Border Tensions: Troubling Psychoanalysis
Annual Conference
2015
1
Table of Contents
Special events
1
Conference Overview
3 - 15
Abstracts of Presentations
16 - 78
Index of Participants and Sessions
79 - 83
List of APCS Board Members
84 - 85
LSS Book Exhibits
Inside back Cover
Palgrave Macmillan
Back Cover
2
Special Events
THURSDAY EVENING
7:00pm
9:00pm
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: As Psychoanalysis Travels
Location: Cook Student Center, Ballroom ABC
Chair: Almas Merchant, Brightpoint Health
Welcome on behalf of Department of Women & Gender Studies, Rutgers University by Nikol Alexander-Floyd
Welcome on behalf of APCS by co-chairs Marilyn Charles & Michael O'Loughlin
Introduction of Sudhir Kaakar, by Almas Merchant.
Keynote Speaker: Sudhir Kakar, Psychoanalyst and Writer
FRIDAY EVENING
5:00 – 6:30. FILM PRESENTATION & DISCUSSION: Mark of War
Location: Room A
Chair: Ricardo Ainslie, University of Texas
The Mark of War
Ricardo Ainslie, David Rosenblatt;rainslie@austin.utexas.edu, davidrosenblatt1@mac.com
University of Texas at Austin
SATURDAY EVENING
6:30pm
7:15pm
Conference Feedback Session
7:15pm
9:00pm
Wine & Cheese Reception
Chair: Marilyn Charles , Michael O’Loughlin
Location: Room A
Location: Dining Room
3
Conference Overview
4
Session Overview
Date: Thursday, 22/Oct/2015
7:00pm KEYNOTE ADDRESS: As Psychoanalysis Travels
Location: Cook Student Center, Ballroom ABC
9:00pm Chair: Almas Merchant, Brightpoint Health
Sudhir Kakar Psychoanalyst and Writer Welcome on behalf of Department of Women & Gender Studies, Rutgers
University by Nikol Alexander-Floyd Welcome on behalf of APCS by co-chairs Marilyn Charles & Michael O'Loughlin
Date: Friday, 23/Oct/2015
8:30am 1A: PANEL
Location: Room A
10:00am Chair: C. Fred
1B: PAPER
SESSION:
Schooling:
Alford, University of Adaptation or...?
Maryland
Trauma as the
Violation of
Identity
C. Fred
Alford1, Marilyn
Charles2, James
Glass3,Marshall
Alcorn4, Lynne
Layton5
1: University of
Maryland, United
States of America;
2: Austen Riggs
Institute, United
States; 3: University
of Maryland, United
States; 4: George
Washington
University, United
States; 5: Co-Editor,
Psychoanalysis,
Culture & Society
Massachusetts
Institute for
Psychoanalysis
Location: Room B
Chair: Elizabeth
Scholom, Adelphi
University
The Emotional
Experience of
Coping with
Polarized Debate
and What
Working with
Children May
Teach Us About
It
1C: PAPER
SESSION: Fictional
Borders
Location: Room C
Chair: Harpreet Malla,
Alliant International
University
1D: PANEL
Conquering
Goliath: The
Slingshot or the
Handshake?
The Father-Series
and the Spectral Self Alice Maher
Private Practice,
in Conrad's Lord
United States of
Jim
Gavriel Reisner
NPAP, United States of
America
Tiresias and
Ana Archangelo
Psychoanalysis
University of
after Oedipus
Campinas/UNICAMP Sheila L. Cavanagh
- Brazil
York University, Canada
1L: ROUNDTABLE
Location: Room D
Location: Library
Chair: Bob Samuels,
UCSB
America
Diversity, Identities,
and
Psychotherapistsin-Training:
Troubling Borders
Both Personally
and Professionally?
Andrew Young Choi
UCSB, United States of
America
Presenter(s): Andrew
Neuroscience
versus
Psychoanalysis:
Descartes,
Damasio, Lacan,
and the
Humanities
Young
Choi (UCSB), Kritika
Dwivedi(University of
Denver)
No, That's the Other
Indian Girl:
Challenges and
Bob Samuels
UCSB, United States Privileges of a
Model Minority in
of America
On the Borders
The
Clinical Psychology
of
Destruction/Creation
Graduate
Psychoanalysis
of Boundaries in the
Programs.
Troubling
and Education: Is
Analytic and Fictive
Kritika Dwivedi
Diagnostic
There Still a
Dyads.
University of Denver,
Criteria:
Place for the
United States of
Joseph Steven
‘Ordinary
Unconscious in
America
Reynoso
Trauma, Identity,
Psychosis’ and
our Schools?
Metropolitan Instititue for
and Working
Contemporary
Olga Poznansky
Training in
Through
Social
Private Practice,
Psychoanalytic
Marilyn Charles
Ramadan fasting in
Formations.
United States of
Psychotherapy, United
Austen Riggs
Africa: My
America
States of America
Alan Bristow
Center, United
foreignness,
Birkbeck College,
States of America
intersectionality,
London., United
and reflections on
Kingdom
Reverb: Patti Smith
“leaning in” to
and Waging War
professional
The Political Life
with Sound
organizations
of Hate: Fanon
D. B. Ruderman
and Calhoun on
Andrew Young Choi
Establishing
UCSB, United States of
America
Community
5
The Ohio State
University, United States
of America
Through the
Initiation of
Political Trauma
James M. Glass
universiry of
maryland, United
States of America
The Rhetoric of
Authority in
Discourses of
Trauma
Marshall Alcorn
George Washington
University, United
States of America
Whistleblower
Narratives:
Stuck in Static
Time
C. Fred Alford
University of
Maryland, United
States of America
10:00am Coffee Break
Location: Dining Room
10:30am
10:30am 2A: PAPER
2B: PANEL
SESSION: Racial Location: Room B
12:00pm Boundaries
Location: Room A
Chair: Claude
Barbre, The
Chicago School of
Professional
Psychology
2C: PANEL
Location: Room C
Revisiting
Marcuse:
Tensions on the
Borders of
Psyche and
Society
2D: PAPER
2L: ROUNDTABLE
SESSION: Critical Location: Library
Psychoanalytic
Perspectives on
Politics
What’s My Line?
Location: Room D
Agendas in Analytic
Chair: Marshall
Social Psychology
We Need to Talk
about Families: Redrawing the
Boundaries Between Alcorn, George
Washington
the Public and the
University
Private in
1
Tod Sloan , C. Fred (Neoliberal) Popular
Culture
Alford2
Jeremy Cohan
NYU Sociology, SPI,
United States of
America
Presenter(s): Jeremy
Creative
Cohan(NYU Sociology,
1
1:
Lewis
and
Clark
Angie
Voela
,
Erica
Maladjustment
Toward a
SPI), Greg
Graduate School of Galioto2, Karen
in the West
Psychopathology Gabrellas (Drexel
Education and
Lombardi3, Louis
Baltimore
of the American School of Medicine,
Counseling, United
Rothschild4
SPI), Scott
Uprisings
States of America; 2: 1: University of East
Political
Jenkins(SPI), Lynne
University
of
Katherine Glanz
Economy
London, United
Layton(Psychoanalysis,
Maryland
Johns Hopkins
Kingdom; 2:
Thomas Paul
Culture & Society)
University, United
Shippensburg University, Bonfiglio
States of America
USA; 3: Adelphi
The University of
University, USA; 4:
Richmond, United
Desublimation
Independent
The Sex-Pol
States of America
Revisited
Practitioner, USA
Agenda asks Must
“Almost the
Tod Sloan
Everyone Adore a
Same, But Not
Lewis & Clark
Fascist?
Quite”: Speaking University, United
A Psychoanalytic
‘Western Civilisation
Jeremy Cohan
English with an States of America
View on the
Accent and
Unsettling the
Must Be Defended’:
6
British
Border Between
“Us” and
“Them”
Herbert Marcuse:
Akiko Motomura
Liberation
Private Practice,
Begins at Home
United States of
America
C. Fred Alford
University of
Maryland, United
States of America
Addressing the
Racialized
Boundaries of
the Body for an
Antiracist
Psychoanalysis
Neoliberal Values in Conservative
Teenage Literature Party’s
Ideological
Angie Voela
Boundaries
University of East
London, United Kingdom Ayla Michelle
Demir
Brunel University,
London, England,
“‘Is Freud Still Part
United Kingdom.
of the Program?’”:
Post-Oedipal Family
Dynamics in THE
On the Subject of
END OF ALICE
Right Wing
Erica D Galioto
Shippensburg University, Politics…
NYU Sociology, SPI,
United States of
America
After 1945: Adorno,
Psychoanalysis,
and Critical Theory
Gregory Gabrellas1,2
1: Drexel University
College of Medicine,
United States of
America; 2: Society for
Psychoanalytic Inquiry
United States of America Nicola Short
York University,
Canada
Jessica Chavez1,2
1: The New School
for Social Research,
United States of
America; 2:
Counseling and
Psychological
Services, The
University of
Pennsylvania
The New Ties That
Bind: Helicopter
Parenting in the
Culture of PostModernism
karen l lombardi
Adelphi University,
United States of America
What’s Awesome?
Coercive
Elements and the
Threat of Child
Sacrifice in the Lego
Movie
Louis Rothschild
Louis Rothschild, United
States of America
12:00pm Lunch
Location: Dining Room
1:00pm
1:00pm 3A: PAPER
SESSION:
2:30pm Theorizing
Psychoanalysis
Location: Room A
Chair: Tod Sloan,
Lewis and Clark
Graduate School of
Education and
Counseling
Psychoanalysis’
Subversive
Edge: Ethics,
Freedom, and
Social Change
Amber M. Trotter
3B: PANEL
Location: Room B
Minds and
Movies:
Documentary
Through a
Psychoanalytic
Lens
Jane Anne
Hassinger1,Donna
Bassin2, Jan
Haaken3,Ricardo
Ainslie4
1: University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor
Michigan; 2: Pratt
Institute, NYC, NY;
3C: PAPER
SESSION: Critical
Issues in Clinical
Training
3D: PANEL
3L: ROUNDTABLE
Location: Room D
Location: Library
Location: Room C
Chair: Esther Rashkin,
University of Utah
“You Can’t Have
Your Cake and
Eat It Too”:
Splitting, Envy,
and Spoiling in
the Policing of
Evidence Based
Binary Gender,
Practice: Blurring
Sexuality, and
the Border Betweem
Relationality
Science and Politics
Allan Scholom
Chicago Center for
Psychoanalysis, United
States of America
7
Elizabeth
Clark1, Kori
Bennett2, Ben
Morsa3
1: Fordham
University, United
The Use of the
Other in Child
Welfare: Navigating
Troubling Borders
Jill Barbre
Erikson Institute, United
States of America
Presenter(s): Pfeffer
Eisin(Erikson
Institute), Jill
Barbre(Erikson
Institute), Angel
Williams (Erikson
Institute),Erika
California Institute of 3: Portland State
Integral Studies,
University; 4:
United States of
University of Texas
America
"What Story to
Tell?
Responsibilities
and
Contributions of
Psychoanalytic
Robin S. Brown1,2 Filmmaking- Part
1: California Institute of Minds and
of Integral Studies, Movies:
San Francisco,
Documentary
United States of
Through a
America; 2: Blanton
Psychoanalytic
Peale Graduate
Institute, New York Lens
On the Limits of
Relational
Thinking as a
Pluralistic
Discourse
Why Cultural
Competence and
Social Justice are
Missing from
Psychoanalytic
Informed Training:
Resistances and Its
Consequences
Contents Under
Pressure:
Toward a
Dynamic
Ruth Lijtmaer
Understanding of
Center for
Minority Stress
Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis of New for Non-Binary
Jersey, United States of and/or NonMonogamous
America
People
Donna I. Bassin
New York University,
United States of
America
The Good Enough
Institution:
Examining the
Ethics of Clinical
Training for Early
Authoritarianism
Career
as an illness of
societies, with a Moving Pictures: Psychotherapists
Ethical Demands and their Patients
view towards
of Documentary Stephanie
treatment
Film Production Hundt, Shannon
Jay Frankel
City, United States
of America
New York
University, United
States of America
Janice Kay Haaken
Portland State
University, United
States of America
Beyond the
'Classical'
Paradigm: The
Great War and
the Grenzen of
Freudian
Thought
The Subject and
Object in
Psychoanalytic
Documentary
Filmmaking
Phillip Henry
University of
Chicago, United
States of America
States of America; 2: Flores (Erikson
Stanford University; Institute)
3: George
Washington
University
Elizabeth Clark
Fordham University,
United States of
America
Expiration
Dates/Predicted
Shelf Lives:
Examining
Relationship and
Gender Dual
Death Anxieties
Lindsay McIntyre
Long Island University
(Brooklyn Campus),
Kori Bennett
United States of America Stanford University,
United States of
America
On Pouting,
Cake, and
Affective
Indulgence:
Troubling the
Regulation of
Affect
ricardo ainslie
university of texas,
United States of
America
Benjamin Alex
Morsa
George Washington
University, United
States of America
2:30pm Coffee Break
Location: Dining Room
3:00pm
3:00pm 4A: PAPER
SESSION:
4:30pm Models of Mind:
Critical
Perspectives
Location: Room A
Chair: Francisco
4B: PANEL
4C: PANEL
Location: Room B
Location: Room C
4D: PAPER
SESSION
Location: Room D
Chair: Peter
Redman, Open
Winnciott For A New University
The Necessity of
a Systems
Day: The Theoretical
Perspective In
and Clinical
Contributions of
8
4L: ROUNDTABLE
Location: Library
Chair: Michael
O'Loughlin, Adelphi
University
Medina, CUNY
Graduate Center
Interdisciplinary
Discussant
Stephen P. Sheehi
The College of
William and Mary,
United States of
America
Institutions and
Group Settings
Heather
Churchill1, Sarah
Hedlund2, helen
Devinney2
1: The Austen Riggs
Center, United
States of America; 2:
The George
Washington
University
Making the
Psychoanalyzing
Unbearable
While Arab: On
Bearable
Terror and
Heather Churchill
Apparition
Lara
Sheehi1, Nadine
Obeid2,Stephen P.
Sheehi3, Lama
Khouri4, Lynne
Layton5
1: The George
Washington
University, SC Dept.
of Health and
Human Services,
United States of
America; 2: The
William Alanson
White Institute; 3:
The College of
William and Mary; 4:
Circle Of Arab
Students In Schools
(Circle Oasis).; 5:
Massachussetts
Institute for
Psychoanalysis
The Austen Riggs
Center, United
States of America
Whose Terror Is
It?
nadine obeid
William Alanson
White Institute
Don Greif1, Jill
Gentile2,David
Lichtenstein3
1: William Alanson
White Institute; 2:
NYU PostDoctoral
Program in
Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis; 3:
Supervising Analyst,
Apres-Coup
Psychoanalytic
Association; Faculty,
Hate in the
The New School
Countertransference University; CUNY
Graduate Center
in Child Welfare
Claude Barbre1, Karl
Southgate1, Jill
Barbre2,Candida Yates3
1: The Chicago School
of Professional
Psychology, United
States of America; 2:
Erikson Institute; 3:
Bournemouth University,
UK
Clinical
Interventions:
Revisiting
Winnicott’s Theory
and Therapy in
Treating Child
Abuse, Neglect, and
Trauma
Protection from
Projection:
Applying a
Systems
Perspective to a Jill Barbre
Therapeutic High Erikson Institute, United
States of America
School Setting
Sarah Hedlund
George Washington
University, United
States of America
Therapist,
Interrupted:
Using an
Understanding of
Unconscious
The Ideology of Processes to
Negotiate and
Apparitions
Resist Systemic
Lara Sheehi
Enactments and
The George
Collusions in
Washington
University/SC Dept. State Psychiatric
Hospitals
of Health and
Human Services,
United States of
America
D.W. Winnicott in
Socio-Cultural,
Speech and
Potential, and
Intermediate Spaces Action
The
Commodification of
Being and the
Neoliberal Mindset:
A Winnicottian
Analysis
Claude Barbre
The Chicago School of
Professional
Psychology, United
States of America
Finding a Place for
Winnicott in the
Psychoanalytic
Literature on Drug
helen DeVinney
George Washington Addiction
University, United
States of America
Karl Joseph Southgate
The Chicago School of
Professional
Psychology, United
States of America
The Play of Casino
Capitalism and
Political Culture
Candida Yates
9
Enshrined
Ambiguity:
Between Speech
and Action in
Psychoanalysis
and Free Speech
Jill Gentile
NYU PostDoctoral
Program in
Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis,
NYC
The Speech Act
and the
Psychoanalytic
Act
David Lichtenstein
David Lichtenstein
PhD, United States
of America
The Origins of
Childhood
Subjectivity:
Cultural and
Dynamic
Considerations
Michael O'Loughlin
Adelphi University,
United States of
America
Presenter(s): Bhupin
Butaney(Arizona
School of Professional
Psychology at Argosy
University), Sudhir
Kakar(Goa,
India), Almas
Merchant(Brightpoint
Health), Sanjay
Nath (Widener
University),Michael
O'Loughlin (Adelphi
University), Burton
Seitler(Private Practice)
Can You See
Me?: The Arab
Immigrant In The
Consulting
Room.
Bournemouth University,
United Kingdom
Lama Khouri
Circle Of Arab
Students In
Schools; Teachers
College, Columbia
University; &
Manhattan Institute
for Psychoanalysis..
4:30pm Coffee Break
Location: Dining Room
5:00pm
5:00pm 6: FILM PRESENTATION & DISCUSSION: Mark of War
Location: Room A
6:30pm Chair: Ricardo Ainslie, University of Texas
The Mark of War
Chair(s): Ricardo Ainslie (University of Texas at Austin)
Presentations of the Symposium
The Mark of War
Ricardo Ainslie, David Rosenblatt; rainslie@austin.utexas.edu, davidrosenblatt1@mac.com
University of Texas at Austin
6:30pm Dinner
Location: Dining Room
8:00pm
Date: Saturday, 24/Oct/2015
8:30am 7A: PAPER
7B: PANEL
Location: Room B
SESSION:
10:00am Critical Issues in
Clinical Practice
Location: Room A
Chair: Michelle
Massé, Louisiana
State University
Psychodynamic
Psychotherapy
of a Youth in
the Throes of a
Psychotic
Break who
Brandished a
Intersections and
Crossroads:
Psychoanalysis,
Children,
Families,
Oppression,
Culture
Benjamin Alex
Morsa1,Richard
Ruth1, Michael
O'Loughlin2, Kate
MacShane3
1: George
Washington
University, United
States of America; 2:
7C: PANEL
Location: Room C
7D:
ROUNDTABLE
7L: ROUNDTABLE
Location: Library
Location: Room D
Other Incubations:
Psychoanalysis
through Surrealism
Scott Joseph
Jenkins1,Benjamin
Koditschek1,2,Christophe
r Crawford1
1: Society For
Psychoanalytic Inquiry
(SPI), United States of
America; 2: The University
of Chicago
10
Bystanding
Catastrophic
Experience
Deanne Bell
Antioch College,
United States of
America
Presenter(s): Deann
e Bell(Antioch
College)
Activist
Collaborative
Learning Projects:
Negotiating the
Tensions between
Individual and
Collective Agency in a
Community College
and Beyond
Eduardo Vianna
LaGuardia Community
College, United States
of America
Presenter(s): Eduardo
Vianna(LaGuardia
Community
Knife in
Therapy
Burton N. Seitler
J.A.S.P.E.R.,
International
Do You Google
Your Shrink?
Boundary
Troubles,
Therapeutic
Tensions, and
Grist for the Mill
Esther Rashkin
University of Utah,
United States of
America
The Youth Will
Bring Vision:
Young Adults
Bridging
Cultural Divides
Judy Roth
City University,
United States of
America
"My Sister Tried
to Kill Me":
Enactment and
Foreclosure in
a Mixed Race
Dyad
Teresa Méndez
The Retreat at
Sheppard Pratt,
United States of
America
Adelphi University; 3:
The Lourie Center
for Children's Social
and Emotional
Wellness
At the Liminal
Edge:
Sociocultural
Factors in the
Assessment of
an Adolescent
Benjamin Alex
Morsa
George Washington
University, United
States of America
Trans()formations with
Children and
Families
Richard Ruth
The George
Washington
University, United
States of America
Inverted Genius:
Psychoanalysis and
the Concept of
Inspiration in
Surrealism.
Scott Joseph Jenkins
Society For Psychoanalytic
Inquiry (SPI), United States
of America
Mass Inspiration: The
Creative Unconscious
after the “Creative
Class”
Benjamin M. Koditschek
SPI, United States of
America
Surrealism, Anti-Art,
and the Value Form
Christopher Crawford
Society for Psychoanalytic
Inquiry, United States of
America
Against
Adaptation:
Navigating the
Boundaries
Between Demand
and Desire,
Between
Assimilation and
Liberation in
Work with
Children
College), Dušana
Podlucka(LaGuardia
Community
College), Mike
Rifino (The Graduate
CenterCUNY),Francisco
Medina (The Graduate
Center- CUNY)
Activist
Collaborative
Project with a
Community College
Student Diagnosed
with Autism:
Negotiating
Learning and
Agency
Dušana Podlucka
LaGuardia Community
College, United States
of America
Creating a
Community of
Activist Learning:
Repositioning
Faculty and
Students as Agents
of Change
Eduardo Vianna
LaGuardia Community
College, United States
of America
Expanding
Learning Through
Social Activism in
the College and
Beyond
Michael O'Loughlin
Adelphi University,
United States of
America
Francisco Medina
LaGuardia Community
College, United States
of America
Informed
Consent in
Community
Mental Health
Work With
Children and
Families
Learning CriticalTheoretical
Concepts as Tools
for Agency
Mike Rifino
The Graduate Center,
CUNY
Kate Hong
MacShane
The Lourie Center
for Children's Social
& Emotional
Wellness, United
States of America
11
10:00am Coffee Break
Location: Dining Room
10:30am
10:30am 8A: PAPER
SESSION:
12:00p Lacanian
m
Subjects
8B: PAPER
8C: PANEL
SESSION: Sexual Location: Room C
Transgression
and Erotic
Location: Room A Boundaries:
The Clinical
Chair: Angie Voela, Location: Room B
Relevance of
University of East Chair: Katherine
Internalized Culture in
London
Glanz, Johns
a Globalized World
Hopkins University
From Subject of
Enunciation to “Luckily He
Subject of the
Backed Off”: A
Political
Mixed Methods
Derek
Analysis of
Hook1, Calum
Undergraduate
Neill2
Women’s
1: Duquesne
Consent,
University, United Attitudes and
States of America;
Behaviors
2: Napier
Edinburgh
University,
Scotland, UK
Kelsey Lynne
Power1, Dr. Megan
Yost2
1: Adelphi University,
United States of
America; 2:
Late Capitalism Dickinson College,
and the
Carlisle PA
Obligation to
Enjoy:
Boredom,
Anxiety, Rage
and Self Harm
Chasing Justice:
Comparing
College and
Barbara Tholfsen Institute
Westchester
Responses to
Center for the
Sexual
Study of
Transgressions
Psychoanlysis and
and Assaults
Psychotherapy,
United States of
America
"The Death of
the Lacanian
Analyst: From
Possum to
Posthuman”
Maryann D.
Murtagh
Duke University,
United States of
America
Katie Gentile
John Jay College,
United States of
America
Jay Alan Roland1, M.
Nasir Ilahi2, Sandra
Buechler3
1: National Psychological
Association for
Psychoanalysis, United
States of America; 2:
British Psychoanalytic
Society, NYU
Psychoanalytic Institute; 3:
William Alanson White
Institute
The Self Across
Civilizations: The
Colonial Legacy in
Psychoanalysis
Jay Alan Roland
National Psychological
Association for
Psychoanalysis, United
States of America
The Clinical
Relevance of
Internalized Culture
Nasir Ilahi
New York University
Psychoanalytic Institute,
United States of America
Preparing Candidates
for the Challenges of a
Globalized World
Assault Culture: Sandra Buechler
Constructing
William Alanson White
Campus Borders Institute, United States of
Michelle Massé
Louisiana State
University, United
States of America
America
12:00p Lunch
m
Location: Dining Room
12
8D:
ROUNDTABLE
8L:
Location: Room D
Location: Library
Chair: Marilyn Charles,
Austen Riggs Center
From Deserved
Shame to
Reparative
Solidarity: The
Role of
Psychosocial
Accompaniment
Mary Watkins
Pacifica Graduate
Institute, United
States of America
Presenter(s): Mary
Watkins(Pacifica
Graduate Institute)
ROUNDTABLE
Graduate Student
Roundtable:
Critical Forum on
Graduate School
Michael O'Loughlin
Adelphi University,
United States of
America
Presenter(s): Harpreet
Malla(Alliant
International
University),Elizabeth
Scholom (Adelphi
University), Momoko
Takanashi (Adelphi
University),Catherine
Marsh (Adelphi
University), Andrew
Costigan(University of
Texas at Austin)
1:00pm
1:00pm 9A: PAPER
9B: PANEL
Location: Room B
SESSION: On
2:30pm Borders of Time,
Space and
Image
Holding the
Location: Room A
Tension: The
Chair: Daniel
Social in the
Gaztambide, Mt.
Unconscious/The
Sinai St. Luke's
Unconscious in
Hospital
the Social
"How Many
Borders Do We
Have to Cross
before We
Reach Home?"
Yianna Ioannou
University of
Nicosia, Cyprus
The Medium of
Psychic Life, or
Le Sinthomatic
Cinema:
Traversing the
Fantasy
through
Synecdoche,
New York
Andrew Santana
Kaplan
University of Illinois
at UrbanaChampaign, United
States of America
My Mummy
Complex:
Fusing Trauma
and History in
the Televisual
1960s
Danny Ray
Leopard
Saint Mary's
College of
Califorina, United
States of America
Where's the
Door? The
Architectural
Katharina
Rothe1, Esin
Egit2,Michelle
Stephens1,3, Nikol
AlexanderFloyd3, Elizabeth
Hegeman1,4
1: William Alanson
White Institute; 2:
Borough of
Manhattan
Community College
(CUNY); 3: Rutgers
University; 4: John
Jay College of
Criminal justice
A
Psychoanalytics
of Blackness:
Reading Race
Relationally in
African American
Literature
9C: PANEL
9D: PANEL
9L: ROUNDTABLE
Location: Room C
Location: Room D
Location: Library
Race, Violence,
Community, and the
Media: Psychoanalytic
Perspectives
Under the
Evening Land:
Traumatic
Imprints in
Intercultural
Contexts
When Cultures
Collide: Myth,
Meaning, and
Conceptual Space
Teresa Méndez1, Daniel
Buccino2
1: The Retreat at Sheppard Claude
Pratt; 2: Johns Hopkins
Barbre, Natasha
Bayview Medical Center
Reynolds, Matthew
Shang,Natasa`
Brozovic, Amanda
Snell
"Bodymore,
The Chicago School
Murderland”:
of Professional
Psychoanalytic
Psychology, United
Musings
States of America
Teresa Méndez
The Retreat at Sheppard
Pratt, United States of
The Impact of
America
“Baltimore in the
Morning”: Toward a
Psychoanalysis of
Place and Uprising
Daniel L. Buccino
Johns Hopkins Bayview
Medical Center, United
States of America
Michelle Ann
Stephens
Rutgers University/
William Alanson
White Institute,
United States of
America
Social Change in
China on Young
Female Adults: A
Shanghai Study
Natasha Lanshin
Reynolds
The Chicago School
of Professional
Psychology, United
States of America
The Cultural
Adjustment of
Chinese-Born
Males to the
American
Masculinity
Paradigm: Issues
of Identity and
Self-Image in
First Generation
ChineseAmerican Male
Immigrants
Self and
Subjectivity:
Growing up in a
Middle-Class
Secular Family in
Istanbul, Turkey
Matthew Shang
The Chicago School
of Professional
Psychology, United
States of America
Esin Egit
Borough of
Manhattan
Community College,
CUNY, United States
of America
Forgotten Voices:
Traumatic
13
Marilyn Charles
Austen Riggs Center,
United States of
America
Presenter(s): Marilyn
Charles(Austen Riggs
Center),Monisha
NayarAkhtar(Psychoanalytic
Center of
Philadelphia), Sudhir
Kakar(Goa, India)
Uncanny of
Boston's
Government
Center
Daniel Bauer
SUNY Purchase,
United States of
America
Psychoanalysis,
Scandal, and
Black Feminism
Inductions of
Shame and Guilt
in the Filipino
Psyche
Nikol G. AlexanderFloyd
Rutgers University,
United States of
America
Amanda Snell
The Chicago School
of Professional
Psychology, United
States of America
(Re)Construction
, Deconstruction
and Resisting the
Pulls for
Reductionism in
the Consulting
Room
Identity
Confusion and
Nationalism:
Intergenerational
Transmission of
Trauma in
Bosnian Culture
Katharina Rothe
William Alanson
White Institute,
United States of
America
Natasa Brozovic
The Chicago School
of Professional
Psychology
2:30pm Coffee Break
3:00pm
3:00pm 10A: PANEL
10B: PANEL
Location: Room A Location: Room B
4:30pm
Troubling
Reflection:
Adorno and
Psychoanalysis
Jeffrey M.
Jackson1, Stefan
BirdPollan2, Kathleen
Eamon3
1: University of
Houston-Downtown, United
States of America;
2: University of
Kentucky; 3:
Evergreen State
College
Working the
Intersection of
Psychoanalysis,
Social Activism,
and Method: A
Qualitative
Research Team’s
Experience
ricardo
ainslie, andrew
costigian, crystal
guevara,hannah
mcdermott, david
rosenblatt
university of texas,
United States of
America
Suffered
Psychoanalysis,
Epistemologies
Qualitative
: Adorno and
Methods, and
Psychoanalysis
Working at the
Jeffrey M.
Margins
Jackson
University of
Houston-Downtown, United
States of America
ricardo ainslie
university of texas,
United States of
America
10C: PAPER SESSION: 10D: PANEL
Difficult Conversatiosn Location: Room D
in Difficult Places
Location: Room C
Chair: C. Fred Alford,
University of Maryland
Inclusion and
Exclusion, Inside
and Outside, Me,
My Self and the
Other: Where Do
Between Scylla and
Charybdis: Tensions the "Boundaries"
at the Border between Lie?
1
, Pfeffer
Structure and Fluidity Zak Mucha
2
10L: ROUNDTABLE
Location: Library
Chair: Jennifer
Durham, Adelphi
University
Graduate Student
Roundtable:
Psychotherapy and
Activism
Marie Hansen
Long Island University
Eisin
Lita Iole Crociani1: Chicago Center for Brooklyn, United States
Windland
of America
Psychoanalysis; 2:
University of the West of
Presenter(s): Marie
Erikson Institute
England, United Kingdom
Hansen(Long Island
University, Brooklyn
Campus), Amber
Annihilation and Trotter (California
The Legacy of Trauma
Institute of Integral
Inclusion:
in Post-Soviet
Studies), Kelsey
Flitcraft, Elvis,
Lithuania: Survival,
Power (Adelphi
and the Mekons
Adaptation, and
University),Eliza
Zak Mucha
Wierzbinska (Columbi
Remnants in the Life
Zak Mucha, Chicago a University Teachers
Narrative of a 1941
Center for
College)
Deportee.
Psychoanalysis
Justina Dillon
Adelphi University
Hibakusha (Atomic
Bomb Survivor) in
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki after 70
14
Troubling the
Boundaries
Pfeffer Eisin
Erikson Institute
The Experience
of Attending a
Specialized
Adorno's
Psychoanalytic Learning
Program for
Critique of
Learners with
Freud and
Dyslexia
Hegel
Stefan BirdPollan
University of
Kentucky, United
States of America
Typical Dreams,
Secondary
Experience, and
Collective
Desire: Working
Between Freud
and Adorno
Kathleen
Margaret Eamon
The Evergreen
State College,
United States of
America
years: Psychological
Transformation from
the Impact and
Trauma of the Atomic
Bomb to Seeking
Meaning in their Lives
Momoko Takanashi
Andrew Costigan
Adelphi University, United
States of America
The University of
Texas, United States
of America
Immigrant
Women,
Immigration
Policy, and Life
in One of
America’s
Detention
Centers
Crystal Guevara
University of Texas
at Austin, United
States of America
Breaking Down
Boundaries of
“Otherness”:
Incarceration and
Testimonio
Hannah Wood
McDermott
University of Texas,
Austin, United States
of America
Film Language,
Qualitative
Inquiry, & Media
Perspectives
David Seth
Rosenblatt
University of Texas,
United States of
America
4:30pm Coffee Break
Location: Dining Room
5:00pm
5:00pm 11A: WORKING 11B: PAPER
SESSION
SESSION:
6:30pm Location: Room A Disordered
Borders
Developing a
Global
Location: Room B
Chair: Benjamin
Alex Morsa, George
11C: Session Withdrawn
11D: WORKING
Location: Room C
SESSION
Chair: Lita Iole Crociani- Location: Room D
Windland, University of the
West of England
Implications of
Psychoanalysis,
15
11L
Location: Library
Psychosocial
Network to
Address
Healing , Selfprotection and
Activism in
Conflict Areas
Washington
University
and Especially
the Presentations
at this
Conference, for
Activism and
Organizing in
Social
Movements
Guilt, Shame,
and the Border
between the
Jancis
Long, Judith Roth Individual and
Society
Psychologists for
Social
Responsibility,
United States of
America
Tod Sloan1, Angie
Voela2,Marilyn C
harles3, Katie
Gentile4
1: Lewis & Clark
College; 2: University
of East London; 3:
Austen Riggs Center;
4: John Jay College
of Criminal justice
Oded Goldberg
Bar Ilan University,
Israel
The Trouble with
Psychosocial
Studies
Peter Redman
Open University,
United Kingdom
Exclusion and
Social
Dismemberment
Associated with
Psychosis and
Homelessness
Catherine Anne
Marsh
Adelphi University,
United States of
America
6:30pm Conference Feedback Session
7:15pm
7:15pm Wine & Cheese Reception
Location: Dining Room
9:00pm
Date: Sunday, 25/Oct/2015
8:30am
9:30am
PCS Editorial Board Meeting
Location: Library
9:30am APCS Annual Board Meeting
Location: Library
12:00pm
16
Abstracts of Presentations
17
Session Overview
Date: Thursday, 22/Oct/2015
7:00pm - 9:00pm KEYNOTE ADDRESS: As Psychoanalysis Travels
Session Chair: Almas Merchant, Brightpoint Health
Cook Student
Sudhir Kakar Psychoanalyst and Writer Welcome on behalf of Department of Women &
Center, Ballroom Gender Studies, Rutgers University by Nikol Alexander-Floyd Welcome on behalf of APCS by
co-chairs Marilyn Charles & Michael O'Loughlin
ABC
Date: Friday, 23/Oct/2015
8:30am 1A: PANEL
Session Chair: C. Fred Alford, University of Maryland
10:00a
m
Room
A
Trauma as the Violation of Identity
C. Fred Alford1, Marilyn Charles2, James Glass3, Marshall Alcorn4, Lynne Layton5
1
University of Maryland, United States of America; 2Austen Riggs Institute, United States; 3University of Maryland,
United States;4George Washington University, United States; 5Co-Editor, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
Massachusetts Institute for
Psychoanalysis; calford@umd.edu, Marilyn.Charles@AustenRiggs.net, jglass1@umd.edu, marshall.alcorn@gmail.co
m
APCS, Themed Panel Proposal, Panel Abstract
Proposed by C. Fred Alford, calford@umd.edu
Trauma as the violation of identity
The proposed panel questions the way in which trauma violates personal identity, challenging the continuity of
personal existence. Trauma is the intrusion of alien experience into the psyche. Does this alien experience come from
the outside? Yes and no. Only in physical medicine is trauma the intrusion of material experience into the body. In
psychic trauma, the intrusion is more subtle, and the primary method is projective identification, in which groups
evacuate their unwanted or unbearable experiences into the minds and bodies of others, usually an out-group of one
form or another. This raises the question of whether there is something in the out-group that is receptive to the
projection. The answer varies.
The paper by Marilyn Charles is based on her consultation work with two Aboriginal preschools in rural New South
Wales. The problem of working across the boundaries of culture has been particularly profound.
The paper by James Glass examines how violence is capable of destroying identity, as well as holding out the
possibility of reconstituting identity from the very experience of violence itself.
The paper by Marshall Alcorn considers the way in which the discourse of trauma as changed during the period from
1915 to 2015, redefining the meaning of the experience for its sufferers.
The paper by C. Fred Alford looks at the way the trauma experienced by whistleblowers is an alien intrusion of
unbearable knowledge, trapping them in static time.
All the papers address the way in which trauma crosses the border of identity structures to force their reconstitution,
18
sometimes with positive results, sometimes with negative, often both. All papers are written from the intersection of the
psychic with the political.
Trauma, Identity, and Working Through
Marilyn Charles
Austen Riggs Center, United States of America; marilyn.charles@austenriggs.net
Unrecognized and unresolved, the transgenerational transmission of trauma impedes identity development, leaving
those subsequent generations further destabilized. Identity development depends on sufficient access to parental mind
and memory to be able to develop a coherent narrative. For people with roots in more than one culture, the ability to
integrate disparate aspects of identity is crucial. In many countries, cultural divides have plagued succeeding
generations, impeding identity development. Individuals on each side of the divide carry their own particular burdens,
implicated in what has occurred but often unable to see a means towards repair. The relatively recent recognition by
the Australian government of the harm done historically to Aboriginal people has provided a potential bridge whereby
such healing might occur. That potential healing, however, occurs in the context of traumatic conditions of high
poverty, substance use, and domestic violence ongoing in Aboriginal communities. Gunawirra, a group headquartered
in Sydney, attempts to provide healing by interventions focused on primary prevention and empowerment for
preschool children and their families. In these efforts, psychoanalytic consultants help to support the work being done
within the preschools throughout New South Wales. Through such efforts at containment, we try to help provide the
possibility of vicarious posttraumatic growth rather than retraumatization and burnout. In this presentation, I will discuss
some of the ways in which trauma and unresolved mourning affect identity development, and then highlight ways in
which psychoanalytic consultants can help to support community interventions that promote the type of integration and
healing crucial to positive identity development.
The Political Life of Hate: Fanon and Calhoun on Establishing Community Through the Initiation
of Political Trauma
James M. Glass
universiry of maryland, United States of America; jglass1@umd.edu
What does liberation mean; what does political liberation mean as a way of asserting freedom and the political
community of diversity? John Calhoun and Frantz Fanon are case studies in the closing off of diversity through a
passionate ‘closed mindedness’. For Fanon violence reestablishes native identity; it cleanses the society, purifies the
native from contamination by the master culture; it burns from consciousness the memeory of and the desire for
western values. For Fanon, the establishment of the native’s hegemony, and his identity in his own racial and cultural
history is far more necessary to freedom than tolerance for diversity, particularly for the kind of diversities represented
by the colonial power. For Calhoun slavery and its domination of the black body and psyche, no matter how violent is
essential for the health of the community. Calhoun and his apologists are blind to the trauma induced by slavery. Both
Calhoun and Fanon move to established freedom through the violent overcoming of diversities or any sense of a plural
society. Rather than these theories becoming the foundation for a pluralist and diverse sense of freedom, they justify
the imposition of violence as the only avenue for resisting the corrupting and destructive effect of cultural diversities
that run up against their ideological and political commitments. Both advocate hate in establishing the foundations of
identity; and it is hate that drives both forms of racism. In a psychoanalytic sense, hate severs the possibility of
community or Eros in Freud's sense. So Fanon's vision of establishing a political space built on the violent annihilation
of the settler and Calhoun's vision of a white community defined by the 'ethics' of slavery are doomed from the
beginning. Hate cannot be the foundation for establishing a viable and just political space.
The Rhetoric of Authority in Discourses of Trauma
Marshall Alcorn
George Washington University, United States of America; alcornma@gwu.edu
From 1915 to 2015, traumatic experience has shifted in its demands for legal, medical, and social attention. In 1915
soldiers could be executed for hysterical responses to combat. Hysterical responses to combat in 2015 require medical
support and attention. Currently the word "trauma," as a generalized term representing adventitious and undeserved
suffering, elicits specialized modes of attention and response world wide. Rather than focusing upon particular themes
and meanings of trauma, this paper will examine the multitude of different experiences, different meanings, and
different uses of the term that have been organized around the concept. Particular emphasis will be given to
19
differences in historical experience, differences in medical obligations, and differences in legal obligations. Different
identities, I will argue, can negotiate and accrue particular relations as they become organized by the rhetoric of
trauma discourses.
Whistleblower Narratives: Stuck in Static Time
C. Fred Alford
University of Maryland, United States of America; calford@umd.edu
Based on my ongoing original research with whistleblowers, I argue that the signs of trauma are deeply embedded in
their narratives. Applying simple narrative analysis to their stories is helpful in bringing this out.
The odd thing about whistleblower narratives, beyond their aura of timelessness, twenty years ago as recent as today,
is that they never stop.
Stories are defined by their end. Everything that happens before is reinterpreted in terms of how it all turns out in the
end. Without an ending, there can be no plot and hence no satisfactory meaning—which is precisely why
whistleblowers cannot bear to end their stories. In the absence of plot, the whistleblower substitutes chronology.
Chronology is meaning, albeit an unsatisfactory one, the meaning that remains when the narrator is absent from the
telling.
One might respond that whistleblowers don't know the end of the story, so they can't tell a finished narrative. This
would be wrong. A story can be meaningful if we don't know the ending if there is a sense that the story is leading
somewhere. Whistleblower stories lack this sense of movement. Instead, their story is an endless sequence of events.
Whistleblowers can move out of static time only by giving up their belief in many of the myths and values we hold most
dear. In other words, they must give up hope.
The paper addresses the conference theme because it concerns people who cross a border they didn't even realize
existed, not just between being inside or outside the organization, but between the myths that sustain us and what we
must give up to move on.
8:30am 1B: PAPER SESSION: Schooling: Adaptation or...?
Session Chair: Eliza,beth Scholom, Adelphi University
10:00a
m
Room
B
The Emotional Experience of Coping with Polarized Debate and What Working with Children May
Teach Us About It
Ana Archangelo
University of Campinas/UNICAMP - Brazil; ana.archangelo@gmail.com
Excessively controversial subjects tend to evoke extremely intense emotional experiences. When tolerance to such
experiences is insufficient, the psyche gets rid of the brutal uncertainty that arises, replacing it with certainty. Where
there should be space for doubt, assertiveness takes place: “I am certain” and “what I am certain about is right.” The
search for truth is shifted by the opposition between right and wrong. In Brazil, the debate around Law Projects
concerning both gender identity and reduction of minimum age of criminal responsibility has been extremely marked by
polarization. Arguments that would reasonably justify one or another perspective have given place to “what I am
certain about is right” statements. Attacking the “wrong side” has been expected. Maher (2015), using a metaphor
related to body, points out that “right eyes won’t ever be able to see the left-sided landscape, and vice versa”, but “if
each is aware and respectful of the point of view of the other eye, they can focus on a shared horizon and move
forward together”. This paper approaches this debate by describing two scenes. In the first, children playing in
classroom cope with gender issues within the playtime and with the help of the teacher. In the second, in a fortuitous
situation among friends, a “right-eyed”, “certain” man hears a story about a child who could not read or write and was
20
being initiated into crime by his family. The emotional experience of overcoming the left-right side equation will be
analyzed: what is needed to trigger uncertainty and a meaningful emptiness and for the one-sided landscape to be
questioned and a shared horizon made possible.
Keywords: emotional experience, minimum age of criminal responsibility, gender issues, psychoanalysis and
education
On the Borders of Psychoanalysis and Education: Is There Still a Place for the Unconscious in
our Schools?
Olga Poznansky
Private Practice, United States of America; olgapoznanskyphd@gmail.com
In his seminal 1949 paper “Psychoanalysis and Education,” Ferenczi described the institution of the school as “a
forcing house for various neuroses.” The pedagogy of his time, he wrote, “set out to achieve that man should cheat
himself in disowning thoughts and feelings stirring within him.” The primary aim of educational reform, he proposed,
“should be an attempt to spare the child's mind the burden of unnecessary repression. After that … should be a reform
of our social institutions so that freedom of action is given to those wish-impulses which cannot be sublimated.”
The pedagogical model prevalent in our time very much resembles the one that Ferenczi criticized as being intolerant
of the unconscious, and forcing unnecessary repression rather than offering a space where children could experiment
with wish-impulses on the way to integration and maturation. Our school system seems to emphasize control in the
name of social adaptation, thereby normalizing repression and dismissing the full range of mental life.
This paper seeks to ‘trouble’ the way our schools treat the often unpleasant expressions of children’s mental life. I will
explore the social and psychological costs borne by children when schools fail to cultivate “freedom of action,” along
with an accompanying sense of social responsibility, and instead become reflexively reactive and rejecting of the
expressions of the unconscious (especially in their ‘antisocial’ manifestations). These ideas will be presented through
clinical material taken from my work as a psychoanalytically informed psychologist and a consultant to schools. In
exposing our schools’ intolerance of the full range of children’s mental life, I wish to implicitly address the illness of our
society, which, as Ferenzci tells us, can only be withstood when the border between internal motivation and social
expectations expands enough to include a space for the unconscious.
8:30am 1C: PAPER SESSION: Fictional Borders
Session Chair: Harpreet Malla, Alliant International University
10:00a
m
Room
C
The Father-Series and the Spectral Self in Conrad's Lord Jim
Gavriel Reisner
NPAP, United States of America; gavriel.reisner@gmail.com
My presentation brings Freud’s father-series and spectrality, the ghostly effect, together in a reading of Conrad’s Lord
Jim. In the search for a paternal substitute (der Vaterreihe) a replacement is sought for an absent father who is also
absent as an internal object. To reach his idealized father, Jim creates an idealized self through the romantic
imagination. The idealized self of the imagination denies the darker self of survivalist instinct. He is left as a divided
being, drifting between the glorified self he has lost and the degraded self he never wanted to find, a spectral self. Jim
is deprived of his light when he meets Gentleman Brown, a pirate renegade who is not so much a ghost as a demon
giving voice to Jim’s hidden self. Yielding to the demon, Jim betrays his war-comrade, Dain Waris, native prince, son of
Doramin, the leader of the tribe Jim defends. It is as if the one who befriends his enemy will make an enemy of his
friend. Presenting himself for death Jim finally finds, in his last moments, the father-figure who allows him to regain the
honor he lost, earlier, when he had abandoned his ship because he was so out of touch with an essential part of
himself.
21
Tiresias and Psychoanalysis after Oedipus
Sheila L. Cavanagh
York University, Canada; sheila@yorku.ca
If psychoanalysis has a founding myth it is the story of Oedipus the King. Oedipus preoccupies Sigmund Freud to the
point where, as Griselda Pollock observes, he was only able to interpret the “human psyche through the exclusive
structure of the Oedipus myth” (2008, 15). As a result, we have sophisticated understandings of sexual difference
within the domain of cisgender masculine identification and phantasy, but only nascent understandings of an Other
sexual difference beyond the phallus. Although Jacques Lacan and Freud give us important psychoanalytic tools to
theorize desire, identification, phantasy, and Oedipal sexual difference, they repeatedly fail to ascertain a space for the
Feminine that is not already passive (as Freud tells us) or non-existent (as Lacan tells us). Moreover there are only
nascent tools available to theorize transgender subjectivity outside psychosis (and to a lesser extent perversion). If
Antigone challenges heteronormative kinship structures as Judith Butler claims (2010) and Tiresias – the Theban
diviner in Sophocles’ plays (who lives as both man and woman) -- challenges cisgender norms of psycho-sexual
development as I demonstrate in this paper, the characters have the capacity to push psychoanalytic theorizing
outside a normalizing Oedipal frame. Oedipal dramas are not the only psychic struggles enacted on stage and the
collateral damage done by the negation of an Other sex difference under the auspices of Oedipal psycho-sexual
development is increasingly well established.
It is incumbent upon us to invest in other non-Oedipal characters and myths, particularly those involving trans
characters. Using the scholarship of Israeli, feminist, psychoanalytic theorist, Bracha L. Ettinger (2006), on the
matrixial borderspace, I excavate an Other sex difference mirrored in the story of Tiresias. I contend that Ettinger’s
(2006) oeuvre offers an understanding of an Other sex difference that is highly relevant to understanding trans
embodiment and trans identifications.
The Destruction/Creation of Boundaries in the Analytic and Fictive Dyads.
Joseph Steven Reynoso
Metropolitan Instititue for Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, United States of
America; drjsreynoso@yahoo.com
In the psychoanalytic aim to take the human mind as its subject, it is a discipline at and about unstable borders:
unconscious/conscious, self/other, aggression/love, fantasy/reality, science/art, mind/body, past/present. Though
psychoanalysts have developed complex theories explaining our mechanisms of regulating various tensions from
within and without, the acts of writing and reading fiction may best represent this experience of existential conflict. It
can be said that we read literature to engage with, perform and assuage these psychic struggles. Pico Iyer’s The Man
Within My Head [TMWMH] is a book that itself stands at many borders—self-analysis, literary criticism, travel memoir,
and psychobiography. In it, Iyer sorts through aspects of his identity and relationship with his philosopher father
through an examination of his lifelong affinity for the works and characters of the writer Graham Greene and the
resulting fantasied relationship he forms with the British novelist. This presentation will use TMWMH to demonstrate
how simultaneous pressures that can be characterized as occurring on dimensions of narcissism/intersubjectivity,
dialogue/monologue, and object relating/usage are present within both the reader/fiction writer and patient/analyst
relationships. It will be argued that the creation, disturbance, protection and transgression of psychic boundaries that is
the focus of analytic sessions occur in acts of reading fiction. Ideas, including Ogden’s thirdness and Bahktin’s
heteroglossia, will be used to trace how both analytic and fictive dyads similarly and uniquely represent aspects of the
intrapsychic and interpersonal border tensions characteristic of human life. The limitations of psychoanalysis and
fictional literature to depict and guide life will be discussed to demonstrate the necessary interdependence of both to
study unconscious processes.
Reverb: Patti Smith and Waging War with Sound
D. B. Ruderman
The Ohio State University, United States of America; ruderman.4@osu.edu
Reverb: Patti Smith and Waging War with Sound
“I went up to 48th St. and got me an electric guitar…I wasn’t interested in learning chords, I was interested in
expressing ideas, however abstract, within the realms of sound.”
22
— Patti Smith
With the affective turn in psychoanalytic and philosophic thought of the last 20 years, sound and music are increasingly
being theorized within the psychoanalytic setting (Lombardi, Rose, Barale). This paper is concerned specifically with
modes of aesthetic, personal, and political repetition and the mapping out of boundaries between sound and meaning,
rhythm and reason. Focusing on the work of rock musician, poet, and activist Patti Smith, and theorizing it through the
work of psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte-Blanco and philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, it contrasts two
competing styles of aesthetic, psycho-affective, and political repetition, namely echo and reverberation.
Whereas echoic repetition is primarily dyadic, linear, with origins and outcomes that are easily identified, reverberation
is bi-directional, bi-logical, and thick. This paper develops reverb as an aural concept and construction, one that
reproduces the transferential possibilities of psychoanalytic temporality and working through. As such, it represents an
opportunity for us to learn to listen to forms of dissonance, layers of repetition that may have their own patterns of bilogic. Juxtaposing Smith’s groundbreaking musical performances such as Radio Ethiopia against her poems and
political engagements with 9/11 and the Occupy Movement, this paper invites us to learn from Smith how to allow the
repetitiousness of culture to feedback through our actions and words, so that we might “fight each other out with
sound,” using reverb rather than guns or bombs.
8:30am 1D: PANEL
Session Chair: Bob Samuels, UCSB
10:00a
m
Room
D
Conquering Goliath: The Slingshot or the Handshake?
Alice Maher
Private Practice, United States of America; alicelmaher@msn.com
This paper will explore the best way to challenge present-day psychiatric models and practices. Do we work to topple
the structure erected by neurobiology, psychiatric education and Big Pharma, or do we try to integrate bio-psychosocial models of understanding and treatment? Might there be a third possibility – a true paradigm shift? Goliath needs
to be brought down, but we’re too conflicted within ourselves to come together and decide on the best method to effect
large-scale change. This paper will explore these questions and propose a way to focus two conflicting visions on a
shared horizon.
Neuroscience versus Psychoanalysis: Descartes, Damasio, Lacan, and the Humanities
Bob Samuels
UCSB, United States of America; bobsamuels_us@yahoo.com
This paper critiques neuroscience from a psychoanalytic perspective by comparing Damasio’s Descartes’ Error with
Jacques Lacan’s reading of Descartes. By showing how Damasio and other neuroscientists misread Descartes, I
reveal why the psychoanalytic interpretation of the unconscious provides a more effective and accurate understanding
of what makes us human, which has profound effects on how we define and defend the Humanities.
Troubling Diagnostic Criteria: ‘Ordinary Psychosis’ and Contemporary Social Formations.
Alan Bristow
Birkbeck College, London., United Kingdom; bazbristow@hotmail.co.uk
This theoretical paper shall argue that the current Lacanian category of ‘Ordinary Psychosis’ represents a direct
challenge to conventional forms of psychiatry, that not only insist on a strict demarcation between sanity and madness,
but also downplay the role socio-political factors can have on symptom formation. By blurring the line between
neurosis and psychosis, this epistemic enquiry into contemporary formations of psychic structure troubles previous
systems of differential diagnosis. I shall firstly provide a rough sketch of what is meant by the term drawing on the
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research project initiated by Jacques Alain-Miller in the mid 90’s. Focusing on instances of quiet or un-triggered
psychosis, differing modes of subjective externality and the role of the body, I will demonstrate how this category has
arisen following the emergence of a number of individuals who do not easily fit within a neurosis/psychosis binary
clinic. Following which, I shall draw attention to elements within the ‘Ordinary Psychosis’ literature that stress the role
particular attributes of socio-political life have on the formation and maintenance of this generalised form of psychosis.
Recent authors (Monnier, Richards, Voruz, 2009) have utilised the concepts of ‘liquid life’, ‘mass democracy’ and a
‘capitalist dialect’ respectively to account for this change in diagnostic structure. By emphasising how these differing
socio-political dynamics have a direct bearing on instances of Ordinary Psychosis, I will argue that the category is far
more attuned to changes within social formations. As such, this paper will challenge DMS inspired knowledge that
presents psychosis as a transcultural and ahistorical phenomena.
8:30am 1L: ROUNDTABLE
10:00a
m
Library
Diversity, Identities, and Psychotherapists-in-Training: Troubling Borders Both Personally and
Professionally?
Chair(s): Andrew
Young Choi (UCSB)
Presenter(s): Andrew Young Choi (UCSB), Kritika Dwivedi (University of Denver)
Across the United States, there is accelerating demographic diversification and an increasingly unmet burden of
mental illness (Kazdin & Blase, 2011). Training new generations of clinicians who are multiculturally representative and
adept brings ethical, professional, and societal implications (Leary, 2014; Shen-Miller, 2009; 2012). Psychology
trainees encounter multiplexed stressors and traverse “troubled” borders of an ambiguous developmental (e.g.,
transitional) space, one in which they are expected to operate as working professionals yet without the associated
authority, credibility, and/or privileges, (El-Ghoroury et al., 2012). With recent moves to diversify psychoanalysis, for
instance, trainees of underrepresented backgrounds encounter new opportunities and challenges with clarifying their
roles in professional organizations (Maton et al., 2006; 2011).
To explore these personal-professional links, two psychodynamically-oriented trainees with diverse, intersecting
identities will present a roundtable to reflect on their involvement in psychoanalytic professional organizations.
Speakers will present shared experiences and questions of whether to “follow” or to “lead” conversations on diversity,
managing authority and power differentials, clarifying appropriate roles and tasks, and finding supportive niches
(Green & Mokenkamp, 2005). By linking these topics to their personal histories of “troubling” borders, which variously
involve the contestation and formation of intersecting identities (e.g., ethnicity, gender, immigration, nationality, race,
religion, sexualities), the roundtable will explore how the navigation of complex personal borders can offer parallel
insights for effectively managing professional and vocational transitions.
The innovative and generative power of cultural diversity brings new visions to psychoanalysis, often through the
recruitment of trainees of diverse backgrounds, while troubling the pre-existing borders of what knowledge and whose
voices are considered legitimate in the profession. Trainees may trouble these borders consciously and unconsciously,
and examining the processes by which these various border tensions manifest may bring useful insights in terms of
psychoanalysis advancing its relevance to the wider public (Leary, 2014; Charles, 2015).
No, That's the Other Indian Girl: Challenges and Privileges of a Model Minority in Clinical
Psychology Graduate Programs.
Kritika Dwivedi
University of Denver, United States of America; kritika.dwivedi08@gmail.com
Roundtable proposal
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Ramadan fasting in Africa: My foreignness, intersectionality, and reflections on “leaning in” to
professional organizations
Andrew Young Choi
UCSB, United States of America; achoi@umail.ucsb.edu
Roundtable Proposal
10:00a Coffee Break
m10:30a
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Dining
Room
10:30a 2A: PAPER SESSION: Racial Boundaries
Session Chair: Claude Barbre, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology
m12:00p
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A
Creative Maladjustment in the West Baltimore Uprisings
Katherine Glanz
Johns Hopkins University, United States of America; kg3201@gmail.com
Recent urban uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore have productively drawn national attention to the deplorable
conditions of the state-supported dispossession and violence faced by communities of color in cities across America.
Focusing on the actions of the West Baltimore protesters, I argue that such actions, in their outright rejection of the
norm of adjustment, have generated an opportunity for privileged communities to realize their profound dependency on
the dispossession of communities of color. Turning to Martin Luther King Jr.’s address to the American Psychological
Association in 1967, I elaborate on his notion of “creative maladjustment.” I reject an adaptively focused ego
psychology theorization of this social situation and instead affirm the usefulness of psychoanalysis as a lens for social
critique. I outline the ways in which psychoanalytic theory, in its more radical incarnations, as in the work of Jacques
Lacan, Joan Copjec, and Leo Bersani, helps theorize an affirmatively “maladjusted” agential comportment that
productively challenges structures of injustice. As agential maladjusted actors, protesters, in an act that might initially
appear as a self-sabotage, have actually initiated a radical challenge to the status quo that structures their
dispossession. They have collectively and publicly enacted a rejection of the calls to “make-do,” “adjust,” and “just
deal” in a manner that might inspire racially and economically advantaged classes to embody a reciprocal posture of
maladjustment, to move toward openness and relationality, and to acknowledge the inequitable distribution of social
nourishment.
This presentation will address the tensions between psychoanalysis as an adaptively focused practice and
psychoanalysis as a method of social critique. It will highlight the ways in which critical psychoanalytic theory works
toward a theorization of social movements that highlights and enhances their potential to dismantle systems of
dispossession and state-sponsored violence.
“Almost the Same, But Not Quite”: Speaking English with an Accent and Unsettling the Border
Between “Us” and “Them”
Akiko Motomura
Private Practice, United States of America; akiko.motomura@gmail.com
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In this discussion of cultural politics of everyday life, I explore the ideas of an “accent” in one’s speech as a marker of
difference, and speaking English with an accent as an act of border crossing of both real and imagined boundaries—of
nation states, language, race, class, and culture, for instance. My work examines the processes of identity construction
in the interstices between cultures, languages, and nations, by focusing on the act of speaking English with an East
Asian accent in the United States.
By employing Melanie Klein’s concept of projective-identification and Judith Butler’s “constitutive outside” (1993), I
hope to illustrate how psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and political philosophy theories together provide a useful
framework from which to deepen the understanding of the dynamics of repudiation of otherness at the border of self
and other and “us” and “them,” and what happens in the in-between space.
Furthermore, I suggest that accented speakers—by embodying the quality of both self and other—can also be
considered to exemplify Homi Bhabha’s “mimic men” (1994), whose hybrid existence betrays the fundamental
incompleteness of identity. By exposing projective-identification as one of the underlying psychological dynamics of
xenophobia, this discussion corroborates the idea that identity is constructed through the repudiation of otherness.
Finally, I argue that such repudiation of otherness occurs not only at an individual level but also at a societal level.
Addressing the Racialized Boundaries of the Body for an Antiracist Psychoanalysis
Jessica Chavez1,2
1
The New School for Social Research, United States of America; 2Counseling and Psychological Services, The
University of Pennsylvania; jessicarchavez@gmail.com
A recent upsurge of interest the body has expanded the boundaries of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts do not often
consider, however, the role of race in the social production of bodies. Psychoanalysis should question how
racialization creates taken-for-granted notions of the body, and a psychoanalytic lens can offer new insights into
racialized biopolitics.
Social scientist and cultural theorists have shared this recent interest in the body. Biomedicalization theory, for
example, considers how technologies transform bodies—not just to treat diseases, but also to enhance and optimize
(Clarke et al., 2010). Psychoanalysts are now interested in how biomedicalization changes the way we gaze at and
imagine the body and how technologies precipitate new social relations and identities. Biomedicalization has pushed
the boundaries of psychoanalysis, and analysts have begun to weigh-in as what Nikolas Rose (2006) calls “pastoral
experts” on new technologies, guiding patients who consider and navigate their use.
Scholars who study race have argued that biopolitical analyses often fail to consider how racialization fundamentally
shapes the boundaries of the human on which biomedicine is built. Alexander Weheliye’s (2014) theory of “racializing
assemblages” reorients biopolitics to consider how constructions of the human and of biology are inextricably tied to
constructions of racial difference. Advocates for reproductive justice have similarly considered how ideologies of
reproduction have been co-constructed with ideologies of racism.
In this paper, I will address the role of psychoanalysts as experts on the biomedicalized body and as practitioners in
embodied experience. Drawing primarily from the construction of the reproductive body and from Black Lives Matter as
examples, I will tie existing psychoanalytic perspectives on biomedicalization to new biopolitical analyses that deal with
racism as a precondition for our taken-for-granted constructions of the body. I will discuss implications for antiracist
clinical practice and consider what a psychoanalytic perspective might offer antiracist activism.
10:30a 2B: PANEL
m12:00p
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Room
B
Revisiting Marcuse: Tensions on the Borders of Psyche and Society
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Tod Sloan1, C. Fred Alford2
1
Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling, United States of America; 2University of
Maryland; sloan@lclark.edu,calford@umd.edu
Fifty years have passed since Herbert Marcuse's dark and prophetic critique of advanced capitalist society emerged in
his One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse deployed a modified psychoanalytic theory to explain the success of capitalist
media and consumerism in suppressing revolution and resistance. In particular, he noted that social control was
maintained in part by encouraging extensive and immediate sensual gratification, binding subjects to the current order
of things. This 'repressive desublimation' would only seem to have been enhanced in subsequent years by the
capacity of the internet and the market to deliver whatever products and experiences the ideological apparatus has
promised.
The three presentations on this panel revisit Marcuse with the following questions in mind: What conceptual
developments in psychoanalytic theory since his lifetime might he find useful in conducting ideology criticism as he did
in One-Dimensional Man? What problematic aspects of contemporary society would he find especially worth noting
now? And, if we take answers to these two questions into account, what sociopolitical strategies seem promising for
the creation of spaces for critical thinking, resistance, and liberation?
Relation to the conference theme: This panel focuses on productive ways of conceptualizing the conflictive borders
between the forces of oppression and social control and individuals' urges toward satisfaction, meaning, and selfdetermination.
Desublimation Revisited
Tod Sloan
Lewis & Clark University, United States of America; sloan@lclark.edu
Marcuse coined the term repressive desublimation to denote a form of political oppression effected by offering more
direct sensual and sexual gratification than previous labor-intensive and pleasure-denying industrial societies could
afford or allow. ‘Repressive’ refers to the oppressive consequences of what is in fact less repression/suppression or at
least a societal invitation to bypass established defenses against prohibited gratifications. Marcuse noted that while
adults in advanced capitalist consumer society continued to have legitimate grievances about overwork and unequal
distribution of resources, they were for the most part pacified by plentiful food and comfort, the use of work-saving
appliances and gadgets, encouragement to indulge in sexual pleasures, and mass entertainment. Marcuse put his
hope for radical social transformation in forms of living that achieved a creative integration of the senses, pleasures,
erotic energies, aesthetics and ethics - all in forms less delinked from the manipulation of desires and needs by the
market or state. A question arises immediately: Can such integration be revolutionary, or does Marcuse’s proposal
quickly devolve into another self-centered humanistic or positive psychology?
Because desublimation has important political consequences, this paper explores how Marcuse might theorize
ideological constraints on democratic impulses had he been given access to postmodern psychoanalytic concepts of
the psyche as well as knowledge of how capitalist political economies have managed to achieve the so-called neoliberal consensus. This entails a rethinking of sublimation itself – for it has always been a problematic concept as the
only defense mechanism defined in terms of its worthwhile social consequences, a transmutation of the erotic and
aggressive drives into cultural achievements and acts of social betterment. The focus of the paper is thus on
examining the psychopolitical implications of a postmodern perspective on sublimation and desublimation as
interwoven with the processes of reification, commodification, and the production of ‘false needs’.
Herbert Marcuse: Liberation Begins at Home
C. Fred Alford
University of Maryland, United States of America; calford@umd.edu
In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse argued that in utopia repression would no longer be necessary. In a free society, one
no longer based on surplus repression, Eros could and would limit its own demands. Close readers have always
understood that Marcuse's transformation of repression from a psychological to a social category was a verbal sleight
of hand. For Freud, repression would always be necessary, as it was generated by internal biological forces (the need
to turn the young boy from mother to the larger world via Oedipal repression) that could not simply be transformed into
social ones once socially induced scarcity was eliminated.
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Quite soon, however, Marcuse abandoned the union of psychoanalysis and utopia. In a paper published in 1970, “The
Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man,” Marcuse laments the passing of the bourgeois individual with a strong
ego. Not because he thought such an individual was good, but because of what came next, what he calls mass man,
whose presocialized ego is already merged with others.
If we consider that something like this has come to pass, at least for a large number of citizens, then Marcuse’s 1970
conclusion also seems correct: politics begins at home, where the goal of parents should be to protect themselves and
their children from mass society, in the hope of fostering individuals who are able to think critically. The psychoanalytic
theory of D. W. Winnicott seems particularly appropriate here, but there are others. The family is the border between
the nascent individual and the over socialized world.
This last statement about the family is the most obvious way in which my proposed paper fits the theme of this year’s
conference.
10:30a 2C: PANEL
m12:00p
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Room
C
We Need to Talk about Families: Re-drawing the Boundaries Between the Public and the Private
in (Neoliberal) Popular Culture
Angie Voela1, Erica Galioto2, Karen Lombardi3, Louis Rothschild4
1
University of East London, United Kingdom; 2Shippensburg University, USA; 3Adelphi University, USA; 4Independent
Practitioner, USA; a.voela@uel.ac.uk
It is often said that neoliberalism, in its euphoric incarnation as the pursuit of success and boundless economic
prosperity in the 80s, eroded the boundaries between the private and the public, exposing the family to the values of
the market, supplanting traditional co-operation and mutualism with individualism and competition, and effectively
destroying the myth of the family as a haven from the turmoil of public life.
Today, and as neoliberalism evolves into a more reflexive, cautious and security-conscious machine, the nuclear
family, once again, becomes the mirror of its most recent transformation. While popular fiction continues to invest
heavily in traditional notions of the family as the bedrock of ‘healthy’ human relationships and societies, the current
phase of its neoliberalisation sometimes borders on the excessive. We find evidence of these tendencies in best
sellers about overzealous parents who relentlessly coach their children to educational success; in novels about young
adults who have lost the capacity to love; in fictions about clandestine armies of young warriors and fathers who
demand secrecy and sacrificial devotion, and in dads who fail to discern serious pleas behind their son’s playful
demands.
The panel explores profound shifts in the cultural representation of contemporary family relations, mapping them onto
corresponding mechanism of subjectivity and interpersonal relating, such as Lacan’s notions of phantasy and desire
and Winnicott’s notions of transitional space and dimension Z. The panel argues that in its present phase
neoliberalism, intensified and perhaps ‘darker’ than before, crosses another boundary and pushes parent-child
relations into the realm of the impossible and the irresolute. In that light, we need to evaluate the parent-child
relationship as represented in the classic Oedipus complex.
‘Western Civilisation Must Be Defended’: Neoliberal Values in Teenage Literature
Angie Voela
University of East London, United Kingdom; a.voela@uel.ac.uk
‘Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief’ (Rick Riordan) is the first book in a popular teenage fantasy series. Percy is
the son of the Olympian god Poseidon and a mortal mother. When Percy is told who his father is, he is taken to a
training camp for young demi-gods and is soon assigned a mission: to retrieve Zeus’ stolen thunderbolt from the
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underworld, an item necessary to defeat evil Kronos and his Titans. On the journey to the underworld, Percy learns to
make the most of his gifts, but, most importantly, gets accustomed to being ignored by his indifferent father while
appreciating the importance of defending Western culture.
Although the book is supposed to be just entertaining teenage fiction, it is imbued with typical neoliberal/conservative
values such as self-reliance, believing in oneself, reversing the nihilistic loss of faith in American values, and
combating the irresponsible relaxation of morality. But rather than promoting self-reliance and maturity – key attributes
of ‘healthy’ neo-liberal individualism – the apprenticeship ‘in the shadow of the divine Father’, the military discipline, the
obedience and the sacrificial devotion to the harsh superegoic leader aim to produce an individual with all the
characteristic of the religious fanatic. Drawing on Ruth Stein’s work and Zizek’s notion of the obscene supplement, I
demonstrate how neoliberal ideology wishes for what it is supposed to reject, an army of young fanatics in direct
vertical communion with an indifferent Father-God (Stein, 2010). This oblique desire is further supported by fantasy in
which democracy and personal development are substituted by a clandestine group of ‘chosen individuals’ or heroes.
“‘Is Freud Still Part of the Program?’”: Post-Oedipal Family Dynamics in THE END OF ALICE
Erica D Galioto
Shippensburg University, United States of America; edgalioto@ship.edu
Like the rest of A.M. Homes’ observant, bold, and shocking fiction, THE END OF ALICE (1996) exposes and
challenges neoliberalism’s abandonment of explicit borders between the private and public spheres. In this
discomfiting novel, Homes features an epistolary correspondence between middle-aged Chappy, a death row inmate
for child rape and murder, and an unnamed 19-year-old female who seeks his advice as she seduces Matthew, her
12-year-old babysitting charge. As readers question the origin of these wayward desires, as well as the unusual
mentorship between Chappy and his pen pal, we learn that Chappy’s mother sexually abuses him in the 1950s during
neoliberalism’s first emergence as a political philosophy, and, in contrast, his equally pedophiliac and plotting female
counterpart enjoys a carefree 1980s childhood when neoliberalism reemerges after twenty years of decline. Whereas
Chappy’s childhood trauma reinforces early neoliberal fears about the dangers of an absent father and cannibalizing
mother, the correspondent’s desires appear to have no distinct antecedent other than our current neoliberal
“traditional” family. By exposing the ubiquitous and dark effects of the post-Oedipal family dynamics championed by
neoliberalism, Homes prompts readers to think critically about the interdependency of our most formative relationships
and how those relationships often reflect societal beliefs about the family, the individual, and the economy. As Lacan
maintains in Seminar XVII, and I will argue here, the Oedipus complex remains a powerful determinant of human
subjectivity, but it needs to be understood in revised form: through the necessity of the simultaneous installation of lack
and enjoyment.
My presentation will address the conference theme, "Border Tensions," in my examination of how neoliberalism erodes
the necessary border between the private and public spheres and how this erosion leads to the negative psychic
effects portrayed in Homes' disturbing novel.
The New Ties That Bind: Helicopter Parenting in the Culture of Post-Modernism
karen l lombardi
Adelphi University, United States of America; karenlombardiphd@gmail.com
Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has been characterized variously as a model for the success of upward
mobility in certain ethnic groups immigrating to the United States, and as an assault against the liberal values of
American culture. Chua speaks to a larger movement of anxious parents who are focused on the eventual success of
their children in a society where upward mobility, or indeed, "ordinarily expectable" middle-class security, seems to be
slipping away. Parents of middle-class backgrounds, under the increasing pressure of test scores and competition for
entrance into desirable colleges and universities, are currently more involved in organizing and directing their
children's lives than in past. Parental control is not limited to involvement in their children's academic work, but extends
to the organization of their social and imaginal lives. This degree of regulation stands in contrast to the social
organization of children as little as a generation ago. When children were expected to discover their own interests,
talents, and friends.
This presentation will address the economic pressures on the contemporary family that contributes to over-involved
parenting, and the effects of contemporary culture on the imaginal lives of children. Clinical examples will explore the
effects of 'control and capture' technologies, including cell phone contact, as well as technologies of virtual escape
(texting, Facebook, etc.), Though parents think they have control, their children find flight lines of escape, only to have
29
that escape rebound. Recent data suggest that social and economic mobility in the United States is lower than many
European countries, while the myth of a classless society continues to be promulgated. Other changes in the culture,
including our hooked-up electronic world, simultaneously keep parents and children more connected and interfere with
the full-bodied relationships necessary for the development of creative living.
What’s Awesome? Coercive Elements and the Threat of Child Sacrifice in the Lego Movie
Louis Rothschild
Louis Rothschild, United States of America; louisrothschildphd@me.com
The Lego Movie is examined in terms of neoliberal conceptions of family and a relational psychoanalytic frame as a
qualitative single case study with emphasis on a father-son relational matrix embedded in our contemporary culture of
intensive parenting. With themes of tension between autonomy and relatedness, the film portrays elements of an
individualistic hero’s quest to repair a damaged world. In the story’s final moments, this quest is shown to be the
product of a son’s fantastic portrayal and simultaneous rebellion against his creativity having been lost to his father’s
narcissistic need for order within the basement of the family home. Pace Winnicott’s Z dimension, the film portrays a
softening of a competitive and individualistic father who cannot find his son. Such support and subsequent solace may
be relegated to the play space of the family basement. Simply a private basement in the family home may serve to
reinforce a brutal environment created by neoliberal economic policies through its very ability to provide a safe place
for nourishment in a toxic environment. Through use of culturally friendly aspects of relational psychoanalysis,
Winnicott’s work is extended from mothering to fathering via Michael Eigen’s focus on the manner in which Winnicott
highlights the creative aspects of destruction to show how the father/son matrix exists in a a field in which individual
and culture are co-existing and co-determing properties and perspectives.
10:30a 2D: PAPER SESSION: Critical Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Politics
Session Chair: Marshall Alcorn, George Washington University
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Room
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Toward a Psychopathology of the American Political Economy
Thomas Paul Bonfiglio
The University of Richmond, United States of America; tbonfigl@richmond.edu
This paper proposes a synthesis of psychoanalytic and Marxist techniques in order to illuminate the discursive gambits
that suppress a socialization of the American political economy, maintain protectionist discourses of exceptional
American capitalism, and suppress the discourses of the capitalist welfare state. Marxist perspectives can account for
the construction and stratification of the political economy, but they are insufficient for illuminating its preservation.
Psychoanalysis is necessary to analyze the dynamics that maintain and protect the system.
Both the Marxist and Freudian models analyze transformations from infrastructure to superstructure. For Marxism, this
concerns agents unaware of their anterior economic motivations; for psychoanalysis, it concerns agents unaware of
their anterior psychological motivations. Both agents transform infrastructural pulsions into dissimilar observable
behaviors.
In the US, the upper bourgeoisie generates proxy discourses of democracy that operate as screen memories, as
superstructural discourses that transform the dialectic of proletariat vs. bourgeoisie into a hegemonic simulacrum of left
vs. right.
The analytic techniques used here are largely from dreamwork and include doubling, repetition, displacement,
condensation, inversion, denial, fetishizing, and cognitive repression. Some of the superstructural discourses
examined are:
- Maintenance of Democrat vs. Republican as proxy binary that suppresses true left vs. right; defense mechanisms for
voting within proxy binary
- Suppression of multiparty information from capitalist welfare states
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- Suppression of the discourses of the subaltern; leveling of discourse to middle class
- Transformation of the racist infrastructural dynamic into the wish fulfillment fable of an accessible universal middle
class via allusions to suburban whiteness
- Detensification of racist anxieties via displacement into metonymic images of low psychic intensity; cognitive
repression and displacement of anxieties of, e.g., ghettoization, incarceration, infant mortality;
- Decoration of the student body with images of color as substitute for systemic economic solutions
- Remapping of the right wing onto the Tea Party; suppression of the socialist party
A Psychoanalytic View on the British Conservative Party’s Ideological Boundaries
Ayla Michelle Demir
Brunel University, London, England, United Kingdom.; aylamichelle.demir.1@my.brunel.ac.uk
This paper explores psychoanalytic theories on ideological and emotional boundaries, such as projective identification,
ideal for analysing how parts of one group’s mind can inhabit, control or deposit themselves in another’s. The
theoretical approach draws on a mixture of psychoanalysis and critical social psychology, to offer insights into what
might be considered as the constituting problematics of political identity. (Hoggett, 1992; Parker, 1997; Wallerstein,
2005) Branny, Gough & Madill, 2009, for example, argue that the abstraction of Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses may
help us avoid psychologising and that the avoidance of myths, stories and narratives may be what critical social
psychologists need to break through the boundaries of orthodox psychology. Of course, desires, emotions, dreams
and fantasies are precisely what break through boundaries, and the fantasy of evading psychical, imaginary or
emotional realms may itself be such a scientific myth or a delusion.
Positioned then, within a specific socio-historical and socio-culture context and at specific ideological, theoretical and
political points along and in-between the lines, this paper takes up the issue of the British Conservative Party’s
ideological boundary tensions. Some of the questions explored include the collapse of ideological identity boundaries
between conservatives and liberals. Asking, what are the main ideologies and discourses that frame, organise and
define conservative ideological identity? If conservative politicians avoid the issue of intra-party ideological (i.e. liberal)
occupation, does their denial derive from anxieties of conflict that have led to weak ideological positions boundaries?
Are political parties more partisan when ideological differences are less and more open to difference and change when
ideological differences are wide? This paper attempts to explore some of these questions through an analysis of the
impact of ideological, symbolic, imaginary, cultural and social processes upon identity boundaries and upon party
political individuation and differentiation.
On the Subject of Right Wing Politics…
Nicola Short
York University, Canada; ncshort@yorku.ca
This paper is interested in a discussion of the relationship between psychoanalysis, politics, and border tensions at a
particular nexus of these three concerns: the understanding of right-wing ideologies. It seeks to consider how a
psychoanalytically-informed approach to ideology might assist in understanding why right-wing ideologies have
particular social and political purchase at different historical conjunctures. It will focus on how such approaches might
illuminate the operation of the fantasies at work in the subtext of right-wing political rhetoric and discourse, the
mechanisms of identification that galvanize right-wing movements, and the role of both affect and violence in far right
political projects.
In the early and mid-20th century, examinations of the phenomenon of fascism and the politics and ideologies of the
far-right through the lens of psychoanalytically-informed historical-materialist analyses were not uncommon in the
social sciences. The global economic crisis of the early 21st century, and the far right movements that have emerged
in some quarters as a reaction, have renewed interest in understanding the right of the question of historical and
material concerns. These movements are characterized by strong anti-immigrants and anti-refugee positions: an
extreme condition of tension about borders. Contemporary political-theoretical discussions of the far right, often rely
implicitly on work from the early “Freudo-Marxist” tradition, such as Willem Riech’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, to
describe the affective dimensions of right-wing ideologies, however, without fully engaging with the question of
psychoanalytic theory, ideology, and politics per se. This paper will offer the reading of Riech’s iconic text and other
insights from the early 20th century discussions of the far right in psychoanalytic and historical materialist context, in
31
conversation with more recent considerations of a psychoanalytically-informed reading of political ideologies and
subjectivities, especially the work of Slavoj Žižek and Lynne Layton.
10:30a 2L: ROUNDTABLE
m12:00p
m
Library
What’s My Line? Agendas in Analytic Social Psychology
Chair(s): Jeremy
Cohan (NYU Sociology, SPI)
Presenter(s): Jeremy Cohan (NYU Sociology, SPI), Greg Gabrellas (Drexel School of Medicine,
SPI), Scott Jenkins (SPI), Lynne Layton (Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society)
In troubled times, it is worth asking basic questions—How do inner life and social form relate? Can an analytic social
psychology contribute to social critique and change? Whose sleep is troubled? But we too often treat theory as a
given, ready for launch against new happenings. We get a perpetual inventory, a critical cataloguing of events. But we
don’t create an agenda for research that points toward possibilities of transformation.
Analytic Social Psychology lives or dies with these agendas. They are shaped by theories concerning the core
elements of psychoanalysis. They put forward core questions. They confront the obscure dynamics of domination.
They have changed and must change. Emphasizing these changes means finding differences even among allies in
the struggle for a better world, for the sake of clarity and purpose. The borders between theories can help elucidate the
problems of our time.
This roundtable invites participants to discuss the theoretical fundamentals of analytic social psychology by examining
schools that set strong agendas for it. Presenters will take on, for purposes of breadth and depth, the Sex-Political
school/movement of Wilhelm Reich (1933), the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (1945), and the Ljubljana school
(1989), among others—their fundamental theories and their entwinement in political history. Each of these formations
will be presented through a brief report on its fundamental fault lines. Each presentation will be followed by discussion.
All participants will then have an opportunity to raise questions about the present, motivated by the conversation.
We feel that this dialogue, while it may prove a modest contribution toward the formulation of a new agenda in social
psychology, is important to the continuing vitality of psychoanalytic social theory as we draw, redraw, and efface the
borders between sociology and psychology, society and individual, the status quo and an emancipated world.
The Sex-Pol Agenda asks Must Everyone Adore a Fascist?
Jeremy Cohan
NYU Sociology, SPI, United States of America; j.cohan@nyu.edu
Roundtable presentation (no abstract required)
Rough abstract, if helpful:
This presentation presents the agenda for analytic social psychology—begun in the 1920s among a group of “political
Freudians” that included Otto Fenichel, Siegfried Bernfeld, and Wilhelm Reich in the name of the prophylaxis of the
neuroses—that came into its own in the waning days of the Weimar Republic and the victory of Hitler in 1933. I call this
the Sex-Pol agenda. Wilhelm Reich demanded that psychoanalytic social theory must answer the core question: can
we comprehend the irrational elements in the most “advanced” civilization? We will look briefly at how theory, research
materials, and organization emerged from this concern. Reich formulated the concepts of the fear of freedom and the
authoritarian personality to understand the unconscious devotion of people, not only passively but actively, to
destruction. These new concepts drew on the analytic concepts of repression, unconscious anxiety, infantile sexuality,
civilized sexual morality, authoritarian family, and the vicissitudes of the instincts. He drew together materials from the
propaganda of fascism, socialist organization, clinical work, trivia from the everyday lives of the middle classes, and
32
even anthropological studies of matriarchal societies, for his purpose. Finally, this presentation will seek to
demonstrate Reich’s view of how sex-political research and sex-political practice—clinics and political organization—
might enable left-wing forces to understand and overcome their paralysis in the face of the advancing night. The
presentation will open up to questions about this agenda in light of the Sexual Revolution, the achievements of
feminism, the decline of socialist politics, and the rise of the New Right.
After 1945: Adorno, Psychoanalysis, and Critical Theory
Gregory Gabrellas1,2
1
Drexel University College of Medicine, United States of America; 2Society for Psychoanalytic
Inquiry; greg.gabrellas@gmail.com
Contribution to the roundtable organized by Jeremy Cohan
12:00p Lunch
m1:00pm
Dining
Room
1:00pm 3A: PAPER SESSION: Theorizing Psychoanalysis
Session Chair: Tod Sloan, Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling
2:30pm
Room
A
Psychoanalysis’ Subversive Edge: Ethics, Freedom, and Social Change
Amber M. Trotter
California Institute of Integral Studies, United States of America; amber.trotter@gmail.com
Psychoanalysis rattled Western man’s basic self-understanding at its inception. It laid bare a psyche driven by
unconscious conflict, repressed desires and impulsive cravings; although earlier philosophers discussed unconscious
behavior, Freud’s assertion that such behavior was not merely arbitrary, but rather obeyed a hidden logic of its own
subverted notions of freedom and autonomy. Freud believed much of our suffering could be traced to a social
repression of our inner experience, and his theories presented a subtle but incisive sociopolitical critique. What has
become of psychoanalysis’ radical edge? Does psychoanalysis remain a subversive force in the contemporary United
States? This paper addresses these questions in an exploratory manner. I first investigate the nature of subversion,
positioning ethics as centrally salient. (Ethics meaning embodied understandings of ‘the good,’ including human
flourishing and, ergo, suffering, rather than moralistic prescriptions.) As I examine factors and forces that engage (and
disrupt) prevailing ethical philosophies, I assess psychoanalysis’ compatibility with these findings. The concept of
‘optimum marginality’ emerges as significant, cogent with this year’s theme, ‘border tensions.’ I also explore the
borders shared by psychoanalysis and diverse fields, including medicine, religion, sociology, and activism. I make a
claim that psychoanalysis can be persuasively conceptualized as an ethical philosophy; I develop a series of core
psychoanalytic ethical principles through an exegesis of four contemporary texts. I contrast this vision with hegemonic
American ethical virtues, as indicated by relevant polls and academic literature. I focus particular attention on the
construct of freedom, as it is understood quite differently in these two frameworks, yet plays a prominent role in each,
and is, moreover, is vital to subversion. I conclude with a discussion of barriers to psychoanalysis’ subversive potential
becoming more fully realized.
On the Limits of Relational Thinking as a Pluralistic Discourse
Robin S. Brown1,2
33
1
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, United States of America; 2Blanton Peale Graduate Institute,
New York City, United States of America; robin_s_brown@hotmail.com
Over the last thirty years, North American psychoanalysis has undergone a significant and necessary shift. In addition
to offering new ways of thinking about the clinical situation, the relational movement has stimulated a broadening in
psychoanalytic discourse. Because the relational turn has sought to question the notion of the analyst’s authority, this
ideal has been expressed in an approach to theoretical discourse that likewise strives towards mutual exchange. Thus
relational thinking might be said to reflect two distinct tendencies: [1] a broad theoretical outlook which has
emphasized greater clinical openness engendering [2] a theoretical receptivity at the level of discourse itself, which if it
is to be wholehearted, must allow for contrary positions that might even question the very basis upon which this
receptivity has been founded. In light of the complex challenges posed by the theme of diversity, it is important to note
that the commitment to openness is itself founded in specific theoretical ideals.
Exploring some of the exclusionary tendencies of relational discourse manifested in the very attempt to include, the
proposed paper argues that the field’s shift towards a constructivist epistemology has not been sufficiently
wholehearted and serves only to mask underlying prejudices. By exploring the ways in which an active commitment to
diversity can come to exhibit tendencies to the contrary, the reflections offered are thought to have broad relevance for
the conference’s stated theme of “border tensions.” While focusing on the dynamics of inclusion as expressed in the
context of psychoanalytic politics and theory, the discussion is believed to have implications for the wider society in
drawing attention to the significant challenges implied if a liberal politics is to succeed in meeting the needs of cultural
pluralism.
Authoritarianism as an illness of societies, with a view towards treatment
Jay Frankel
New York University, United States of America; jaybfrankel@gmail.com
When a narcissistically disturbed parent uses a child to regulate her anxiety, self-esteem, or mood, the child usually
complies with the role assigned her, under threat of losing the parent's love—what Ferenczi called identification with
the aggressor (different from Anna Freud’s later concept). Compliance undermines the child’s capacity for autonomy,
and occurs not only in behavior but mentally and morally.
Mentally, the child automatically and instantaneously "eliminates" thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that threaten
compliance, and "creates" those needed to play her role convincingly. Importantly, the child shuts down not just
specific thoughts, but her capacity to think independently.
Moral accommodation involves irrational self-blame, in place of seeing the parent’s aggression, and includes feelings
of shameful defect and guilt. These feelings undermine the child’s trust that her thoughts are sound, and that she is
capable and deserving of autonomy.
And the child often develops an idealizing fantasy that compensates for her loss of self, and of secure connection, by
letting her “borrow” a feeling of specialness and strength, and feel she belongs.
Authoritarian societies similarly require obedience and threaten social exclusion, often in the form of economic and
cultural dispossession, should someone assert autonomy; and they offer an exciting idealization as compensation.
I examine how this plays out in different authoritarian situations, and explore what these ideas suggest about
"treatment": how a well intentioned leader may turn an anxious population away from authoritarian temptations, using a
model for treating narcissistic disorders (which this system is); and how individuals may begin to free themselves, at
the least from psychological enslavement—a necessary start to political emancipation. Re-activating independent
thinking is key in both cases, and as in a family, is likely to depend on a sense of social solidarity.
I rely on the thinking of philosophers and social critics, as well as analysts.
Beyond the 'Classical' Paradigm: The Great War and the Grenzen of Freudian Thought
Phillip Henry
University of Chicago, United States of America; pjhe85@gmail.com
This paper is concerned with the impact of the First World War on the politics of psychoanalytic therapy. The war
intruded into psychoanalytic thought, unsettling some of its most basic assumptions and precipitating a prolonged,
34
open-ended process of rethinking that unfolded on several levels and addressed itself to the limits of psychoanalysis
and the boundaries that defined it. The encounter with the war neuroses in particular proved profoundly unsettling for
Freudian theory and therapeutic practice: not only did the phenomenon of the war neuroses challenge the basic
Freudian tenet that traced neurotic suffering to psychosexual conflict, it simultaneously exposed the limits of orthodox
therapeutic method, which was capable of addressing only a small fraction of the psychic misery the war had
generated.
Looking at the Fifth International Congress of the IPA in Budapest in 1918, an event devoted to a discussion of the war
neuroses, and above all at Freud’s seminal address, “Wege der psychoanalytischen Therapie,” this paper explores
how the psychoanalytic movement sought to respond to the psychosocial catastrophe of the war. The tension between
the twin imperatives of modifying psychoanalysis to address the consequences of the war and preserving its identity by
upholding its fundamental theoretical and technical precepts runs throughout this event. Responding to the
depredations of the war – i.e. the social deterioration and psychical regression it unleashed – appeared to Freud to
require the elaboration of a more educational (erzieherische), and hence disciplinary, model of analytic therapy.
Freud’s vision of a modified psychoanalytic therapy, in which treatment figured as a right and not merely a privilege,
involved a comprehensive renegotiation of the politics of psychoanalysis, one that paved the way for the innovation
and experimentation of the interwar years and drew psychoanalysis into the new era of mass democracies.
1:00pm 3B: PANEL
2:30pm
Room
B
Minds and Movies: Documentary Through a Psychoanalytic Lens
Jane Anne Hassinger1, Donna Bassin2, Jan Haaken3, Ricardo Ainslie4
1
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Michigan; 2Pratt Institute, NYC, NY; 3Portland State University; 4University of
Texas;dibassin@gmail.com, haakenj@gmail.com, rico.ainslie@mail.utexas.edu
Demands of documentary film production include key problems that inhere in many applied disciplines. The
presenters, all practicing clinicians and filmmakers, focus on tensions in reconciling political, artistic, scholarly, and
ethical aims of these projects. The goals of a documentary are never as simple as "giving voice" or working
collaboratively with subjects. Indeed, the documentary thesis emerges over time, sometimes overdetermined by
histories and dynamics that emerge in the process of production. Much like the therapeutic working alliance, the
relationship between director and film subjects takes hold in a complex relational, cultural, political, and historical field.
Since the aims and interests of documentarian and subject are not the same, we borrow from our psychoanalytic
understandings of the differences of (self) interest that arise in the therapeutic relationship. In documentary work, such
alliances can produce inhibitions and countertransferences, as they do in the clinical encounter. While noting parallels
to clinical practice, the panel reflects on crucial differences where psychoanalytic principles and theory are applied and
explores these 'border tensions' in mapping out applied, artistic psychoanalytic work.
The presentation addresses current tensions within psychoanalysis regarding the legitimacy of applied community
psychoanalysis as it pushes borders of the sites and objectives of practice, and the interdependence of political,
community and individual change. Additionally, the panelists will illustrate multiple ways in which psychoanalytically
informed film can uniquely reflect multi-layered and conflicting political, cultural, and psychological narratives, while
often bypassing structural boundaries/borders that inhibit engagement and widening of perspective and possibility.
All three filmmakers will be available to present parts of their films and engage with audience questions at a separate
time during the conference. The panel and the film discussion will be facilitated by Jane Hassinger.
"What Story to Tell? Responsibilities and Contributions of Psychoanalytic Filmmaking- Part of
Minds and Movies: Documentary Through a Psychoanalytic Lens
Donna I. Bassin
New York University, United States of America; dibassin@gmail.com
35
As psychoanalysis evolved beyond a belief in practitioner neutrality, documentary filmmaking also questions the
possibility of telling stories uninfluenced by filmmaker’s subjectivity. Contemporary documentarians acknowledge the
‘shadow of the camera,’ and film as an art form that symbolizes and transforms events into meaning. While based on
actual events, documentary often tells compelling but fictive stories built on fragments of narrative threads and
testimonies. And, while the subjects are given voice, and viewers hopefully find ‘truth’ in the product, many
documentaries are imaginative constructions, perhaps offering necessary and useful illusions.
Jan Haaken, has noted the ethical dilemmas for the documentarian who encourages testimony from vulnerable
communities in the service of collective witnessing and social justice (personal communication). The filmmaker is
challenged to evoke and re-present traumatizing memory in a form that will engage and “move” the audience from
bystander to witness without contributing to further injury and suffering or diminishing those whose stories are told. For
the psychoanalytic practitioner, this attention to the aesthetics of affect regulation and construction of a coherent
narrative requires struggling with serious ethical considerations. While the grief of others unsettles us, it allows us to
experience vulnerability, thus enlarging the self through connection to others.
Documentary involves more than mere detailing experience; it shapes and re-makes history, thereby creating an
afterlife for events difficult to metabolize. In Leave No Soldier, combat veterans and military nurses, opened their lives
to unexpected and possibly transformative possibilities. For many, massive traumatic losses (and those they may have
caused) catalyzed a call to action. Their military oath “to leave no soldier behind” inspired activism in civilian life. My
interest in creating a public platform in which their wisdom could be shared and recognition and compassion inspired,
pushed me into creative engagement with the concerns of politics and the power of aesthetic representation.
Moving Pictures: Ethical Demands of Documentary Film Production
Janice Kay Haaken
Portland State University, United States of America; haakenj@pdx.edu
Whether through film/video projects or scholarly reports, activist academics bring various assumptions into their work,
including fantasies, anxieties and defenses. While contemporary theories of knowledge production allow for—indeed,
require—attending to the co-construction of meanings, the psychological processes involved in creating moving
pictures tend to be under-theorized in the field of documentary methods. The seductiveness of moving images, with
their apparent capacity to produce a window onto reality, heightens the risk of colluding in this very fantasy.
The presenter takes up some of the ethical demands of documentary film production, explaining how ideological
assumptions concerning the impact of exposing a problem—of making visible the invisible—may produce blindspots in
the production process. Psychoanalysis brings to theorizing the visual an emphasis on pleasure in looking,
scopophilia, as constitutive of subjectivity. This pleasure carries infantile anxieties associated with the gaze, or looking,
just as there are anxieties and defenses associated with looking away. Two clips from recent film projects are
presented to illustrate these dynamics in relation to audience reception of images, as well as in conceptualizing the
conflicted desires that find their way into the relational field of making movies that matter.
The Subject and Object in Psychoanalytic Documentary Filmmaking
ricardo ainslie
university of texas, United States of America; rainslie@austin.utexas.edu
Psychoanalysis has a long history of theorizing the meaning and the implication of the relative positions of the analyst
and the patient as subjectivities within the therapeutic encounter. In documentary film, the filmmaker’s role has a
strikingly close parallel to that of the analyst within the analytic situation, especially when the filmmaker is exploring
emotionally powerful material. They may feel reluctant to venture into content that activates feelings of shame or
anxiety, for example. The working alliance, as well as the transferential-countertransferential matrix within which the
relationship is evolving (which includes the relationship to the filmmaker, but also the subject’s understanding of and
unconscious fantasies about the project, appearing on screen before an unknown audience, etc.) plays a part in the
process. Similarly, the filmmaker’s countertransference plays an important role in the shaping of story, including his/her
experience of tension over responsibility to the subjects whose lives form the core of the film, what the filmmaker
“needs” from them, and the project’s larger goals. This is akin to therapeutic dilemmas related to the timing of
interpretations, the therapeutic alliance, and the role of countertransference in shaping specific interpretations. I argue
that our psychoanalytic method requires both the clinician and the filmmaker to approach the work as an open, freeassociative process, allowing for a unique sensibility within which unanticipated narratives can and do emerge.
In this presentation I will illustrate these dynamics with documentary interviews I have done with Vietnam veterans,
36
most with PTSD diagnoses, about the impact of war. I will also draw parallels between the clinical encounter and the
editing process. Finally, I will discuss the ways in which psychoanalytic clinical work informs my documentary interview
methodology more generally.
1:00pm 3C: PAPER SESSION: Critical Issues in Clinical Training
Session Chair: Esther Rashkin, University of Utah
2:30pm
Room
C
Evidence Based Practice: Blurring the Border Betweem Science and Politics
Allan Scholom
Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, United States of America; ascholom@ccpsa.org
The term Evidence Based Practice (EBP) itself has the sound of science, rationality and common sense embedded in
it. After all, who could be against using evidence and thereby "science" as a basis for judgment, action or practice. It
dominates the landscape in the health care world as valid and valuable. In mental health it has become synonymous
with cognitive behavioral therapy, which most easily fits the (flawed) empirical requirements that constitute scientific
evidence these days. Those who do not practice so called EBP are left vulnerable to treatment denials, audits and
lawsuits on a practical level. Experientially there is a stigma, shame and marginalization that haunts those in the
psychoanalytic, humanistic/existential and family systems based clinical worlds.
I will argue, from a psychoanalytic social psychology perspective, that EBP is fundamentally a political and economic
construction that developed during the late 1980’and 1990’s when the corporate takeover of health care took place.
Correspondingly, funding for mental health was severely curtailed - spending today is in effect HALF of what it was
then. EBP is a widespread basis upon which treatment can be found “medically necessary” (a term created by the
health insurance industry to control cost and maximize profit). As such, it provides a “scientific” rationale for
“accountability” in mental health care that functions to reduce spending ("austerity") by the government and profit for
the insurance industry. EBP is defined to include research, clinical expertise and patient characteristics but, in reality,
primarily the former gets recognized as EBP and funded. The scientific basis of EBP will be critiqued, as will the failure
of our professional organizations to educate the public and oversee how EBP is used by so called payers.
Understanding the often blurred border between science and politics can help insure that the public interest will best
be served.
Why Cultural Competence and Social Justice are Missing from Psychoanalytic Informed Training:
Resistances and Its Consequences
Ruth Lijtmaer
Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of New Jersey, United States of America; ruth.lijtmaer@verizon.net
Cultural competence is not emphasized enough in the training of future clinicians. The student's and the
teacher's/supervisor's inability to tolerate anxiety, fear, and narcissistic vulnerability, when talking about race, ethnicity
and social justice, prevent the exploration of these topics. This is a "cultural resistance".
For many instructors, personal attitudes and stereotypes impede their ability to effectively present the information in a
nonbiased manner. Students experience resistance because they are confronted with issues that may make them feel
uncomfortable. If they are minorities, they report that their feelings are misunderstood.
Typically, there is also a lack of supervisors and teachers who are from culturally and racially diverse backgrounds
and/or familiar with multicultural perspectives within the psychodynamic literature.
It is not surprising, then, that psychoanalytic institutes tend to recruit few minority candidates, and that students in
graduate training programs have little access to psychoanalytic ideas. Further, there are gaps between supervisees
and supervisors with respect to exposure to training in cultural competence and social justice contributing to
challenges in the supervisory relationship.
37
Now, many programs in counseling and clinical psychology, and in psychoanalytic institutes, require a course in
cultural diversity, with the hope of implementing these principles of cultural competence. The resistance in doing more
than one course center around the complexity of navigating across and within individual, interpersonal, and systemic
issues and to addressing the dynamic nature of culture itself. Adding cultural competence requires self-examination at
an individual and institutional levels and a deeper scrutiny of social context and identity. Learning psychoanalytic
treatment involves multiple cultural interactions for both members of the dyad.
I suggest that many faculty/supervisors and students suffer from character resistances, transference resistances, and
content resistances. All these will be addressed in the presentation.
The Good Enough Institution: Examining the Ethics of Clinical Training for Early Career
Psychotherapists and their Patients
Stephanie Hundt, Shannon Lindsay McIntyre
Long Island University (Brooklyn Campus), United States of
America; stephaniehundt@gmail.com, shannon.mcintyre@my.liu.edu
This paper introduces the concept of “the Good Enough Institution” for clinical training, borrowed from Winnicott’s
(1978) notion of “The Good Enough Mother,” which describes a mothering environment that contains frightening affect,
and facilitates psychic growth. Just as Winnicott’s “ideal mother” cannot exist, the same is true for institutions providing
mental health treatment to communities, and clinical training for graduate students. We define the “Good Enough
Institution” as a protective environment which strives to delineate borders and uphold boundaries between and among
patients, trainees, supervisors, and institutional demands.
We will use clinical vignettes to demonstrate that ethical tensions arise when institutions fail to be “good enough.” This
paper extends and adapts Davies and Frawley’s (1992) model of relational re-enactments to unpack the ways in which
boundary slippages and role reversals are reified in the institution that does not sustain a “Good Enough” training
environment. We assert that it is all too common for financial and administrative pressures to trickle down from nonhuman institutional objectives to innervate the intimate, essentially human practice of psychotherapy. As pressure
builds and organizational boundaries dissolve, supervisors, staff and trainees may consciously or unconsciously take
on the institutionally imposed burdens as their own. Without protective organizational boundaries, it becomes difficult
to accurately recognize and effectively process relational re-enactments in the transference /countertransference and
parallel processes. Both the patient and the training therapist are left vulnerable to the primitive anxieties and projected
material that is bound to arise during the course of psychotherapy.
This paper concludes with a discussion of methods that uphold protective clinical and institutional boundaries, and
support trainees to provide high quality care to their patients. We discuss the ways in which relational psychoanalytic
principles can support psychologists to function within the current institutional parameters to re-humanize mentalhealth care, promoting “good enough” training and ethically sound patient care.
1:00pm 3D: PANEL
2:30pm
Room
D
“You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Too”: Splitting, Envy, and Spoiling in the Policing of Binary
Gender, Sexuality, and Relationality
Elizabeth Clark1, Kori Bennett2, Ben Morsa3
1
Fordham University, United States of America; 2Stanford University; 3George Washington
University; lizclarkpsyd@gmail.com,koribennett@gmail.com
Prejudice against non-binary and/or non-monogamous people is often expressed as an aggressive (or overly
concerned) insistence that you can’t “have it all” - either that it is literally impossible/does not exist, or that you *should*
not have it all. Does this insistence actually express rage that someone is able to have what is wished for by others? A
reaction formation against one’s own fluidity, and an identification with the aggressor who denied it to you? Envy that
someone else’s compromise formation seems to have involved less compromise/loss than your own? How can
38
psychoanalysis help us understand and effectively respond to these prejudices, both within and outside the therapy
room? The papers presented in this panel will apply psychoanalytic and queer theory to the tensions experienced at
the borders of gender, sexuality, and relationality.
Contents Under Pressure: Toward a Dynamic Understanding of Minority Stress for Non-Binary
and/or Non-Monogamous People
Elizabeth Clark
Fordham University, United States of America; lizclarkpsyd@gmail.com
Disparities in health outcomes for gender and sexual minorities (particularly bisexual/non-monosexual and
transgender/gender non-conforming individuals) are well documented. While traditional psychological interpretations
(including classical psychoanalytic approaches) might have attributed these outcomes to inherent pathology or
developmental "failure" in such individuals, they are now more commonly understood to be the result of living in a
pervasively unsupportive and often openly hostile environment - a perspective called the Minority Stress Model (Herek,
2000). While this model depathologizes marginalized individuals, it says little about the actual dynamics through which
discrimination and marginalization produce negative health outcomes - the relationship between the two is presumed
and thus not elaborated. Drawing on diverse psychoanalytic theories, including Chodorow's notion of sexualities as
compromise formations, Klein's concepts of splitting, envy, and spoiling, and Bion's container/contained dynamic, this
paper seeks to open the "black box" of the Minority Stress Model, unpacking the dynamics at play both for those
enacting and those receiving prejudice based on sexual, gender, or relational orientation.
Expiration Dates/Predicted Shelf Lives: Examining Relationship and Gender Dual Death Anxieties
Kori Bennett
Stanford University, United States of America; koribennett@gmail.com
Both gender expansive identities and modes of consensual non-monogamy can elicit a number of reactions within
everyday relational contexts (Butler, 1990; Istar Lev, 2004; Weitzman, 2006). Interpersonal reactions may include
identified feelings of confusion (“that sounds complicated!”), expressed “concerns” about the sustainability or longevity
of a relationship or identity, as well as other microaggressive or more explicit negative responses. This portion of the
discussion aims to examine the phenomena and anxieties driving such reactions, including un/conscious awareness of
the substantial risks facing those whose lives violate gender and relational norms and experienced challenges to
beliefs about identity and immutability, humanness, and points of relatability. Themes and topics addressed will include
the following: death anxiety associated with transitioning and shifting relational norms, the privileging of static
relationalities and “fixed/preserved” identities, and potentialities regarding flexibility and oscillation of object relatedness
specifically relevant to gender and relational orientations.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. London, UK: Routledge.
Istar Lev, A. (2004). Transgender emergence: Therapeutic guidelines for working with
gender-variant people and their families. New York: The Haworth Clinical Practice Press.
Mills, J. (2006). Reflections on the death drive. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 23(2)373-382
Weitzman, G. (2006): Therapy with clients who are bisexual and polyamorous, Journal of
Bisexuality, 6(1), 137-164
On Pouting, Cake, and Affective Indulgence: Troubling the Regulation of Affect
Benjamin Alex Morsa
George Washington University, United States of America; bmorsa@gmail.com
Psychoanalysis offers many useful frameworks for understanding the individual experience of affect. What happens
when we consider affect as an individual phenomenon? What might change if we were to expand our view of affect to
a group or societal phenomenon? Affect theorists, including Sara Ahmed (2010) and Lauren Berlant (2011), explore
the role affect plays in understanding the connection between the individual and their environment. Their frameworks
offer opportunities for investigating what happens when affect is located in the individual or dyad. How then do we
understand psychoanalytic concepts such as the ego function of affect regulation? This paper will discuss the
39
injunction to regulate one’s affect and the moral sanction of those who seem to indulge their affects - e.g. those who
are read as trying to have their cake and eat it too. What function might the moral value placed on regulating one’s
affect, and aligning oneself with group sentiment serve in larger projects of domination and oppression? How might
psychodynamic theories of group dynamics (e.g. Bion, 1968) inform a critical discussion of the moral value placed on
particular forms and expressions of affect? By examining collective and environmental determinants of affect and by
deconstructing popular understandings of affect we might understand having one’s cake and eating it too as more than
a simple, puerile, indulgence of one’s base passions.
Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bion, W. (1968). Experience in groups: and other papers. London, UK: Routledge.
1:00pm 3L: ROUNDTABLE
2:30pm
Library
The Use of the Other in Child Welfare: Navigating Troubling Borders
Chair(s): Andria
Goss (Erikson Institute)
Eisin (Erikson Institute), Jill Barbre (Erikson Institute), Angel Williams (Erikson
Institute), Erika Flores(Erikson Institute)
Presenter(s): Pfeffer
The field of child welfare is rife with border tensions at every level. These border tensions are at the least troubling, at
the worst, traumatic. They too often result in un-mentalized, unmetabolized experiences and interactions that leave all
parties involved prone to maladaptive attempts to cope, through various forms of destructive acting out, or through
internalizing that can also lead to severe consequences. Within the family, abuse and neglect can result in borders
between parent and child that range from too porous and violating, to too rigid and unempathic, leaving child and
parent as stranger to each other, sometimes dangerously so. The border between professional and family can be
similarly troubled, when disavowed and cut-off or overwhelming and highly emotional identifications with the family –
child or parent - leave a professional behaving toward their clients in ways that are confused, coercive, reactive,
punitive, or too lenient. In return, parents and children can be left feeling unheard, disenfranchised, and lost in their
particular, isolated worlds of hurt, leading them to further defensive manoeuvers. Everyone in the child welfare system
– client and professional, going all the way up to the highest levels of administration – has to somehow manage both
real and unconscious violence, fear and pain lurking around these borders of self and other.
In this presentation, our group will describe experiences of the ways that disturbing self and other experiences
manifest in our work with the child welfare system in Illinois. In the DCFS/Erikson Institute Early Childhood Project, the
wisdoms and values of psychoanalysis provide a means for navigating the waters at these troubled borders, and allow
us to take a reflective stance, one which seeks to understand both our identifications and what it means when we
create ideas of otherness.
2:30pm Coffee Break
3:00pm
Dining
Room
40
3:00pm 4A: PAPER SESSION: Models of Mind: Critical Perspectives
Session Chair: Francisco Medina, CUNY Graduate Center
4:30pm
Room
A
Interdisciplinary Discussant
Stephen P. Sheehi
The College of William and Mary, United States of America; spsheehi@wm.edu
What do “border tensions” and haunting apparitions have in common? In the therapeutic dyad between Zionist and
Palestinian (or Arab Lebanese as projected Palestinian/terrorist), they share much. They are both constructs of
ideology. They are both effects of history and power. They are both consequences of processes of self and othering.
But most of all, they also seem to work in tension. Borders define and apparitions defy those boundaries. As such,
borders and the apparitions that violate and haunt them occupy particular shared spaces: social space, gendered
space, psychic space, and therapeutic space. As Lebanese, Arabs, women, and as practitioner in the United States,
these two presentations use psychoanalysis to raise their voice to bind these spaces and, as Arab women
psychologists, they speak across and against gendered, political, and racial fields of power that have structured their
own position within psychoanalysis and the external world.
As discussant and a non-psychologist, I would like to speak to these overlapping spaces and contextualize the borders
which are being traversed and those that pen many of us in. I would like to speak to the history of the ideology that
does not construct “others” but rather a history of an ideology that attempts to acknowledge others only in order to
isolate, contain, control, and manage them. As such, I read these two papers as expressions of history’s repressed
returning as apparitions to cross boundaries of Palestine/Israel, US/Arab, in order to haunt therapeutic spaces but also
the dream-space of the analyst as much as the analysand.
Psychoanalyzing While Arab: On Terror and Apparition
Lara Sheehi1, Nadine Obeid2, Stephen P. Sheehi3, Lama Khouri4, Lynne Layton5
1
The George Washington University, SC Dept. of Health and Human Services, United States of America; 2The William
Alanson White Institute; 3The College of William and Mary; 4Circle Of Arab Students In Schools (Circle
Oasis).; 5Massachussetts Institute for
Psychoanalysis; drlarasheehi@gmail.com, obeidnadine@gmail.com, spsheehi@wm.edu, lamakhouri9@gmail.com
This panel will focus on the largely unexplored meanings and tensions of Arab identity and perception in clinical
psychoanalytic encounters, while elucidating implicit and explicit cultural and societal structures that perpetuate border
tensions within the Jewish/Arab/Israeli/US constellation. Three Arab women psychologists and psychotherapist will
bring forth unique theoretical, clinical and personal accounts widening the scope of subjectivity in the field of
psychoanalytical theory and technique, and elaborating on important psychoanalytic concepts pertaining to asymmetry
of power,
ideology, and normative unconscious processes, especially within context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the
United States’ war on terror, which inevitably seep into to the presenters’ psychoanalytic work.
The panel integrates psychoanalysis, culture and society in the content of the papers, and importantly in inviting an
interdisciplinary analysis and discussion by an Arab American cultural historian and expert on Middle Eastern Studies.
The aim is to provide clinical, supervisory and theoretical materials from the presenters’ subject positions, with a
discussion that offers a contemporary analysis and an ideological backdrop for the material presented in the papers.
The goal of the panel is to bear out new spaces for ethical engagement with issues of social justice and to create
opportunities, paradoxical ones, for exposing and arousing border tensions within the field of psychoanalysis.
The Ideology of Apparitions
Lara Sheehi
41
The George Washington University/SC Dept. of Health and Human Services, United States of
America; drlarasheehi@gmail.com
“She brought me her first dream on our fourth session. “It's about terrorism,” she said, watching me closely “Buildings
are being blown up in New York City. I am watching the bombings from my window.” She hesitated a moment, a smile
crossing her face. “I feel very happy.” … How would I react to her dream? Would I be horrified or repulsed?...How
would I deal with the terrorist in her?” (Suchet, 2010) As analysts, we are taught to approach dreamwork as a symbolic
representation of the unconscious. Yet, in the quote from Suchet’s fascinating article about her work with a proPalestinian Arab woman, the symbolic swiftly transforms, even if unconsciously, into the literal when discussing “the
terrorist” in her patient.
This problematic is precisely the position I occupy as an Arab woman within the space of North American
psychoanalysis, in which I otherwise find a welcoming home. The paper will offer reflections, self-analysis, and critique
of the appearance and disappearance of the Arab, and “terrorist,” in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic space. My
own struggle specifically involves a recognition of “allies,” so to speak, analysts who are progressive, socially-minded
and have taken ethical stances on issues of social justice, while at the same time awkwardly aware of a taboo and
seemingly unanalyzable space that continues to exist around the Palestine/Israel issue. In this unanalyzable space,
the apparition of the “terrorist” always threatens to reappear and haunt the friendships, debates, and dialogues that
give my life meaning.
Rather than understand these apparitions as the product of intergenerational transmission of trauma as some suggest,
I invite the audience to consider how these hauntings may be reflections of ideology. This ideology involves first world
and race privilege, gender and class position and identity politics of the analysts in the room.
Whose Terror Is It?
nadine obeid
William Alanson White Institute; obeid.nadine@gmail.com
The talk will describe clinical moments in an Arab/Jewish Zionist analytic dyad, with special emphasis on the
challenges of the linking of terrors and empathy. To this effect, I elaborate on the internal dreamworld in both analyst
and patient and pertinent external socio-political events, and how they create tensions and opportunities across
borders of the interpersonal dyad, as analyst and patient negotiate closeness and separateness, similarities and
differences. Clinical and theoretical concepts of collective traumas, asymmetry of power, responsibility, normative
unconscious processes, and the search for a moral third will be highlighted on both dyadic and social levels. My talk is
pertinent to psychoanalysis, culture, and society, and particularly to the theme of Border Tensions, as it describes the
struggles of a dyad infused with cultural conflict both in Israel/Palestine and in the US, with a sustained tension
between internal object world and the external world.
Can You See Me?: The Arab Immigrant In The Consulting Room.
Lama Khouri
Circle Of Arab Students In Schools; Teachers College, Columbia University; & Manhattan Institute for
Psychoanalysis..;lamakhouri9@gmail.com
The presenter argues that the nature of her and her clients' identities as Arab are constituted by ideology embodied in
major social and political institutions. She uses clinical vignettes, a dream and other clinical material to demonstrate
how she and her clients are not individual agents with self-produced identities, but subjects produced by social forces.
3:00pm 4B: PANEL
4:30pm
Room
B
The Necessity of a Systems Perspective In Institutions and Group Settings
Heather Churchill1, Sarah Hedlund2, helen Devinney2
42
1
The Austen Riggs Center, United States of America; 2The George Washington
University; hchurchill1@gmail.com,sarhedlund@aol.com, hdevinney@gmail.com
As mental health institutions increasingly move away from a psychodynamic approach to understanding systems, the
clinicians in this panel will speak to the ways a psychodynamic approach is useful, perhaps even vital, in order to
contain the irrationality endemic to group settings, including in hospitals, schools, and residential treatment centers. A
psychodynamic perspective to systems, which assumes the presence of an unconscious both in the individual and on
the group level, is increasingly rare, and even viewed with suspicion by some circles. However, the clinicians in this
panel will argue that this tension leaves systems vulnerable to unconscious forces and bereft of a theoretical
foundation to help recognize and understand a variety of potentially destructive systemic defenses, including
projection, displacements, splitting, and dissociation. Without this foundation, those most vulnerable in the institution,
particularly the patients or students, can become the bearers of unbearable split off aspects on behalf of the group and
treatment is negatively impacted.
The panel will address the topic of psychoanalysis, culture and society, as well as the theme of the conference, in its
address of both the increasing rarity and suspicion of a psychodynamic systems perspective in institutions and group
settings of all kinds, as well as how this tension leaves institutions bereft of a way to contain the irrationality endemic to
group settings.
Making the Unbearable Bearable
Heather Churchill
The Austen Riggs Center, United States of America; hchurchill1@gmail.com
The manifest reason for the hospitalization of many patients is that they are a danger to themselves or others.
However, from another perspective, their admission can be understood as a reflection of their support network’s, in
particular, their family members and treatment providers, difficulty containing the affect generated by their behavior. In
this way, this affect can be understood as split off unbearable aspects of the patient’s own experience. Once
hospitalized, the hospital system is at risk of unwittingly recreating the same dynamics that led the patient to be
hospitalized in the first place, as various members of the institution can also become filled with unbearable
countertransference feelings. However, if the institution has a theoretical foundation to aid in the understanding and
integration of these feelings, the system may be able to contain and, eventually, help the patient reintegrate the split
off aspects of themselves. To illustrate this idea, two clinical cases will be presented; one from a state psychiatric
institution that did not have the capacity to contain or interpret these split off feelings, and another from a residential
treatment center, the Austen Riggs Center, that used a psychodynamic systems perspective to understand and
contain the feelings invoked in staff members. The impact on the treatment for both the cases will be discussed.
Protection from Projection: Applying a Systems Perspective to a Therapeutic High School Setting
Sarah Hedlund
George Washington University, United States of America; sarhedlund@aol.com
There is an inherent and dynamic tension in many therapeutic milieus which treat children and adolescents between
the educational and therapeutic program components and between the teaching and clinical staffs. At the Lodge
School, a therapeutic high school for severely disturbed adolescents which was formerly on the grounds of Chestnut
Lodge Hospital and is now owned by Sheppard Pratt, it has been found that utilizing a psychodynamic understanding
of systems is necessary in order to manage this tension. Over 20 years, the staff has developed methods of working to
understand and manage the conscious and unconscious forces which develop between a variety of constituents,
including between staff and students, between staff and parents, between the clinical staff and the teaching staff, and
between the administrative staff and front line staff. When this perspective fails to be present, the institution becomes
vulnerable to more regressed defenses and behaviors, including increases in behavioral dyscontrol, absences (staff
and student), and the need for increased levels of care, including hospitalization.
Therapist, Interrupted: Using an Understanding of Unconscious Processes to Negotiate and
Resist Systemic Enactments and Collusions in State Psychiatric Hospitals
helen DeVinney
George Washington University, United States of America; hdevinney@gmail.com
Working as a psychologist in a state psychiatric hospital is complex. Many therapists note that such a setting is unique
because of the complexity of patients’ trauma and the severity of the symptoms of mental illness observed. Given the
43
realities of both the limited resources of a state facility and the severity of patients’ presentations, clinicians and health
providers are challenged to do the best they can in clinical situations where they often feel inadequate. As such,
clinicians and staff can become caught in a cycle of learned helplessness, in which they feel powerless to advocate for
themselves or patients; others, unable to tolerate the feelings of impotence, may be unconsciously pulled to align with
the societal factors that have plagued many of the patients (Jacobs, 1986).
Relying on theory allows clinicians to resist systemic enactments of misogyny, racism, brutality, and intergenerational
trauma, all of which inundate clinicians in the histories of the patients with whom they work (Steinberg & Cochrane,
2013; Colson et al., 1986). By using a psychodynamic framework, clinicians can help others with whom they work to
see how the hospital often processes the trauma of its patients in parallel process (Gedo, 2011). Specifically,
psychodynamic theory can help to illuminate perpetuations of rape culture, racism, intergenerational trauma, and
violence in staff-staff relationships and in staff-patient policies (Shur, 1994). By using theory to think about the extent to
which the hospital-as-system absorbs what the patients cannot contain, hospital administrators can resist pulls to put
policies in place that recreate feelings of victimization (Rumgay & Munro, 2001).
3:00pm 4C: PANEL
4:30pm
Room
C
Winnciott For A New Day: The Theoretical and Clinical Contributions of D.W. Winnicott in SocioCultural, Potential, and Intermediate Spaces
Claude Barbre1, Karl Southgate1, Jill Barbre2, Candida Yates3
1
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, United States of America; 2Erikson Institute; 3Bournemouth
University,
UK;claudebarbre@earthlink.net, kjs9746@ego.thechicagoschool.edu, jbarbre@erikson.edu, cyates@bournemouth.ac
.uk
Scholars and clinicians have criticized D.W. Winnicott of conceptual ambiguity and theoretical contradictions, both of
which seems to arise from his writing style and overall approach to theorizing. This is say that the same qualities that
make his writing so appealing, effective, and unique can sometime be quite unsystematic, in turn hindering the
reader’s attempt to clearly grasp his profound concepts or to implement them in thematic readings. In short, many
theorists attribute Winnicott’s contradictions and ambiguity as natural and inevitable byproducts in the lifelong
endeavor of an extremely gifted individual attempting to understand complex and ultimately ineffable aspects of human
experience. Winnicott’s ideas evolved over time. Jan Abrams asserts that only toward the end of his life did Winnicott
feel more comfortable writing, saying “I am asking for a kind of revolution in our work. Let us re-examine what we do”
(2012, p. 312). In this panel and paper presentations we will re-examine not only what Winnicott “does” in his clinical
thinking, but in particular how Winnicott’s theories and therapeutic vision can be applied to socio-cultural contexts such
as addiction studies, political theory, and child welfare interventions. We will see that, as Dori Goldman notes, that “For
Winnicott… pathology is, to a large extent, a failure of imagination” (2012, p. 343). Winnicott distinguishes himself from
others in his statements on the etiology of mental illness, the role of the environment, and psychopathology’s
relationship to creativity, being, aggression, and play—topics that will be discussed in our applications of Winnicott to
social psychology in cultural settings. In doing so we will re-examine Winnicott’s imaginative and timely contributions in
conversation with contemporary social theory and the larger worlds of health and healing in the context of our shared
lives.
Hate in the Countertransference in Child Welfare Clinical Interventions: Revisiting Winnicott’s
Theory and Therapy in Treating Child Abuse, Neglect, and Trauma
Jill Barbre
Erikson Institute, United States of America; jill.barbre@illinois.gov
D. W. Winnicott’s classic paper of 1949 has much to say to the psychoanalyst, especially in connection to child welfare
work and clinical interventions: how the analyst’s hate is evoked by the client, and how it manifests; what
countertransference hate says about the client’s functioning; how important it is for the analyst to see hate for what it
44
is, and in seeing it to contain it, reflect on it, and use it with care to influence one’s therapeutic actions. Ever the British
interpersonalist and developmentalist, Winnicott connects the mother’s normative hate of the baby with the analyst’s
experience of the client whose psychic development has not progressed beyond an early ruthless use of the object.
The analyst, like the mother, acknowledges his or her own hate internally, but protects the client from its direct
expression as the mother does the baby, and acts judiciously in ways that helps to contain the client’s hate. In this
presentation we will ask: Does Winnicott’s conception of hate contribute to understanding situations where the parent
is abusive to the child and hate appears pervasive and toxic? Should this hate be limited or stopped? Is neglect an
expression of hate? Further, what can be said about intergenerational traumatic reenactments and hate? Can
normative feelings of hate be thought to exist in the parent-infant relationship under conditions of abuse and neglect?
Finally, what does this mean for the professional’s experience in terms of their own hateful countertransferences
towards the parent and/or child—in particular, how they address the hate they see in the parent/child relationship? In
this presentation these questions will be explored in order to apply Winnicott’s analytic and developmental formulations
to what we now know about chronic trauma in parent/child relationships.
The Commodification of Being and the Neoliberal Mindset: A Winnicottian Analysis
Claude Barbre
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, United States of America; claudebarbre@earthlink.net
Lynne Layton points out the social and psychological roots of what she calls “neoliberal subjectivity”—that is, “a
version of contemporary subjectivity marked by a repudiation of vulnerability that has arisen from the social, economic,
and political milieu of the past 30 years”(Layton, 2009). She underscores that the defense mechanisms of such a
repudiation has caused “a decline in empathic capacities and in the capacity to experience ourselves as responsible
and accountable for the suffering of others” (Layton, 2009). In this presentation we will argue that such a repudiation
and decline of empathic capacities also includes a commodification of being. Through a Winnicottian analysis of the
importance of being as “the centre of gravity” for a person from the start, we will examine the impact of neoliberalism
on the individual’s primary core of “feeling real” and “aliveness.” Borrowing from Charles Strozier’s term “the
fundamentalist mindset” that suggests distinct characteristics of fundamentalism, we will discuss a psychology of
neoliberalism--a “neoliberal mindset” that creates a number of distinct features that echoes what Layton calls the
neoliberal subjectivity—features that compromise, we will posit, a sense of being, and continuity of being, as described
by D.W. Winnicott. In essence, the neoliberal mindset has shifted from an economic theory to a political, social
ideology, underscoring distinct characteristics such as: the expansion of self-interest and market fundamentalism that
deeply affects social justice; and the commodification of individuals and the creation of the consumer culture with its
impact on human identity—to name a few examples. We will see the value of Winnicott’s theoretical and therapeutic
vision on the importance of nurturing and supporting the experience of being in individuals and cultures, and in doing
so understand more fully the impact of the neoliberal mindset that commodifies and therefore deconstructs, imperils
being itself.
Finding a Place for Winnicott in the Psychoanalytic Literature on Drug Addiction
Karl Joseph Southgate
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, United States of America; kjs9746@ego.thechicagoschool.edu
My presentation will identify some of the ways in which the theories of D.W. Winnicott can enrich our understanding of
drug addiction. At this point in time, our society views addiction primarily as a disease or as a manifestation of
inadequate willpower—each of these positions can easily lead to reductionism and moralism and can preclude a
meaningful exploration of the lived experiences and complex dynamics of individuals who struggle with drug addiction.
I believe that examining drug addiction from a Winnicottian perspective would aid us in seeing beyond the medical
model by illuminating the interpersonal, emotional, psychological, intrapsychic, developmental, and unconscious
dimensions of drug addiction. I will begin with a brief overview of psychoanalytic literature on addiction and will discuss
what has been written about Winnicott and drug addiction. This presentation will argue that Winnicott has not received
adequate attention in addiction studies and that exploring addiction from a Winnicottian perspective could help to
rejuvenate psychoanalytic addictions literature. I will then share some of the tentative conclusions that my investigation
of Winnicott and addiction has yielded; in doing so, I will focus primarily on his theories of being, aggression, and
continuity. I will share with the audience my view that, from a Winnicottian perspective, some individuals’ relationships
with drugs of abuse can be seen as both interpersonal and regressive and nature, and as founded upon the need to
experience the personal aliveness that accompanies the actualization of one or more developmental potentials.
45
The Play of Casino Capitalism and Political Culture
Candida Yates
Bournemouth University, United Kingdom; cyates@bournemouth.ac.uk
This paper addresses the conference theme by applying psychoanalytic understandings of play, flirtation and gambling
to the ambiguities of contemporary political culture. The term ‘political culture’ refers to the fluid, mediatized
relationships that now exist between politics and popular culture that shape common sense and the normative
unconscious processes of every day life. Applying Winnicott's language of play to the cultural field, one can argue that
while pockets of political culture have the potential to create transitional spaces for the political imagination, the
psycho-cultural dynamics of ‘play’ within the contemporary political scene is often shaped defensively by the processes
of repetition and mastery. The latter connotes an addiction to a system that does not function effectively and yet
cannot change or move on.
Scholars have used the concept of ‘casino capitalism’ as a metaphor to explore financial mismanagement of banks
and their investors, together with the addictive, short-term financial habits of late capitalism and the deleterious costs
of that financial system for the structures of democracy and political accountability. The arbitrariness of being either an
economic ‘winner’ or ‘loser’ are popular themes in UK political culture and elsewhere when talking about the ‘reckless’
behaviour of the banks. The language of the casino is deployed in popular culture through dramas such as House of
Cards (2013-) where politics is represented as a game to be played, or in films such as Wall Street; Money Never
Sleeps (2010), or The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), where the themes of masculinity, gambling, excess and addiction are
foregrounded. Drawing on examples taken from political culture, the paper applies the ideas of Winnicott and Andre
Green to explore the theme of casino culture and its articulation in different psychosocial and cultural contexts.
3:00pm 4D: PAPER SESSION
Session Chair: Peter Redman, Open University
4:30pm
Room
D
Speech and Action
Don Greif1, Jill Gentile2, David Lichtenstein3
1
William Alanson White Institute; 2NYU PostDoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; 3Supervising
Analyst, Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association; Faculty, The New School University; CUNY Graduate
Center; greif.don@gmail.com,jillgentile3@gmail.com, dlichtenstein@gmail.com
Psychoanalysis was created by the discovery that speech may have material effects on the human subject. One
striking and still troubling principle of the ‘talking cure’ is that although words are only words, the act of saying them out
loud to another subject is an act that has material effects on both parties in the exchange.
There is a border between speech and action, but like any border it functions both as the link and as the mark of
separation between the two domains that it divides. The link between speech and action has troubled psychoanalysis
since its inception. Freud noted that repetitive unconscious acts could be significantly altered or ended altogether if
they were symbolized and talked about. And unconscious desire that was not so symbolized instead persists as
symptom, i.e. an act that speaks through the body. Enactments, ‘acting out’, and indeed all manifestations of
transference are the moments in a treatment when the tension on this border makes itself known.
The political realm encounters an equivalent tension on the border between speech and action. When is verbal
registration of political will sufficient? When is some other action required? What is the function of registering political
will discursively, i.e. through speech? When is political speech an action in its own right? When does it function, like
the ‘talking cure’ to have material effects on both the subjects who speak and those who listen?
This panel will address fundamental psychoanalytic theory on the relationship between speech and action so as to
indicate how it might be useful in think about the border tension in the social, cultural, and political spheres as well.
Enshrined Ambiguity: Between Speech and Action in Psychoanalysis and Free Speech
46
Jill Gentile
NYU PostDoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYC; jillgentile3@gmail.com
Psychoanalysis was created by the discovery that speech may have material effects on the human subject. One
striking and still troubling principle of the ‘talking cure’ is that although words are only words, the act of saying them out
loud to another subject is an act that has material effects on both parties in the exchange.
There is a border between speech and action, but like any border it functions both as the link and as the mark of
separation between the two domains that it divides. The link between speech and action has troubled psychoanalysis
since its inception. Freud noted that repetitive unconscious acts could be significantly altered or ended altogether if
they were symbolized and talked about. And unconscious desire that was not so symbolized instead persists as
symptom, i.e. an act that speaks through the body. Enactments, ‘acting out’, and indeed all manifestations of
transference are the moments in a treatment when the tension on this border makes itself known.
The political realm encounters an equivalent tension on the border between speech and action. When is verbal
registration of political will sufficient? When is some other action required? What is the function of registering political
will discursively, i.e. through speech? When is political speech an action in its own right? When does it function, like
the ‘talking cure’ to have material effects on both the subjects who speak and those who listen?
This panel will address fundamental psychoanalytic theory on the relationship between speech and action so as to
indicate how it might be useful in think about the border tension in the social, cultural, and political spheres as well.
The Speech Act and the Psychoanalytic Act
David Lichtenstein
David Lichtenstein PhD, United States of America; dlichtenstein@gmail.com
This is intended to be part of a working session organized by Jill Gentile entitled: Tensions on the Border between
Speech and Action.
ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis was created by the discovery that speech may have material effects on the human subject. One
striking and still troubling principle of the ‘talking cure’ is that although words are only words, the act of saying them out
load to another subject is an act that has material effects on both parties in the exchange.
There is a border between speech and action, but like any border it functions both as the link and as the mark of
separation between the two domains that it divides. The link between speech and action has troubled psychoanalysis
since its inception. Freud noted that repetitive unconscious acts could be significantly altered or ended altogether if
they were symbolized and talked about. And unconscious desire that was not so symbolized instead persists as
symptom, i.e. an act that speaks through the body. Enactments, ‘acting out’, and indeed all manifestations of
transference are the moments in a treatment when the tension on this border makes itself known.
The political realm encounters an equivalent tension on the border between speech and action. When is verbal
registration of political will sufficient? When is some other action required? What is the function of registering political
will discursively, i.e. through speech? When is political speech an action in its own right? When does it function, like
the ‘talking cure’ to have material effects on both the subjects who speak and those who listen?
This panel will address fundamental psychoanalytic theory on the relationship between speech and action so as to
indicate how it might be useful in think about the border tension in the social, cultural, and political spheres as well.
3:00pm 4L: ROUNDTABLE
Session Chair: Michael O'Loughlin, Adelphi University
4:30pm
Library
47
The Origins of Childhood Subjectivity: Cultural and Dynamic Considerations
Chair(s): Michael
O'Loughlin (Adelphi University); michaeloloughlinphd@gmail.com
Butaney (Arizona School of Professional Psychology at Argosy University), Sudhir
Kakar (Goa, India), Almas Merchant (Brightpoint Health), Sanjay Nath (Widener
University), Michael O'Loughlin (Adelphi University), Burton Seitler (Private Practice)
Presenter(s): Bhupin
Participants in this session will engage in a dialog with Sudhir Kakar around his writings concerning the role of culture
in childhood subjectivity. All participants will have read Kakar's Culture and Psyche and The inner world: A
psychoanalytic study of childhood and society in India, and each participant will pose a question to Sudhir Kakar as a
way of opening up a dialog that will also include audience members.
Bhupin Butaney.
From Kakar’s views on subjectivity emerges a sentinel question for psychoanalysis: What aspects of the process
toward an emergent self are crystalized, fixed, and universal? And what processes are more fluid, contextual, and
culture dependent? In particular, what aspects can be understood through traditional psychoanalytic approaches and
which aspects must be understood through knowledge of specific myths, religion, and philosophy/ethics inherent to
distal historical-cultural contexts?
Almas Merchant
Sudhir Kakar's observations and exploration of the Hindu psyche and the emergence and development of a self in the
Hindu child are entrenched in contextual understandings of post-modern Indian culture whilst utilizing western
psychoanalytic theory. . How does one attend to the emerging individual and her internalization of the intergenerational
transmission of her culture described by Kakar, which she brings into the consulting room?
Sanjay Nath
Can you speak to how you would have come to define the construct of the self over your career, especially in light of
balancing collectivistic or inter-dependent notions with individualized, Western notions?
Michael O’Loughlin
Are Western models of childhood growth incommensurable with or reconcilable with Indian notions of childhood?
Kirkland Vaughans
In what way can your concepts on culture and psychoanalysis inform our understanding and treatment of the
intergenerational transmission of trauma?
4:30pm Coffee Break
5:00pm
Dining
Room
5:00pm 5
6:30pm
48
5:00pm 6: FILM PRESENTATION & DISCUSSION: Mark of War
Session Chair: Ricardo Ainslie, University of Texas
6:30pm
Room
A
The Mark of War
Chair(s): Ricardo Ainslie (University of Texas at Austin)
The Mark of War (TRT: 57:52 minutes) is an intimate portrait of seven men who served in the Vietnam War drawn by a
psychoanalyst-filmmaker who explores their lives before going off to war, their experiences fighting in Vietnam, and
their lives since their return. Most of the veterans grew up in small towns or cities in Texas. All served in combat
operations and they describe the hardships endured and the terrors of coming face to face with the realities of war.
The veterans also trace their experiences of being plucked from the jungles of Vietnam and arriving in the United
States where some found anti-war protests and families and communities that often did not know how to receive them.
They also describe their struggles to digest what they had seen, what they had lived, and what they had done in
Vietnam. Given the director's background, the interviewing style in this film is open and reflective, giving it an intimate
tone. This makes The Mark of War more psychological and personal rather than historical in its treatment of the
experiences of these men, some of whom the director has interviewed on and off for over ten years.
Director: Ricardo Ainslie
Editors: David Rosenblatt and Amal Kouttab
TRT (Total Running Time): 57 minutes
Presentations of the Symposium
The Mark of War
Ricardo Ainslie, David Rosenblatt; rainslie@austin.utexas.edu, davidrosenblatt1@mac.com
University of Texas at Austin
Viewing of The Mark of War will be followed by discussion with Director, Ricardo Ainslie and Film Editor, David
Rosenblatt.
6:30pm Dinner
8:00pm
Dining
Room
Date: Saturday, 24/Oct/2015
8:30a 7A: PAPER SESSION: Critical Issues in Clinical Practice
m - Session Chair: Michelle Massé, Louisiana State University
10:00
am
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Room
A
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy of a Youth in the Throes of a Psychotic Break who Brandished a
Knife in Therapy
Burton N. Seitler
J.A.S.P.E.R., International; binsightfl1@gmail.com
When Kirk, a 19-year old youth brought a very sharp hunting knife perilously close to my person in the 3rd session of
psychotherapy, I responded in a way that was a surprise to me, one which serendipitously turned out to be a key to the
way therapy needed to be conducted with this young man. I could have reacted to the knife in any number of ways, such
as yelling for help, running away, or attempting to forcibly take the knife away from him. Instead, I managed to
simultaneously soothe myself, stay calm, and engage him in conversation about his big, shiny, powerful knife. Ultimately,
he was able to give up his knife so that I could look at and admire it more closely.
This presentation will trace how Kirk came into treatment with me and how we collaboratively came to understand how
his aristocratic cultural upbringing--with all of its expectations and pressures--directly contributed to the meaning of his
knife and will respect the symbolic importance it held for Kirk in his life and in our ultimate relational interaction.
Do You Google Your Shrink? Boundary Troubles, Therapeutic Tensions, and Grist for the Mill
Esther Rashkin
University of Utah, United States of America; esther.rashkin@utah.edu
A psychiatrist’s recent editorial in the New York Times about patients who google their shrinks generated a variety of
responses from clinicians. Some were intrigued by what patients had been able to discover about them. Others felt that
such behavior represented an unacceptable violation of therapeutic boundaries and their personal privacy. Still others
acknowledged the inescapable reality of social media and viewed being googled as just more material or grist to be
processed in the therapeutic mill. My presentation examines the psychosocial complexity of googling one’s shrink. This
means first recognizing the broad spectrum of psychopathology that googling might signal, from relatively harmless
neurotic anxiety to possibly dangerous psychosis. It also means exploring how googling contests borders between
fantasy and reality, public and private spheres, and digital knowledge and unconscious process. To illustrate my
argument, I will draw on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that explored these very issues long before
Google was invented or the WEB, as we know it, existed. This psychosocially complex piece of pop culture situates the
boundary troubles evoked by technology within relevant emotional and developmental contexts. It thus opens the way to
thinking substantively about the potentially positive and negative effects of social media and information technology on
the goals and processes of analytic treatment. And it obliges us to reconsider traditional psychoanalytic notions about
boundaries, privacy, and self-disclosure that conflict with sociocultural and technological realities of the twenty-first
century.
The Youth Will Bring Vision: Young Adults Bridging Cultural Divides
Judy Roth
City University, United States of America; Judysroth@gmail.com
The Youth Will Bring Vision: Young Adults Bridging Cultural Divides
Judy Roth, PhD
This paper explores the unique, relational trajectories of emerging adults hailing from immigrant, refugee, and
marginalized families, who present at university counseling services, and reflects on their psychotherapeutic odyssey, a
process of “translating themselves to themselves.” These young adults move between discrepant cultural worlds that
often send conflicting messages about which roads to travel. The nuanced but disjointed cultural mix they navigated
during earlier years of development shifts, as they now move into the developmental demands of young adulthood,
igniting identity turmoil.
This paper presentation will open a conversation about some resourceful and motivated adults who reach unexpected
and startling impasses. While they show extraordinary sensitivity and loyalty towards their parents’ and extended family’s
life missions, they lack empathy for their own strivings and idioms, unsure whether they are entitled to author their
personal histories or future dreams. Some begin to live with escalating secrecy, confusion, and shame, unable to accept
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the discrepancies between stated ideals and unconscious or subconscious yearnings. Anguish mounts as defensive
adaptations destabilize, leaving them unsure of how to forge ahead. They scramble to juggle competing identifications,
unacknowledged losses, and demanding expectations. They can be at risk of divorcing themselves from essential core
self-states. For these adults, treatment involves transforming marginality and biculturality into emotional muscles that can
be used to link divided worlds, and to develop a more authentic life compass. This process, necessarily slow, presents a
conundrum as pressing real decisions await.
I hope to think together with participants about the analyst’s/therapist’s role in refereeing discrepant and culturally
saturated self-states and identifications; containing destabilization, loneliness, and terror that erupt as these adults reflect
upon, embrace, and integrate vastly diverging psychological realities; and the need to work creatively to imagine
adaptations.
"My Sister Tried to Kill Me": Enactment and Foreclosure in a Mixed Race Dyad
Teresa Méndez
The Retreat at Sheppard Pratt, United States of America; tmendez@sheppardpratt.org
How is treatment complicated when both patient and therapist bring into the room multiracial identities that stand in
contrast to their visible race or ethnicity? Using relational psychoanalysis' concepts of dissociation, enactment, and
relational trauma, this paper examines the way multiple racial realities, beyond the more familiar black/white binary, can
co-exist in the consulting room. The implications and potential pitfalls of a cross-cultural dyad, in which each participant
carries a mixed-race identity, are considered through a clinical vignette.
(This paper uses concepts drawn from relational psychoanalysis to trouble and expand a black/white racial binary.)
8:30a 7B: PANEL
m10:00
am
Room
B
Intersections and Crossroads: Psychoanalysis, Children, Families, Oppression, Culture
Benjamin Alex Morsa1, Richard Ruth1, Michael O'Loughlin2, Kate MacShane3
1
George Washington University, United States of America; 2Adelphi University; 3The Lourie Center for Children's Social
and Emotional
Wellness; bmorsa@gmail.com, rruth@erols.com, michaeloloughlinphd@gmail.com, katharinemacshane@gmail.com
This panel aims to explore opportunities in psychoanalytic theory and practice for developing insight into the impact of
cultural oppression on individual life. Members of the panel will present clinical work with children and families and
discuss the intersections, borders, and systems that inform our understanding of the clinical encounter. They will
investigate specific tensions between therapy and assessment, individual and family therapies, working with children and
working with adults, psychosis and sanity, gender identity, working in nontraditional settings, and working with
marginalized populations. Panelists will explore how individual work with children and families is reflective of and
responsive to dynamics of contemporary culture and society including those involving race, class, gender, ability, sexual
orientation, migration, language, and documentation status. Following panelists’ case presentation, our colleagues who
attend will have the opportunity to think with the panel about the ways psychoanalytic theory can inform dialogues about
the development of individuals and families as they navigate shifting landscapes of identity, culture, and oppression.
At the Liminal Edge: Sociocultural Factors in the Assessment of an Adolescent
Benjamin Alex Morsa
George Washington University, United States of America; bmorsa@gmail.com
This paper will discuss clinical material from the assessment of an adolescent whose parents emigrated to the United
States. Case discussion will serve as a basis for further discussion of the liminal edges in this work. These include points
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of connection and exchange across languages, between the practice of social justice and psychological assessment, and
at the intersection of differing identities. Psychoanalytic theory offers a vehicle for elucidating as yet unexplored
sociocultural dynamics that influence the assessment and diagnosis of children and families in marginalized
communities.
This case presentation aims to discuss both the utility and limitations of an intrapsychic approach to understanding
psychosis. In particular, I will emphasize the necessity of augmenting an intrapsychic approach with consideration of
sociocultural context in assessment. More specifically, the case I will present in this panel raises curiosity about the
impact of persistent threat and persecution on individuals’ perception of reality and themselves. Those attending will have
the opportunity to consider the nature of severe reality distortion when an individual is embedded in larger systems of
domination and oppression.
Trans(-)formations with Children and Families
Richard Ruth
The George Washington University, United States of America; rruth@erols.com
Psychoanalysis in our times continues to grapple, or resist grappling, with an understanding that there can be multiple
pathways of development, that all development and all clinical work nest in sociopolitical contexts that are about
oppression and privilege more than about “diversity,” and that neutrality when our patients face oppression undermines
the therapeutic enterprise. We encounter these challenges in evolving our theory and practice in a time when social
movements often view us with suspicion, or as irrelevant to their goals – a situation that needs to change if a progressive
psychoanalysis is to survive.
A case in point is work with trans/gender-nonconforming children and their families, in a period when a vital, provocative,
empowered trans movement is rising. As Diane Ehrensaft has written, our work with such children and families is often
not the work of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis in the traditional sense, but vital nonetheless. When we lend our
professional authority to the desire of trans/gender-nonconforming children to self-determine their identities and
trajectories, we have the potential to re-find important elements of our own professional identities.
I will use clinical material from family therapy with a teenager identifying – for now, he notes – as gay and agender to
explore some of these themes and how they can inform broader visions of what contemporary psychoanalytic clinical
work are and can be.
Against Adaptation: Navigating the Boundaries Between Demand and Desire, Between Assimilation
and Liberation in Work with Children
Michael O'Loughlin
Adelphi University, United States of America; michaeloloughlinphd@gmail.com
The tensions between critical analytic work and the adjustment goals of many psychotherapies is nowhere more in
evidence than in work with children. Children are often brought to therapy by parents because they disappoint their
parents; because in failing to meet parental demand the child develops symptoms; because the child is the symptombearer for complex family dynamics, often intergenerationally inherited; or because of the child’s failure to measure up in
that ultimate apparatus of assimilation: the school. The difficulties are particularly acute for children who are gendervariant, and who show little interest in growing “up” within the straitjacket of conventional norms. What, Cathy Stockton,
asks, if we considered growth as a sideways process rather than a linear progression? In this presentation I will draw on
Lacanian work with children, and particularly the work of Piera Aulagnier and Philippe van Haute to argue for the
inherently violent posture of assimilatory approaches to work with children and families, and use illustrations from my
clinical practice to explore the complexity of engaging in child and family work that seeks to create a space for desire and
the possibilities of sideways growth.
Informed Consent in Community Mental Health Work With Children and Families
Kate Hong MacShane
The Lourie Center for Children's Social & Emotional Wellness, United States of
America; katharinemacshane@gmail.com
At the heart of psychotherapy with children is the consenting caregiver: the person or persons who agree to bring the
child to therapy and who, hopefully, will participate in the work of therapy themselves. At the beginning of these
relationships are conversations in which informed consent is obtained but may or may not be referred to again. In
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community mental health settings, where therapists often occupy positions of greater privilege than our clients, consent in
the context of such power differentials raises complex questions. To what, exactly, is a caregiver consenting? What are
the possible risks of our deep involvement in a family’s life? Do the caregiver’s ideas about what therapy is and does
align with ours, and how do we address—or avoid—the places where they do not? How is consent to treatment made
more complicated when therapy is mandated by some other entity, or is required in order to obtain other services? How
might it be possible to use these initial conversations about consent to empower and engage caregivers? Using several
case vignettes, I will discuss ways in which consent across privilege disparities can inform, complicate, and thwart work
with children and families.
8:30a 7C: PANEL
m10:00
am
Room
C
Other Incubations: Psychoanalysis through Surrealism
Scott Joseph Jenkins1, Benjamin Koditschek1,2, Christopher Crawford1
1
Society For Psychoanalytic Inquiry (SPI), United States of America; 2The University of
Chicago; scttjnkns@gmail.com,bkoditschek@gmail.com, circas19@gmail.com
In her book "Psychoanalytic Politics," historian Sherry Turkle suggests that the tenor of psychoanalytic thought is
mediated by the social institutions and cultural conditions of its time and place of reception. Whereas in America, argues
Turkle, psychoanalytic ideas were channeled almost exclusively through the medical community, in France “the
psychiatric resistance to psychoanalysis allowed it a long period of incubation in the world of artists and writers… a
pattern which reinforced the tendency to take ideas and invest them with philosophical and ideological significance
instead of turning them outwards toward problem solving.” These artists and writers — particularly those in the orbit of the
Surrealist movement — appropriated and further developed psychoanalytic ideas as part of a radical and general critique
of reason; as a complement to a philosophical vitalism; and as a view of mental life that expanded the frontiers of
experience and reality far beyond the borders of conscious, controlled waking life. Elaborating concepts and themes like
the unconscious, the dream, desire, and automatism in a manner different than the psychoanalytic movement proper, the
early French appropriation of Freud by Surrealism and its fellow travelers carried psychoanalytic thinking to the borders of
philosophy, aesthetics, and politics. This panel takes Turkle’s observation as a point of departure in order to examine
psychoanalysis at the borders of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics as it emerges in France in the first half of the
twentieth century, through the work of the Surrealist movement proper and its associates like Georges Bataille.
Inverted Genius: Psychoanalysis and the Concept of Inspiration in Surrealism.
Scott Joseph Jenkins
Society For Psychoanalytic Inquiry (SPI), United States of America; scttjnkns@gmail.com
Reflection upon of the sources of aesthetic productivity is a frequent topos in the positional and theoretical texts of André
Breton. This paper argues that concepts and vocabulary borrowed from psychoanalysis provided Breton the intellectual
resources to break with traditional accounts of inspiration and to found a new model of aesthetic production based on an
idiosyncratic interpretation of the receptive and formative capacities of the unconscious. This is demonstrated through a
comparison of Breton's psychoanalytically oriented accounts of inspiration with central texts from Kant and Schelling on
the concept of genius. Breton’s new model of aesthetic productivity, conceived through psychoanalytic models,
establishes a new relation of art and knowledge, which allows aesthetic production to be conceptualized as a mode of
"research," redrawing borders between psychology, epistemology, and aesthetics, as well as between knowledge and
practice.
Mass Inspiration: The Creative Unconscious after the “Creative Class”
Benjamin M. Koditschek
SPI, United States of America; bkoditschek@gmail.com
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“Poetry must be created by everyone.” — Lautréamont
Many avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century fantasized about the democratization of creativity. The
Surrealists version of this vision was underpinned by a psychoanalytic model in which inspiration was not a rare gift of
special genius, but a source to be tapped by anyone with an unconscious. Today, with creativity a hot commodity, and
books like ‘The Genius In All of Us’, widely read, it might seem that Breton’s vision has become a reality. But if we do live
in a creative democracy now, it is nothing like what Breton hand in mind. This paper interprets the Surrealist vision of
democratized creativity in light of contemporary ideologies of the “creative class.” Clarifying what the Surrealists meant by
creative democracy may help us work towards a better one in the future.
Surrealism, Anti-Art, and the Value Form
Christopher Crawford
Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry, United States of America; circas19@gmail.com
This paper will be presented as part of the panel "Reception Across the Rhine: Psychoanalysis through Surrealism". This
panel will look at the concept of the unconscious in non-therapeutic contexts, modern art in particular. I will focus on the
relation between psychoanalytic concepts of surrealism, art history, and the development of capitalism in the early 20th
century. Modern art witnessed an explosion of technical experimentation as aesthetic gestures previously unthinkable
were integrated into the production of artworks. Prominent among these were Surrealist forms of spontaneous or
automatic art-making, tangentially inspired by the emergence of psychoanalysis. I will argue that the integration of
“automatic” techniques and other ostensibly unreflective creative gestures find their ground in the concept of the
“modern” itself. These techniques will be analyzed not in their ideological forms as pure, actualized force of the drives but
rather from the perspective of the development of aesthetic rationality alongside the development capitalism in both its
rational and irrational aspects. Thus, art forms that utilize “psychological” strategies will be interpreted in more objective
terms as the expression of art’s struggle to remain non-identical to a society witnessing the universalization of capitalist
social relations.
8:30a 7D: ROUNDTABLE
m10:00
am
Room
D
Bystanding Catastrophic Experience
Chair(s): Deanne
Bell (Antioch College)
Presenter(s): Deanne Bell (Antioch College)
How is trauma, as a consequence of state violence, experienced by the historically marginalized in the neoliberal world?
What psychic mechanisms do we use to bystand, and therefore contribute to, this injustice? If psychoanalysis is meant to
increase our understanding of ourselves, how do we understand our apathy in not utilizing psychoanalytic insights
including denial, disavowal and derealization in the face of overlooked collective trauma against oppressed peoples? This
roundtable will explore these issues in the context of extending psychoanalytic social theorist Kelly Oliver’s (2004) idea of
developing “social notions of alienation, melancholy, shame, affect, sublimation, idealization, and forgiveness” (p. xiv) to
denial/denied racism and classism, enablers of state crime. Also, psychoanalytically informed trauma theory promotes
witnessing as an ethical response to treatment of traumatic experience. Is this an adequate response if we are concerned
with social transformation? Can we elaborate upon witnessing, extending it further? Finally, participants in the discussion
will be asked to consider how psychoanalysis may contribute to a psychosocial theory of traumatization - that process by
which everyday structures in the social world oversee suffering, deprivation, humiliation, physical endangerment and
scarcity (Stevens, forthcoming).
This roundtable will include a brief overview of Oliver’s argument followed by a facilitated discussion on issues raised.
Oliver, K. (2004). The colonization of psychic space. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
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Stevens, M. (forthcoming). Ruination's Glow: Trauma and Catastrophic Injury as Complex Cultural System. In (Eds.),
Injured: The Cultural Politics of Injury and Redress in Comparative Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke University.
8:30a 7L: ROUNDTABLE
m10:00
am
Librar
y
Activist Collaborative Learning Projects: Negotiating the Tensions between Individual and
Collective Agency in a Community College and Beyond
Chair(s): Eduardo
Vianna (LaGuardia Community College)
Presenter(s): Eduardo Vianna (LaGuardia Community College), Dušana Podlucka (LaGuardia
Community College), Mike Rifino(The Graduate Center- CUNY), Francisco Medina (The Graduate CenterCUNY)
This roundtable will feature presentations by both faculty-researchers and student-participants as they engaged in two
transformative activist research projects in an urban community college in New York City. Inspired by the emerging
transformative activist stance approach (Stetsenko, 2008), discussions will highlight a model for educational research
that engages the dialectics of agency and contribution in the pursuit of social justice and solidarity. The first three
presenters will describe the dynamics of building the Peer Activist Learning Community (PALC), a voluntary project
created in collaboration by faculty and students with the aim of transforming alienating and oppressive educational
practices in their college and communities (Vianna, Hougaard & Stetsenko, 2014; Rifino, Maatsura & Medina, 2014). By
focusing on the synergistic links between (a) agentive positioning in learning (b) critical-theoretical knowledge and (c)
social activism, the presenters will shed light on how the emergence of activist agendas at the individual level of
participants’ agency, was supported by, and supported, changes at the collective level (Vianna, Hougaard & Stetsenko,
2014). The second project will center on an activist collaborative method in a study of educational context with a female
community college student diagnosed with autism. The purpose of the study was to interrogate and expand current
models of autism by examining the complex interplay of personal and social processes as the participant engaged in
educational practices in the community college. Drawing on transformative activist stance, the study focused on the
dynamic relationships between learning, self and autism at the nexus of shifting positions negotiated by the student,
professors, administrators and her guardian in the context of college and beyond. Together, both projects underscore
ethico-political issues in research that explicitly aims to move beyond the goals of adapting to the world to instead
develop activist projects of social and institutional transformation.
Activist Collaborative Project with a Community College Student Diagnosed with Autism:
Negotiating Learning and Agency
Dušana Podlucka
LaGuardia Community College, United States of America; dpodlucka@lagcc.cuny.edu
Abstract submitted for roundtable presentation
Creating a Community of Activist Learning: Repositioning Faculty and Students as Agents of
Change
Eduardo Vianna
LaGuardia Community College, United States of America; evianna@lagcc.cuny.edu
Abstract submitted for roundtable presentation.
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Expanding Learning Through Social Activism in the College and Beyond
Francisco Medina
LaGuardia Community College, United States of America; favm360@gmail.com
Abstract submitted for roundtable presentation.
Learning Critical-Theoretical Concepts as Tools for Agency
Mike Rifino
The Graduate Center, CUNY; mrifino@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Abstract submitted for roundtable presentation
10:00 Coffee Break
am 10:30
am
Dinin
g
Room
10:30 8A: PAPER SESSION: Lacanian Subjects
am - Session Chair: Angie Voela, University of East London
12:00
pm
Room
A
From Subject of Enunciation to Subject of the Political
Derek Hook1, Calum Neill2
1
Duquesne University, United States of America; 2Napier Edinburgh University, Scotland,
UK; hookd@duq.edu, c.neill@napier.ac.uk
Perhaps the most challenging of Lacanian concepts that have been adopted by political theorists attempting to apply
Lacan to the social field is the notion of the subject. In Lacan’s work, the subject is broached as a moment of
unconscious insistence, as that which exists definitely outside the parameters of the ‘objectal.' Lacan’s early conceptual
references are those of linguistics and logic (the subject of a preposition, etc.).
Philosophical and legal connotations soon follow however, as in the notion of the subject as subject “only by virtue of
subjugation to the Other”, and in view of the ethical dimension of the subject responsible for their acts, their unconscious.
How then is the notion of the subject taken up by Slavoj Žižek – surely the foremost Lacanian theorist of the political –
particularly so in his most recent work? This paper will argue that something of the constitutive division of the subject is
evident in Žižek’s most recent conceptualizations of the concept. His subject of the political remains at the same time a
faithful extension of the Lacanian notion, and yet, oddly, is likewise less than fully reconcilable with it.
An investigation of this topic will address the issue of whether the Lacanian concept (of the subject) in its initial ethical
and clinical dimensions can viably be applied to the socio-political realm. The paper thus reflects upon a mode of
disciplinary border-crossing – the transportation of a clinical notion to the domain of socio-political conceptualization, and
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back again - wondering, furthermore, whether paradoxically, such a ‘response from the political’ might be the best way of
refining the clinical concept.
Late Capitalism and the Obligation to Enjoy: Boredom, Anxiety, Rage and Self Harm
Barbara Tholfsen
Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanlysis and Psychotherapy, United States of
America; btholfsenlcsw@gmail.com
Since the 1970’s one can find the psychoanalytic literature grappling with what is seen to be a “new” kind of patient.
There is an increase in references to patients who use drug addiction, self-cutting, eating disorders and plastic surgery to
address demands “arising out of the real body." Sometimes referred to as borderline or narcissistic, sometimes as
“perverse subjects of late capitalism” the sense is that something has changed since Freud’s time; people are more
perverse or narcissistic than they used to be. Some see the same symptom picture and say: No, when Freud came
across these patients he deemed them un-analyzable, saying there was no “associative link to an underlying repressed
train of thought.” This paper will address the following questions about these difficult-to-treat patients: Do their problems
reflect changes in the cultural landscape sometimes referred to as “late-capitalism,” or are these people the same
patients Freud said were un-analyzable? Either way, do we say these patients cannot benefit from analysis and send
them on their way? Is their anxiety overwhelming and meaningless because it is less processed than the neurotic’s signal
anxiety? Are they more vulnerable to inner tensions because they lack the signification-rich desires and fantasies
neurotics use to mediate and process the drives? Absent such processing, are auto-mutilation, eating disorders,
addictions and compulsive plastic surgery direct attempts to control the drives? Is there any point to labeling these
patients narcissistic or perverse? What kind of treatment works best with these patients?
"The Death of the Lacanian Analyst: From Possum to Posthuman”
Maryann D. Murtagh
Duke University, United States of America; maryann.murtagh@duke.edu
Jacques Lacan informs us the role of the analyst, the subject supposed to know, is to “play possum." The analyst feigns
dead where intersubjective ego discourse is concerned because the clinical task is to project the patient’s unconscious
desire back onto himself revealing his sinthome in language. In this paper, I explore the necessity of the human in the
analyst’s occupation and the materiality of the clinical space. I ask what the implications might be in removing the human
from the analyst function or dissolving the structure of the clinical space for something more virtual. Drawing heavily on
Lacan’s proclamation that twentieth century phenomenology holds great influence over his vision of psychoanalysis, I
attempt to rethink its futurity by retracing its lineage from phenomenology to the contemporary “sciences.” To counter the
danger of the theoretical and clinical death of the discipline, I argue it is more productive for Lacanian psychoanalysis to
move away from cognitive behavioral therapies and neurological pathologizations and instead revitalize it by thinking
within and against science, technology, and media studies. Turning to alternative outlets such as online platforms by
imagining possibilities for something like analysis software where the unconscious functions like a machine, do we
unhinge psychoanalysis from its historical parentage and offer it a new future, or do we instead cancel it out because
such an intense mutation of its original arrangement and constitution precludes it from still counting as psychoanalysis?
What might we sacrifice in forfeiting the physical exchange of the speech act for an alternative medium? Does the analyst
as a disembodied subject exist only in the register or realm of fantasy? In a sort of speculative inquiry, I open Lacanian
theory to potential transformations prompted by twenty-first century methods for thinking through a dialogue between
psychoanalysis and media theories and technology studies.
10:30 8B: PAPER SESSION: Sexual Transgression and Erotic Boundaries:
am - Session Chair: Katherine Glanz, Johns Hopkins University
12:00
pm
Room
B
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“Luckily He Backed Off”: A Mixed Methods Analysis of Undergraduate Women’s Consent, Attitudes
and Behaviors
Kelsey Lynne Power1, Dr. Megan Yost2
1
Adelphi University, United States of America; 2Dickinson College, Carlisle PA; power.kels@gmail.com
The present research is part of independent research project that originally aimed to understand how rape myths
operated through women’s sexual behaviors and attitudes. The purpose was to create a dialogue surrounding the issue
of women’s sexuality and societal expectations through both quantitative scales and qualitative narratives. Sexual
compliance appeared as a dominant theme throughout participants’ narratives. According to O’Sullivan & Allgeier (1998),
sexual compliance is defined as “consensual participation in unwanted sexual activity,” (p. 234). O’Sullivan and Allgeier
(1998) reported that significantly more women engage in sexual compliance than men. More specifically, three studies
found that compliance rates varied between men and women, with roughly half of women an one third of men reporting
having sex when they did not want to (Impett & Peplau 2002; Katz & Tirone 2009; Katz & Tirone 2010; Vannier &
O’Sullivan 2010). Understanding sexual compliance is a vital tool to combat the devaluation of women’s agency.
Vignettes were employed to illustrate the study findings indicating the relationship between women’s boundary issues,
identity formation, and sexual compliance. The complexity of women’s sexuality is addressed by examining the
manifestation of society’s sexual scripts in female sexual communication styles. The agency of women ages 18 to 25 with
their sexual partners is critically examined and discussed under an assessment of the dominant culture. The purpose of
this paper is to link culture bound gender role stereotypes, identity, and how women feel they are permitted to
communicate their sexual needs. While evidence suggests that women might engage in sexual compliance out of
pressure from society to fulfill certain expectations, there has been little dialogue on this issue. The paper also offers
suggestions for programming and future work concerning women’s sexuality and sexual expression.
Chasing Justice: Comparing College and Institute Responses to Sexual Transgressions and
Assaults
Katie Gentile
John Jay College, United States of America; kgentile@jjay.cuny.edu
Sexual boundary violations with the contexts of psychoanalytic training institutes and sexual assaults on college
campuses are gaining traction in the popular press. Colleges have been taken to court under a new use of Title IX,
resulting in increased policing of language including trigger warnings for classes, witch-hunts on feminist and gender
studies professors, one shot prevention programs, and mandatory structures for investigations. Although a different
context, psychoanalytic training institutes too, are suddenly acknowledging and grappling with ways to address sexual
boundary violations, albeit without the pressures of Title IX and government intervention. This presentation compares the
approaches to these violations, situating them as ruptures within the social structure, not just individual transgressions.
As such, approaches like bystander intervention and restorative justice, that take as their focus the group and not
individuals, may be important and generative ways of dealing with these ruptures. Although the academic setting is
different from the clinical setting some basic ideas of bystander intervention and restorative justice, namely the emphasis
on community building, the roles of community members to act and respond and in turn create conditions for responding,
can help shape institutional approaches to dealing with sexual violations. In this context, ethics and prevention training
would focus on creating the conditions for responding. Violations would be approached as an indication of the shame-full
and destructive atmosphere created and sustained by the patriarchal-based institute and college communities. This
would be an ethics based on integration, not dissociation and splitting, reflective of our theories of how groups evolve,
how trauma is enacted, and how affective engagement can be best used toward transformation. As will be proposed,
these group-based interventions must emerge from within the liminal spaces between psychoanalysis and culture,
understanding these are co-created and interpenetrating.
Assault Culture: Constructing Campus Borders
Michelle Massé
Louisiana State University, United States of America; mmasse@lsu.edu
In the United States we read about estimates as high as 1 in 4 women in the military experiencing forms of assault, and
we gasp. We hear about assaults upon women in the Sudan and we shudder. We see accounts of violence against
women in Afghanistan and our indignation is boundless. When we are told that the hallowed halls of academe shelter
assault cultures as virulent, as common, as harmful, we all too often fall silent. The statistics of victimization, the
procedural violations in which perpetrators oversee hearings, the outcomes in which the accused may remain on
campuses while victims resign, seem unbelievable. And so, all too often, we don't believe. We deny evidence-based
scholarly reports; we deny individual accounts. As one comment on a Chronicle essay demonstrated, there is still a
58
chilling insistence that women claim victimization for self-aggrandizement or that, as one writer insists, "until she names
her assailant . . . it is safe to assume she is lying."
Paradoxically enough, however, when we are persuaded that assault has happened--is happening--regularly on college
campuses--we construct measures for protection that implicitly resurrect the spectre of the "good victim," the (white)
college co-ed whose violation far outweighs that of the 70% of restaurant workers who have reported some form of
sexual assault in the workplace.
My focus in this presentation will be on the psychoanalytic defenses that go up, although with campus fences, to divide
town/gown communities into "good" and "bad" girls, working-class women for whom hostile climate is simply reality, and
college women who deserve succor.
10:30 8C: PANEL
am 12:00
pm
Room
C
The Clinical Relevance of Internalized Culture in a Globalized World
Jay Alan Roland1, M. Nasir Ilahi2, Sandra Buechler3
1
National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, United States of America; 2British Psychoanalytic Society, NYU
Psychoanalytic Institute; 3William Alanson White Institute; alanroland@aol.com, Nilahi@cs.com, sbuechler2@msn.com
Psychoanalysis, developed in the West, has rarely taken into account that culture is deeply internalized into the self. For
many decades, this has not mattered since psychoanalysts were primarily working with patients from their own culture, or
at least cultures not greatly different from their own. Today, however, in a globalized world, we are at times working with
patients from radically different cultures where the nature of early child rearing is significantly different, where social
relationships are also governed by different norms, where norms of ethical behavior also vary greatly, where the very
nature of thinking and cognition can be different, where modes of communication can vary radically, and where the
continuum of normality/psychopathology also varies from our own. As a result of this, the self of the person from a
radically different culture, also varies significantly from the Euro-American self, even in its current diversity. It is often
difficult to apprehend this experientially unless one has been exposed to a radically different culture. It is not that culture
is repressed but that it is silently woven into our whole psychological makeup. This can result in the psychoanalytic
relationship being structured differently, and transference and countertransference reactions can occur that may well be
puzzling.
Nasir Ilahi, originally from Pakistan, trained in Object Relations Theory at the British Independent School, will apply this
theory to the different early formations of the self. Alan Roland will concentrate on the later internalization of culture, such
as Asian hierarchical relations, and how it manifests clinically. He will also talk about the roots of the psychoanalytic
dismissal of internalized culture, such as the psychic unity of mankind. Sandra Buechler, who has trained Japanese at
the White Institute, will discuss problems of training Japanese who will return to Japan to practice.
The Self Across Civilizations: The Colonial Legacy in Psychoanalysis
Jay Alan Roland
National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, United States of America; alanroland@aol.com
In our globalized era today, persons from radically different cultures have spread over the world. Some from Asian,
African, and Middle Eastern cultures have sought psychoanalytic therapy in the West, while others have become
psychoanalytic therapists, themselves, sometimes returning to their homeland. In this context a critical question must be
raised as to why the vast majority of Western analysts do not recognize significant differences in psychological makeup in
patients from radically different cultures. Two major answers come to mind.
The first revolves around Western individualism with its unreflected values of individual autonomy, self creating ones
identity, predominant verbal expression, firm outer ego boundaries between self and other, and such. Freud"s one person
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psychology is a direct descendant of individualism"s cardinal assumption of the self-contained individual. Since this
culture pervades one"s psyche in the west, it is difficult to see the need to recognize other psychologies.
The second answer involves Freud formulating psychoanalysis at the height of the colonial era when Social Evolutionism
was the predominant social theory. Rationality, science, and technology were considered the height of social evolution,
and mainly was present in the Northern European and North American countries. (Brickman 2003). All others, including
Jews and Slavs were seen as inferior, while Asians, Africans and others were seen as primitive or savage. Freud
endeavored to counter this superiority/inferiority continuum with psychological universalism, or the psychic unity of
mankind. While it was a major advance over Social Evolutionism, it discounts any differences in psychological makeup in
persons from radically different cultures.
It can easily be observed from working with Indians and Japanese that they have a familial self (consisting of a we-self
and we-self regard, a dual self structure, non verbal communication, and such) in contrast to a Western individualized
one (Roland 1988, 1996, 2011).
The Clinical Relevance of Internalized Culture
Nasir Ilahi
New York University Psychoanalytic Institute, United States of America; nilahi@cs.com
Starting from Freud, it has been generally assumed that culture is something "out there" and in conscious awareness
including that of analyst and patient. The idea of culture, and its associated values and beliefs, as being deeply
internalized has not received sufficient attention. After Freud, analysts such as Klein, Bion, and Winnicott instigated the
"object relations approach" by putting the individual's relationship to objects at the center of their considerations. While
Klein emphasized primitive instinctual impulses and their phantasied effects upon internal objects, the work of others (e.
g. Bion, Winnicott, Fairbairn) led them to recognize the profound influences of the external environment on the early ego
and the ways in which the infant's caretakers provide a "holding" and "containing" function without which a mind in a truly
integrated sense could not come into being. These ideas represent a significant movement from the more one-body
psychologies formulations of much of Freud to the articulation of genuinely multi-body psychologies from the earliest
levels. Nevertheless, while a nuanced consideration of the environment, with a universal significance, was put firmly on
the map in these contributions, the way in which the needs of the developing individual, and his environmental
interactions, from the earliest stages have been thought about thus far is significantly influenced by largely implicit and
unconscious values of an individualized Western culture which are radically different from those of non Western cultures.
These may appear as so "natural" and axiomatic that they escape attention. These discrepancies give rise to significant
difficulties where the analyst (or his theory) comes from a radically different culture from that of the patient, an
increasingly common occurrence not only psychoanalysis attempts to spread internationally but also as migrants from
non Western cultures increasingly seek analytic therapy. Clinical illustrations for discussion will be provided.
Preparing Candidates for the Challenges of a Globalized World
Sandra Buechler
William Alanson White Institute, United States of America; sbuechler@gmail.com
What are the culturally shaped assumptions that affect our functioning as clinicians and as supervisors? How can we
best prepare today's candidates for their work with an expanding spectrum of patients from varying backgrounds? As
psychoanalysis strives to further its reach, how can we train candidates to conduct analysis with an adequate
appreciation for the impact of culture on BOTH treatment participants? Hopefully, psychoanalysis will elicit greater
numbers of adherents from a wider array of countries and cultures. This means it will more often occur that the members
of a treatment or supervisory dyad will have been raised in different cultures.
In this segment I facilitate participants' awareness of how our culturally shaped assumptions affect our work as
supervisors and as clinicians. I will describe specific moments in my own practice that highlight the interplay of culturally
based premises about psychological health and pathology, among other issues. I describe interactions in supervision and
treatment, resulting from unformulated differences in these assumptions. I will encourage discussion of my vignettes, and
elicit experiences that other participants may have encountered, where members of different cultures worked together in
therapeutic or supervisory contexts.
As an example, I believe that each culture inculcates an attitude about personal agency. Often without formulating them,
these attitudes affect how supervisors, clinicians, and patients understand psychological health, pathology, and
treatment's goals and therapeutic actions. I suggest that attitudes about agency, that are, in part, culturally based, affect
the supervisor's and clinician's focus in sessions (and the patient's focus, as well).
60
A second example I have frequently encountered is the impact of culture on attitudes toward interpersonal confrontation.
As I see it, cultures convey different attitudes about individuals expressing disagreement or anger toward others. I will
illustrate how these attitudes, while often unformulated, can profoundly affect therapeutic and supervisory processes.
10:30 8D: ROUNDTABLE
am 12:00
pm
Room
D
From Deserved Shame to Reparative Solidarity: The Role of Psychosocial Accompaniment
Chair(s): Mary
Watkins (Pacifica Graduate Institute)
Presenter(s): Mary Watkins (Pacifica Graduate Institute)
From a decade of work on the borders between Anglos and Mexicans in the U.S., Watkins has tracked the role of
deserved shame in psychological and community life. She defines deserved shame as feelings of shame that arise in the
aftermath of individual or collective actions that have caused harm, differentiating it from undeserved feelings of shame
experienced by innocent individuals. She asserts that if deserved shame is given psychological and community space, it
can be a transformative emotion, capable of helping us move toward greater integrity in our relationships with those we
or our cultural group has aggrieved.
Watkins argues for the inclusion of psychosocial accompaniment as an important role for psychologically-minded people
and as a critically important and needed alternative to individual psychotherapy. Through such accompaniment we not
only provide support and witness to people who are encountering the multiple challenges of membership in exploited and
oppressed communities, but we may begin to locate and claim our own collective remorse and shame over excess profit,
privilege, and use of natural resources at the expense of others. While often entering into the practice of psychosocial
accompaniment to “help” others, the accompanier more deeply discerns her own identity and group history and is moved
to joint actions of reparative solidarity that seek to transform the social, political, ecological, and economic conditions that
generate misery in our time.
This roundtable will provide a space for individual reflection and voluntary group sharing around social arenas where
participants experience deserved shame or collective remorse and the “borders” we are each called to cross to
acknowledge this shame and to act in solidarity-with-others to address and redress the consequences of shameful
actions and living. Psychosocial accompaniment will be explored as a role that can contribute to this process.
10:30 8L: ROUNDTABLE
am - Session Chair: Marilyn Charles, Austen Riggs Center
12:00
pm
Librar
y
Graduate Student Roundtable: Critical Forum on Graduate School
Chair(s): Michael
O'Loughlin (Adelphi University); michaeloloughlinphd@gmail.com
61
Presenter(s): Harpreet
University), Momoko
Malla (Alliant International University), Elizabeth Scholom (Adelphi
Takanashi(Adelphi University), Catherine Marsh (Adelphi University), Andrew
Costigan (University of Texas at Austin)
This will be an open forum where students can discuss their experiences in graduate school, including challenges with
the system and concerns about the ways in which the training molds people to be future clinicians, researchers, and/or
academics.
12:00 Lunch
pm 1:00p
m
Dinin
g
Room
1:00p 9A: PAPER SESSION: On Borders of Time, Space and Image
m - Session Chair: Daniel Gaztambide, Mt. Sinai St. Luke's Hospital
2:30p
m
Room
A
"How Many Borders Do We Have to Cross before We Reach Home?"
Yianna Ioannou
University of Nicosia, Cyprus; yianna.ioannou@gmail.com
This paper proposes to explore the complex set of relations between internal and external borders through Theo
Angelopoulos’ 1998 film “Eternity and a Day,” the third in what has come to be known as “The Trilogy of Borders.”
Angelopoulos’ film follows the internal and external journey of a terminally ill poet and his transforming encounter with a
young illegal refugee. Through this emerging relationship the film traces the crossing of multiple borders—temporal and
spatial, internal and external—to expose both the poet’s struggle to finally acquire a sense of feeling at home in the
world, and Greece’s struggle to find its own geopolitical ‘place’ in the post-communism era, when the impact of changing
borders in the Balkans is strongly felt all over Europe. Given Greece’s current precarious position at the ‘border’ of
Europe, and the growing humanitarian crisis of illegal immigration and political asylum refugees, Angelopoulos’ film
forces us to contend with the complex ways in which we negotiate political, racial, ethnic, linguistic, interpersonal and
psychological borders.
In this paper, I would like to interrogate the borders between space, time, memory, and language in the film from a
psychoanalytic perspective, using the works of Freud, Green and Loewald among others, to discuss the possibility of
transforming the sense of displacement and alienation so characteristic of modern life, to a sense of “homeliness.” As the
title of the paper (which is borrowed from one of the characters in “The Suspended Step of the Stork,” Angelopoulos’ first
film in the Trilogy of Borders) suggests, reaching ‘home’ might entail crossing multiple internal and external borders that
intertwine and influence one another. Through Angelopoulos' film, the paper will attempt to demonstrate how
psychoanalysis may offer us ways of crossing the geopolitical and psychosocial borders that need to be crossed so as to
reach ‘home.’
The Medium of Psychic Life, or Le Sinthomatic Cinema: Traversing the Fantasy through
Synecdoche, New York
62
Andrew Santana Kaplan
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States of America; arkapla2@illinois.edu
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York stages the theater – a constitutive trope of psychoanalytic theory – as a
synecdoche of both the cinema and psychic life. The film allegorizes the precariousness of finitude – marked by both
death and sexual difference – in director Caden Cotard’s (failed) realist fantasy to stage the totality of (his) existence.
Caden’s symptomatically endless rehearsal is a modernist assemblage, re-iterating his being-in-the-world-with-others
through the rehearsals’ metonymic dissemination across each metaphorical synecdoche of his (psychic) life.
Consequently, the dissemination of his fantasy stands in for the cinema’s dissemination across the people and
technologies that make it possible—deconstructing the (phallic) sovereignty of the auteur, camera, and image.
My reading draws on Lacan’s conception of le sinthome: the fourth ring mediating the RSI registers. The sinthome
signifies the metonymic contingency of the paternal metaphor – which Caden narcissistically fetishizes – and the
potentiality to re-figure it. As psychic life’s medium, the sinthome discloses how Synecdoche, New York performs the
cinema’s phallic fantasy of totalization, presence, and Truth as a means (ala sublimation) of cultivating an alternative
orientation to finitude as immanent to the cinema and psychic life.
Hence, given that the theater is a metonymic synecdoche for the cinema and psychic life, the cinema neither
metaphorically transcends the theater nor the psyche. Instead, Synecdoche exemplifies the impossibility for any
transcendence of the medium as such – including psychoanalysis – disclosing the conditions of possibility for traversing
the phallic fantasy of sovereignty: understanding our finitude and its precedence in our relation – our medium – to others.
Thus, as Synecdoche, New York is the border – shared by audience and Caden/fantasy – that becomes permeable
through its plurality of synecdoches, the sinthome is the border par excellence: the common ontological border bringing
singular psychic life into social being.
My Mummy Complex: Fusing Trauma and History in the Televisual 1960s
Danny Ray Leopard
Saint Mary's College of Califorina, United States of America; dleopard@mac.com
“At the origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex.” – André Bazin, 1960.
Bazin namechecks psychoanalysis as he suggests that cinema represents a technological form of embalming – a
mummy complex. In 1962, a child, gravely ill and quarantined to an intensive care unit, fixates on the bandaged face of a
mother nearly killed in a car crash. In 1920, the German expressionists create cultural objects that reflect the brutal facial
disfigurements created by the technologized warfare of World War I. Many of these filmmakers immigrate to Hollywood
and the fantastical images of this interwar period become embedded in the Universal Horror cycle of films from the
1930s, which in turn influence British filmmakers in the revived cycle of films produced by Hammer in the 1950s.
A key figure from these films is the mummy. The visual artifacts from these films thread through 20th century
cinematic/televisual culture until they gobsmack the child in the ICU in 1962. Postwar culture was painted in shades of
film noir gray (swept away by the colors of Swinging London and the Summer of Love) and featured distorted faces
among shadows and off-kilter camera angles. The trauma of personal injury, illness, and pain combined with the trauma
of world-historical events found a resonant home in the media-saturated psyche of the child. This case study draws upon
a political reading of Melanie Klein for a provisional understanding of popular culture’s fort-da/death-drive as it was
circulated through British and American mass media in the early 1960s.
With discussions of triggering events and broad calls to censor images and stories that may evoke trauma, this paper
attempts to challenge this impetus through an examination of the ways in which media and mentalities reciprocate one
another.
Where's the Door? The Architectural Uncanny of Boston's Government Center
Daniel Bauer
SUNY Purchase, United States of America; d.boy@mac.com
This talk, accompanied by images, will examine an urban spatial condition where the border between the zones of the
sane and insane is unclear. Aside from its imposing corduroy concrete, the Erich Lindemann Center in Boston
Massachusetts’ Government Center complex does not have a clearly defined architectural footprint or a readable façade.
It blurs what may be traditionally considered inside or “outside the asylum” to paraphrase the literary notion coined by
Douglas Adams’ character “Wonko the Sane” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy and further developed by
63
architectural theoreticians such as Reyner Banham and Fredric Jameson as signs of the destabilizing effects of
postmodernism. The blurring of interior and exterior parallels the symptoms of many patients in the multiple mental health
programs housed within this public facility. These patients drift about the grounds, the interior courtyards, parking
garages, sidewalks, stairs, catwalks, as well as the convenience stores adjacent to the site and become part of the fabric
of the city.
The Lindemann Center seems to be a unique scenario where a public mental health facility has developed its own
interface with the public aspects of a city due to or in spite of it’s architecture. Designed by the renowned and
controversial architect Paul Rudolph, known mostly for his institutional structures built in the fifties and sixties, in a style
that has come to be known as brutalism. The Lindemann Center is a megastructure occupying a city block, but it is also
in spite of its coarse facade, a permeable and amorphous set of architectural conditions. The evolution of these
conditions evokes many aspects of Anthony Vidler’s Architectural Uncanny and the scenographic architecture allows for
Art and Architecture’s psychological underpinnings to be played out on a haptic concrete backdrop.
1:00p 9B: PANEL
m2:30p
m
Room
B
Holding the Tension: The Social in the Unconscious/The Unconscious in the Social
Katharina Rothe1, Esin Egit2, Michelle Stephens1,3, Nikol Alexander-Floyd3, Elizabeth Hegeman1,4
1
William Alanson White Institute; 2Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY); 3Rutgers University; 4John Jay
College of Criminal
justice; rotkathz@gmail.com, esinegitphd@gmail.com, mas732@rci.rutgers.edu, ngaf@rci.rutgers.edu,ehegeman@pipel
ine.com
This panel is organized as an opportunity to engage in a discussion about the interface between psychoanalysis and
social research. Both psychoanalysis in a critical theoretical tradition as well as contemporary relational and interpersonal
psychoanalysis do not conceptualize the human subject’s life as merely “intrapsychic” but at the same time as social.
Similarly, social researchers increasingly employ psychoanalytic approaches in their methods. This panel, on the one
hand, explores how to understand persons in a psychoanalytic dyad as experiencing subjects with unique dispositions,
but also embedded in social and cultural contexts. On the other hand, it aims to argue that social research needs
psychoanalytic methodology as well as theorizing. This panel brings together scholars with backgrounds in anthropology,
literature, feminist political theory, and psychology. Rothe’s paper draws on a psychoanalytical concept of the societal
dimension of the unconscious in the tradition of Critical Theory and discusses the need for a systematic integration of
‘societal aspects’ into psychoanalytic practice in order to avoid individualizing and reifying tendencies of psychoanalysis.
Egit’s paper examines self experiences of a specific cohort of Turkish women by incorporating recent theorizing of self
and subjectivity in relational psychoanalysis with anthropological analysis. Stephens’ and Alexander-Floyd’s papers
incorporate contemporary psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches with various methods of media and literary
analysis with a specific focus on race and gender identity. Stephens’s paper explores the formation of black identity in the
US by integrating literary techniques with psychoanalytic approaches. Alexander-Floyd’s paper focuses on black feminist
identity by investigating the narrative themes and psychoanalytical dynamics of the hit TV show Scandal. In line with the
conference theme “border tensions” this panel explores the tension between the borders of ‘disciplines’, the ‘individual’
and the ‘society’, the researcher and the subject(s), as well as between the clinician and the patient.
A Psychoanalytics of Blackness: Reading Race Relationally in African American Literature
Michelle Ann Stephens
Rutgers University/ William Alanson White Institute, United States of America; mas732@rci.rutgers.edu
Psychoanalysis is often characterized as a theory of sexuality and sexual difference. How might psychoanalytic theory
and methods, including theories of clinical practice and relating, reshape how we approach and analyze problems of
race—race as difference, racial dynamics, race relations, racism—and more broadly, how we interrogate issues of
sameness and difference? Can interpersonal and relational approaches offer new perspectives on relations that cross
64
the color line? Given that African American literature has been such a key site for explorations of black subject formation
in the United States, this paper will explore how a mixed methods approach, integrating both literary techniques of close
and surface reading with psychoanalytic approaches to enactments and transference processes in the consulting room,
can inform how we read literature focused on the psychic lives and experiences of African Americans.
Self and Subjectivity: Growing up in a Middle-Class Secular Family in Istanbul, Turkey
Esin Egit
Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, United States of America; esinegitphd@gmail.com
Based on ethnographic interviews with a cohort of middle-class, secular Turkish women who came of age in the 1980s in
Istanbul, this paper argues that the parent-daughter relationship constitutes a crucial site in the formation of a particular
subjectivity shared among these women, which I call ‘self-assured.’ However, women’s narratives also reveal that
growing up they received conflicting messages regarding women’s identity. On the one hand, they were told that they
would grow up to be modern and independent women, yet on the other hand, by observing the dynamics between their
mothers and fathers, they learned that women were typically seen as dependent and accommodating. Therefore in order
to inhabit the modern and independent woman identity, this cohort of women has to reject feminine identifications, and
associate themselves with male identities and roles –a dynamic that creates ongoing inner conflict, frustration and selfdoubt. Drawing on Margaret Crastnopol’s concept of “configural self” a larger goal of this paper is to address the problem
that efforts to understand non-Western modern women’s lives typically navigating between the traditional and the modern
discourses and largely neglect psychodynamic factors. This paper will show that these two processes are not easily
separable in the formation of self and subjectivity, and their interconnection needs to be taken into consideration in
anthropological analysis.
Psychoanalysis, Scandal, and Black Feminism
Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd
Rutgers University, United States of America; ngaf@rci.rutgers.edu
Scholars across disciplines, such as English, history, women's and gender studies, and political science, have called for
renewed attention to psychoanalysis in Black studies. This essay represents one attempt to take up this call focusing on
the intersection of political science, Black women's and gender studies, and psychoanalysis. More specifically, I argue for
an interdisciplinary integration of psychoanalysis and Black feminist political theory and philosophy. As a case study, I will
examine Shonda Rhimes's hit TV show, "Scandal." I am adapting Esther Rashkin's approach to close reading,
investigating the narrative themes and psychoanalytical dynamics of the show itself and then setting these dynamics
within a larger political and historical context. The piece, thus, addresses the issue of border tensions by directly
addressing what is at stake in incorporating psychoanalytic perspectives in Black feminist political theory and philosophy.
It also directly connects the interpersonal dynamics represented in "Scandal" to contemporary socio-political debates
regarding equality and social justice.
(Re)Construction, Deconstruction and Resisting the Pulls for Reductionism in the Consulting Room
Katharina Rothe
William Alanson White Institute, United States of America; rotkathz@gmail.com
In the tradition of critical psychoanalytic social research others and myself have often made the argument for why
(psycho)social research benefits from psychoanalytic methods and theorizing. This is especially the case whenever we
aim at understanding (conflicted) subjectivities in social contexts and ask questions about complex and seemingly
irrational phenomena. In his theory of socialization and symbolization, psychoanalyst and sociologist Alfred Lorenzer
reformulated Freudian drive theory in a way that allowed for conceptualizing the dialectical relationship of the ‘societal’
and human ‘nature’ in the very constitution of the subject. Although in the consulting room we aim at re- and coconstructing as well as transforming experiences of individual suffering, the genesis of this suffering is at the same time
idiosyncratic and societally produced. However, in most psychoanalytic practices ‘the societal’ remains ‘external reality’
that the individual is supposed to ‘adapt to’ in a more ‘functional’ way than when initially having sought treatment. My
presentation will discuss Lorenzer’s concept of the societal dimension of the unconscious, and his view that corporeality
is from birth on – at the very emergence of the drives – societal ‘in nature’. Even though Lorenzer conceptualizes the
inextricable intertwinement of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ in the human subject, when he describes a mode of “scenic
understanding” in working with patients in the transference/countertransference relationship, ‘the societal’ remains
implicit. Elaborating both on Lorenzer’s theorizing of the societal dimension and of the “scenic understanding” in
65
psychoanalytic practices, I will invite a discussion of whether the societal dimension of (unconscious and conscious)
suffering could and should be examined in a systematic way.
1:00p 9C: PANEL
m2:30p
m
Room
C
Race, Violence, Community, and the Media: Psychoanalytic Perspectives
Teresa Méndez1, Daniel Buccino2
1
The Retreat at Sheppard Pratt; 2Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical
Center; tmendez@sheppardpratt.org, dbuccin1@jhmi.edu
Living and working as psychoanalytic therapists in Baltimore, MD, has necessitated confronting the difficult and
intertwined dynamics of race, violence, community, and the way they are represented in the media. The recent and
sustained upsurge of violence in Baltimore, specifically, along with nationwide attention to race relations, police violence,
and economic disparities has spilled into the consulting room, while our work in the consulting room inevitably informs our
understanding of these issues. Through history, case study, and essay that are grounded in the sociocultural realities of
our city, this panel will grapple with the broader question: How can a city, a collective group, or an individual function as a
repository for our country's racialized projections, and how can we begin to work with this in treatment?
(This panel will use psychoanalytic concepts to trouble the tensions of class, black and white, and the street and the
clinic, while considering what racial unrest and urban uprisings might have to teach psychoanalysis. )
"Bodymore, Murderland”: Psychoanalytic Musings
Teresa Méndez
The Retreat at Sheppard Pratt, United States of America; tmendez@sheppardpratt.org
A treatment that had unfolded largely in the displacement, through a patient’s furious narration of brutal current events,
was brought home when the violence came to Baltimore. His birthplace, my new home, shuddered, and my patient
became my guide. This paper will offer an analytic therapist’s personal reflections on city, trauma, race, place, and time.
The audience will be encouraged to help make sense of the treatment.
“Baltimore in the Morning”: Toward a Psychoanalysis of Place and Uprising
Daniel L. Buccino
Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, United States of America; dbuccin1@jhmi.edu
Two years after Freud “brought the plague” on his only visit to America, the American Psychoanalytic Association was
established in Baltimore in 1911. Present at creation were Freud’s emissary, Ernest Jones, and Adolf Meyer, then
chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Fifty-five years later, in 1966, Jacques Lacan made Baltimore his first stop on his first visit to the U.S., speaking at the
Johns Hopkins University’s foundational conference, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” which some
argue brought to America the added “plagues” of structuralism and post-structuralism. While in Baltimore, Lacan also
spoke at the venerable Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, now the workplace of his analyst’s son.
Although the tree of psychoanalysis in the U.S. has grown many branches over the past century, its roots are deeply
embedded in Baltimore. This presentation will review the history of psychoanalysis in Baltimore, Baltimore’s influence on
psychoanalysis, and the implications of “Baltimore” for psychoanalysis.
Yet given the riots in 1968 and the uprisings of 2015, it is clear that Baltimore continues to be vexed by its own struggles.
What are the specific traumas produced by being of, from, and dislocated by this place? What are the challenges of
66
trying to practice psychoanalysis in Baltimore? Drawing on the “psychology of place,” we will come to see how life in
Baltimore is both much better and far worse than the stereotypes portrayed in the most often considered representation
of the city in HBO’s “The Wire.”
Lacan’s 1966 observation, “The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning,” remains truer
now than ever.
1:00p 9D: PANEL
m2:30p
m
Room
D
Under the Evening Land: Traumatic Imprints in Intercultural Contexts
Claude Barbre, Natasha Reynolds, Matthew Shang, Natasa` Brozovic, Amanda Snell
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, United States of
America; nlr9132@ego.thechicagoschool.edu,mks5250@ego.thechicagoschool.edu, nxb6380@ego.thechicagoschool.e
du, ams7179@ego.thechicagoschool.edu
The term “trauma” has been used as a blanket term in the humanities to cover various dimensions of human experience.
This panel will explore the nature of trauma and traumatic imprints on individuals and cultures that encompass historical
conflict and tensions inherent in global change-- border tensions that arise when societies intersect with the influences of
other countries, in turn impacting group identity and narratives. Social change may revitalize trauma and conflict as we
will see in the lives of immigrants and their cultural adjustments, gender issues, historical identities, and the reactivation
of traumatic imprints through multicultural intersectionality. Beginning with Sigmund Freud’s own work and understanding
of suffering, Freud begins writing about the “other scene” or the “black hole” in the psyche that carries das Unbewusste,
or “unknown” (Schützenberger, 1998). The “black hole” in the psyche is synonymous with a “psychological
homelessness” that is not exclusive to the individual, but is connected with others. Zinchenko (2011) noted that trauma
survivors and their children often resort to silence that feels much like psychological homelessness, leading to a struggle
with a dual identity and the desire to understand the unspoken trauma. Therefore, Zinchenko (2011) argues that not
having a memory is not acceptable, so a new memory is created. The loss of a country also creates a mass
disorientation of identity in groups, as well as a loss of biographies in individuals. Symbols become representations of a
memory that cannot be verbalized, what Bion called “selected facts,” as quoted by Connolly (2011). The re-writing of
personal biographies presents the danger of creating a split between public myths, making it impossible to consolidate
the two. We will explore in this panel how the re-writing of history and trauma creates divisions among ethnic, gender,
and generational groups, each making claims to solidify their identity.
The Impact of Social Change in China on Young Female Adults: A Shanghai Study
Natasha Lanshin Reynolds
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, United States of America; nlr9132@ego.thechicagoschool.edu
This mini-ethnography explores the beliefs, practices, culture, and artifacts of contemporary dating and relationships as
impacted by individual, family, and societal influences of modern Chinese women living in Shanghai, China. As China is
the most populated country in the world, as well as a growing and influential culture, the importance and demand for
psychological sensitivity with this particular cultural group becomes more critical in the field of psychology. Given the
recent dramatic shifts in China’s economic, political, and social landscapes, young adults, particularly, young females,
are most profoundly impacted as they have been exposed to both traditional and modern beliefs and culture.
Furthermore, significant changes in economic and political power have led to shifts in Chinese families, relationships, the
institution of marriage, and degree of personal choice. This research illuminates and unravels experiences internal and
external conflicts and tensions related to agency and pressure amongst young, modern Chinese women in Shanghai,
China. The influence of Western globalization and pressures will also be explored as they affect young Chinese women.
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The Cultural Adjustment of Chinese-Born Males to the American Masculinity Paradigm: Issues of
Identity and Self-Image in First Generation Chinese-American Male Immigrants
Matthew Shang
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, United States of America; mks5250@ego.thechicagoschool.edu
As the field of psychology becomes more global and embraces diversity, it runs the risk of overlooking the nuances and
particularities of specific cultures. Although researchers may earnestly attempt to better understand specific cultural
groups, they have the propensity to mistakenly use Western paradigms as a backdrop for comparison to other cultures.
However, such a methodological approach inherently presupposes Western perspectives as the standard while
simultaneously devaluing the culture in focus (Louie, 2003). An attempt to unify and expand multicultural sensitivities
should not come at the cost of recognizing and appreciating the unique subtleties of specific cultural groups. As China is
the most populated country in the world, as well as a growing and influential culture, the importance and demand for
psychological sensitivity with this particular cultural group becomes more critical in the field of psychology.
Broadening our understanding of historical and modern Chinese views of gender, this presentation highlights the cultural
immersion process of first-generation Chinese-American male immigrants and their adjustment to the American
masculinity paradigm. Gender theorists (e.g. Louie, 2002; Zhong, 2000; Kimmel, 2001) suggest that there are significant
differences between Chinese and American expectations of what it means to be a “man.” Yet, little research has
investigated how these differences are experienced and reconciled upon immigrating to the United States. As a result,
this presentation will draw from interviews to cross-examine the potential conflicts for first-generation Chinese-American
male immigrants – e.g. how they are pressured to meet the ideals and standards of the dominant, American culture while
negotiating their own understanding of masculinity developed in China. Charmaz’s (2006) constructivist model of
grounded theory was used as a foundation to analyze the collected data. We will examine emergent themes, and their
clinical applications with this population will be discussed.
Forgotten Voices: Traumatic Inductions of Shame and Guilt in the Filipino Psyche
Amanda Snell
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, United States of America; ams7179@ego.thechicagoschool.edu
Research on personality development has suggested that the conceptualization of a healthy personality is subjective to
an individual's culture (Church, 1987). The Filipino psyche, however, remains an area of research that is still developing.
This presentation will discuss how theories of the intergenerational transmission of trauma apply to better understanding
the traumatic impact of socio-historical and cultural events on the Filipino psyche. The Philippines has experienced
significant events within its history that may have resulted in a collective traumatization of the culture. Through an
analysis of traumatic inheritances within the Philippines, the experience of the intergenerational transmission of suffering
in the Filipino psyche can be explored. Through an analysis of the socio-cultural traumatic inheritances that have
occurred throughout the history of the Philippines, this presentation will introduce forgotten voices that witness to the
intergenerational transmission of suffering within the Filipino psyche.
A prominent feature of traumatic induction found in the Filipino psyche is captured well by the term, hiya-- a Tagalog term
that has been associated with the construct of shame within the Western cultural understanding - but has a greater
meaning that cannot be expressed in terms of Western cultural definitions. (Church, 1987; Agbayani-Siewart, 1994; Yap,
1984). Hiya is defined as an affective experience following a relational exchange in which an individual experiences
intense fear of interpersonal abandonment and annihilation anxiety to his or her cohesive self (Yap, 1984). When an
individual within a Filipino culture experiences this sense of hiya, ego security is threatened contributing to feelings of
anxiety, shame, and low self-worth (Yap, 1984; Church, 1987). The presentation of hiya can be compared to the
experience of shame that is seen when an individual experiences a traumatic event. We will explore the nature of shame
and guilt due to trauma transmission in the Filipino collective psyche.
Identity Confusion and Nationalism: Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Bosnian Culture
Natasa Brozovic
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology; nxb6380@ego.thechicagoschool.edu
Bosnia’s history is very unique, so much so that it has been impossible to compare to any other Balkan country. These
scattered and early accounts of settlements, kingdoms, and empires, also demonstrate the very questionability of the
actual events that transpired in this region. One thing scholars think is for certain: the historical artifacts, documents, and
puzzle pieces remain an avid distraction and dissociation from the wars and lost lives that have soaked Bosnia’s land
since its beginning. The ghosts of ancestors become a symbolic representation of an identity that is comprised of religion,
language, and history; thus, the absence of a comprehensive historical account creates a loss – a loss too painful to
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bear, screaming for restoration of an identity. The Bosnian culture eagerly waits to gaze into the abyss that could explain
the hauntings and loss that it experienced in history and continue to experience in regard to historical transmissions. The
abyss, as Nietzsche warned, begins to gaze back, especially in light of invisible loyalties of Bosnians to their fragmented
history that continues to carry on the bloody tradition of this psychic and material landscape. In this presentation we will
examine briefly existing literature on intergenerational trauma in an attempt to better understand the Bosnian identity
dynamics, particularly after the Bosnian war during the 1990’s. As we have noted, Bosnian history is filled with holes,
creating space for speculation and molding of history to the preference of ethnic groups that have grown into enemies
over time. As history is re-written, national, group, cultural, and individual identities strengthen. We will examine how
generational traumas have impacted the development of Bosnian mentality—namely, the rise of identity diffusion and
nationalism as a significant transgenerational trauma response and collective defense.
1:00p 9L: ROUNDTABLE
m2:30p
m
Librar
y
When Cultures Collide: Myth, Meaning, and Conceptual Space
Chair(s): Marilyn
Charles (Austen Riggs Center)
Presenter(s): Marilyn Charles (Austen Riggs Center), Monisha Nayar-Akhtar (Psychoanalytic Center
of Philadelphia), Sudhir Kakar (Goa, India)
In this roundtable, participants will discuss a prepublished paper that will be available for attendees to read before the
conference. The paper explores the relationship between cultural myths and clinical experience. The author makes use
of individual case material to exemplify the way that culture informs the development of primary and secondary
processing as it is elaborated in dream work, and thus in the space of the psychoanalytic session. Looking at the case of
a man whose history is nested in both Eastern and Western culture serves to illuminate not only the individual dilemma
but also the transformative and obfuscating functions of the unconscious processes themselves. Roundtable participants
will be coming from three perspectives, first the author whose heritage is of Western culture, then a psychoanalyst whose
work has informed an understanding of Indian culture, and finally a psychoanalyst who has moved back and forth
between Indian and American culture and who has a special interest in the immigrant experience.
2:30p Coffee Break
m3:00p
m
3:00p 10A: PANEL
m4:30p
m
Room
A
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Troubling Reflection: Adorno and Psychoanalysis
Jeffrey M. Jackson1, Stefan Bird-Pollan2, Kathleen Eamon3
1
University of Houston--Downtown, United States of America; 2University of Kentucky; 3Evergreen State
College;jacksonjef@uhd.edu, stefanbirdpollan@uky.edu, eamonk@evergreen.edu
This panel considers different ways in which the critical social theory of Theodor Adorno intersects with psychoanalysis.
Kathleen Eamon draws on psychoanalytic theory in her reading of Adorno’s analysis of the ways newspaper astrology
columns reveal an historically-specific coding of a shared and even exaggerated reality principle among readers and
writers. This analysis “troubles” an overly narrow focus on either the individual or on paradigmatically universalized
cultural forms. Stefan Bird-Pollan suggests that Adorno’s emphasis on the unconscious as the non-identical amounts to a
criticism of both Freud’s realist or scientistic tendencies, as well as the excessive idealistic tendencies in Hegel which
seeks to subsume all of nature under the concept. Adorno thus contrasts the emphasis on closure in Hegel’s system with
the necessary openness to experience in psychoanalysis, construed from the perspective of the disruption. Jeffrey M.
Jackson discusses ways in which Adorno’s Marxian, Freudian critique of philosophy mimics the psychoanalytic critique of
reflection, insofar as it scrutinizes life “in its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even
in its most hidden recesses…” (Minima Moralia). Adorno’s critique of phenomenology is linked with the psychoanalytic
notion of splitting, and the possibility of integrating partial objects.
Beyond his well-known essay, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” Adorno’s philosophical position
is deeply informed by psychoanalysis in ways that are seldom acknowledged. One might say that the tendency of
contemporary philosophy—which after all is largely a form of ideology—to ignore (and often dismiss) Adorno is
coextensive with contemporary society’s disavowal of its own repressive social histories. In his version of ideology
critique, Adorno’s disruption of dominant models of reflection always points to the concrete possibility of the creation of
better social conditions.
Suffered Epistemologies: Adorno and Psychoanalysis
Jeffrey M. Jackson
University of Houston--Downtown, United States of America; jacksonjef@uhd.edu
In many ways, Theodor Adorno’s troubling of the philosophical tradition reflects the trouble psychoanalysis makes for
reflection. In Minima Moralia, Adorno remarks that “He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must
scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden
recesses…” Prominent trends in 20th c. European philosophy attempt to occlude the relationship between subject and
object via appeals to ontology, the immediacy of existence, etc. Adorno shows that these attempts inevitably fail,
suggesting that the only coherent way forward is a radicalization of the conceptualization of the subject-object distinction,
not its obliteration. For example, contrary to its self-understanding, Edmund Husserl’s empiricist view that objectivity is
constituted within lived embodied experience, implicitly suggests what Adorno calls “the preponderance of the object”, i.e.
that the subject is object and is conditioned by its history with other objects. From this perspective, reading
phenomenology critically, along with the psychoanalytic notion of splitting and Melanie Klein’s analysis of the lived,
suffered attachment to partial objects, one might say that there are objective conditions for facilitating or thwarting the
subjective process of integrating partial objects into wholes. These conditions shape subjectivity, often as split.
Capitalism constantly reproduces such splitting in so far as the commodity is a quintessential partial object: its “value” is
systematically separated from its concrete history. Psychoanalysis provides an indispensable model of what integration
might look like.
Adorno's Psychoanalytic Critique of Freud and Hegel
Stefan Bird-Pollan
University of Kentucky, United States of America; stefanbirdpollan@uky.edu
Adorno makes extensive use of psychoanalytic concepts in his critique of both Kant and Hegel. The purpose of this paper
is to show that Adorno’s use of these psychoanalytic concepts actually produces a two-pronged critique, a critique of
Freud’s scientistic tendencies and a critique of the idealism as the quest to grasp nature in thought. These two critiques
can help us understand Adorno’s central theoretical motif, the non-identical.
By emphasizing the radical, disruptive and persistent character of the unconscious’ drive to manifest itself, Adorno
criticizes Freud’s attempt to reduce the workings of mind to a hydraulic model. Adorno contends that the psyche is rather
to be understood as the work of conceptually ordering the disruptions stemming from the unconscious. In this sense, the
unconscious is a way of describing the non-identical, Adorno’s term of that which has not yet been categorized and
hence put to rest by the human intellect.
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Just as the idea of the non-identical as the unconscious criticizes Freud’s realist or scientistic tendencies, so it is used by
Adorno to criticize what he sees as the excessive idealistic tendencies in Hegel which seeks to subsume all of nature
under the concept. Adorno shares with Hegel the idea that thinking is fundamentally reflection. But for Adorno reflection
is the application of concepts to particulars in such a way that the application does not arrest the process of thinking or
conceptualization but allows the deeper expression of the subject’s unconscious nature. Adorno thus contrasts the
emphasis on closure in Hegel’s system with the necessary openness to experience in psychoanalysis, construed from
the perspective of the disruption.
Typical Dreams, Secondary Experience, and Collective Desire: Working Between Freud and Adorno
Kathleen Margaret Eamon
The Evergreen State College, United States of America; eamonk@evergreen.edu
This paper will focus on Freud’s treatment of typical dreams and dream symbols in The Interpretation of Dreams against
a reading of Adorno’s analysis of secondary experience and astrology in “Stars Down to Earth.” Typical dreams and
symbols are those dream elements that are resistant to a psychoanalytic interpretation that seeks to establish
connections back to the day’s residue and the dreamer’s individual history. The paper will contrast the set of typical
dreams grouped according to theme (embarrassing dreams of being naked, grief-stricken dreams of the death of loved
ones, and exam dreams) with Freud’s treatment of symbols as individual dream elements, and examine both in terms of
the possibility that they reflect, contribute to, and/or resist the forces of socialization and political identification. Although
the paper will focus on Freud’s early writings about dreams, it will look at his analysis of typical dreams in particular for
the traces of death-drive-like references to a compulsion to repeat and drive-pleasure. These will form the connection to
Adorno’s analysis of astrology as working across the gap between ego-oriented rationality and the desire to submit to
authority. Adorno’s content analysis of the LA Times astrology column is not directly interested in revelations about either
its readers or its writers but rather in what it can reveal of an historically-specific coding of their shared and even
exaggerated reality principle. Working between Freud and Adorno in this way allows us to see how psychoanalytic
cultural criticism and analysis “troubles” an overly narrow focus on either the individual or on paradigmatically
universalized cultural forms.
3:00p 10B: PANEL
m4:30p
m
Room
B
Working the Intersection of Psychoanalysis, Social Activism, and Method: A Qualitative Research
Team’s Experience
ricardo ainslie, andrew costigian, crystal guevara, hannah mcdermott, david rosenblatt
university of texas, United States of
America; rainslie@austin.utexas.edu, andrewpetercostigan@gmail.com,crystalguevara90@yahoo.com, hwmcdermott@
utexas.edu, davidrosenblatt1@me.com
This Themed Panel invites the audience to enter the world of a research team at the University of Texas that draws from
psychoanalytically informed qualitative methods to grapple with a variety of contemporary social issues. Each of the
presentations reflects a team member’s research agenda. The unifying theme is the team’s commitment to qualitative
research that includes dimensions of social activism. The first contribution will provide an overall framework by theorizing
about psychoanalytic methods as uniquely suited for engaging and attempting to understand issues of culture and
experiences within marginalized communities. The tools of analytic inquiry, including empathy, an appreciation of the
relational field, and a focus on subjective experience, are essential for working in and understanding marginalized
communities. Provided this framework, we will then present four team members’ projects, each in a different phase of
development, to illustrate and reflect on the utility and limitations of psychoanalytically-inspired qualitative engagement
with these communities. The four illustrations include work at a immigration detention center housing undocumented
women who are separated from their families and awaiting judicial proceedings, work conceptualizing incarceration as a
traumatic experience and exploring the challenges faced by formerly incarcerated women as they reenter society, work
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with dyslexic children within a therapeutic community, and, finally, theoretical work conceptualizing media as a research
tool and as a vehicle for education and the dissemination of ideas, including the ways in which this process parallels the
therapeutic process as an editorial team attempts to engage, understand, and structure narratives. If the first presentation
sets a theoretical frame for our projects, this last presentation addresses the challenges of representation and the use of
media, which is key to the work with which we are engaged.
Psychoanalysis, Qualitative Methods, and Working at the Margins
ricardo ainslie
university of texas, United States of America; rainslie@austin.utexas.edu
Beginning in the 1970’s, at a time when psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic ideas enjoyed pervasive influence over
psychology and psychiatry as well as mental health institutions and training (especially in the United States), a new
movement emerged to challenge that hegemony. This movement was motivated to address the widespread absence,
within the prevailing paradigm, of engagement with poor communities and communities of color, communities that much
of psychoanalysis had ignored since its inception. This neglect existed both in terms of the provision of services and in
terms of efforts to understand these communities and include their experiences within the frameworks of inquiry and
theory more generally.
The new movement that emerged at that time, multiculturalism, took hold in university counseling and clinical programs
and has become, arguably, the strongest voice in contemporary psychology. The gulf between the multicultural
movement and psychoanalysis remains, for the most part, quite broad. Even as a growing number of psychoanalysts and
our professional organizations have sought to bridge this gulf, it remains wide.
For the most part, multiculturalism has been firmly wedded to quantitative methods of investigation. In doing so,
multiculturalism has undermined its overall project, which is to better understand and engage marginalized communities.
In this presentation I make the case that, in addition to its clinical applications, psychoanalysis is a qualitative
methodology that is uniquely suited to working with these very communities. Specifically, the psychoanalytic interest in
creating a safe space within which personal narratives may unfold, coupled with the singular interest in subjective
experience, give psychoanalytic qualitative inquiry an unparalleled potential for actually entering and meaningfully
engaging communities of varying histories and cultures. The tools of analytic inquiry, including empathy, an appreciation
of the relational field, and a focus on subjective experience, are essential for working in and understanding marginalized
communities.
The Experience of Attending a Specialized Learning Program for Learners with Dyslexia
Andrew Costigan
The University of Texas, United States of America; andrewpetercostigan@gmail.com
This presentation will focus on a project involving young people with dyslexia attending specialized summer program
developed for their learning profile. Dyslexia is a language-based learning difference, which is neurobiological in origin,
and characterized by a difficultly learning to read and write. The condition exists on a spectrum from mild to severe.
People with dyslexia struggle relative to their not dyslexic peers in school, especially in language intensive subjects, and
their challenges typically persist without the provision of effective instruction. Furthermore, research has illustrated that
people with dyslexia struggle psychologically, particularly with regard to how they perceive themselves as students. While
approximately 15%-20% of children experience some form of learning difficulty (International Dyslexia Association, 2008),
in many ways it is a silent and invisible disorder.
In a number of communities, parents, educators and researchers have developed learning programs and schools to
address the specific needs of learners with dyslexia. Typically they feature a trained staff specializing in dyslexia, small
class sizes, and intensive language instruction. Also, community-building activities are a component and intended to
embolden students’ sense of self, while normalizing dyslexia and emphasizing its potential strengths.
The presentation will discuss an effort to use psychoanalytically-informed qualitative methods to understand the operative
elements and the impact of this experience on the young students attending the summer intervention program.
Specifically, I will use interviews conducted with students and teachers participating in the a five-week summer camp for
learners with dyslexia to flesh out the psychological and educational issues that they experience. An interpretivephenomenological approach to analysis will attempt to capture the experience of participants in their own words. Finally, I
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will address the limitations and potential strengths of the study, considering the researcher’s concurrent status as
researcher and program participant.
Immigrant Women, Immigration Policy, and Life in One of America’s Detention Centers
Crystal Guevara
University of Texas at Austin, United States of America; crystalguevara90@gmail.com
Immigration is at the forefront of global politics, media, and social discussion. This presentation details my experience as
a co-therapist as part of an NGO team working in a women’s detention center run by U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) in Texas. Most of the women with whom I worked were from Central America and Mexico fleeing
experiences of domestic abuse, life threatening circumstances caused by local gangs and drug cartels, institutional
discrimination against their gender in their countries of origin, and conditions of impunity for perpetrators who victimized
them. Unfamiliar with the immigration process, they were transferred to detention centers pending determination as to
whether or not they had a credible case for asylum.
The detention center holds approximately 500 residents with an average 2-3 week turnover. The women attending group
therapy routinely spoke of a variety of issues, from the circumstances that led them to leave their countries of origin to the
particulars of being apprehended by ICE and the conditions within the detention center, including the inhumane “hieleras”
or ice lockers where they were held during their first few nights after encountering the Border Patrol.
The existence of the detention centers and the experiences of the women who are detained, serve to highlight the impact
of government decisions in the face of the national ambivalence regarding immigration policy. From a therapeutic point of
view, working with these women raises significant challenges, including having a limited time frame in the face of the
overwhelming problems and needs with which the detained women are struggling. This presentation will describe some
of the experiences that the women have shared as a means of conveying who they are and illustrating the psychological
toll of current immigration policy.
Breaking Down Boundaries of “Otherness”: Incarceration and Testimonio
Hannah Wood McDermott
University of Texas, Austin, United States of America; Hwmcdermott@gmail.com
In the United States, the rate of incarceration of women grew over 404% between 1985 and 2007, an expansion primarily
attributed to the war on drugs (The Sentencing Project, 2007). Incarcerated women are disproportionately likely to be
women of color and to have experienced trauma, including physical or sexual violence, and poverty (DeHart, 2008;
Green et al., 2005). Already at risk for poor outcomes, these women are separated and “othered” from mainstream
American life, first by their physical incarceration and then by the conditions of their release, including stipulations of
parole, denial of benefits and the shadow of a felony record over future endeavors. Individuals are stripped of their
communities, exposed to dehumanizing conditions and potential traumas in prison and then returned, with little reentry
planning, to communities from which they were uprooted.
Although mass incarceration has entered public discourse, evidence suggests that public education efforts about the
disparate impacts of incarceration only confirm biases about incarcerated individuals and increase support for harsh
sentencing (Hetey & Eberhardt, 2014). The social boundaries of otherness constructed around these individuals prevent
their stories from being heard. New avenues of inquiry must air these perspectives, to facilitate policy change and create
opportunities for healing at the societal and individual levels. Bohleber (2007) argues for the key role of memory and
commemoration in healing collective trauma as these processes acknowledge the lived realities of those impacted.
Similarly to the Latin American concept of testimonio, the public testimonial of those impacted by trauma can speak to
individual experiences within a larger framework of social conflict (Ainslie, 2013). Qualitative inquiry, generating empathy
for the subjective experience of these individuals, creates space for public education about the impact of mass
incarceration and for healing through the empowerment of formerly incarcerated women’s voices.
Film Language, Qualitative Inquiry, & Media Perspectives
David Seth Rosenblatt
University of Texas, United States of America; davidrosenblatt1@mac.com
Film, and visual media are to an increasing degree a primary source of media consumption. With rampant proliferation of
visual media distribution sources, primarily enabled by the internet, more people than ever utilize this communication for
information that extends beyond the scope of entertainment. The written word is universally accepted as a language of
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entertainment, news, art, and the primary vessel to distribute knowledge. Visual media relies on a commonly understood
structure for communication in a way similar to written language. All facets of pictures and sound composing a film
transmit text and subtext designed to communicate, just as the organization of letters, punctuation, and sentences do in
written language. Many consumers of visual media are not consciously aware that they are already trained to interpret
this language, yet the system is established and utilized constantly.
There are interesting and valuable parallels that exist between the clinical role of the counselor and the practical creation
of visual media. A filmmaker must sift through large quantities of moving pictures and sound to find the ones that are the
most important or representative of the desired communication of the film. In brief there is much similarity with a
counselor as they listen to the experiences of a client, and conceptualize the nature of their concerns. Framing and
communicating these observations are the critical roles in both practices.
As scientists and clinicians utilizing film language as a valued means of communication for research and knowledge,
could be an important addition to our practice and science. If the same standards of quality, objectivity, and transparency
are implemented in the creation of visual media, as they are in scientific publication how can we add to the strength of
our science, and it’s accessibility to the public we serve.
3:00p 10C: PAPER SESSION: Difficult Conversatiosn in Difficult Places
m - Session Chair: C. Fred Alford, University of Maryland
4:30p
m
Room
C
Between Scylla and Charybdis: Tensions at the Border between Structure and Fluidity
Lita Iole Crociani-Windland
University of the West of England, United Kingdom; lita.crociani-windland@uwe.ac.uk
This paper uses the well-known image of the twin monsters Scylla and Charybdis as a metaphor for the contemporary
extremes of ‘liquid modernity’ and ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’. It proceeds by using one of Weber’s famous and prophetic
quotes from the Protestant Ethic to summarise the predicament of our time and the kind of person these conditions
produce. This is then taken up using Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism.
The central tenet of the paper is that much effort in British and other European societies is expended in trying to subdue
excess fluidity by procedural bureaucratic means, increased hierarchical and regulatory controls, particularly in public
sectors such as education. This does not address the conditions of turbulence it is trying to manage; rather it fosters an
emptying out of values and culture and an increasing narcissism in individuals.
The metaphor of Scylla and Charybdis contains important indications: it is the tension between fluidity and structural
geographical features, i.e. constriction of water caused by land features, that creates the deadly whirlpool of Charybdis;
land is no safer in these conditions as there lies the danger of a cave, where Scylla imprisons and devours those who
might be dashed against the rocks or seek refuge on land. It is not these elements per se that constitute danger or
salvation: it is their polarisation, how much of each, their form, position and relationship. That is in itself a cultural and
political matter.
The paper seeks to trouble what is analysed as an increasingly impregnable border between structure and fluidity in
contemporary society. Lasch’s popular, but controversial work is an early example of the value of taking psychoanalysis
out of the consulting room boundary to analyse social, cultural and individual phenomena.
The Legacy of Trauma in Post-Soviet Lithuania: Survival, Adaptation, and Remnants in the Life
Narrative of a 1941 Deportee.
Justina Dillon
Adelphi University; justina.k.dillon@gmail.com
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Under the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in the 1940s and 1950s, 132,000 non-prisoner Lithuanians, 70% of them
women and children, were forcibly deported to Siberia, the Arctic Circle, and Central Asia as a consequence of political
upheaval and as a tool of oppression. In presenting this paper, I will discuss the legacy of massive collective trauma in a
post-communist society by exploring the process of trauma narrativization revealed through an extended interview with a
Lithuanian woman survivor of the 1941 deportation. The manifestations of unspeakable suffering expressed in her life
narrative will be evaluated in light of the psychoanalytic literature, with a particular focus on potential mechanisms for the
intergenerational transmission of trauma. As cross-border displacement continues to be a prevalent issue in today's
world, the insights from this study might help inform our understanding of resiliency as well as long-term social and
psychological impacts of such circumstances.
Hibakusha (Atomic Bomb Survivor) in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after 70 years: Psychological
Transformation from the Impact and Trauma of the Atomic Bomb to Seeking Meaning in their Lives
Momoko Takanashi
Adelphi University, United States of America; mtakanashi8@gmail.com
Despite the significance of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, psychological issues among the
bomb survivors has not been well studied while the physiological impacts have been extensively researched in Japan. It
has been suggested that this lack of research on the psychological aspects of those survivors may be due to their silence
about their traumatic experiences influenced possibly by the following reasons: 1) Japanese civilians did not have any
knowledge of atomic bombs and the effects of nuclear radiation on the human body during and for a certain period of
time after the war. Therefore, those survivors were and are often viewed by society as contaminators for various
diseases, such as leukemia, and carriers of genetic mutations to a fetus. This may have resulted in their silence in order
to avoid stigmatization and discrimination in Japanese society, 2) The dropping of atomic bombs had been supported by
other nations, and accordingly, the death of civilians by the dropping of the atomic bombs was rationalized, and 3) Many
of the survivors feel tormented by the sense of tremendous guilt for not being able to rescue others who were dying in the
midst of the chaos. However, some survivors have been coming out from their silence, speaking about their traumas, and
seeking meaning in their lives. Analyzing some testimonies of atomic bomb survivors, this paper will discuss
psychological transformation of some survivors through psychoanalytic lenses
3:00p 10D: PANEL
m4:30p
m
Room
D
Inclusion and Exclusion, Inside and Outside, Me, My Self and the Other: Where Do the
"Boundaries" Lie?
Zak Mucha1, Pfeffer Eisin2
1
Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis; 2Erikson Institute; zak@zakmucha.com, pfeffereisin@gmail.com
This panel focuses on the way in which psychoanalytic theory informs thinking about boundaries. Boundaries, defined as
“a line which marks the limits of an area” or “a limit of a sphere of activity,” are, for the most part, far more clear in the
abstract than they are in practice. Much of one’s self is created in response to the other, the surrounding culture and the
world. This panel examines the space in between the boundaries- between the self and the other, between an artist and
the surrounding culture, between the client and therapist. It looks closely at the felt experience of the individual, and the
shared experience of a dyad, one’s experience of culture and how one forms in reaction to the outside world. Particular
attention will be paid to how the boundary, and where it is drawn, can impact the individual and their experience of reality.
Annihilation and Inclusion: Flitcraft, Elvis, and the Mekons
Zak Mucha
Zak Mucha, Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis; zak@zakmucha.com
75
Annihilation and Inclusion: Flitcraft, Elvis, and the Mekons
Lacan’s view from the side reveals the protective boundaries of identity. This presentation examines issues of inclusion
and exclusion in ‘outsider art’ and commercially created art, even if the latter art rejects the culture to which it contributed.
These boundary issues are created in the traumas that separate the individual from the other. Perceptions of inclusion
and exclusion become the stories we tell ourselves to survive childhood trauma. Creating who we are, we fill in the
blanks to justify contradictions of the external world. The more disparate those contradictions, the more desperately the
individual seeks reciprocity from the other, finding a manner to mediate that split sense of self until that narcissistic need
is met. At best, the subject seeks a return to the peace of being at one with its surroundings and, at worst, fears total
diffusion of the self. The outsider, self-anointed or assigned by the other, must create a narrative in order to protect the
self.
Troubling the Boundaries
Pfeffer Eisin
Erikson Institute; pfeffereisin@gmail.com
The treatment of children with histories of severe, chronic relationship trauma presents substantial challenges for the
psychotherapist. When the client suffers from psychotic symptoms as a result of these early experiences, communication
between client and psychotherapist often remains largely, perhaps entirely, dependent upon non-verbal, unconscious
transmissions. In their efforts to understand the child’s experience of the world, the psychotherapist encourages and
opens themselves to the realm of symbols, play, art and music, which offer the child direct ways to clearly communicate
that which they have no words for.
Psychoanalysis offers many ways to think about the boundaries between the self and the other. Yet these boundaries are
often clear in theory only- in the felt experience of sitting with another’s pain we often find that it can be quite difficult to
discern what is our experience and what is that of the client. There is risk on either side- to lose one’s self, or to cut off
the experience of the other. This paper examines what happens in the space in between, that which is co-created and
has great personal meaning for both the therapist and the client. It will consider what is to be gained by “troubling”
boundaries, by perhaps remaining open when fear might invite us to close ourselves off, thereby learning from our felt
experience that which the client needs us to know. This paper will also consider how the space in between is embedded
in and influenced by the surrounding culture- of the therapist, of the client and of their particular time in history.
3:00p 10L: ROUNDTABLE
m - Session Chair: Jennifer Durham, Adelphi University
4:30p
m
Librar
y
Graduate Student Roundtable: Psychotherapy and Activism
Chair(s): Sudhir
Kakar (Goa, India)
Presenter(s): Marie Hansen (Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus), Amber Trotter (California Institute
of Integral Studies),Kelsey Power (Adelphi University), Eliza Wierzbinska (Columbia University Teachers
College)
Is psychotherapy the place for activism? Current clinical psychology graduate students discuss the intersection between
social justice and therapy.
4:30p Coffee Break
m-
76
5:00p
m
Dinin
g
Room
5:00p 11A: WORKING SESSION
m6:30p
m
Room
A
Developing a Global Psychosocial Network to Address Healing , Self-protection and Activism in
Conflict Areas
Jancis Long, Judith Roth
Psychologists for Social Responsibility, United States of America; jancisl@hotmail.com, Judysroth@gmail.com
This APCS 15 Working Session proposal concerns a developing Global Psychosocial Network (GPN) to provide
psychological support to professionals and volunteers working in conflict and disaster areas. We will focus on bringing a
therapeutic presence across the “borders” of cultures, political arrangements, dangerous life experience and
psychological techniques.
The GPN team will address:
a) The concept of psychological accompaniment, a process whereby professionals can be helpful to those living in
battles zones in reworking the meaning of anguish. Psychological accompaniment is meant to differentiate between the
conventional in-depth therapeutic stance from the unconventional engagements needed along the back roads. We will
reflect on the synergy between our psychoanalytic understandings of presence and containment and psychosocial work
with indigenous populations.
b) Between healing, self protection and activism: Tensions arising from working with people simultaneously engaged in
recovery from trauma, self protection, and political activism in a situation of human rights violations and cultural tolerance
for violence. How is support balanced between needed healing, awareness and emotions concerning inhumane
social/cultural factors and negotiating both the dangers resulting activism and the shutting down of dissent. We will
discuss work with humanitarian workers in Palestine and counselors at an acid attack rehabilitation center in Uganda,
and ensions arising in mental health system reforms in the USA.
c) Developing a psychosocial support network.
Organizational , economic, ethical and training Issuesa arising in developing a global support network. in disaster and
conflict settings, often with people tho have experienced massive or chronic trauma and frequently communicating at a
distance with colleagues and clients.. (e.g. by Skype. Every part of this proposal involves the connections between
psyche, social structures, cultural values and the tensions troubling people and theories in the spaces between. (289
words)
5:00p 11B: PAPER SESSION: Disordered Borders
m - Session Chair: Benjamin Alex Morsa, George Washington University
6:30p
m
77
Room
B
Guilt, Shame, and the Border between the Individual and Society
Oded Goldberg
Bar Ilan University, Israel; odedgold1@bezeqint.net
From a sociological and historical perspective, emotions are narratives that are culturally constituted, primarily through
language and discourse and are connected to political cultural and economic aspects of society. I would like to compare
between the narratives offered by Freud and by Kohut and his successors pertaining to the emotions of guilt and shame.
Both are considered to be moral sentiments, which also function as social regulators; therefore, any narrative of these
emotions concerns the relationship between the individual, society, and the boundaries between them. I propose that
Freud offered a novel and subversive narrative of guilt that was politically liberating, affecting the likes of the feminist
movement. This narrative's critical potential is rooted in the concept of the superego, which blurs the boundary between
the individual and society. Conversely, critics of psychoanalysis viewed this narrative as serving the values of hyperindividualistic capitalist consumer society. Kohut devised a shift from the Freudian "guilty man" discourse to a "tragic
man" discourse, involving a move from a discourse of guilt to a discourse of shame. Yet, this movement towards a
discourse of "tragic man" also neutralized psychoanalysis' critical potential, as it articulated a narrative of shame that
disregards culture's role in the constitution of this emotional experience. In line with the liberal tradition, the Kohutian
narrative regards the individual as a sealed unit with discrete borders that society and culture can affect from the outside
at most. While Freudian thought regarding guilt discloses the cultural manipulation that the subject undergoes from
within, Kohut views shame as a personal issue while disregarding the context of a consumer culture, which produces
experiences of shame and perpetual "discontent". Finally, I will offer an outline for a critical narrative of shame within
capitalist consumer society.
The Trouble with Psychosocial Studies
Peter Redman
Open University, United Kingdom; peter.redman@open.ac.uk
In the UK, the social sciences and psychoanalysis are in closest dialogue in the field of psychosocial studies.
Psychosocial studies were first taught in the early 1980s when the University of East London presented a number of
undergraduate courses using the title. (The term ‘psychosocial’ itself has a much longer history, of course). Since the
1980s, teaching and research labelled psychosocial studies have spread. Although not exactly mainstream, the field now
has a firm niche in UK universities and has started to make connections with equivalent projects in northern Europe and
beyond, including the USA.
Although psychoanalysis has been and continues to be a significant influence on psychosocial studies, the field has also
always seen itself as troubling that discipline. Like Freudo-Marxism, Frankfurt School critical theory and the processbased ideas of group analysis before it, the field has sought to reorientate psychoanalysis in a sociological direction,
aiming to understand what is social in individual and interpersonal psychic life and what is unconscious in social and
collective life.
That goal – the psychosocial conceived as a fully social psychoanalysis or a fully psychoanalytic sociology – remains an
important one. Yet, as is well known, it is beset by problems of its own. Not only are psychosocial studies constantly
destabilised by what they seek to exclude from their boundaries, their attempt to know about things that are unconscious
challenges many of the assumptions of intellectual knowledge and research. What does it mean to be knowledgeable
about things that escape knowledge?
This paper seeks to explore the field’s relationship with its interlocutors – past and present; acknowledged and otherwise
– and asks what it means to give space to the unconscious in critical academic and other work.
Exclusion and Social Dismemberment Associated with Psychosis and Homelessness
Catherine Anne Marsh
Adelphi University, United States of America; marshcatherine@gmail.com
Both psychosis and homelessness may be psychological and physical expressions of a breakdown in the mechanisms
that would normally allow and drive humans to join the social body. Scanlon and Adlam posit that for some, social
membership demands too great a cost and that to “dis-member” is an empowering refusal to participate in what seems
like a violent system. They argue that social health systems invest in care that inadvertently places blame on the
78
individual while allowing the dominant social order to avoid responsibility. Declerck goes so far as to say that health
systems actively provide inadequate services to punish publicly those who mock “normal” aspirations. From a different
angle, Lacan looks at intrapsychic processes in psychosis, another form of social dismemberment. Psychosis, he says,
involves a foreclosure in access to the social order, which results in the inability to weave individual experience with that
of others such that “common concern and interrelatedness are lacking.” Similarly, theorists of mind suggest that lack of
secure attachment fails to “house” individuals in the minds of others and to promote reflective functioning. Secure
attachment is therefore a necessary aspect of belonging. Using this model for group functioning, Scanlon and Adlam
have asserted, that social policy and “offended” social members strive to forget those considered offensive, and it is this
act of “un-housing” that prevents these individuals from participating in the social group. This presentation will investigate
aspects of psychosis and homelessness related to exclusion and social dismemberment and will explore novel
approaches to inclusivity.
5:00p 11C: Session Withdrawn
m - Session Chair: Lita Iole Crociani-Windland, University of the West of England
6:30p
m
Room
C
5:00p 11D: WORKING SESSION
m6:30p
m
Room
D
Implications of Psychoanalysis, and Especially the Presentations at this Conference, for Activism
and Organizing in Social Movements
Tod Sloan1, Angie Voela2, Marilyn C harles3, Katie Gentile4
1
Lewis & Clark College; 2University of East London; 3Austen Riggs Center; 4John Jay College of Criminal
justice; sloan@lclark.edu,A.Voela@uel.ac.uk, mcharlesphd@gmail.com
Conference participants are invited to reflect on the implications of psychoanalysis, and especially the presentations at
this conference, for activism and organizing in social movements. Questions to be posed will be:
What insights can you share about how psychoanalytic theory illuminates the obstacles that activists in progressive social
movements face as they work to raise awareness and mobilize their fellow human beings for sociopolitical
transformation? How can ideology and propaganda be challenged? How can, apathy, fear, and hopelessness be
addressed?
In what ways does psychoanalysis help us understand the affective life of activists in their work with each other in
groups? How can conflict within and between be transformed into effective collaboration?
Can psychoanalytically-oriented academics and clinicians offer anything particular as members of activist organizations
or collectives?
Notes from the dialogue will be shared with members of APCS and perhaps shared through relevant social media.
79
Index of Participants & Sessions
Ainslie
Ricardo
3B, 6, 10B
Alcorn
Marshall
1A, 2D
Alexander-Floyd
Nikol
9B
Alford
C. Fred
1B, 2B, 10C
Archangelo
Ana
1A
Barbre
Claude
2A, 4C, 9D
Barbre
Jill
3L, 4C
Bassin
Donna
3B
Bauer
Daniel
9A
Bell
Deanne
7D
Bennett
Kori
3D
Bird-Pollan
Stefan
10A
Bonfiglio
Thomas Paul
2D
Bristow
Alan
1D
80
Brown
Robin S.
3A
Brozovic
Natasa
9D
Buccino
Daniel
9C
Buechler
Sandra
8C
Butaney
Bhupin
4L
C harles
Marilyn
8L
Cavanagh
Sheila L.
1C
Charles
Marilyn
1A, 9L, 11D
Chavez
Jessica
2A
Choi
Andrew Young
1L
Churchill
Heather
4B
Clark
Elizabeth
3D
Cohan
Jeremy
2L
Costigan
Andrew
8L, 10B
Crawford
Christopher
7C
Crociani-Windland
Lita Iole
10C, 11C
Demir
Ayla Michelle
2D
Devinney
helen
4B
Dillon
Justina
10C
Dwivedi
Kritika
1L
Eamon
Kathleen
10A
Egit
Esin
9B
Eisin
Pfeffer
3L, 10D
Flores
Erika
3L
Frankel
Jay
3A
Gabrellas
Greg
2L
Galioto
Erica
2C
Gaztambide
Daniel
9A
Gentile
Jill
4D, 11D
Gentile
Katie
8B
81
Glanz
Katherine
2A, 8B
Glass
James
1A
Goldberg
Oded
11B
Goss
Andria
Greif
Don
4D
Guevara
Crystal
10B
Haaken
Jan
3B
Hansen
Marie
10L
Hassinger
Jane Anne
3B
Hedlund
Sarah
4B
Hegeman
Elizabeth
9B
Henry
Phillip
3A
Hook
Derek
8A
Hundt
Stephanie
3C
Ilahi
M. Nasir
8C
Ioannou
Yianna
9A
Jackson
Jeffrey M.
10A
Jenkins
Scott
2L, 7C
Kakar
Sudhir
Keynote, 4L, 9L
Kaplan
Andrew
9A
Khouri
Lama
4A
Koditschek
Benjamin
7C
Layton
Lynne
1A, 2L, 4A
Leopard
Danny Ray
9A
Lichtenstein
David
4D
Lijtmaer
Ruth
3C
Lombardi
Karen
2C
Long
Jancis
11A
MacShane
Kate
7B
Maher
Alice
1D
82
Malla
Harpreet
1C, 8L
Marsh
Catherine
8L, 11B
Massé
Michelle
7A, 8B
McDermott
Hannah Wood
10B
McIntyre
Shannon
3C
Medina
Francisco
4A, 7L
Méndez
Teresa
7A, 9C
Merchant
Almas
Keynote, 4L
Morsa
Benjamin Alex
3D, 7B, 11B
Motomura
Akiko
2A
Mucha
Zak
10D
Murtagh
Maryann D.
8A
Nath
Sanjay
4L
Nayar-Akhtar
Monisha
9L
Neill
Calum
8A
O'Loughlin
Michael
4L, 5, 7B
Obeid
Nadine
4A
Podlucka
Dušana
7L
Power
Kelsey
8B, 10L
Poznansky
Olga
1B
Rashkin
Esther
3C, 7A
Redman
Peter
4D, 11B
Reisner
Gavriel
1C
Reynolds
Natasha
9D
Reynoso
Joseph Steven
1C
Rifino
Mike
7L
Roland
Jay Alan
8C
Rosenblatt
David
6, 10B
Roth
Judith
7A, 11A
Rothe
Katharina
9B
83
Rothschild
Louis
2C
Ruderman
D. B.
1C
Ruth
Richard
7B
Samuels
Bob
1D
Scholom
Allan
3C
Scholom
Elizabeth
1B, 8L
Seitler
Burton
4L, 7A
Shang
Matthew
9D
Sheehi
Lara
4A
Sheehi
Stephen P.
4A
Short
Nicola
2D
Sloan
Tod
2B, 3A, 11D
Snell
Amanda
9D
Southgate
Karl
4C
Stephens
Michelle
9B
Takanashi
Momoko
8L, 10C
Tholfsen
Barbara
8A
Trotter
Amber
3A, 10L
Vianna
Eduardo
7L
Voela
Angie
2C, 8A, 11D
Watkins
Mary
8D
Wierzbinska
Eliza
10L
Williams
Angel
3L
Yates
Candida
4C
Yost
Megan
8B
84
List of Board Members
Officers
Co-Chairs:
Marilyn Charles & Michael O’Loughlin
Executive Director
C. Fred Alford
Secretary:
Almas merchant
Treasurer:
Dan Livney
Membership Director:
Editor, PCS:
Lynne Layton & Peter Redman
Members at large
Ainslie
Alcorn
Rico
Marshall
University of Texas, Austin
George Washington University
2016
2015
Alexander-Floyd
Nikol
Rutgers University
2015
Drury
Doreen
University of Maryland
2014
Durham
Jennifer
Adelphi University
2014
Figlio
Karl
University of Essex
2016
Friedlander
Jennifer
Pomona College
2015
85
Haaken
Jan
Portland State University
2016
Jagodzinski
Jan
University of Alberta
2015
Krips
Henry
Claremont Graduate University
2016
Massé
Michelle
Louisiana State University
2014
Pivnick
Billie
White Institute
2015
Rashkin
Esther
University of Utah
2016
Ready
Trisha
Redman
Peter
The Open University
2014
Ruti
Marilyn
University of Toronto
2016
Short
Nicola
York University
2017
Sloan
Tod
Lewis and Clark Graduate School of
Education and Counseling
2017
Crociani-Windland
Angie
Lita
University of East London
University of East London
2016
2016
Wyatt
Jean
Occidental College
2015
Voela
2015
Emeritus Members
Robert A. Paul
Robert Samuels
Simon Clarke
Charles Stephenson
Paul Verhaege
86