Johanna Krout Tabin, PhD

After completing a degree in Human Development at the University of Chicago, I entered the third class at what is now known as the Anna Freud Centre in London. The emphasis there upon treatment of children helped me to form a conviction. I believe that key developmental issues continue throughout life as we humans successively deal with challenges to our senses of inner harmony and social belongingness: closeness, dependence, autonomy, acceptability of inner urges, loss, gender identity, and more. Ways of dealing with these issues as time goes on connect with the earlier ways of our managing them. Feelings are fundamental to this process. In working with children (as well as through my personal analysis), I recognized that our emotions are a constant part of who we are, and the meanings we find in all experience. Tomkins's contributions came upon the scene just in time to underscore and explain for me much of why this is so. All of these influences make it clear that body/mind is a construct for ease of learning, but that the organism is always a unit. I try to maintain dialogue with others concerned with mental health issues, both by means of traditional avenues and the remarkable opportunities we have online. I am a founding member and serve on the faculty and administrative board of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. My publications range from study of universal symbolism, treatment outcome, and the relation between mechanisms of defense and mental retardation – to theoretical and clinical subjects in psychotherapy, and the understanding human of behavior. A book, On the Way to Self: Ego and Early Oedipal Development (Columbia University Press, 1985), integrates a coherent view of ego formation with fresh understanding of the early difficulties that lead to gender specific pathologies, such as anorexia.

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