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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 6/2/2010 2:52 PM
In my final President's Corner blog, written as outgoing President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, I return to the idea that psychoanalysis has a tremendous contribution to make to the understanding of a wide range of human experience. We can counter a cultural tendency to "rush to meaning", which often employs pseudo explanations to reduce anxiety, by using core explanatory psychoanalytic concepts in conversations with journalists, politicians, government and not for profit leaders and business people.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 4/28/2010 10:48 AM
An April Forbes magazine article called "Psychoanalyze This" describes a "new" trend in marketing that analyzes consumers emotions as a way to make them buy more.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 4/28/2010 9:52 AM
"Psychoanalysis" continues to pop up in surprising places--ads, articles, invitations, etc. It continues to be a puzzle to me that casual references to psychoanalysis seem to far exceed the awareness of our field as a serious treatment and theory of the mind.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 4/21/2010 4:04 PM
A remarkable essay by Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee for the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) resonates profoundly with "psychoanalytic values".
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 3/30/2010 11:25 AM
For those interested in the future of mental health in all its manifestations it's well worth taking the time to offer comments to the official APA site that is accepting them.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 2/10/2010 5:20 PM
Today's release of the draft version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Methods V raises complex questions about the future understanding and care of patients. And I found myself already mourning one particular diagnosis.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 2/1/2010 2:55 PM
Shedler's ground breaking study, just published in the American Psychologist, explains the disconnect between psychoanalysis and empirical research and proceeds to elucidate a robust and enduring effect from psychodynamic psychotherapy.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 1/29/2010 9:05 PM
President Obama, in his State of the Union address, acknowledged that it is time to end the pernicious policy known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" which forces gays in the military to hide their sexuality--or leave the service. A powerful editorial in today's New York Times argued strongly for the end of DADT. As psychoanalysts, we know about the emotional damage the policy is responsible for.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 12/17/2009 5:35 PM
My dog Shelby, who is a chow-border collie mix, not a pure chow like Sigmund Freud's Jofi, recently forced me to wrestle with her on the floor of my office, and, with my head at a much lower than customary level, I spied a book on my bottom shelf that turned out to be the key to a mystery I've been pursuing and an absolute delight. The mystery? I've wanted to know the source for the much quoted phrase, attributed to Freud, that mental health can be represented by the ability to love and work.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 12/5/2009 11:45 AM
Cop meets dog meets Hassidic Rabbi in Helena, Montana. A near perfect story about the importance of being understood.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 11/7/2009 8:27 PM
It's late 1963. Betty Draper, the malaise laden frostily beautiful female lead of the television series Madmen, is a sitting duck for The Feminine Mystique. I am preoccupied with this: will she pick up a copy of Betty Friedan's book, and if she does what will happen?
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 10/28/2009 10:05 PM
President Obama signed a crucial and long awaited piece of civil rights legislation today, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The measure is named after a gay man and black man, both killed in hate crimes in 1998. This bill extends the coverage of current federal hate crimes legislation to include violence based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 10/28/2009 9:44 PM
Our colleagues Ken Reich and Jaine Darwin, cofounders of SOFAR (Strategic Outreach to Families of All Reservists) have been honored with the 2009 Purpose Prize, awarded to social entrepreneurs who address social issues in the second half of their professional lives.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 10/4/2009 6:51 PM
The affective state of anxiety was used to explain the current conservative opposition to health care reform in a recent NY Times Op-Ed. And in a Kaiser Family Foundation study released last week, serious attention was paid to the self described feelings of respondents who were in favor of or opposed to health care reform. As a psychoanalyst it is gratifying but a little disconcerting to see affect states used in the analysis of political phenomena. I disagree with this particular argument, and see other forces at work such as a deterioration of the social compact and a massive “splitting” in the body politic.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 10/3/2009 9:04 PM
The humble doughnut is associated with an unusual phenomenon. There lives within us (doughnut eaters anyway) an experience of the perfect doughnut, even though we've never had one. Each doughnut we actually eat creates a little wave of dejection. Not this one. It's ok, but not the perfect doughnut. Then I did have the perfect doughnut, from Hanson's in Hart Michigan, and it was startling. I would argue we feel about our mothers the way we do about doughnuts. Always longing for the ideal we never experienced but could always taste.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 9/27/2009 10:03 AM
"Comparative Effectiveness" is the latest buzzword to come out of the health care policy industry, and it is widely used--and heavily funded--in recent health care legislation. The phrase seems to have come out of nowhere and eclipsed its brethren, evidenced based medicine, medical necessity, and pay for performance. All these phrases make me nervous and should make you nervous too.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 9/22/2009 2:21 PM
The American Psychoanalytic Association has invested a great deal of energy and effort in defending a patient's right to privacy regarding personal medical information. This battle has become particularly fraught as health care reform brings in demands for electronic health records and other presumed efficiencies. In advocating for privacy, are we standing for a "societal value" or something more immutable, a constitutional right?
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 9/11/2009 11:30 AM
I have long held on to the perhaps arrogant idea that that we psychoanalysts have something useful and important to say about just about any human affair—de coeur, or any other kind. Because we have the capacity to look beneath the surface—and the interest—I am pretty confident that we can find a different and intriguing angle in any discussion. This fantasy of mine has held true in numerous settings.
But trying to find something "psychoanalytic" to say about a "Fishboil" was a challenge.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 9/11/2009 11:05 AM
Psychoanalysts work every day with patients experiencing conflict. A profound conflict seems to underly the current health care debate -- between two strains in the national character. One believes in a benign government that solves problems for all (what might be called an "I am my brother's keeper stance) and the other voices a belief in rugged individualism, freedom and liberty. Are these irreconcilable conflicting value systems? Can psychoanalysis help?
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 8/21/2009 7:48 AM
A reporter from Clinical Psychiatry News had seen APsaA's Soldiers and Veterans Initiative online and wanted to hear about what had led to our developing it. She was writing an article on The Soldier's Project, and wanted my comments. The Soldier's Project is a pro bono treatment service for returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Several APsaA Members are deeply involved.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 8/19/2009 10:25 AM
OK, I'm exaggerating. It was one guy, Albert Gonzales, all of 28 years old, and two unnamed Russians. Mr. Gonzales had previously been arrested in 2003 for computer crimes, and cooperated with Federal investigators at that time. So he was all of 22 then.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 8/19/2009 9:10 AM
I was glad to see a story in last Tuesday's New York Times Business Section (August 18, B1) about the struggles Diabetes experts are encountering with nationally promulgated treatment guidelines.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 8/5/2009 12:58 PM
Journalist Erica Goode, past winner of APsaA’s Excellence in Journalism Award, wrote a moving and disturbing story in last Sunday’s NY Times (August 2, 2009) putting the problem of veteran suicide “above the fold”, where it will, I hope, provoke further thought and action.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 7/9/2009 2:45 PM
A friend of a friend of the American Psychoanalytic Association has worked for many years, in many capacities, as a health care policy "guy" in Washington DC. The members of APsaA are understandably concerned about and invested in numerous aspects of health care policy, both reform and otherwise.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 7/9/2009 2:40 PM
My colleague Paul M. Brinich, Ph.D., Clinical Professor, Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry,University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and faculty, Psychoanalytic Education Center of the Carolinas offers this wonderful collection of quotes --primarily from literature with a few from Sigmund Freud-- that convey in a few perfect words the muddles of human nature, the misery of neurosis, and the healing power of words.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 4/23/2009 8:01 PM
For those of us in the mental health field, one of the more shocking aspects of the Department of Justice memos regarding “enhanced interrogation” released by the Obama Administration last weekend was the description of the central role of a psychologist.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 4/23/2009 7:52 PM
Reflecting on the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, the New York Times published a most peculiar piece on Sunday April 12. Titled “Word for Word: Deviates and Inverts” the anonymous "Week in Review" piece seemed to be a kind of apology for the language and attitude the Times presented as “news” about homosexuality in 1963.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 4/7/2009 3:40 AM
A few days ago, I received a call from a company describing itself as an agent of my patient's health insurer, charged with the task of determining the "medical necessity" of her treatment. (A haunted term I was pleased not to have heard in a while). I told the caller that I didn't have a consent from the patient to release the information they wanted, which included "physician's orders, treatment plan, progress notes, and lab results" and in any case I only responded to written requests. The caller became irate, and said "everybody does it [on the telephone]" and eventually hung up on me.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 2/7/2009 4:05 PM
What's up with all the rude people? Viewers of a Boston television station wanted to know, and the reporter assigned to investigate ended up on former APsaA president Dr. Robert Pyle's psychoanalytic couch in order to find the answers to his troubling questions about human nature.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 1/29/2009 8:27 PM
Round one of the Stimulus Package passed the U.S. House of Representatives this week. The American Psychoanalytic Association has been lobbying for privacy protections in the bill, since on of its major components is a section that would promote development of a comprehensive health information technology system.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 1/21/2009 3:31 PM
Seven stories were chosen as the Top Psychiatry Stories of 2008 by Journal Watch Psychiatry, a publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society, which describes itself as "an editorially independent literature-surveillance newsletter summarizing articles from major medical journals".
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 1/19/2009 1:20 PM
I've just returned from APsaA's winter meeting, which was so full of riches that it could feed this blog for months to come. One of many important themes at our meeting related to the needs of those who suffer psychological injury from war, and their families who suffer secondary and often severe trauma as well.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 12/16/2008 8:19 PM
Mad Men, a hip and quirky TV drama on AMC, won the NY magazine's vote for best TV show of 2008 in their review of "The Year in Culture" (New York Magazine, Dec 13, 2008).
The show's premise is unappetizing--a bunch of drinking- before- lunch Madison Avenue advertising executives in 1960, busily engaged in sexual harassment of their secretaries, with pre Betty Friedan wives writhing in neurotic misery back home. It's execution is impeccable and addictive.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 12/15/2008 7:06 PM
I'm grateful to APsaA member Paul Brinich, a reliable source of interesting and sometimes quirky information, for calling our attention to a wonderful article on the European edition of CNN's website. CNN's Mairi Mackay wrote the piece, which lays out the staff's list of the ten best ideas, ever. The first is farming, not to be argued with. But the second is the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 12/11/2008 5:59 PM
For the last year, while gutting and remodeling my home and office a couple of miles East, I have lived in an apartment in a NW side neighborhood of Chicago sometimes called Albany Park, and sometimes called Ravenswood Manor, depending on which side of the class divide you're on. One block North of my apartment is the home of now notorious Illinois Governor Rod Blogojevich.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 12/7/2008 3:52 PM
There's a journal I've subscribed to for a couple of years that I like very much. It's called Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology (PPP) and is a joint American-- British effort with an international editorial board of, not surprisingly, psychiatrists, psychologists and philosophers.
The latest issue is devoted to a consideration of George Engel's biopsychosocial model, which Engel unveiled in 1977 and which had a tremendous impact on medicine and psychiatry.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 12/2/2008 7:31 PM
I'm continuing on the theme of how come, if we're obsolete etc, sparks of psychoanalytic thinking crop up regularly in the most unexpected places?
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 11/29/2008 11:41 AM
Here's what I don't understand. As a psychoanalytic organization we struggle to refute the old canard that "psychoanalysis is dead". We fight to ensure that psychoanalytic theory and therapy are still taught in the core mental health professions of psychiatry, psychology and social work. We labor on public information efforts to make sure that people are still aware of our profession and our theory, because we truly believe they are invaluable.
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 11/21/2008 4:54 PM
Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) has unseated Congressman Dingell (D-MI) as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This could be a positive development for privacy protections in health IT legislation (electronic medical records).
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 11/21/2008 4:27 PM
The Obama transition team has named former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle as the Presdient-Elect's pick for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
APsaA's Legislative representative, Jim Pyles, reports the following...
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By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 11/19/2008 4:13 PM
On Veteran's Day APsaA announced its Soldiers and Veterans Initiative. I was very pleased to hear Michelle Obama say, in last week's interview on 60 Minutes, that meeting the needs of military and veterans families would be an area of focus for her as First Lady.
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