My Favorite Chileans

[Gary Freedman]

Dean Claudio Grossman, American University Law School (and a former research fellow! -- yes, I know about those research fellows)

Otto Kernberg, MD, past president, International Psychoanalytical Association

Claudio Arrau, pianist

During the summer of 1972, if I recall correctly, I saw Claudio Arrau perform the Brahms first piano concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Robin Hood Dell in Fairmount Park. The orchestra performed the Beethoven seventh symphony in the second part of the concert. I was 18 years old at the time. What you don't know when you're 18 is that you'll be 18 for the rest of your life.

Here's Claudio Arrau performing the second movement of the Brahms first piano concerto.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3cVxI52gbU

[Alendar]

Contribution in the fields of narcissism. Sounds like an oxymoron.

[Gary Freedman]

Otto F. Kernberg (born 1928) is a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. In addition, his work has been central in integrating postwar ego psychology (which was primarily developed in the United States and the United Kingdom) with Kleinian and other object relations perspectives (which was developed primarily in the United Kingdom and South America). His integrative writings were central to the development of modern object relations, a theory of mind that is perhaps the theory most widely accepted among modern psychoanalysts.

Born in Vienna, Kernberg and his family fled Nazi Germany in 1939, emigrating to Chile. He studied biology and medicine and afterwards psychiatry and psychoanalysis with the Chilean Psychoanalytic Society. He first came to the U.S. in 1959 on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study research in psychotherapy with Jerome Frank at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1961 he emigrated to the U.S. joining the C.F. Menninger Memorial Hospital, later became director of the hospital. He was the Supervising and Training Analyst of the Topeca Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Director of the Psychotherapy Research Project of Menninger Foundation. In 1973 he moved to New York where he was Director of the General Clinical Service of the New York State Psychiatry Institute. In 1974 he was appointed Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. In 1976 he was appointed as Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University and Director of the Institute for Personality Disorders Institute of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. He was President of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1997 to 2001.

His principal contributions have been in the fields of narcissism, object relations theory and personality disorders. He developed a novel and useful framework for coordinating personality disorders along dimensions of structural organization and severity. He was awarded the 1972 Heinz Hartmann Award of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the 1975 Edward A. Strecker Award from the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, the 1981 George E. Daniels Merit Award of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine.

Dr. Kernberg's mentor, the late Ernst Ticho, Ph.D., was married to the late Gertrude R. Ticho, MD, who (in consultation with Dennis M. Race of the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld -- telephone [phone]) determined, in October 1991, that I was paranoid and potentially violent.

Dr. Kernberg is the author of Ideology, Conflict, and Leadership in Groups and Organizations. In this book a psychoanalytic clinician and theoretician of world renown integrates current knowledge of the psychodynamics of individuals, groups, and organizations into a new theoretical framework. Dr. Otto F. Kernberg shows how the interplay of libidinal and aggressive impulses enacted within the dynamic unconscious of the individual also occurs at the level of groups and social organizations. He sheds new light on the turbulent nature of human interactions in groups, suggests how this understanding may help to resolve conflicts at the group and institutional levels, and provides a model for achieving effective institutional change.

I wonder what Otto Kernberg would have to say about the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld -- its organization and pathology.

[Gary Freedman]

Claudio Grossman (born 1947) is a lawyer and law professor. He is the dean of the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C. Grossman served as vice chair of the United Nations Committee Against Torture (2003-2008) and now as Chair (2008-present). He is a former member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Grossman was born in Santiago, Chile. He attended the law school at the University of Chile in Santiago. He received his Licenciado en Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales in March 1971, with a summa cum laude thesis "Nacionalización y Compensación," coauthored with Carlos Portales.

Grossman served as a lecturer in the University of Chile's Faculty of Law in 1972 and as a research fellow at the Instituto de Estudios Internacionales (Institute of International Studies at the University of Chile in 1973.

From 1974-1980 Grossman was associate professor in international law at the Department of International Organizations of the Europa Institute of the Law School of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. In August 1980 Grossman earned the Doctor in de Rechtsgeleerdheid (Doctor of the Science of Law) at the University of Amsterdam. . His thesis was Het Beginsel van Non-Interventie in de Organizatie van Amerikaanse Staten (The Principle of Non-Intervention in the Organization of American States).

From 1980-1983 Grossman was professor in international law at the Department of Law, Universiteit Twente.

I took two courses taught by Dean Grossman at American University Law School in the fall of 1983 and in the spring of 1984.