Recognizable Vessels: A Note from the Editors of Psychoanalytic Perspectives on its 20th Anniversary

Abstract

On the 20th anniversary of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Rachel Altstein and Karen Perlman, as Co-Editors-in-Chief, look back to the very first published issues of their journal to find the early seeds of its philosophy and mission that remain at the heart of the current iteration of the publication. They introduce new features that retain the ideology of the old, specifically that of giving voice to analytic writers from the sidelines of psychoanalytic publishing who are not on the traditional roster of frequently published writers. Another new feature, “Second Look,” pairs a current writer with a classic paper for a contemporary rereading, imagining a dialogue across time. The three unique sections of Perspectives that privilege creative writing, memoir, and interview are described, lauded, and committed to anew. Reflecting on what it means to edit, and what it means to edit psychoanalytic papers specifically, Altstein and Perlman also think about the priority of preserving voice and the notion of refraction in the process of an editorial interaction with texts.

Keywords:

• canon
• editing
• literature
• NIP
• psychoanalytic journal
• Psychoanalytic Perspectives

The name of this introductory essay in honor of the 20th anniversary of Psychoanalytic Perspectives is culled from a poem from the very first issue of our journal, published 20 years ago almost to the month. Describing what it feels like to contemplate publishing a psychoanalytic paper, Rachel Newcombe (2003) wrote:

I am not quite ready

to have my words shipped off

in a recognizable vessel that feels

unrecognizable to me

Indeed, letting a paper that you have written out into the world is a powerful launch, and a profound separation from a thing the writer has created. An idea occurs to us. It is nurtured, pulled on, written out, rewritten. We fall in love with what we’ve made, we fight with it, we hate it, we erase it, we recreate it, we love it again. And then, at some point, it feels done. It is done. We let it out of our hands and into the world.

Usually, the first step of letting go is releasing our writing into the minds of others. Friends, colleagues, and partners first. And then, eventually, if we decide to move forward, into the hands of a journal editor. An editor goes into the words of a writer and tries her best to inhabit them, to feel them from the inside out, to see where the problems are in a way that the writer herself cannot see. But that’s not her only job. The real task of an editor is more nuanced and abstract: to change the thing for the better while retaining its sameness. The text unto itself passes through the mind of the editor and, by way of something akin to refraction—a phenomenon where the direction of a wave is bent as it passes from one medium to another—emerges as something both the same and slightly different. This is intimate work. Most importantly, we, Rachel and Karen, try to stay out of a writer’s way, and we coach our junior editors to do the same. Preserving voice is essential.

And then, after all the editing, after the problems with track changes are solved and that one section we’ve been going back and forth about is settled, the piece is published. It is “shipped off/in a recognizable vessel,” but even then, it’s not as simple as that. Because after our writing appears on PEP-Web and in our soft paper bound volumes, after we hear people talking about our products, our paper gets handed back to us through the minds of other readers; it becomes something different yet again. It can feel “unrecognizable.” The text is the same—the words, the letters, the commas, the apostrophes—but it’s changed because other people have experienced it, and in experiencing it, they have imbued it with the non-tangible fingerprints of their minds (Iser, 1980; T. H. Ogden, 2012, see chapter 1: “Some thoughts on how to read this book”).

As the current co-editors of Perspectives, we are keenly aware of how big a deal it is for writers to allow their work out of their hands and into the world, and the corresponding responsibility we carry as we see their papers across the finish lines. This is not a small thing. Papers are like babies. We make them, and then, if things go well, we let them go and, like children, they make their way in the world and become something of their own. With anxiety and hope, we watch and wait. As analysts, we know this deeply and viscerally vis-a-vis our understanding of how children launch, a process that includes a lot of love, kicking and screaming, and ultimately a surrender to and anticipation of a renewed return of the product we’ve created, which had to leave in order to become something of its own (Mahler & Furer, 1963; Winnicott, 1965).

This issue marks the 20th anniversary of our journal; it is filled with babies. We’re using the opportunity it affords us to get clear on who we are and who we want to be, and to think, remember, and imagine.

Origin Story

To understand this journal, one must understand the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), the institutional progenitor of Perspectives. The establishment of NIP in 1970 was itself a gesture of breaking old analytic vessels and wriggling out of a received analytic doctrine that felt rigid and closed (see Frank, 2023, this issue, for a thorough history of the founding of NIP). From the very beginning, its curriculum has been committed to the idea of pluralism among theories, with the idea that giving candidates a deep dive into many schools of analytic theory would set them up to know which one(s) would ultimately feel the most like them. This distinctive psychoanalytic pedagogy remains at the heart of NIP.

Perspectives was founded by friends, which is significant to us: camaraderie remains a cornerstone of our Journal community. It began as a newsletter called the NIPPA Review, named for the professional organization of NIP. The philosophy of the Review was extremely clear, and contained many of the things that we are intent on prioritizing as we move into our third decade. It “did not set out to mystify or intimidate” (Geffner et al., 2003, p. 4). Yes; we feel this too, right now. It wanted to focus on clinical content that was evocative, accessible, and straightforward: “neither dogmatic nor doctrinaire, [it] presented scholarship in an unpretentious and readable fashion” (p. 4). Yes again; in the now, we aim for writing that feels open and clean, not ostentatious. We want the articles we publish to feel clinically useful to our readers, most of whom are practitioners but not necessarily themselves writers or theoreticians. We want our papers to provoke their own thinking and reflection, rather than having the writing be at a remove from our readers’ everyday practice and experience, as some contemporary psychoanalytic writing can be.

Those involved quickly felt that a newsletter was, in fact, a proto-academic creature. They organized a more serious publication: a new psychoanalytic journal. The Statement of Editorial Philosophy which introduced the inaugural issue reiterated their priorities: to publish scholarship that was evocative, available and straightforward (Geffner et al., 2003). NIPPA continued to undergird the efforts of publications, and this organization remains to this day our indispensable fiscal sponsor.

And, a strong commitment to cultivating new writers was announced. Resounding yes here. Perspectives has recently introduced our “Emerging Voices” section, in which we publish the work of up-and-coming writers in the field who are new to publishing, whether they are young, recently minted analysts, or have years of clinical experience. The section is an evolution of the “New Voices” section introduced in the journal’s third year, which was designed to introduce never-before-published writers. We pair our emerging voices with the commentary of a more established writer and thinker, highlighting our intention to provide fledgling analytic writers a forum in which to have their voices heard, to try out new ideas that may grow and change as they gain confidence and as their perspective on writing, theory, and clinical work develops. By pairing an emerging author with the voice of a more established writer, we parallel the kind of supervisory experience that psychoanalysts employ in our analytic work at any stage. In this issue, Eric Schwartz (2023), in “We’re Living in a Society: Ideology and the Social Object,” proposes a social object theory, an idea whose burgeoning importance in the field of relational theory was recently highlighted in a recent IARPP colloquium (May, 2023). Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay is his generous discussant.

The first volumes of Perspectives were published in a printing shop somewhere in the city where the price was right. Holding them in our hands today, they have a DIY feel from way before those three letters became an early-aughts meme. Scrappy, serious, collaborative, personal, mission-driven, and a steal at $35 a year. Anyone who is used to buying homegrown poetry collections that used to be sold in piles near the check-out registers in independent bookstores, or familiar with reading zines from the '80s about punk and hardcore music (see Hsu, 2022) knows that tactile feel. Philip Bromberg (2003), writing a Letter to the Editors about his experience of our inaugural issue, put it this way: “No dances, no nonsense, none of the decoration typically added to a first issue to mask the inevitable anxiety of new parents … I am expressing my admiration for the breathtakingly high quality of your inaugural issue.”

The next few issues hewed to the particularity of time in the early 2000s. Historically, the Relational movement was in full force when our journal came onto the scene (our first book review ever, written in essay-style [Rosenthal, 2003], was of Stephen Mitchell’s Relationality), and 9/11 was acutely in the air (our third issue featured a suite of papers reflecting on trauma, terrorism, and psychoanalysis; see Clifford, 2005; Frawley O’Dea, 2003; Goren, 2005; Greenwald, 2005). Political and social currents were foregrounded and woven into developmental paradigms from the very beginning: our second issue (Dimen, 2004) contained feminist commentary by Muriel Dimen (2012) and Cleonie White (2004), among others, on the development of the relationship between mothers and sons. “Politics and Taboo” was the center of a roundtable discussion among Neil Altman, Jessica Benjamin, Theodore Jacobs, and Paul Wachtel (2004). The issue also included the first published poetry by Thomas Ogden, a poem called “Crumbs,” both playful and deep (Ogden, 2004). The book review—very intentionally, we’re sure—highlighted Jeremy Safran’s work on the unfolding dialogue between psychoanalysis and Buddhism (Porter, 2004). The integration of non-analytic ideas into the tenets of psychoanalysis was vital from the Journal’s beginning (see again Frank, 2023, this issue).

And so the earliest issues kept coming, many including work from then-newcomers, relatively early themselves to publication: Robert Grossmark (2006) and Sarah Hill (2006) on diversity, Galit Atlas-Koch (2010) on trauma and playfulness, Cleonie White (2004) on voice and politics. The third-ever issue features a lengthy interview with Lew Aron, warm and personal (Dorfman, 2005). In it, Aron talks about the beginning days of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and his fascination with the idea of authenticity, a complicated philosophical notion given the fact that we all have an unconscious. He describes the productive “creative tension” that can result from “emphasizing the continuities between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis,” which we like to think was a wink to our own emphasis on integration (pg. 21). We are extremely proud to have published this time-capsule of a lost and beloved person.

Family Tree

As current Co-Editors-in-Chief, we acknowledge those who came before us. Judith Becker Greenwald was our first Executive Editor, with Ken Frank as Senior Consulting Editor (a position he maintained for 18 years); Amanda Hirsch Geffner and Shelly Itzkowitz were by her side. Mary Sussillo was significantly instrumental early on. Geffner and Itzkowitz took over after Greenwald’s tenure, becoming the next co-editors (2004–2009). Deborah Pines and Steven Kuchuck succeeded them, introducing themselves to readers in their first issue with their experience of encountering the expected and the unexpected in their analytic work and lives (Kuchuck & Pines, 2009). They were editors for eight years, and oversaw many vital publications, including roundtables devoted to female desire (see Atlas, 2012; Bjorklund, 2012; Dimen, 2012; Orbach, 2012), and, among many others, individual papers by Ogden on analysts as literary readers (B. H. Ogden & Ogden, 2012), Katie Gentile (2009) and Abby Stein (2009) on gender, violence, and aggression in the consulting room, Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris (2010) on Ferenczi, and Margaret Crastnopol (2011) on the otherness of being.

Kuchuck took over in 2014 on his own, with Hillary Grill as his Executive Editor. Together (see Grill, 2023, this issue), they continued to publish papers that were remarkable for their variety and timeliness. Among many others: Alan Sirote on mutual influence in the analytic relationship (Sirote, 2015); Jill Gentile (2015) on freedom and feminine space; Ilene Philipson (2017) on the continued importance of Fromm (Philipson, 2017); Lisa Cataldo (2019) on God; and Jean Petrucelli (2020) on packing for a trip. Lynne Layton (2018) wrote about lying and disillusionment (Layton, 2018), and Eric Sherman (2018) on Trump. Kuchuck stayed at the helm until 2020. During his time as editor, Kuchuck presided over a remarkable growth in staff, board structure, and content. With foresight and ambition, he negotiated our contract with publishing powerhouse Taylor & Francis, and established our presence on PEP-Web, greatly expanding our readership and reach. Kuchuck has been vital to us in his continual support, respect, and encouragement for our vision, and his unique combination of imagination, practicality, and warm camaraderie.

Rachel Sopher took over in 2020, filling an important seat at the table just as Covid and BLM/racial reckoning infused our world. We joined her in 2021 and took over in 2022; she remains a present third still, always ready to think and imagine with us. In this issue, Sopher (2023) reflects importantly on what her brief term meant to her and how she has come to see that the political upheaval and radical social change of her time as editor impacted not only the world at large but the psychoanalytic journal world specifically. She imagines and outlines the power of the journal in defining the field, and calls for greater dialogue among all psychoanalytic journals to mitigate our tendency to silo different factions and ideas (see also Sopher, 2020).

In the vein of dialoging, but this time between the past and the present, we’re proud to announce another new feature, “Second Look,” wherein we republish a classic psychoanalytic paper and pair it with a contemporary rereading by a current writer or theorist, looking at how the original paper’s ideas stand up, can be viewed from our current context, and have evolved or changed over time. Or, perhaps something in the original paper sparks something completely new in the current writer’s mind, and can be used as a jumping off point, an opportunity to reflect on some repressed or unthought aspect of psychoanalysis—as Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) did for Jane Eyre and Victorian literature.

We have one more reflection from an integral past leader at the journal to introduce. In her energized and energizing essay reflecting on what Perspectives has meant to her, Hillary Grill (2023, this issue) calls psychoanalytic writing an “unruly beast that has been over-tamed for far too long.” This idea in particular is alive in our peripheral vision as we march ahead.

Art, Memoir, and Psychoanalysis

As far as we know, we are the only psychoanalytic journal to dedicate one section in every issue to purely artful writing. This feels both radical and natural. Psychoanalysis and art are companion disciplines in many ways, both requiring freedom, imagination, creativity, and risk (see Loewald, 1975; Symington, 1987). Bonnie Zindel was the original architect of the “Creative Literary Arts” section. “For the first time,” she wrote 20 years ago, “a psychoanalytic journal has made a place for a section dedicated to the celebration of artistic expression.” Why is this natural? Because creativity resounds in psychoanalysis: “the creative process that transpires between analyst and patient brings something into existence that had not been there before” (Zindel, 2005, p. 93).

In this issue, Allison Katz, having put her own creative stamp on this section for the last four years—with poetry, prose, and short stories about art, film, and reentry after Covid, among other themes—uses her final issue as Creative Literary Editor to curate a collection of essays and poems on rage, a feeling familiar to all of us, yet often absent in much of the relational literature. Katz takes her leave of us to focus on other important NIP and personal initiatives, and we wish her well. In a lovely boomerang turn, Zindel will return to edit “Creative Literary Arts” with all the heart and imagination she was filled with when that section was first introduced. We welcome her back with open arms and a warm anticipation for what she’ll think of next.

So, too, is memoir in harmony with psychoanalysis, chiefly because to know one’s patient is to know and articulate one’s self. Nobody gets into psychoanalysis randomly. It’s just too weird a profession, making a living listening for unconscious content all day long (see, e.g., Bernstein, 2020; Miller, 1997). Hence the naturalness in being curious about what it is about us that drew us into this line of work, and wanting to write about it. In the journal’s fifth year, Clemens Loew introduced “Private Lives,” a section which grazes the line of memoir, and he has continued to edit it annually. Loew, a Holocaust survivor who has himself published a memoir, When the Birds Stopped Singing (Loew, 2014), about his experiences as a child during and after the Second World War, came to the United States with his mother as a young boy who needed to assimilate and make sense of his experience. In this issue, he writes movingly of how, decades later and despite the many successes and joys of his life, he can be swept up in the sadness and loneliness of those early years, and how he can also make sense of them through stories (Loew, 2023, this issue). He is currently at work on a new book, to be published in the near future.

Rounding out the artistic features of Perspectives is “Global Perspectives,” which embodies our dedication to international discourse. Once a year for the last 10, Jill Choder-Goldman has interviewed psychoanalysts from around the world, getting them to elaborate on their work, but also seeking to understand the culture, economics, and social fabric of the countries in which they live and practice. Most often, her interviewees are not relational practitioners, and her interviews with them offer our readers not only a glimpse of another country—Greece, Japan, Israel, Italy, France, among many more—but also different ways of thinking about psychoanalysis as influenced by history and culture. Traveling to meet her subjects in person gives her interviews a precise and detailed flavor they would otherwise not have, and brings a fascinating and explicitly global perspective to the journal and our work. An upcoming issue of Perspectives will feature her most recent interview with Dr. Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, director of the Sigmund-Freud-Institut, Frankfurt/Main, who lives and works in Frankfurt. The interview promises to be a fascinating look at the practice of psychoanalysis and at trauma and resilience in postwar, contemporary Germany. In this issue, Choder-Goldman (2023) reflects on her time as editor and interviewer.

Of course, traditional academic papers are and will continue to be the mainstay of the Journal. In this issue, in addition to our “Emerging Voices” pairing, we have also included pieces by longtime NIP faculty which look both back and forward as they offer integrations and expansions of various psychoanalytic theories. James Fosshage, co-founder of NIP, board director, faculty, and supervisor; and Chuck Finlon, board president, faculty member and supervisor (along with Susan Berck, Noah Glassman, and Jonathan Raffes), offer “Expanding Our Understanding of Transferences as Organizing Patterns: Theoretical Evolution, Contributions of Other Sciences, and Clinical Implications” (Fosshage et al., 2023, this issue). In it, they delineate the concept of transference as it has evolved over time, incorporating empirical findings and theoretical contributions from other scientific discourses to conceptualize transference as an organizing activity involving perceptions, affects, motives, meanings and verbal and sensorial symbolic encoding and processing. This cohesive picture of transference, they argue, best captures the mind’s complex functioning on implicit and explicit levels within relational systems, and has important clinical implications which subtly but importantly shift standard psychoanalytic techniques.

Peter Kaufmann, also a longtime NIP faculty member and supervisor, and in recent years the instructor for a foundational course on the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, has also written an ambitiously integrative piece, “When Empathy Opens.” Kaufmann draws on concepts from self-psychology and relational psychoanalysis to illustrate the particular usefulness of combining Kohutian empathy with a more relational focus on enactment in work with accommodative patients whose presentation and character otherwise preclude the emergence and expression of aggression in treatment. A detailed case study of his many years of work with Anne, as well as his incorporation of what he calls Winnicott’s “leading edge” ideas about destruction, survival and breakdown, supplement and explicate his Self-Relational model of therapeutic action.

Jenn Joy’s (2023, this issue) excellent review of Avgi Saketopoulou’s recent book, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (Saketopoulou, 2023), rounds out the issue by bringing us back, in a completely different register, to the intertwining questions of race, sexuality, trauma, and transformation that infuse contemporary theory. Where Schwartz and McKay reflect on social subjects who struggle with and against a complex tapestry of toxic social ideologies, Joy, an analytic candidate with years of prior experience as a dance critic, writer, editor, and professor of dance theory, allows herself to be drawn into Saketopoulou’s proposition to “give [ourselves] over” to an alternative theory of trauma in her argument for limit consent, a “vision of consent in which power, vulnerability, and responsibility are more complexly distributed, not only between participants but in the texture of the encounter” (p. 65). As Joy writes, Saketopoulou (who has herself has taught at NIP) brilliantly “elaborates the tensions inherent in [the] pull between unconscious and ego (itself constituted socially as much as psychically) as a constant negotiation of enigma that is foreign or opaque within the self” (Joy, 2023, this issue).

So, as in previous issues, exposure to a wide range of psychoanalytic models and theories, negotiation between old and new, integrative thinking, and, always, a focus on clinical utility suffuse our pages, guiding our editorial decisions and reflecting and shaping the relational field and dialogue with readers around the world. It has been our pleasure to curate this issue with papers that highlight these hallmarks of Perspectives.

Motivation and Community

Signing up for a big job when nobody is making you do it is a funny thing. I’m sure every editor of every academic journal, psychoanalytic or otherwise, hears something like, “I don’t know how you do it” once in a while. Implicit in this is often something like, “I don’t know why you do it.” Good questions. Editing a journal takes hours and hours every single week of the year, and not just for those in the chief positions. Determined and devoted associate editors, assistant editors, submissions editors, treasurers, and proofreaders give hundreds of hours a year as well. We are beyond fortunate to have the committee we do, who do this work shoulder to shoulder with us. Kelly Bassett Buono, Robert Fellman, Jenn Joy, Julia Kirchoff, Robin Kirman, Andrea Fortunato Loftus, Hilary Offman, Michele Orecklin, Allison Penn, and Lissa Schaupp can be counted on, and not just to put in the hours, but to be in true community with us. Matt Aibel, as our Submissions Editor, is indispensable; we quite frankly could not do our work without his keen eye, astute writing, and careful shepherding of our peer review process. Aibel always seems to know just the person to tap for each and every one of our peer reviews, and his artful critiques of every submission we receive are worthy contributions to the literature in and of themselves. In this issue, Aibel (2023) thinks about why he reads (and keeps reading) analytic papers.

And in past years, Kathleen Amshoff, David Austern, Arthur Baur, Anja Behm, Kim Bernstein, Joanne Camas, Beth Dorfman, Alexandra Eitel, Philip Gardner, Francoise Jaffe, Janet Kelly, Sharyn Leff, Sharon Mariner, Charlotte Prince, Ginny Rachmani, Maggie Robbins, Roger Rosenthal, Juliet Ross, Sandra Salerno, Melissa Secrest, and Marc Sholes were integrally involved in many ways, large and small.¹

This is how we do it. With help.

So … why do we do it? We do it because we want to. None of us has to do anything we don’t want to do, including being the editors of psychoanalytic journals. But it’s not hard to say why we enlist. Lots of things go into our motivation: an excitement for writing and writers, a love of our literature, a certain kind of ambition, a desire to be connected to people we admire, a desire to widen our circle of regulars, an awareness of how psychoanalysis can help readers understand trauma, both individual and collective. It can be fun, and it is often extremely hard. It’s a powerful job with a lot of responsibility, and we don’t take that lightly. Who gets published and how frequently, how quickly papers are funneled through pipelines and into what journals, all of these factors impact the field indelibly. Decisions to publish have ripple effects: which papers get cited in other papers, which papers are included on the syllabi of training institutes, which writers are invited to participate in conferences and symposia, which writers are invited onto boards, onto faculties and into supervisory pools. These are not small things.

***

Since this introduction contains many of our personal notions and describes memoir-style writing as a hallmark of our journal, we’d like to walk the walk and say a little bit about ourselves and how we find ourselves in our current positions.

First, we were candidates. Actually, before that, we were many other things. An early childhood teacher and literature professor (Karen). A criminal defense lawyer (Rachel). Mothers (both). Readers (both). Writers (aspiring). Armchair fans of Freud (both), Italian-language lover (Karen), linguistics nerd (Rachel). Then we became candidates. In the mid-2000s, New York State law evolved to allow people with postgraduate degrees in non-mental health disciplines to enter psychoanalytic training for licensure (N.Y. Edn. Law § 8405: NY CODE—Section 8405). This not only ushered in people like us, who had different kinds of qualifications, but made the living of life itself an advanced study. Karen had a PhD, Rachel had a JD, and in 2008, both in our 40s, there we were, sitting in a classroom with that inimitable first-day-of-school feeling.

Our cohort was diverse, our closeness hard-fought, and we learned as much from the experience of studying and being together as we did from the academic papers assigned. Our classes had phenomenal names: transference; therapeutic action; object relations, dreams. We were both so curious, so turned on, and so interested in the literature. So interested! And, we were friends. Many Monday mornings we were the two early ones, sitting next to each other at the far corner of the long table. We joined the journal committee as candidates, and stayed on after graduation, rising to become Senior Editors first under Kuchuck, then Rachel Sopher. We began to write ourselves, Karen (Perlman, 2019) with an emphasis on skin and object relations, Rachel (Altstein, 2020, 2021) focusing on language and writing, and drawing from the law. In a lovely, lucky, and complementary way, we’re each pretty good at things the other finds challenging. Affection, respect, and a shared intuition as to when to take things seriously versus when to hold them lightly define our team.

In bookending fashion, we’d like to end with another nod to a poem published in our “Creative Literary Arts” section: Claire Basescu’s (2015) “We learn to love the density.” It’s not about journals, psychoanalytic or otherwise. It’s not even about psychoanalysis proper. It’s a poem about love, bodies, connection, and the passage of time. Still, the title captures something of what we feel about editing, and about editing this journal specifically, which is so concentrated—so dense—with history and ideas. We too have learned to love the density. For the time being, we’ll go on doing just that, with a great sense of adventure for the future accompanied by a reverent feeling for our roots. Both sentiments mark this moment in time.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Altstein

Rachel Altstein, LP, JD, is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and teaches psychoanalytic writing at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP). She is a member of Beatrice Beebe’s Infant Research Board, and chairs the Educator’s Award for Unpublished Scholarship at NIP. Before entering the psychoanalytic field, she worked as an attorney specializing in prisoners’ rights, criminal defense, and anti-death penalty litigation. She publishes and presents on themes occurring in language and writing, and in the psychoanalytic writing process in particular. She maintains a practice in New York City.

KAREN Perlman

Karen Perlman, LP, PhD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice working with children, adolescents, adults, and families. She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and a faculty member and supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, as well as a member of NIP’s Curriculum Committee and on the Editorial Board of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. She is also a consultant to a number of preschools and speaks frequently in the community on topics relating to parenting and child development.

Notes

¹ If we’ve left you out, contact us at [email protected] or [email protected] so we can set the record straight.