Welcome to the Virtual Psychoanalytic Museum

We invite you to enter the Virtual Psychoanalytic Museum for a new experience of psychoanalytic understanding. You are now a part of our museum community.

I am Nancy R. Goodman, Director of the museum and want to introduce you to the most current exhibit, The Courage to Fight Violence Against Women, curated by Paula L. Ellman.  It is a vibrant and heartfelt display of narrative and artwork illustrating the traumas of violence and the resilience of the human spirit to symbolize horrors of rape, femicide, and hatred.  These exhibits communicate to our souls and make us all witnesses.

For navigating through this exhibit you can follow this link to Dr. Ellman’s introduction and to galleries by Raquel Berman, Janice Lieberman, Rachel Cohen, and Myra Sklarew.  Paula Ellman is Overall Chair of the Committee on Women of the International Psychoanalytic Association, is co-editor (with Nancy Goodman) of a book: The Courage to Fight Violence Against Women (Karnac, 2017) which grew out of a two day conference in Washington, DC by the same name.  Paula has also curated the Body Gallery that is an exhibit from the opening of the virtual museum.

We began a few years back with four very busy seasons bringing you a wide variety of exhibits that you can see here. Our Grand Opening featured three galleries.

Space and Time curated by Batya Monder with Nancy R. Goodman. Exhibitions are by Nancy R. Goodman, Antonino Ferro, Desy Safan-Gerard, and Batya Monder’s narratives about space and time include contributions from Calvin Settlage, Robert S. Wallerstein, Thomas H. Ogden, & Gerald Fogel.

Space and Time relate to the interior of the mind and to the interior of a museum.  In both we find timeless works of art and unconscious fantasies that need containment to be held securely.  Both the contemporary and the ancient reside within the spaces of mind and museum.

The Body,  curated by Paula L. Ellman. Exhibitions with commentary and images from Janice Lieberman, Ellen Sinkman, Marsha H. Levy- Warren, and Calli Ryan.

Freud told us that the body is the first ego and clinicians recognize that the soma and psyche are intimately connected both in pleasure and in pain.  The exhibitions tell and show the way beauty, pain, and injury directly impact experience of living in a body communicating to self and other.

Film,  Lars and the Real Girl, curated by Marilyn B. Meyers with exhibition commentaries from Noa Ashman, George Halasz and Marilyn B. Meyers.

This film is a moving and compelling story reminding us all of the importance of attachment, grief, and reparation. Film clips and discussions help reveal the inner life of Lars and indeed, all of us.

We’ve had a few hiatuses here and there, but all of our exhibits remain online. You’ll find fascinating explorations involving music, jazz and classical and images of all kinds.

Your feedback will help create a place for psychoanalysis to show the dynamism of deep unconscious life and the vitality inherent in dialogue. Please give us feedback about the museum as a whole, content of each gallery, the format, and topics for future development.

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Nancy R. Goodman, PhD, is a training and supervising analyst with the Contemporary Freudian Society, Washington DC Program and the IPA. She is interested in unconscious fantasy, witnessing of individual and mass trauma, enactments, and psychoanalysis and film. She is the leader of a CIPS study group on enactments. Her most recent publications include: The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust—Trauma Psychoanalysis, and the Living Mind (co-editor/writer with Marilyn B. Meyers), ‘Enactment: Opportunity for Symbolising Trauma’ (Ellman & Goodman) in Absolute Truth and Unbearable Psychic Pain: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Concrete Experience (ed. A. Frosch), as well as being editor of Psychoanalysis: Listening to Understand–Collected Papers of Arlene Kramer Richards. She maintains a psychoanalytic practice in Bethesda, MD.

⇑ use the top menus to move directly among the galleries and exhibits.