Please see if you have library books on loan ready to be returned. You can either mail them to the library or drop them off during your next visit to BPSI.

Library Metrics: July 2022 - August 2023

Check out BPSI's Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram pages for news and updates.

Our BPSI RESOURCES page provides an updated list of resources on race, diversity equity and otherness, as well as the Final Report of the Holmes Commission. 

The Library Corner of the BPSI Blog features announcements of recently published journal articles by BPSI members. If you have a publication in press or your recent work has been reviewed, please share your news with our library! 

You can also head to our Library Catalog any time to see what books we have available to check out.

Books published by BPSI authors can be found on our Recent Work blog.

An updated list of recent journal articles by BPSI authors can be found in the Library Corner section of our blog.

If you have works that you would like to be added to these pages, please contact Veronica Davis via at [email protected].

Recordings of past Meet the Author events, including our most recent event with Dr. Andrea Celenza, PhD, can be watched here.

Meet Shari Thurer, Sc. D. on January 9, 2024, to discuss her book, Beyond the Binary: Essays on Gender.

The increase in the number of non-binary children and adults in our society raises important treatment questions as well as much controversy. It seems essential that analysts and candidates grapple with the challenges this change in society presents. As we struggle in our psychoanalytic societies to diversify our membership and broaden our understanding of difference, this collection offers an opportunity for further discussion and study of one of the most important issues of our time.

The opening essay by editor Shari Thurer provides a clear overview of recent cultural changes and the evolution of thinking about gender identification by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Next is an autobiographical essay by long-term non-binary individual Robin Haas plus a clinical reflection on Haas’ contribution by Rita Teusch. A recent account of an individual becoming non-binary from Francesca Spence is followed by the reactions of their parents, L. Harry Spence and Robin Ely. After that are psychoanalytic thoughts about the body and gender by Malkah Notman and reflections on gender from Dan Jacobs.

The book ends with an extensive bibliography on the subjects of transsexuality and non-binary gender by Oren Gozlan.

Beyond the Binary: Essays on Gender introduces readers to current ideas about gender fluidity and choice, as well as giving voice to those who are non-binary. This is a must-read for all practicing clinicians that will help broaden their perspective on this growing issue.



The idea for this book originated in and was fostered by our Library Committee.

Meet Shellburne Thurber on April 9, 2024, to discuss her book, Analysis.

"The analytic office is forever a space of paradox: a place of safety as well as of danger. A place where one tries to hide from oneself among attempts at self-discovery. It is, paradoxically, a space that is both private and not, a space in which its possession is contested. The objects in these rooms incite shifting feelings of desire and distress as our associations drift among them.  Place and space are precipitants of memory, fear, and desire. Thurber’s brilliant images keep us in suspense, expecting, wondering, dreaming. They remind us where we live: between coming and going, living and dying, amidst what has happened to us and what is yet to come."

~Dan Jacobs

In Memoriam

Steven Varga-Golovcsenko, MD

November 1, 1944 - October 12, 2023

Steve was a member of our Library Committee since 2015. He attended our meetings regularly until a year ago when ill health prevented him from participating. Steve initial interest was in being a ballet dancer for which he trained. He switched to medicine, but

Steve interviewing Dr. Anna Ornstein, 2019

retained the dignity and grace of a dancer. His father Semyon Troyanoff was a internationally known ballet dancer. Steve worked with Olga Umanksy, our former librarian, to try to find translator for his father Russian language memoirs (see our Spring 2023 Newsletter). Near the very end of his life, he told others he needed time alone to dream. I hope you are analyzing your dreams somewhere, Steve.

~ Dan Jacobs

In Press:

Malkah Notman’s monograph of Women at BPSI will be available soon.

Here is an excerpt about our only Training Analyst of color :

Frances Bonner, 1919–2000 

Frances Estelle Jones Bonner was born in St. Louis and grew up in North Carolina. After graduating from Bennett College and studying abroad for a year, she entered Boston University School of Medicine in 1939; she was the only Black person in her class. She married fellow medical student, Charles Bonner, who was called to serve in World War II shortly after his graduation. Frances Bonner completed her residency in neurology at Boston City Hospital and in 1949 began a lifelong affiliation with 

Frances Bonner's Candidate polaroid

Massachusetts General Hospital. She was the first female African American physician to train on an MGH service. Dr. Bonner received her psychoanalytic certification from BPSI, became the institute's first Black TA, and was an active member of BPSI from 1960–1975. In 1975, she became one of the founding members of PINE (Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East). She was a relentless proponent of social justice and is acknowledged as a pioneer in crossing racial and gender boundaries within medicine. In 2010, the MGH Department of Psychiatry and the Center for Diversity established the Francis J. Bonner, MD Award in her honor, which recognizes an individual who has overcome adversity and has made significant contributions to the field of mental health and the care of minority communities.

On Display

Given the current violence taking place in the Middle East, we thought it timely to, once again, exhibit the drawings of children during wartime. The drawings were collected by Robbie Apfel and Bennett Simon during their 1989-90 sabbatical year at the Hebrew University, and culminated with an international conference, “Children in War,” at the Freud Center of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, Drs. Apfel and Simon returned to the Middle East and started interviewing a group of Israeli and a group of 8-year-old Palestinian children, and then met with each group annually for ten years. The drawings included in the collection come from a children’s art studio at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, a studio founded by an art teacher Malka Haas, serving three generations of kibbutz children, and still functioning. She kept the studio open for children during many wars, collected their artwork and saved notes on copies of children’s drawings. These drawings are part of our Children in War archival collection. 

Also on display are two oil paintings done by our psychoanalytic colleague, Silvia Bell, PhD. Silvia Bell is a Training and Supervising Analyst Emerita in Adult, and Child & Adolescent Analysis at the Washington-Baltimore Institute. She minored in art in college, with a special focus on sculpture,,  continuing to take courses in painting at the Maryland Institute of Art while she pursued graduate training  at Johns Hopkins. There, she collaborated with Mary Ainsworth in her pioneering studies of attachment.

Fortuitously, an invitation to the Aspen meetings of the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies (CAPS) kindled a passion for landscape painting. The majestic beauty of the Colorado mountains had a powerful emotional impact that called out to be explored and understood through painting.  Silvia Bell has taken workshops with painters of the western landscape --Matt Smith, Scott Christensen, Dan Young, Barbara Kiwak, and assiduously studies the work of Clyde Aspevig, Len Chmiel, and others. Ultimately, her wish is to continue to explore the unique power of nature to impact emotion, and to stimulate in others a desire to seek experiences in nature.

Silvia lives in Los Angels where she is in private practice and supervises at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. 

Davenport, Leslie (2017): Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change: A Clinicians Guide. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. 208pp. 

Published six years ago, Leslie Davenport’s highly readable and heartfelt book is as relevant, timely and important today as it was then. The author accurately predicts more frequent and severe climate catastrophes - record heat waves, wildfires, air pollution, flooding, deaths, accelerating extinction of species, loss of livelihoods, community, and livable spaces around the globe. Davenport urges all mental health professionals to become aware of the evolutionary transformation that is occurring right now and to challenge ourselves to honestly manage our own feelings about the climate crisis and those of our patients. She maintains that it is necessary to add a Climate Psychology lens to our clinical practices, and work toward assuming an eco-harmonious outlook, which, via identification, will be communicated to our patients. Davenport draws our attention to acutely and vicariously suffered mental health impacts from the climate crisis, such as increases in depression, suicides, violence, which will continue to accelerate in the coming years. She offers therapeutic interventions, strategies and resources for clinicians and patients for dealing with climate related stress, anxiety and trauma and ways to build resiliency and empowerment when many feel the climate crisis is too big a problem to take in. She demonstrates that each person’s awareness of and attitude towards the climate crisis makes a difference, and she advocates for mental health clinicians to adopt a stance of transformational leadership because “mental health professionals have valuable tools for ushering forth powerful transitions in consciousness and behavior that can ultimately lead to a healthy humanity” p.25.   

The BPSI Library Committee recently surveyed the attitudes, feelings, and experiences of BPSI students regarding the climate crisis. Responses to the survey revealed that students do not feel prepared to notice, effectively address and manage their own feelings about the climate crisis and those of their patients. Davenport’s book offers a deeply thoughtful and informed discussion of people’s complex reactions to global warming, and a pathway to increased awareness, climate competency and resiliency. Her book is a valuable resource not only for clinicians but for everyone, because we are all living with the climate threat.  

Davenport, MS, MFT is a clinician in private practice, a founding member of the Institute for Health &Healing at California Pacific Medical Center. She is active with several climate advocacy organizations, and on the faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies and John F. Kennedy University. Her book features a foreword by Lise van Susteren, MD., a psychiatrist in private practice in Washington DC who was trained in 2006 by Al Gore at the Climate Project to educate the public about global warming. Dr. Van Susteren co-authored the book “The Psychological Effects of Climate Change” (2009) and collaborated with Our Children’s Trust in lawsuits against the federal government for breach of its fiduciary duties to preserve and protect the atmosphere for children and future generations. An important lawsuit was recently won in Montana. Van Susteren serves on the advisory boards of many Organizations and University committees advocating for climate mitigation, adaptation, and social action, including the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. Van Susteren reinforces Davenport’s message that mental health professionals are uniquely qualified to address climate-change induced anxiety, trauma, and depression, and help understand the problematic attitudes and behaviors that are preventing constructive and effective climate action. “It is our collective effort that is needed for the urgent social and political evolution our planet’s condition requires” p.15.    

Davenport presents a broad understanding of global warming and its deep psychosocial interfaces. She proposes that its large-scale, long-term, and complex challenges require that we all learn to be resilient. Only if we develop the capacity for resiliency, which can be learned by everyone, will we become able to accept the reality of global warming, enlarge our mindful awareness of what is happening around us, focus on what can be done, engage in meaningful conversations and actions, join with others to build community, and nurture self-care and creativity p.25).  

The book is organized in two parts: Part 1: Clinical themes in the era of climate change. This part has six chapters: The psychology of climate change denial, climate grief, clinical themes involving climate change, mindful disaster response, long-term and complex clinical themes, resiliency stories. Each of the chapters is accompanied by a worksheet that encourages self-reflection and the management of emotions that prevent a reality- based engagement with the climate crisis. These worksheets can be used by clinicians to become comfortable with their reactions to the climate crisis and be given to patients to start a discussion about climate- related feelings and beliefs, especially hopelessness, helplessness, and despair, which have a paralyzing effect and prevent effective climate action. Part 2 is titled: Vitalization of an Eco-harmonious Life- Twelve Body, Heart/Mind and World Wise Practices, which support mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-care to increase the freedom to act responsibly and with awareness to the climate crisis. The practices focus on, for example: The (really) big picture, grounding, kindness, humor, love, who is driving the bus, seeing clearly, gratitude.  

Davenport discusses why climate change denial is so strongly entrenched. She outlines various human reactions to stress, which also apply to the climate crisis: fight (against the climate threat), flight (fleeing from dealing with it because it is felt to be too big a force), or freeze (dissociating the threat, cognitively and emotionally, to avoid a sense of overwhelm.) Davenport describes denial as “an old and familiar, unconscious survival mechanism that helps us ignore anxiety and the pain of loss, … it generally works against us later in life and does not serve our collective distress” (p.57). Denial allows us to tune out non-acute signs and habituate to them, and this is possible because the effects of climate change are gradual in some regions and occur in prolonged and repetitive cycles. “We become dismissive toward warnings, treating them like low-level background noise, or we quickly attribute the changes to reasons other than global warming (and) when we habituate to something unhealthy, it perpetuates and worsens the problem” (p.109).. The author contrasts unconscious and unhealthy habituation with conscious adaptation, which involves responding to a change and using discernment to choose the best direction after considering multiple factors. Adaptation requires being awake, having our eyes and hearts wide open, being flexible and willing to make changes and choices from a place of mindful awareness.   

Davenport urges mental health professionals who are experts in helping others become aware of and regulate emotions to allow for a deeper awareness of climate grief. She reminds us of losses from the climate crisis in the past two decades: a staggering loss of species (150-200 species are lost every single day); 70.000 deaths in 2003 during an unprecedented European heat wave; 1,836 fatalities and damage estimated between $97.4 billion to $145.5 billion in 2005 from Hurricane Katrina. Facing psychological grief about loss is an organic way to move through the pain of loss and transition to an empowered stance where meaningful changes can be made. The author notes the five stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining (it is not so bad), depression and acceptance, which do not occur in linear sequence, but in cycles. She urges clinicians to help patients trust in their grief, develop self-compassion, welcome all their feelings, including those channeled into the body, and help patients become aware of what they tell themselves. If climate-induced grief has morphed into depression and helplessness, then hopelessness and isolation are present and need to be treated. She also addresses issues of moral injury, survivor guilt, and vicarious traumatization.  

Davenport emphasizes that as clinicians we always want to remain client-centered, however, we want to help patients connect the dots as they may be unaware of climate distress that has become manifest in insomnia, diffuse anxiety, or behavioral problems. She maintains that it is the task of the clinician to help facilitate appropriate emotional processing and, also in some cases help with cognitive restructuring to develop new and healthy behavioral responses. Patients may not realize the ways in which action can facilitate psychological ease. Clinicians can help patients to “explore how they can experience agency through greening and protecting their community, whether legislatively, creatively or educationally” (p.107).  

Davenport’s book is an invitation to personal and professional transformation that is needed because of “changes in the evolutionary dynamics” from genetic determination to cultural determination. We need to accept that the planet is evolving according to our decisions, which has created a new responsibility for us all (pp.57;66). We need to re-shape our ethics toward an interspecies awareness and global perspective. Davenport expands the role of mental health practitioners and shows how professional development can help us take a leadership role in the transformative work needed to confront the climate crisis. With much climate change news projecting what dire events may occur in the coming decades, we are all living with an ongoing threat of climate change-related disruptions. This news creates ambient stress and readily fuels anxiety. Awakening to the climate change reality and becoming active is doing transformational work.  

I highly recommend this book since all clinicians will encounter at some point patients suffering from climate distress or trauma. Clinicians will want to feel prepared emotionally and technically, and Davenport’s book offers understanding, education, strategies, and resources. She maintains it is crucial that we face our climate grief to open an emotional and mental space to approach the climate crisis with awareness and resiliency and engage in positive and constructive climate action. The recently released Task Force Report (2022) from the American Psychological Association “Addressing the Climate Crisis, an Action plan for Psychologists” echoes Davenport’s message: A climate psychology lens needs to be added to our professional frame of reference (for ex. asking patients about climate distress in intake interviews) and competencies for the field of climate psychology need to be included in psychotherapy training programs. The climate crisis is quickly evolving, and starting right now, we can make a conscious choice to join other disciplines to support a regenerative transformation which the world so deeply needs 

~Rita Teusch, PhD

Recent Donation of Books to Ukraine

 As I found myself packing several surprisingly heavy boxes of library books from BPSI, I pondered several things: the fact that I was sending books to Ukranian psychoanalytic colleagues in a war zone, and the ways in which vast distances across the globe can shrink in a vivid, exhilarating, and frightening ways.  

          The books in question, generously donated by the Library Committee and gathered together by our librarian Veronica Davis, have been mailed to my psychoanalyst colleague Volodymyr Mamko in Kyiv. I met Volodymyr while building the nonprofit I founded, Eyra Psychosocial Assistance. Two psychologist friends and I created the organization with a double mission— first, to render high quality volunteer mental health care to victims of disaster in other parts of the world, and second, to bridge the worlds of international humanitarian relief and psychoanalysis.  

       It was through serendipitous networking that we connected with our Ukranian counterparts, and the enthusiasm with which we were greeted knocked my socks off. Given that Ukraine has been in a full-scale, grueling, and bloody war for 18 months it would not have surprised me if clinicians were too overwhelmed to even communicate with us, let alone embark on a joint project. And yet they embraced us wholeheartedly. 

 At the same time, the generosity of BPSI, APSA and Div 39 colleagues who have volunteered their time (we only asked for one hour per week) has made us proud of our profession.   in addition, I was able to talk with the directors of PEP Web in England and arranged for free PEP Web memberships for all the psychoanalytically inclined clinicians who were not already included by being part of IPA. 

    We have tossed around many different ideas for collaboration, but the one that we landed on first was co-leading supervision groups with Ukranian psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.  We have been working with 5 groups since mid-March, with BPSI’s own Mary Calabrese and Jany Keat each guiding a group. Other BPSI members (Karen Melikian, Dov Fogel, Frances Lang) have contributed to our efforts to set up pro-bono therapies and supervisions. Along the way, my colleague Volodymyr mentioned how difficult it was to get hold of psychoanalytic texts and I was determined to make this happen. Voila, BPSI’s library stepped up! 

And thus, several boxes of psychoanalytic treatises, textbooks and essays are now on their way to Ukraine via the US Postal Service. 

~ Cris Ratiner, PhD, MPA

We are deeply grateful to Deborah Choate, Jack Foehl, Ellen Goldberg, Mark Goldblatt, Dan Mollod, Malkah Notman, Rafael Ornstein, Dean Solomon, Rita Teusch, and Julie Watts for donating print journal issues to the library. 

With funds established by Morton and Raisa Newman many years ago, we continue building our child analysis and neuropsychology collections, and our Gifford fund helps to purchase books on the history of psychoanalysis.