Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute

18/06/2025

Dear Institute community,

Ilonka Alexander is the granddaughter of Institute founder Franz Alexander. She is also a psychothera**st herself, as well as the author of several books about her grandfather and her family.

In the photo below, Ilonka's grandmother Anita Venier Alexander is pictured with an unidentified man. If anyone would like to help her with her current research project and might know who the man in the picture is, please reply in the comments.

Thank you in advance for your help.

11/06/2025

Is burnout creeping in this summer?

You’re not unmotivated or broken. Burnout is a real response to prolonged stress — and it deserves real care. You deserve true rest.

Our Summer Support Series is here to help you recharge. For the first week, we’re focusing on small ways to recognize and recover from burnout so you can reconnect with yourself.

🌿 Therapy can be part of your reset. Visit the link in our bio!
📩 Message us to learn more!

06/06/2025

Kudos to Our Authors!

Congratulations to former Institute Dean Neal Spira! His new article, "Mind and Body: Whatever happened to psychosomatics?" has just come out in The American Psychoanalyst magazine, a publication of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

In his article, Spira traces the concept of psychosomatics back to the 1895 book, "Studies on Hysteria," by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer. He then goes on to discuss the founding of the Chicago School of Psychosomatic Medicine by Helen Flanders Dunbar and Institute founder Franz Alexander.

Spira continues to follow the development of psychosomatic thinking up to the recent past. He examines the considerable scientific evidence for a mind-body connection before addressing the question, "What happened?" Among the possible explanations Spira offers for the decline of interest in psychosomatics is the possibility that "a combination of public disappointment [in some of the early promises of psychoanalysis] and professional lack of interest may have converged and impacted on the pursuit of the connection between psychic distress and somatic disease."

One of the most likely contributors to the decline of psychosomatics, Spira says in conclusion, is the rise of medicalization, or the focus on patients' physical symptoms of distress and their treatment with drugs, to the exclusion of social contributors that lead to emotional symptoms of distress. He ends on a positive note, though, saying that "there is also a great opportunity for us to remember where we came from and to reassert our interest in the frontier between the" mind and the body.

You can read Spira's new article at the link below.

Whatever happened to psychosomatics?

05/06/2025

Congratulations to the 2025 graduates of our Psychoanalytic Education Program and our Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program! Below are the candidates who have completed their studies with the Institute and who will be honored tomorrow evening at the Institute's headquarters at 8 South Michigan in Chicago:

Psychoanalytic Education Program Graduates:

Lori He Liang

Bobbie Davis (Child & Adult Program)

Lolly Connolly

Sharron He

Peter Shaft (Child/Adult)

Sepideh Firouzi

Alexandra Hedberg

Summer Wang

Jim Grabowski

Sultan Al-Owidha

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program Graduates:

Neal Swartz

Karyn Sandlos

Taotao Huang

Lin Zhou

Shirley Zhang

Tianyi Ma

Irene Zhang

Cecilia Wu Xi

Anna Belozer

Rachel Du

Ren Zhe

Noha AbdulGhaffar

Suad Hashim

05/06/2025

In October 2023, the Institute moved most of its archives to the University of Chicago. Thanks to the generosity of former Institute president David Terman and his family, archivists in the Special Collections Research Center at the University’s Regenstein Library have been busy since then making a record of the holdings in this collection. With the estimated size of the holdings being somewhere between 200 and 250 linear feet, they certainly had their work cut out for them.

Last month, University archivist Kathleen Feeney said the work on creating a finding aid to help researchers navigate this vast collection is nearing completion. The person who created the finding aid is Ivy Yahner, who is graduating from the University this weekend with a Masters in Humanities. Feeney said the document would be completed later this summer. The Center will also be hiring a full-time archivist to oversee the collection, she said.

Pictured here are Feeney and Yahner, along with Archives & Manuscripts Accessions Supervisor Alexandra Breza. On display is a small portion of the Franz Alexander / Terman Family / CPI Archives, which will soon be available to researchers.

14/05/2025

Admissions Open for Psychoanalytic Education Programs 2025 -

07/05/2025

🌟 Upcoming Event! 🌟

🧠 The 2nd Annual Dr. Mark Solms Lectureship in Neuropsychoanalysis
Topic: The Primitive Roots of Consciousness

📅 Saturday, May 17, 2025
⏰ 9:00 am – 10:30 am CST

Join us as internationally renowned neuropsychologist Dr. Mark Solms challenges conventional wisdom on the origins of consciousness. While many believe consciousness arises from the higher cerebral cortex, Dr. Solms will present compelling clinical, neurological, and experimental evidence showing that it stems instead from the primitive brainstem.

He’ll explore why consciousness is fundamentally affective and emotional — not just perceptual and cognitive — and how these insights connect back to Freud’s original ideas on unconscious processes and conscious feelings.

Don’t miss this fascinating opportunity to dive into cutting-edge neuropsychoanalytic thought!

✨ Register now and save your spot! ✨
https://shorturl.at/OAEBo

06/05/2025

Happy Birthday, Sigmund Freud! 🧠🎂

Born on May 6, 1856, Freud radically reshaped how we understand the mind—introducing concepts like the unconscious, defense mechanisms, dream symbolism, and the power of talk therapy.
There’s no denying his lasting impact on psychotherapy, psychology, and beyond.

💬 What’s one Freudian idea you find fascinating?

11/02/2025

Faculty in the News

Congratulations to faculty member Paul Holinger!

Holinger was quoted by the Chicago Tribune's Heidi Stevens in her Friday column. Stevens expressed dismay about comments made by Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R) during hearings on President Trump's nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Tuberville said he missed the days when the use of corporal punishment to discipline misbehaving children was more widespread.

Holinger has written about the harmful effects of physical violence on children. Stevens asked him what he thought of Tuberville's comments.

“It goes contrary to everything we know in terms of children’s development,” he told her. Stevens quoted from some of Holinger's writing on the topic: “Hitting a child elicits precisely the negative effects a parent, caretaker or other abuser does not want to generate in a child. Distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust.”

Holinger has written and spoken before about the issue of physical punishment of children and alternatives to it. He has written on the topic for Psychology Today and been quoted in the New York Times. His latest book is titled, "Affects, Cognition, and Language as Foundations of Human Development."

Tuberville lamented what he says is an overreliance on medication to treat ADHD. He lost credibility when he mentioned whipping a child.

23/01/2025

Happy Birthday to Institute founder Franz Alexander!

Born today in 1891 in Budapest, Franz Alexander founded the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1932, serving as its first director until 1956. Alexander is most well-known for his contributions to the study of psychosomatics, but he also wrote extensively on the application of psychoanalysis to the study of criminals.

Alexander's granddaughter, Ilonka Alexander, has written several books about her grandfather. The foreword to her 2015 book, "The Life and Times of Franz Alexander," notes his efforts to help French analyst Marie Bonaparte in her unsuccessful campaign in 1959 to commute the death sentence of convicted robber, kidnapper and ra**st Caryl Chessman.

The photos here are of a letter that Alexander wrote to Bonaparte regarding the Chessman case. Alexander states that Chessman had seemed to improve his ability to control his anger after a period of psychotherapy. "...previously when he became enraged he had the impulse to grab a gun," Alexander wrote. "Now he lets out his anger by pounding a typewriter." In fact, Chessman wrote four books in prison, the most well-known of which was entitled "Cell 2455 Death Row."

21/01/2025

Kudos to Our Authors!

Congratulations to advanced candidate Sultan Al-Owidha! Sultan recently published two original articles and a translation into Arabic of a book originally written in English. The book, "Psychology of Pain," was written in 1996 by English researcher Suzanne Skevington.

Sultan's most recent article is entitled, "Psychoanalysis Across Cultures: A Personal Journey of a Saudi Arabian Analysand through Egypt, Canada, and the United States." In it, he asserts that psychoanalysis must be adapted to cultural sensitivities to gain wider acceptance in the Arab and Muslim world. The article appears in the newest volume of the journal, "Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology."

Sultan began exploring the theme of cultural adaptations of psychoanalysis in non-Western settings last year in an article entitled, "Islam and Psychoanalysis: Exploring the Intersection of Sufism and Psychoanalytic Self-Psychology." The article was published in the European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, volume 16, no. 2.

Both articles can be downloaded for free from the publishers' web sites. To download Sultan's most recent article, click on the link below.

18/01/2025

Reminder - CPI Education Department Open House 2025 -