Getting to Know the IAPSP International Community

As the International co-editor of eForum with Annette Richard, I am pleased to present a new "Getting to Know the IASPS International Community" column that offers biographical sketches of members who live outside the United States. Since the next IAPSP International Conference will be held in Antalya, Turkey, I thought it would be very timely to begin with Yavuz Erten, from Istanbul. I welcome your comments and suggestions. Please send them to me at .

Yavuz Erten

Yavuz Erten has a psychoanalytic private practice in Istanbul, Turkey. He also teaches and supervises master's and doctoral students at both the Bosphorus and Bilgi University and is on the faculty of the Training Institute in Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis in Rome, Italy. In 2003, Yavuz, a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), co-founded Psike-Istanbul, a psychoanalytic study group accredited by IPA and is actively involved in giving seminars to numerous psychoanalytic candidates. He has written over twenty articles on various aspects of psychoanalytic practice and is the co- author of five books published in Turkish.

His latest book, The Faces in the Dark Room (2010), is a compendium of articles which he wrote and published in Turkish between 1999 and 2010. The topics of the articles include the formation of subjectivity; the relationship between transference, fantasy and dream; and the link between game and psychoanalysis. Some of the articles are examples of applied psychoanalysis, such as psychoanalytic studies of movies. As Yavuz explained, the title of the book has a double-meaning: the first, refers to camera obscura which translates from Latin to mean the "dark room" --the camera itself. (The prototype of the modern camera was a large box used to take the first pictures in human history. However, it was used only to take the picture of immobile objects such as cathedrals, monuments, nature because it took long hours to do it. ) The second, refers to the darkness of the cinema hall and the unconscious side of the human psyche. The faces in the dark room, are both the objects in the unconscious and the figures on the screen onto which the unconscious objects are projected.

Yavuz began his psychoanalytic training in 1998, at the National Institute for Psychotherapies (NIP), in the International Training in Contemporary Psychoanalysis program. His training involved a four-year, Odysseus-like commute between New and Istanbul. Concurrently, he was a founding member of the Anatolian Center for Psychoanalytical Psychotherapies where he continued his training in self psychology under the mentorship of the Siegels. In 2003, Yavuz trained for an additional four years in psychoanalysis at the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA).

Yavuz lives in Suadiye, Istanbul with his wife, Meral; 11 year old daughter, Yasemin; and cat Osman. Meral, also a psychotherapist is currently a psychoanalytic candidate at IPA and has a private practice in Istanbul.

Jane Lewis, L.C.S.W. is a training and supervising psychoanalyst both at the Training and Research Institute for Psychoanalysis (TRISP) and at the American Institute for Psychoananalysis (AIP). In 1999 she founded and was the director for ten years of the AIP-affiliated Karen Horney Clinic Eating Disorder Program. She has written numerous papers on eating disorders and hair-pulling and how the body both expresses and disavows trauma. In 2002, she was recipient of the student Gradiva Award for her psychoananlytic research study on hair-pulling. She is currently in private practice in New York City.