me an opportunity to write this note.

We are all born with the possibility for gradual growth from infancy to adulthood, from middle age to possible senior-hood if we dodge the pitfalls that eventually take us to the (for me) Unknown and Unimaginable states.

As to my years thus far on the Blue Planet, I have had my joys and sorrows, laughter and tears, families and friendships, hopes and disappointments, challenges and frustrations. Above all, throughout my life I have been blessed with lots of love and affection and kindness from countless sources, and with a capacity to enjoy and create wit and humor. So I have little to complain about the years that have elapsed in my world of experience, and much, much to be thankful for.

I have been in many phases of creature-conveniences. I remember nights lit by kerosene lamps in a remote village in India, and long-distance rides in bullock carts on bumpy roads. I have used pens with nibs dipped periodically in black and red inkpots, and used blotting papers to dry the wet scripts. I have typed on mechanical typewriters with ribbons and carbon papers for copies, and multiplied four-digit numbers mentally, without calculators. I have greeted school teachers when they entered the classroom by standing up respectfully with fellow students.

I have lived and taught in five continents, conversed in a dozen languages, read grand poetry, listened to glorious music, and worshiped in scores of places of different faiths. These are some of the delights I have had.

I have watched history unfold on the grand canvas: I recall when World War II broke out. I saluted the waving tricolor when India re-incarnated as a modern nation in 1947. I have read news about the eruption and erasing of many wars and conflicts, the birth of new nations, the tumbling of dictators, the rot that followed some revolutions, the rise and receding of the Cold War, the full emancipation of millions, the gradual dilution of cultural identity of nations with open doors for immigrants, the tottering resurgence of ancient civilizations aspiring for global stature, and the sunset of superpowers. I have observed positive transformations as well as regressions in societies, the upswing and fall of economies.  I have shared the dream of the atomic nucleus eventually answering humanity’s energy needs, and now I see that dream is shattered. I have  witnessed the creation and wonders of technology, and also  possibility of Rachel Carson’s silent spring. I have seen science on a prestigious positivist pedestal, and regretted its dethronement from its epistemic supremacy.  I have seen religion at its best as inspirations for love and charity, and its degeneration to bigotry and hate, anti-science rhetoric and mayhem with the invocation of God’s greatness.

As the tireless tick of cosmic  time  keeps advancing, here on earth new knowledge and insights are continuously emerging, new works of art and poetry and music are created, new experiences and possibilities are coming within reach of more people, if not of everyone. But as a species we are also facing challenges to our very survival. Aside from the dangers lurking in our physical environment, there is ubiquitous ideological rancor among contending claimants to Truth and Right Answers on virtually every plane of human pursuit: political, religious, economic, doctrinal, and more. Mass education there surely has been, but somehow the soil of current human societies seems to lack what it takes to produce leaders with charisma and vision to urge the billions towards greater harmony, or to inspire them to break off from the fetters of circumscribed religious outlooks, cultural chauvinism, and unending reminders of historical injustices whose effect is to perpetuate acrimony and fan irate feelings towards the other.

As I approach the closure in the temporal bracket of infinity wherein I am privileged to reflect, I wish the very best for the generations that are at the threshold and at the peak of their lives. I am tentatively confident that they will manage the affairs of the world one way or another, and not allow the spark of human life to be extinguished from the planet before the Sun does it a few billion years hence. Though as a scientist I have serious doubts about this ever coming to pass, thanks to my religious inclinations, I nurture the hope that peace and mutual understanding, caring and social justice will eventually prevail everywhere in the world. Unless hope transgresses the bounds of visible reality, there will be only despair and depression which I refuse to yield to. In the time left for me to still be kicking around I will continue to do my little towards actualizing that goal.

V. V.  Raman

May 28, 2012

Songwriting and Psychology

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This Sunday, May 20th, I’ll be presenting a workshop at the Old Town School of Folk Music.  Here’s the description:

Songs and the Subconscious:  Songwriting Beneath the Surface
Sunday, May 20, 2012, from 2:00-3:50 PM, with Jay Einhorn, 4544 N. Lincoln Ave.-WEST  7737286000
Songs express and evoke feelings that the writer may be more or less aware of.  Participants will bring their instruments and songs, sing for the class and discuss the feelings and images the songs evoke.  Jay is a singer-songwriter and psychologist whose latest CD, “Elephant in the Dark,” features “storylike” songs of “self-examination, learning and rebirth” (Evanston Round Table). $25.00

Wisdom from Robert Downey, Jr.

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“…And so the real definition of success is essentially, How comfortable are you in your own skin, and are you heading in a direction that gives you a sense of hope for the future, or a sense of, at least, engagement with life?”

…”I’ve been a street kid, and I’ve had too much money to count, and I can’t tell which one is more of an impediment or a motivator.  It depends on the day.”

 

(in the May, 2012, issue of Esquire)

Some Neurodevelopmental Benchmarks of Child Development Ages 3-5

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About two and a half years ago, when I was Director of the Healthy Families free weekly mental health clinic in Waukegan, Illinois (a joint program of Rosalind Franklin University and the Healthcare Foundation of North Lake County), I was asked to speak on early childhood development to a group of early childhood educators and representatives from community agencies, sponsored by the Community Action Partnership of Lake County.  In addition to the handout, below, each person at the meeting received a bilingual (English-Spanish) Hoopoe book of teaching stories (www.Hoopoekids.com) donated by the Learning Resource Alliance (www.learningresourcealliance.com).  As part of my presentation, I read the children’s book referenced at the end of the handout, The Lion Who Saw His Reflection in the Water (http://www.hoopoekids.com/orderEng.htm#lion/).  Here’s the handout:

Some Neurodevelopmental Benchmarks of Child Development Ages 3-5

I. Developmental Benchmarks

A. Sensorimotor:  The child consolidates what she has been learning through much practice and trial and error.  Most actions of daily life become automatic, unconscious and fluid, operated primarily through the cerebellum rather than the neocortex.  Gross motor (running, climbing, throwing) and fine motor (tool use, drawing/writing, computer dexterity) control is consolidated and extended.

B. Linguistic:  The child consolidates basic structures of language–words and grammar–that have been acquired with much practice and effort.  Receptive vocabulary is extended as the child learns to understand many more words than he will often use.  Expressive vocabulary is extended as the child learns to actively use many more words.

C. Social-emotional:  The child consolidates and automatizes his attachment relationships with primary attachment figures (usually parents), which will provide much of the foundation for her patterns in new relationships.  The child learns to relate to teachers in pre-school.  Through play and adult-structured activities, the child learns to relate to peers, maturing from parallel play to interactive and reciprocal play.  The child begins to find and explore partnerships and an expanded network of relationships of various kinds, including creative relationships, exploratory relationships, status relationships (up vs. down), intimate relationships (close vs. far), power relationships (controlling/controlled), etc., and develops interpersonal problem solving strategies within and outside the family.  The child learns to communicate feelings, resolve problems, and self-soothe (not always in the best ways, e.g., watching television for distraction).  Language is increasingly used to mediate feelings and relationships.  The child learns that behavioral choices have consequences and begins to think strategically.

D. Pre-academics:  The child learns to:  recognize letters and numbers, read letters and count numbers in sequence, read small words and do simple addition and subtraction with real objects (not necessarily abstract numbers), write letters, numbers, and simple words, and follow adult instructions sufficiently to manage her behavior to meet early classroom requirements.

II. Critical Connections

A. The child learns when and how to obey and when and how to make independent decisions, and how to learn from demonstration and correction, through supervision and instruction by adults, including parents and teachers.

B. The child learns to listen to stories being read or told to her, maturing language, memory, and imaginative functions, as well as supporting healthy social-emotional attachment.  One of the best things parents and teachers can do for children is to READ TO THEM!  Stories that contain metaphoric structures (teaching stories) are the most useful for combining linear thinking (the words are linear) with thinking in images and metaphors.  Example:  The Lion Who Saw His Reflection In The Water.

Note:  That’s the handout.  If I were doing it now, I’d want to add something about musical and visual-artistic perception, both of which are being trained during the early neuromaturational period.

Learning Disabilities Evaluation: Psychological and Educational Dimensions

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This Tuesday evening, May 1, Jordi Kleiner and I will be reprising the presentation we gave at the American Learning Disability Association annual conference, last February in Chicago, for the Chicago North Chapter of the Learning Disability Association.  The program takes place from 6:00-7:30 PM, at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago.  All are welcome and there’s no fee.

At the Illinois Reading Council Conference: The Common Core Reading Standards

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The annual conference of the Illinois Reading Council (IRC) is perhaps the largest gathering of people interested in teaching reading in the state. This year the conference met in Springfield, and I participated to present on a project I had done for the Learning Resource Alliance (www.learningresourcealliance.com) called “Parents and Children Reading Together.”

Springfield is the capitol of Illinois, with two capitol buildings; the old one, now a museum, and the current one. Yet, although the government buildings are there, and despite it’s population of 118,000, Springfield feels more like a town than a city. There’s a curious kind of energy vacuum, as if the dynamic power of the state is really four hours northwest in Chicago. Lincoln’s presence is still to be felt: his home is there (now a museum), there’s an Abraham Lincoln library, a model replica of the train that brought his body back for burial after he was killed (in a restored train station, itself a museum), and several statues.

The IRC was like a town coming to town, with hundreds of people filling the Lincoln Hotel Conference Center and spilling over into many rooms in the Hilton across the street, where I gave my presentation. I’ll write about “Parents and Children Reading Together” later. Here I’ll review a presentation entitled:

Literacy Strategies to Implement the “Common Core” Reading Standards

This presentation was by Dr. Roberta Sejnost, a teacher of teachers at Loyola University in Chicago and literacy consultant to the Kane County Regional Office of Education, west of Chicago. Sejnost’s presentation focused on the “common core” reading standards. The common core standards result from a collaboration among state educational programs to try to establish common goals and comparability across reading programs within and between states. My impression is that the state educational leaders got together to try to improve, redirect, or compensate for some of the problems of the “No Child Left Behind” law. More information about the common core standards is at:

(http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards/english-language-arts-standards/).

The goal of the common core reading standards is to produce readers who, as Sejnost said, can “read like a detective and write like an investigative reporter.” “Lexile level” is a measure of reading complexity that is increasingly being used to select reading material by grade. Sejnost provided examples of a host of teaching methods with which teachers could support students achieving the common core standards. Graphic organizers, long used by educational therapists and tutors to help students with learning disabilities improve their writing, are included as methods to support both student reading comprehension and writing development within the common core framework. “Inquiry Circles” is a method that involves student-led small group projects to support understanding in depth; Sejnost recommended the text “Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action” (http://www.amazon.com/Comprehension-Collaboration-Inquiry-Circles-Action/dp/032501230X/).

The common core standards are optimistic and lofty. Students are expected to understand what they read and think critically about it. Teaching is seen to involve less lecturing and more active student learning, facilitated through lots of exercises of various kinds. One such exercise might be completing a “Critical Thinking Map,” basically a box on a page with sections for the student to complete, including:

•List the events, points, or steps that occurred in the section you read
•Summarize the main idea or message conveyed by the author in the section you read
•Present viewpoints or opinions you hold about the section you read
•What conclusions did you reach about the selection you read? Were the author’s conclusions valid or invalid? Explain.
•How is what you read in this section relevant to the world of today?

In the common core standards, good reading involves “not just telling about a character, but linking the telling to where in the story it says that.” And students should be able to answer questions not only directly from the text, but also questions whose answers are implied but not stated in the text. So both close reading and inference are goals of the common core standards.

The common core goal that appealed to me most was that children should learn to “read from different perspectives” within a text. For example, in a nonfiction piece about the creation of the intercontinental railroad, students would be able to see it from the point of view of the supporters of the railroad, as well as from the point of view of the buffalo. This is the kind of reading that is most like thinking into a teaching story, or a dream, in which all the characters and objects can have unexpected meaning.

Sejnost gave a great presentation. She knew her stuff up and down, presented it clearly and accessibly, and is obviously a seasoned veteran of many educational winds of change. I was impressed by some aspects of the common core standards, which certainly aim high in close reading and literal comprehension, but was also alarmed by some of the huge gaps in them. For example, if readers are supposed to “read like detectives and write like investigative reporters,” what about reading to absorb meaning and metaphor for later use in perceiving situations and relationships, and writing to create and discover meaning? As the states try to formulate a level playing field of expectations, while also aiming high, they seem to have ignored a great deal of the value in reading and writing .

The use of “lexiles”–language, or lexical, measuring of texts to determine appropriate grade level–seems to me to be both half-brained–because it focuses on literal language, the sort of processing characteristic of the left hemisphere, more or less ignoring the right hemisphere’s relational perception role–and an example of wishful thinking confused with reality; in this case, the wish to be able to precisely measure the reading level of a book through the application of quantitative methods. Lexiles quantify the reading level of a text according to categories like the average length of words and syntactic complexity of sentences, and you can miss a lot of meaning that way. Sejnost told us, for example, that according to lexical measurement, John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” would be a 2nd or 3rd grade reading level book! Such measurement is utterly blind to the meaning of the story, and to the level of experience needed by the reader to understand it. It’s something like evaluating text grade level by computer. This exemplifies the attitude that, “if it can’t be measured, especially by our current methods measurement, it either doesn’t exist, or doesn’t matter” which underlies so much of our thinking about human nature and education.

Another huge gap in the common core standards, it seems to me, is that they are entirely about active reading for details and meaning, but completely oblivious to the reading for passive absorption of narrative structure and meaning; which, it seems to me, is about half of the value of reading. In the common core standards, reading is very serious business, and reading for wonder, joy, and to be transported to another reality, has no place.

The common core standards seem to have another huge blind area, in that they don’t start with a working assessment of where the children are reading when they come into the class. Common core standards for each grade level assume that all children begin a class at more or less the same level; which is, of course, completely false. The common core standards belong to the tradition of “mastery learning” in education, which sees the goal of teaching as bringing students up to a level of mastery of the material. When it comes to teaching reading in the elementary, junior high or high school grades, which is what the common core standards aim for, most students will not achieve mastery learning, unless the bar is lowered so much as to make “mastery” meaningless. Along with the common core standards, or whatever measure we choose to reflect mastery of a subject, there needs to be an assessment of student progress from point A–say, when the school year begins–to point B–say, the end of the school year. Passing Dr. Sejnost on the sidewalk later on, as she was going into a restaurant for lunch, I thanked her for her presentation and remarked that it didn’t seem that the common core standards took note of where students were when they began the school year in their new grades. “Right,” she said.

Nine Criteria For Usefulness in Evaluations of Learning and Attention Issues

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(As consulting psychologist, I am asked to review private evaluations of learning and attention issues in students, and explain them to administrators, teachers, and even the parents whose children have been evaluated.  Since the quality and usefulness of evaluations varies, I prepared this memo as a guide for parents, as consumers, and evaluators, as providers.)    

This memo is prepared for parents who are considering seeking evaluation of learning and attention issues in their children, and also for potential providers of such evaluations.
Methods for evaluating learning and attention issues and disorders, and for reporting on evaluations, have evolved over the years, not necessarily in a consistent or integrated way. Professionals from several fields, with varied backgrounds, have entered the marketplace as evaluation providers. As a result, we have seen evaluations of varying quality and usefulness. Here are nine criteria that characterize a more useful evaluation:

1. A specific problem statement provides the focus for the evaluation. It tells the readers what this evaluation is about, and why it is important for this child to be evaluated for this problem at this time.

2. A detailed case history places the referring problem within the context of the child’s developmental and family history. Part of understanding a learning and/or attention disorder is understanding its history in this child’s life, and whether it might also be reflected in this child’s family history.

3. Information from the school, from teachers and other staff who may have useful information to report, tells readers how the school sees the child and the referring problem. Detailed descriptions by teachers and staff help to clarify the the referring problem. Observations by the evaluator of the student in school can also shed light on the referring problem, especially where classroom behavior is contributing to the referring problem.

4. Information from other sources, which may include therapists, tutors, former teachers, etc., who can contribute to the evaluator’s, and the readers’, understanding of the child.

5. Behavioral observations of the child during the evaluation process, with specific reference to the referring problem. The evaluator’s astute observations of the child’s behavior can contribute to the evaluator’s, and the readers’, understanding of the child.

6. Selection of tests that are specific enough and comprehensive enough to address the referring problem. Selecting tests that focus on the child’s cognitive functioning with reference to the referring problem will help the evaluator and readers understand the child’s cognitive functioning with regard to the referring problem. Where multiple explanations of a child’s problem are possible, it can be important to have testing across different areas in order to rule some out and establish others as associated with the problem.

7. Report of test results, including all scores. Reporting all scores supports the evaluator’s conclusions and provides professional readers with the information necessary to understand the basis of those conclusions.

8. Discussion of all the foregoing information leads to an impression about why the child is having the referring problem, in the context of his or her developmental history and cognitive processes, including a diagnosis, if appropriate. By discussing all the foregoing information, the report makes sense of the child’s referring problem, and helps readers make sense of it also.

9. Recommendations that are specific to the referring problem, the specific child, and the child’s situation, will help insights in the report find integration and application in the child’s educational program. When multiple recommendations are included in a report, prioritizing recommendations helps educators and parents determine the most appropriate next steps in supporting the child’s education.

Commentary on the Film, “A Dangerous Method”

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This Commentary is reprinted from the Winter-Spring, 2012, CAPPSTONE, the newsletter of the Chicago Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology. It appeared alongside a review of the film by my colleague Michael Losoff.

The story of Freud and Jung needs to be told, because of its importance for our time; especially, though not only, for those of us who practice psychotherapy. So I am grateful to “A Dangerous Method” for telling that story. I’m also grateful that the film takes a big step toward restoring Sabina Spielrein to her rightful place in that story. Yet I found the film more useful for prompting me to look into source material, than for conveying the characters of Freud, Jung, and Spielrein. One doesn’t blame the film for this, but rather acknowledges that there are certain qualities of extraordinary character that are difficult, if not impossible, to portray artistically.[more…]

Something similar happened with “Nixon,” the film about Richard Nixon and Watergate; another “must be told” story for our time. Several years ago, I happened to be at a great local bookstore, the Bookstall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, when Elliot Richardson, Nixon’s attorney general who resigned rather than follow his chief’s order to fire independent prosecutor Archibald Cox, was making an author’s appearance in support of his book, and so I was present when Richardson was asked what he thought about the film. Richardson said that Nixon had personal qualities that inspired loyalty and respect and made people want to follow him, that couldn’t be conveyed by an actor, no matter how technically proficient. He went on to say that Nixon’s fatal flaws–by which he meant the paranoia, grandiosity and manipulativeness that ultimately undermined him–needed to be seen in the context of his exceptional leadership personality. Freud, Jung, and Spielrein were all exceptional personalities too, yet in “A Dangerous Method” they seem so ordinary, even when they are discussing extraordinary matters, such as the creation of psychoanalysis, or doing extraordinary things, such as Jung dutifully paddling a semi-nude Spielrein.

It’s unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable, that the “danger” in “A Dangerous Method” is the risk of consummated erotic attraction between doctor and patient. The greater danger in the psychoanalytic enterprise, one which is much more difficult to portray dramatically, is the inevitable insufficiency of knowledge on the part of the doctor who enters into a treatment relationship with a patient centered around how the patient’s unconscious processes are undermining him or her, within a cultural milieu which constitutionally keeps certain experiences unconscious. The analytic therapist must thread his or her way through the lack of sufficient information about people in general and this person in particular, the false security of theoretical dogma, the narcissistic appeal of making up some apparently adequate explanation of the patient’s problems out of whole cloth, and the tempting attractions of transference and countertransference; to arrive, eventually, at enough of a cocreated understanding of this particular person to effect a series of healing, corrective experiences. Mindfucking, rather than sex, is the greater danger of the “dangerous method.”

After watching “A Dangerous Method,” I’ve been reading “The Freud-Jung Letters,” abridged edition, edited by William McGuire, and “Sabina Spielrein, Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis,” edited by Coleen Covington and Barbara Wharton (available on Google Books). It’s clear that both Freud and Jung were acutely aware that they were overturning the prevailing logical-rational view of human nature, and erecting in its place a view of human nature as largely at the mercy of unconscious forces that could only be brought into the light of awareness and made civilized through the “dangerous method” of psychoanalysis. Their early union, productive collaboration, eventual conflict and final break is the stuff of legend, and well enough told in the film. But what about the role of Spielrein in the development of psychoanalysis?

Freud, Jung and Spielrein were all forces of nature, and are inevitably diminished in the film; but Spielrein’s character, played by Keira Knightly, is the most attenuated. The role focuses on her emotional neurosis, physical beauty, and emotional-sexual attraction to Jung, while underplaying the contribution of her conceptual brilliance to her personal and erotic magnetism. It seems to have been her brilliance, no less than her eroticism, that made her love for Jung impossible for them to resist, and led to a kind of fusing of identities with Jung, at least for awhile; which he seems to have found both inevitable and profoundly upsetting. In the film, when Jung finally relents and becomes Spielrein’s lover, he is giving into his needs, and hers, but not merging with a brilliant partner whose self and love resonate with him as they merge into an eroto-analytic third; as seems to have been the case in their actual relationship. In the film, Jung is dutiful, and Knightly beautiful, but we don’t get that merging of identities, or the reversal of roles in which she becomes the more powerful and nurturing figure, and he the more dependent and suppliant. Yet something like that seems, from her diary, to have happened. We get a hint of that, for example, in this diary entry about a last meeting with Jung; whom, at one point, she refers to as “my beloved little son!:”

“My friend and I had the tenderest ‘poetry’ last Wednesday. What will come of that? Make something good of it, Fate, and let me love him nobly. A long, ecstatic kiss in parting, my beloved little son! Now—may luck be with me! What a difference between his diary entry and mine…in spite of the colossal similarity between us. How remarkable the difference in the way he, the man, and I, the woman, contemplated the tasks ahead of us. With him the sacredness of his profession occupied the foreground, with me the sacredness of love…”

Coline Covington describes Spielrein’s profound role in influencing Freud’s and Jung’s evolving ideas, a role which was acknowledged but minimized by both. “It was in Oct., 1911, that Spielrein first met Freud, in Vienna. The following month Spielrein read her first theoretical paper, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being,” at one of Freud’s meetings, in the presence of Freud, Federn, Rank, Sachs, Stekel, and Tausk, among others. Here she introduced the concept of the death instinct, later to be incorporated and developed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) in which he refers in a footnote to Spielrein’s idea of the ‘destructive’ component of the sexual instinct. Commenting on her paper some months later, Freud wrote to Jung, “She is very bright; there is meaning in everything she says; her destructive drive is not much to my liking because I believe it is personally conditioned; she seems abnormally ambivalent (McGuire, 1974: 494).” Jung acknowledged Spielrein as the originator of the idea of the death instinct, but not until the revised edition of his Symbols of Transformation, in 1952, by which time she was long dead–murdered by Nazis in Russia, where she had gone to live.

Perhaps Spielrein’s neurotic problems were partly due to her incredible ability to tolerate conflicting feelings and ideas together, without having to artificially resolve the conflict by rejecting one side or the other; and perhaps this is the “ambivalence” that Freud refers to. Covington quotes Spielrein, in her diary entry of 26 November, 1910, as she “expressed her fear that Jung would ‘simply borrow the whole development of the idea (of the death instinct).” Spielrein wrote, “’Is this another case of unfounded distrust on my part? I wish so fervently that it might be so, for my second study will be dedicated to my most esteemed teacher, etc. How could I esteem a person who lied, who stole my ideas, who was not my friend but a petty, scheming rival? And love him? I do love him, after all. My work ought to be permeated with love! I love him and hate him, because he is not mine. It would be unbearable for me to appear a silly goose in his eyes. No, noble, proud, respected by all! I must be worthy of him, and the idea I gave birth to must also appear under my name.’ (Carotenuto, 1982: 35).”

Defending his advocating the same or similar ideas as Spielrein, Jung had said that they were thinking along the same lines, had stimulated one another’s thoughts, etc. I expect that there is truth on both sides here. The situation of Freud, Jung and Spielrein has undeniable parallels with that of Rosalind Franklin and Watson and Crick. Franklin was a biophysicist and x-ray crystallographer whose x-ray diffraction images of DNA were studied by Watson and Crick and lead to their discovery of the double helix shape of the DNA molecule. Watson and Crick’s paper didn’t acknowledge anything like the full contribution of Franklin’s work to their discovery, and she was not included in their Nobel award, as many feel she should have been. Like Spielrein, Franklin died young, of ovarian cancer, at 37. The film, “The Double Helix,” helped restore Rosalind Franklin’s place in the historical record, as “A Dangerous Method” might eventually do for Spielrein.

Spielrein went on to a distinguished career as a psychoanalyst, among whose analysands was Jean Piaget, practicing in Switzerland and in her native Russia, where she married and started a school, before being slaughtered. Thus was another veil cast over her life and accomplishments, much like those of her compatriot, the pioneering psychologist Lev Vygotsky, whose influence on psychology and education is profound but mostly unacknowledged.

As I often say, psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a powerful and sometimes necessary method for understanding ourselves and finding our way in this world, yet the teaching and learning of it has been so deeply infected with pathologies of personality and politics by its originators and transmitters that we must engage in much work of disentangling what’s useful in it from what isn’t. To some extent, analytic therapists need to cultivate an anthropological attitude toward the culture of psychoanalysis, in order to sort out “the baby from the bathwater.” I am grateful to “A Dangerous Method” for highlighting the intertwined truths and pathologies present at the birth of psychoanalysis, and also for providing a delayed acknowledgement of the indispensable contribution of an overlooked woman pioneer. Her role can now be studied, acknowledged, and incorporated into our understanding of where we have been, where we are, and where we might be going.

Sometimes the Teacher is the Lesson

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A lot of what I’ve learned in psychology has come from the research, study, and teaching of psychologists, but I’ve also learned a lot from watching how psychologists behave.

My first undergraduate college class in psychology was all about how rats are conditioned. That’s what learning was about, according to the psychology of that time. I had taken psychology to learn something about human nature, but the teacher droned on and on in the large lecture class about the methods and technical language conditioning rats. The teacher was very disappointed with how poorly the class performed on the first exam, and chastised us for not being better students. When I commented that perhaps the class performance on the exam had something to do with they way the subject was being taught, the teacher refused to consider it. The possibility that her selection of content and method of presenting it had any influence on what or how the class learned wasn’t part of her theory of learning. [more…]

If we think about the first four levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs–which are, briefly and from the bottom up, survival, security, love, and identity–and if we take as objective a look as we can at our own behavior and that of others, we’ll see that human behavior is often shaped by deprivations and satisfactions of those needs. Had the teacher applied the principles of conditioning on a framework of human motivation, she would have had a lot more to say about learning, and certainly would have had my attention.Now, although this psychology instructor was supposedly an expert on learning, she really knew very little about it. Furthermore, she wasn’t able to apply what she did know about rats to people. There is, in fact, a lot about how rats learn that can help us understand how people behave, when you make allowances for more complex human motivation and different reinforcers.

The truth was that the psychology teacher herself had been conditioned to believe that what she had been taught was what there was to know about the psychology of learning. Although claiming to teach scientific knowledge, she was really teaching what she believed. She had been conditioned by the giving and withholding of attention, grades, approval, promotion, social status, recruitment, professional identity, economic compensation, within a closed world of authority that defined the boundaries of the mental rat box in which she lived her professional life. The most important psychology lesson in her class was the teacher herself. She was a living lesson on the power, and limitation, of conditioning.