Henry Zvi Lothane

Lothane is currently Clinical Professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, specializing in the area of psychotherapy.

In 1963 he emigrated with his wife and daughter to the United States and completed his residency training at the Strong Memorial Hospital, Rochester NY, chaired by Prof. John Romano.

Since 1969, Lothane has been a member of the faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, where he has risen to the rank of Clinical Professor of Psychiatry.

Beginning in 1994, Lothane has worked for the German consulate in New York as a psychiatric expert, evaluating the restitution claims of Holocaust survivors, including those from Auschwitz (the 70th anniversary of its liberation having recently been celebrated).

For example, Lothane frequently draws on his historical research with the goal of correcting misconceptions of Freud in contemporary discussions of psychoanalytic technique.

[2] Oddly enough, the English translation omitted the subtitle "In what circumstance can a person deemed insane be detained in an asylum against his declared will?"

Perhaps the most original element of Lothane’s approach is the respect he shows for Schreber himself, as a worthwhile thinker in his own right and as a teacher imparting important lessons to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.

Shortly after her arrival, Spielrein had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital as a patient of director Eugen Bleuler and his deputy C. G. Jung, then 29 years old.

[14] These sources filled in significant and previously unknown details about Spielrein as a student and about Jung as her teacher in medical school.

Furthermore, Lothane argues, Spielrein solves the riddle of her relationship with Jung in a letter to her mother, calling her erotically colored friendship with Jung "poetry": "So far we have remained at the level of poetry that is not dangerous, and we shall remain at that level...." Whether they engaged in "dangerous" sex beyond such temptations is a fact known only to them; existing evidence, Lothane argues, does not confirm the story that they engaged in a sexual relationship.

In several articles, Lothane criticizes the literature following on Carotenuto’s book, which as a rule assumes Jung’s sexual misconduct and the cover-up of a public scandal.

For Lothane, love and its antagonist hatred, manifesting as aggression in speech and violence in acts, are not merely feelings but also the most important actions, behaviors, or conducts in interpersonal relations.

Lothane has argued the opposite thesis, claiming there to be an "interpersonal Freud" that has remained largely unrecognized in the psychoanalytic tradition.

Lothane elaborated on Freud’s interpersonal approaches to traumatic disorders, the role of humor in psychotherapy, and the method and technique of free association in several papers.

According to Lothane, it was Sandor Ferenczi, more than any of the other major figures in the psychoanalytic tradition, who contributed the most to investigating love in its breadth and in its significance for psychoanalysis.

[21] Much of Lothane’s methodological work attempts to clarify the nature of free association and its foundational role in clinical psychoanalysis.

[citation needed] Lothane retains his explicit roots in Freud and in the classical psychoanalytic tradition while simultaneously emphasizing the interpersonal character of life and of the clinical situation, in contrast to many contemporary relational psychoanalysts.

Lothane argues that contemporary relational psychoanalytic theorists have tended to overlook the expressly interpersonal dimensions of Freud.

When the listening is augmented by reciprocal free association, the process encompasses not only the conscious content but also taps into its unconscious connections and ramifications to yield a remembrance of things past that is both more complete and insightful.

In Lothane’s words, "I propose the term ‘dramatology’ ... as a paradigm that refers to (1) dramatization in thought: images and scenes lived in dreams and fantasies, and (2) dramatization in act: in dialogues and non-verbal communications such as facial expressions and gestures between dramatis personae involved in plots of love and hate, faithfulness and betrayal, ambition and failure, triumph and defeat, fear and panic, despair and hope".

The patient and the therapist alternate in their role of speaker and listener and in the processes of reciprocal free association, continually evoking images, which coalesce into acts of interpretation and confrontation, which in turn create insight.

If all the person’s behaviors are translated by the psychiatrist into symptoms, syndromes, and systems, and molded into diagnoses, e.g., of a Kraepelinian or a Jaspersian orientation, the result may be that the individual’s uniqueness is lost in the process of abstraction and generalization.

While dramatology-inspired interpersonal drama therapy[32] respects the importance of diagnoses and interpretive dynamic formulas in scientific discourse and elsewhere, it strives to make contact with the living reality of the person in the therapeutic encounter beyond diagnostic labels and formulaic interpretations, using participant observation (Harry Stack Sullivan), empathy, reciprocal free association, and confrontation as some of its basic tools.

In 2011, Duncan Reyburn referred to dramatology, in connection with the philosophy of G. K. Chesterton, as a "dramaturgical" hermeneutic approach that is rooted in a "dramatic understanding of the nature of being".

Citing Le Bon ("the individual forming part of a crowd acquires a sentiment of invincible power, the sentiment of responsibility disappears entirely by contagion, [he is] a creature acting by instinct [with] the violence, ferocity, enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings"), to which Freud added: "in the group the individual throws off the repressions of his unconscious impulses, all that is evil in the human mind, a disappearance of conscience, a sense of omnipotence [for] love relationships (or, to use a more neutral expression, emotional ties) also constitute the essence of the mass mind; the head — Christ, the Commander-in-Chief — loves all with an equal love as a kind of elder brother, as their substitute father, the similarity with the family is invoked; the individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal as embodied in the leader the need for a strong chief."

He is a Member of International Psychoanalytical Association, and an Honorary Member, Polish Psychiatric Association From 1985-2004, he was the Science Editor of the Psychoanalytic Review ; since 2005 he has been on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, since 2000 on the Editorial Board, of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis; since 2005, Corresponding editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis