Howard J. Covitz, NCPsyA, PhD Howard Covitz is Director of (since 1989) and Training / Supervising Analyst at (since 1985 ) the Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies (Bryn Mawr, PA) and sits on a variety of psychoanalytic boards. His trek to these roles encompassed interests in Religious Texts, teaching and administration, and research and teaching in mathematics. Office: 24 Latham Parkway Melrose Park, PA 19027-3148 Telephone: (215) 635-5368 Fax: (215) 635-5601 Dr. Covitz' work (Individual, Couple & Group Treatment and Supervision) is based on an object relations oriented treatment approach which he has outlined in a variety of presentations, papers and in his 1997 volume Oedipal Paradigms in Collision: A Centennial Emendation of a Piece of Freudian Canon (Peter Lang Publishers): this latter work was nominated for the 1998 Gradiva Book of the Year Award by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Some commentaries on the volume: "While neither deifying nor vilifying Freud or his theory of the Complete Oedipus Complex... Dr. Covitz argues for a novel developmental schema for triadic object relations that functions as a bridging algorithm for individual and social psychology's. Particularly pleasing is the author's ability to interweave this work through a variety of interdisciplinary lenses, ranging from Genesis studies to socio-political thinking and clinical object relations... Dr. Covitz utilization of the Oedipus Complex as a key hermeneutical construct for interdisciplinary rapprochement is not only remarkably pioneering; it is visionary." --Barry Arnold, Ph.D., Author: The Pursuit of Virtue: The Union of Moral Psychology and Ethics "Howard Covitz' Oedipal vision is an uncannily subversive one. He loosens the binding of the family script and encourages a new reading of the Theban narrative, a reading which may spell out why the Oedipus story is still intriguing. This new Oedipal dream is an ungendered one for both parent and child. I found myself reading this Elementary Oedipal without regard to sexual difference. Woman is not the other parent; daughter is not the other child; and the Oedipal journey does not necessarily take place on the road from total self-absorption to empathy with others. Some will say this Oedipal tale, which invites a comparison of the imperfections of Oedipus with those of Joseph the Dreamer, bears little resemblance to its parental complex.That may be why it is possible to read Covitz' Oedipal and the feminine side-by-side." -- Cass Dalglish, Ph.D., Department of English, Augsburg College. Author of Sweetgrass. "While having established Psychoanalysis as a discipline that looks upon phenomena developmentally..., for many of his concepts Freud failed to apply this developmental principle. The Oedipus Complex, his central explanatory construct for personality and for psychopathology, is just such an instance. For him, this Complex was an inherited given of the human's archaic heritage and was framed in a categorical way; the Oedipus complex was either mastered or not. A number of psychoanalysts have hinted at the possibility of framing the Oedipus Complex in object relational terms (e.g., the Blancks, Greenberg & Mitchell, Loewald), but they did not actually do so. Lebovici suggested that the Oedipus should be conceptualized in terms of developmental levels, but did not follow through on this suggestion. Dr. Covitz is the first to take the bold step of framing the Oedipus within a developmental schema of object relations. In so doing, he not only rescues the Oedipus Complex from Freud's biological and nondevelopmental frames of reference, but places the Oedipus the way people related to one another into its proper contemporary context, object relations. " --George Frank, Ph.D., Training Analyst, National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis; Member, International Psychoanalytical Association. hhcovitz@aol.com

 

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