Interview with Bertram Schaffner,M.D.

In 2007, the author interviewed Dr. Bertram Schaffner, one of the first openly gay psychiatrists and psychoanalysts of his generation. In this interview, conducted when Dr. Schaffner was 94 years old, he speaks candidly about the educational and career struggles he faced as a gay man at a time when homosexuality could result in a loss of medical licensure. Among other topics, the interview covers Dr. Schaffner's childhood and college years, his army service, his psychiatric practice, his work as a psychoanalyst, and his work as an activist for human rights.     

Interview with Gaetano Benedetti,M.D

Professor Gaetano Benedetti has been working as a psychoanalyst with individuals with a schizophrenic disorder for over 50 years in his capacity as psychotherapist, supervisor, and teacher. In this interview Professor Benedetti defines the basic psychological problems in schizophrenia. He and his younger colleague in the field of schizophrenia, Dr. Maurizio Peciccia, understand the illness to be the result of an interaction between possible neurobiological vulnerabilities, overwhelming affects, and a self lacking cohesion and integration. Specifically, they characterize the core psychological deficit in schizophrenia to be a deintegration of the separate and symbiotic selves of the patient, resulting in the oscillation between pathological symbiosis with the world and a defensive autistic-like retreat from object relations. Other topics discussed include: the therapeutic symbiosis; the transitional subject; progressive psychopathology; therapeutic counteridentification; the origins of schizophrenia; therapeutic images and psychotherapeutic transformation.     

Hazard, heredity and depression. A family study

The relationship between proband characteristics and familial aggregation of depression was assessed in an interview study of 83 families ascertained via probands who had a recent onset of depression. Contrary to expectations and to previous reports in the literature there were no differences between the frequencies of depression in the first degree relatives of probands who had or had not experienced adversity prior to the onset of their illness. Depression was actually slightly more common among the first degree relatives of probands who had experienced a threatening life event compared with the relatives of those who had not. Early onset of depression (before 32 yr) and a neurotic pattern of symptoms in probands were associated with significantly higher rates of current illness in relatives. However, both these differences disappeared when lifetime prevalence or morbid risk to age 65 were considered. Indeed the morbid risk of severe depression in the relatives of endogenously depressed probands was nearly twice that in the relatives of neurotic probands.