Reverse Analysis, the Existential Shift, Gestalt Family Therapy and the Prevention of the Next Holocaust

By Dr. Len Bergantino Ed.D. Ph.D.

Do you think that some slug who looks very professional who "whispers" an occasional interpretation to you five times a week for 7 years can make one bit of difference in your life or does such a psychotoxic slug called a psychoanalyst merely stick you in an emotional toilet bowl for seven years having the cumulative result of turning you into a hopeless bastard who will never turn the tragic corner in his or her life?

Can your analyst analyze an archaic liquid symbiotic or an osmotic transference, or can they even recognize this phenomena in order to analyze it? If the psychoanalyst cannot analyze these transferences they can't do an analysis!

I used to get "good faith" patients who had the balls to work on the cutting edge at the same time I did because they had had combinations of twenty years of two seven year analyses plus several briefer psychotheraphies, only to be as crazy as the day they walked in! (-$200,000.00)

As Dr. Donald Rinsley, M.D., fellow-American College of Psychoanalysts wrote about me, my work has both a healing effect and affect. Patients used to pay me six months in advance to hold the time open because I was irreplaceable; I was the only one who could analyze the psychotic core of the personality and I was the only who could actually do what Dr. Wilfred R. Bion, MRCS (Medical Royal College of Surgeons) wrote about analyzing the psychotic core of the personality/

As I am seventy-six years old, I have written five books that must be read and digested in their entirety. As these books are the thing-in-itself they will transform the reader into the kinds of analyst, patient and psychotherapist who can make a difference in helping people turn the tragic corner in their lives! In other words, these five books are analysis!

These books were written to be around for a few hundred years and were directly guided by the Almighty!

By: Dr. LEN BERGANTINO, Ed. D.(USC), Ph.D., A.B.P.P.

 

 

Reverse Analysis, the Existential Shift, Gestalt Family Therapy and the Prevention of the Next Holocaust

This is a clinical example of a one-session existential shift in a lifelong personality characteristic of a patient. This is for hypnosis or training in hypnosis contact.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796021165

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Dr. Len Bergantino, Ed.D., Ph.D..

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 10/23/2023

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Books that are either published or will be published authored by The Reverend Dr. Len Bergantino as these books were written as the thing-in-itself and were divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit to at the very least give men and women an opportunity to be more fully themselves and more in touch with their own nature. It is strongly recommended that the readers develop their level of attention to read all four books and permit them to become part parcel of how each individual answers the question TO BE OR NOT TO BE. As The Reverend Dr. Len Bergantino is seventy five years old, he will not be around personally to do psychoanalysis or psychotherapy with you, therefore these books were written on the basis of them being around for at least TWO HUNDRED YEARS!!!

1. I AM FREUD! PSYCHOANALYSIS IS THE ONLY METHOD OF CURE: IT’S TOO BAD NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO DO ONE, XLIBRIS PUB. CO., 2019. 502 PP.

2. REVERSE ANALYSIS, THE EXISTENTIAL SHIFT, GESTALT FAMILY THERAPY AND THE PREVENTION OF THE HOLOCAUST, XLIBRIS PUB. CO.,

3. THE ART OF PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE LIBERATION OF THE THERAPIST XLIBRIS PUBLISHING COMPANY.

4. THE ESSENCE OF MUSIC, XLIBRIS PUBLISHING COMPANY.

Other Books:

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CONTENTS

Foreword 1: Making an Impact in Therapy

Acknowledgments To Xlibris Publishing Company

Acknowledgments

Foreword 2 : Reverse Analysis and the Existential Shift

Book Query : Prevention of the next Holocaust

The Germans, The Modern-Day Non-Germans, And The German Americans

Creative Aggression Therapy

Dr. James S. Simkin, PhD - Diplomate American board of Professional Psychology

Gestalt Group Therapy

Dr. George Bach and creative aggression

Prospectus for entire book How I put it all together

Preface: More Creative Aggression

Foreword 3: To Gestalt Family Therapy Section

More Political Psychology

A Foreword and review to my 1 st book shows the kind of clinical skill I had at 37 years old. This book demonstrates a few of the things I did in the next 50 years.

FOREWORD 1

Making an Impact in Therapy

How Master Clinicians Intervene

T he plethora of how-to books is increasing. This is not one of those. Barbara Betz stated that the dynamics of psychotherapy is in the person of the therapist. Abraham Maslow stated that the peak experience lasts two weeks. Winicott insisted that if you haven’t been hated by your psychotherapist, you have been cheated. Erenwald has stated that psychotherapy is the effort to evolve an existential shift.

Len Bergantino is trying to expand this operational territory by stretching the psychotherapeutic geology. He succeeds. Describing the therapist as a person of liberated wisdom, he dares to the chaos and anxiety of not knowing; he opens a gate to see and make the impact of psychotherapy more clearly. His description of beingness as a process is reminiscent of Paul Tillich. His grasp of responsible involvement with the patient as a discipline of self shows his own search for creative options. He makes no pretense of camouflaging the psychotherapist as a wounded healer. Furthermore, Len makes crucial the pattern of the therapist’s search for his own healing and successfully validates the authentic trickery of the psychotherapist as a liberated spirit. The approach to his own craziness, the freedom from the culture bind, and the discipline of self each emerged as obtainable goals of that professional parent we call the psychotherapist.

Further evidence of his own search is illustrated by his impersonalized impressionistic response to the other searchers he uses as models.

Simply reading his book leaves me feeling it would be meaningful to join in his search for his beingness. Though he would be enjoying himself and enjoying me as a patient, he would not be doing things to keep from being himself, and, thus, I could be more fully myself.

Carl A. Whitaker, MD

Professor of Psychiatry

School of Medicine

University of Wisconsin

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D r. Bergantino’s book in scholarly and even entertaining fashion sets out to address issues such as these. The blurb on its book jacket states that it integrates 17 prominent therapists’ styles and problem solving techniques . . . Its more accurate subtitle, The Existential Moment, reflects the author’s searching awareness that effective psychological healing, or psychotherapy, or whatever one chooses to call such interpersonal transactional processes, ultimately expands one’s awareness, hence one’s knowledge of one’s self, one’s surroundings, and the relationship between them; and further, that such awareness and knowledge develops in saltatory fashion, deriving from unheralded and even momentary experiences of insight, illumination (aha!), or unconscious internal change. So far so good, but there is, after all, nothing new in that, so why read yet another book devoted to arresting human experiences that many believe to be inexplicable and unteachable?

There are at least two answers to that question. To begin with, the book reflects the personal odyssey of a trained, disciplined, yet open-minded professional psychologist who has drunk deeply at the wells of an number of acknowledged healer-therapists whose work he has carefully studied and evaluated—among them, Viktor Frankl, Wilfred Bion, the Gouldings, Frederick Perls, Milton Erickson, and Carl Whitaker. A unique feature of Dr. Bergantino’s presentation is his detailed accounts of these therapists’ hour-to-hour work, drawn from his own personal experience and from verbatim descriptions provided by their students and analysands, offering fascinating and instructive insights into the therapeutic labors of admittedly gifted treaters. The book is thus replete with clinical material, excerpts from therapeutic encounters, and direct reports of those precious aha-type moments, conveyed within a disciplined epistemic context that presents each example in terms of ethical professionalism rather than exemplary amateurishness.

Again, the book reflects its author’s ongoing growth and development as both thinker and therapist. Dr. Bergantino has gone to great length to converse and consult with both primary and secondary sources, delving into the what and the how, ferreting out illustrative clinical situations and indicating how he has proceeded to synthesize and integrate what he has learned from them and from his own therapeutic work. His book is indeed a literate statement of how one clinician has made of himself a therapist, and his statement is both informative and poignant.

As I read this book, my thoughts returned to a little-known 1962 Psychiatric Quarterly paper by Ernst Federn, the son of the psychoanalyst Paul Federn, titled The Therapeutic Personality, as Illustrated by Paul Federn and August Aichorn. It described in some detail the uniquely intuitive therapeutic work of these two outstanding clinicians, drawn from the author’s own experience of knowing them both; Federn and Aichorn brought disciplined artistry to their respective therapeutic tasks in working psychoanalytically with difficult cases, Federn with psychotics, Aichorn with disturbed adolescents; both readily sensed suffering and never flinched from addressing it; both could occupy honored places in Dr. Bergantino’s book. I learned much from that paper, and I have learned much from Dr. Bergantino’s book as well.

Psychotherapy, Insight and Style is an absorbing work to be returned to time and again after one has read it through.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO XLIBRIS PUBLISHING

COMPANY STAFF

M ichelle Postrano is a manager with tenacity. Her greatest asset is in knowing the entire playing field and getting the football across the goal line. Thank you Michelle!

Thank you to Carlos Cortes for being there in ways I needed him to be there when I needed him to be there.

Sarah Perkins has been quite helpful in getting the manuscript ready for the production team.

Sheila Legaspi has been instrumental in putting together the final manuscript for final production and design.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would not have written this book of stories if it were not for the continued urgings of Joe Diorio, WHO WAS KNOWN TO BE THE WORLD’S GREATEST JAZZ GUITAR PLAYER AT LEAST BETWEEN 1970 and the time of his quintuple bypass around 2003. Joe is unknown to the general public in that he never gave a shit about pandering to the mass market of pop music!

We talk on the telephone a couple of times a week, and when I tell him stories, he laughs and laughs and says, You’ve got to put that one in your book! Of course, the idea was that I would have to have a book to put it in, which I would not have unless I wrote the book of stories!

Now, you might think I am full of shit when I tell you that for twenty-five years, Joe Diorio was the best jazz player in the world, because you never heard of him and you wonder who the hell I am to tell you in the first place!

Joe Pass was known as one of the great jazz guitar players on the West Coast that I never heard of when I lived on the East Coast. Nevertheless, Joe Pass was playing a gig one Saturday night in 1977 at a Chinese restaurant above Harry’s Bar in Century City, California, and Joe Diorio and I went to hear him. There weren’t too many people there, and Joe Pass, who survived the encounter groups at Synanon (drug rehab facility in Santa Monica), saw us and yelled out, Hey, Joe! Who’s your friend! Joe Diorio yelled back, That’s Dr. Len Bergantino! Joe Pass yelled at me, What kind of doctor are you anyway? I yelled back, A clinical psychologist! He said, What’s Joe got you working on his head! We stayed two sets and left via the other staircase, and Joe Pass, who had just made a CD WITH ELLA FITZGERALD, ACCOMPANYING HER SONGS, YELLED TO JOE DIORIO, HEY, JOE, WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO PLAY SONGS AGAIN! AS A CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST, THIS WAS RELATIVELY EASY TO INTERPRET; Joe Pass, who most jazz lovers have heard of, was telling Joe Diorio that he was better than Joe Pass (himself) but that unless he played songs again, no one would ever hear of him in the mass market of music and he would not become as wealthy financially as Joe Pass.

So throughout the years, I have told some people the best jazz guitar player in the world is and was Joe Diorio, but no one has ever heard of him because he is a weird little bastard who sits in a corner with a guitar six hours a day, playing notes that Coltrane and Miles would love!

As a labor of love and not a compromise to his soul, I actually played songs with Joe Diorio on a CD where he accompanied me on guitar where I played mandolin. The CD is called Falling In Love and can be heard on Orchard Records.com (the song Misty).

Joe has told me that when he plays notes, his every desire is to play deeper as the pearls that lay at the bottom of the ocean, not at the top, and that is how to reach the soul both musically and with the stories in this book.

FOREWORD 2

Reverse Analysis and the Existential Shift

T HE WORLD OF THE POSSIBLE!

1. REVERSE ANALYSIS is the telling of nonstop storytelling for anywhere between ninety minutes to six hours from the unconscious mind of the storyteller to the unconscious mind of the listener, whereby it is possible to attain a series of PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL RELEASES WHEREBY ON A GOOD DAY, A SIMILAR RESULT MIGHT BE ACHIEVED AS WITH THE WORKING THROUGH OF THE OEDIPAL COMPLEX VIA A SEVEN-YEAR, FIVE-DAY-A-WEEK PSYCHOANALYSIS.

2. When I gave a workshop in Newcastle, Australia, I told stories at a slow pace that Margaret Mead told Milton Erickson she had only heard in a rare African tribe relatively free of disease. This fine-tuned vibration was instrumental in creating a therapeutic environment THAT WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR ENHANCING THE QUALITY OF BEING OF THIRTY WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS AT THE SAME TIME! This pace is also the pace and vibration emitted by the great British psychoanalyst Wilfred Ruprecht Bion when he made his long-winded interpretations.

3. Such psychological releases via reverse analysis are not the everyday experience, and I have one written example of such an occurrence that was in a Clinical Corner 1983 write-up of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis.

In order for me to develop such abilities, I had to both gain access to my unconscious mind and begin telling stories that lasted five minutes and then ten minutes and then fifteen minutes, until I could tell stories for a fifty-minute hour. After I gained unimpeded access to my unconscious mind, I could tell stories for two, three, or even six hours straight at the finer vibration Shafica Karagulla wrote about in her book, Your Higher Sense Perception, DeVorss Press, 1967.

4. THE EXISTENTIAL SHIFT can be a one-session shift in a lifelong personality characteristic in either an individual or a family constellation. When patients are thrown off balance, there exists opportunities for life shifts to relieve the chaos of not knowing.

a. Always pick a problem that can be solved as opposed to presenting problem that cannot be solved. For example, Father telephoned. He said the entire family was upset because his youngest son would not