In 1994, Dr. Greenblatt completed the Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California Santa Cruz, where her studies focused upon the relationships between Freud’s thinking and the various forms of cultural modernism emerging in Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century. History of Consciousness is well known for its expansive analysis of culture, and psychoanalytic theory and interpretation have been central to a number of its faculty and graduate students, many of whom take up psychoanalysis in strikingly original ways.

However, the distance that separates the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and the uses of psychoanalysis in critical studies is vast. Dr. Greenblatt has had the great fortune of bridging that distance in several different ways, within several different institutions, first when she was invited to give a lecture on visuality and psychoanalysis on a panel of analysts at a conference sponsored by the Morphos Gallery in San Francisco. At the request of the chief of psychiatry at UCSF Mt. Zion Hospital, who organized the conference, Dr. Greenblatt designed and taught a seminar for postdoctoral clinicians in psychology at UCSF, addressing questions of fantasy in the clinical context as well as in psychoanalytic theory and history. The aim of the course was to bridge the divergent worlds of clinical training and the kind of inquiry more typical of humanistic and critical thinking. A number of clinicians from various Bay Area training institutes have sought out individual consultations with her about their writing, and Dr. Greenblatt in turn has delivered research papers in progress at the “grand rounds” of the hospital. Most recently, Greenblatt has been a consultant with the Access Institute for Psychological Services, a clinic that aims to provide low-cost services in psychotherapy as well as psychoanalytically oriented training for post-doctoral clinicians. Greenblatt is advising Access on refining all aspects of its public presentation and institutional message, all of which are crucial in its early ambitious efforts at fundraising and programmatic development.

The meeting of cultural theory and clinical practice is potentially rich. However, for complex historical reasons, academic and clinical discourses diverge seriously in their understanding. Within the clinical setting, the introduction of humanistic ways of thinking about medical training is inventive and often inspires new ways of thinking about treatment. To integrate these fields renews the relevance of analytical training in an era when that training is diminished through industries of managed care and through perennial efforts within medicine to dismiss psychoanalysis as nothing more than a costly fiction. Dialogue between these distinct spheres enlivens our understanding of psychology and its clinical practices, particularly in our contemporary world, where many forms of anxiety are played out so vividly on our cultural and political stage.

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