Psychoanalytic Intersections

Psychoanalytic Intersections examines the influence and legacy of the Austen Riggs Center, one of the oldest psychoanalytically oriented psychiatric hospitals in America, and home of the Erikson Institute for Education and Research.Former Erikson scholar Elise Miller brings together the work of a wide range of clinicians and scholars who have participated in the Erikson Institute’s Visiting Scholars Program. Representing a variety of disciplines, departments, and methodologies, the contributors exemplify the cutting edge of interdisciplinary work at the intersections of psychoanalysis and academia, psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis, and hospital and private practice settings. For this unique collection each contributor has selected a piece of their published work to be presented with a new afterword reflecting on how time spent in a clinical setting shaped their thinking and writing. These personal narratives also offer a unique opportunity to consider how this kind of scholarship was produced, and what it can teach us about the disciplinary crossings and migrations of applied psychoanalysis, especially as it continues to extend its insights and influences out into the world around us.Psychoanalytic Intersections will be of great interest to psychoanalytic clinicians, psychiatrists and psychologists engaged in cross-disciplinary work, and to academics and scholars of interdisciplinary psychoanalytic studies.

“This brilliant collection of incisive and powerfully interdisciplinary essays is the outcome of scholarly retreats, organized through the Erikson Institute at the Austen Riggs Hospital in Stockbridge, Mass. What is striking is how deeply the presence of the hospital, its bucolic setting, its work with patients, and its commitment to psychoanalysis inspired these writers, who come from many different practices and disciplines to immerse themselves in the psychoanalytical and rehabilitative world of Riggs and its patients. Each scholar finds a way to revisit and reinhabit his or her discipline with an exciting grounding in psychoanalytic theory and treatment.”-- Adrienne Harris, PhD, Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.“The Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center is a unique place within a unique place. Since 1985, its Scholar-in-Residence program has given more than 50 academics and clinicians the double gift of extended time to write while participating in the life of an in-patient therapeutic community. If, as Erikson once said, what he had to offer was above all ‘a way of looking at things,’ the essays by Erikson scholars collected by Elise Miller in this volume teach and delight the reader with 12 interdisciplinary perspectives that together add up to an inspiring vision of the creative power and critical possibilities of psychoanalysis.”— Peter L. Rudnytsky, Head, Department of Academic and Professional Affairs, American Psychoanalytic Association.“This splendid collection of essays by former Erikson Scholars represents interdisciplinary work at its best and testifies to the importance of the Erikson Institute at the Austen Riggs Center, which was its generative source. This volume demonstrates compellingly how knowledge gained through clinical work contributes to our understanding of the wider world in which the clinical is embedded. It also grounds more theoretical work in the humanities and social sciences in actual clinical practice, that is, in lived human experience.”--Thomas Kohut is the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Professor of History at Williams College, a member of the Council of Scholars of the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, and the President of the Freud Foundation, US.

Elise Miller is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California, and a clinician in private practice. She has published articles in literary journals and in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, winning the American Psychoanalytic Association Peter Loewenberg Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture two years in a row for her work on the writing process.