This program, when participated in its entirety, is available for 2.5 continuing education credits.  Division 39 is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists.  Division 39 maintains responsibility for this program and its content. This presentation also meets the requirements of WAC 246-809-620 (definition of recognized categories of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists and social workers).

This class has filled. To be added to the waitlist, please contact jallemandpsych@gmail.com. 

In this Alliance Master Class, Marilyn Charles, PhD will lead participants in a discussion of her 2022 essay, “The Haunting of Hill House: Psyche, Soma, and Destiny”.  All participants will receive a copy of the essay upon registration.  In order to provide an intimate, stimulating discussion, the group will be limited to 10 participants who can directly engage with the author. 

Charles, M.  (2022).  The Haunting of Hill House: Psyche, soma, and destiny.  American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 82(1), 1-21.

Primary Source Materials:

Jackson, S.  (1959).  The haunting of hill house.  New York, NY: Viking Press.

Wise, R.  (Producer & Director).  (1963).  The haunting of hill house [Motion picture].  USA: Argyle Enterprises.

Flanagan, M.  (Producer & Director).  (2018).  The haunting of hill house [Television broadcast].  USA: Paramount.

“There exists for each one of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past” (Gaston Bachelard).

Fairy tales and horror stories inhabit the realm of terrible truths, affording opportunities to survive and work through them from the safe distance of displacement.  Psychoanalysis, too, provides spaces to enter into that enigmatic realm of imagistic, oneiric meanings and explore possibilities beyond the concrete manifestations of daily life, to penetrate the mysteries and discover the patterns.  Stories are the context in which identity develops and through which personal meanings are both discovered and hidden in our engagements with one another:  “We are, to put it briefly, ‘authored,’ configured by an internalized Other in much the same way as a hero is authored by the writer of fictional narratives” (Erdinast-Vulcan, 2008).  Through free associations, dreams, and reverie, we encounter meanings beyond the stories we have learned to tell ourselves, stories that both describe and obscure us. 

Like psychoanalysis, myth, literature, and film also invite us to think in metaphor, to explore possibilities beyond the concrete manifestations of daily life.  The novel (film, television), unlike its epic predecessors, offers us a more personal, psychological and contextualized set of metaphorical reflections: “The novel’s ground and foundation, beginning and end, success and failure, depends entirely, as the epic never did, on the author and the power of his interiority to reflect, desire, imagine, interpret, and finally, to treat his subjectivity like an object, which is perceived as a phenomenon among phenomenon” (Kurrik, 1975, p. 106).   Considering theory alongside the dual lenses of literary and screen portrayals of a haunted house, we will investigate subjectivity in relation to the realm of the uncanny and explore ways in which we are haunted by truths we fail to face.

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, (Co-Chair) is a staff psychologist at the Austen Riggs Center, a psychoanalyst in private practice in Stockbridge, MA, and Co-Chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS).  Her affiliations include the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (CCPP); Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM); and Harvard Medical School.  She is a contributing editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, and a member of the editorial boards of numerous other psychoanalytic journals.  She is actively engaged in mentoring, creating professional opportunities, and promoting community involvement and socially relevant research.  Dr. Charles’s research interests include creativity, psychosis, resilience, reflective function and the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

Dr. Charles is also an artist, a poet, and a writer who has presented her work nationally and internationally, publishing over 100 articles and book chapters as well as five books: Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience (2002); Constructing Realities: Transformations Through Myth and Metaphor (2004); Learning from Experience: a Guidebook for Clinicians (2004); Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan (2011); and Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live (2015).  Her edited volumes include: Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis (2017); Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering (with Michael O’Loughlin, 2014); Women and Psychosis (2019), Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness (with Marie Brown, 2019); and The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education: Psychoanalytic, Attachment, and Developmental Perspectives (with Jill Bellinson, 2019).

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will be able to explain the importance of the uncanny to psychoanalysis.  
• Participants will be able to distinguish between a Freudian and Jungian perspective on the relationship between images and meaning.
• Participants will be able to explain the link between primary process and aesthetic sensibilities. 

Further Suggested Reading:

• Charles, M. (July 1, 2021). Aesthetic sensibility, Primary process, and meaning.  Association for Psychosocial Studies Conference.
• Feigelson, C. (1993). Personality death, object loss, and the uncanny.  International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 74: 331-345.
• Hillman, J. (2005). Peaks and vales: The soul/spirit distinction as basis for the difference between psychotherapy and spiritual discipline. In Uniform edition of the writings of James Hillman, v. 3: Senex & puer. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, pp. 67-90.
• Laplanche, J. (2019).  Should we burn Melanie Klein?  Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 67(5): 825-838.

Recent publications:

• Charles, M. (2021). Meaning, metaphor, and metabolization: The case of eating disorders.  American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81(4): 444-466.
• Charles, M. (2021). What can a woman know: Subjectification, desire, perversion, and possibility.  Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 22(2): 96-104.
• Gomez, K. L. & Charles, M. (2020).  Mythological bridge between intergenerational transmission of unmourned loss and substance addiction.  American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 107(2): 153-174.
• Charles, M. (2019).  Abjection, identity and the enigmatic message: Embodied meanings and social constructions.  Journal of Psychosocial Studies, 12(1-2): 69-79.
• Charles, M. (2019). The dream and the image: Creative transformations in psychoanalytic space.  American Journal of Psychoanalysis 79(2): 174-195. 
• Charles, M. (2019). Trauma, identity, and social justice.  Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, 24(2): 118-131.
• Charles, M., & Bellinson, J. (2019).  The importance of play in early childhood education: Psychoanalytic, attachment, and developmental perspectives. New York: Routledge.
• Charles, M. (2018).  Introduction to contemporary psychoanalysis: Defining terms and building bridges.  New York: Routledge.
• Charles, M. (2015). Psychoanalysis and literature: The stories we live.  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Video:
 

Division 39 Presidential Address (2015): The Future of Psychoanalysis (https://vimeo.com/129141233)

Participants: This event is designed for graduate level students in mental health and all mental health professionals from introductory to advanced levels.  The presentation is geared for clinicians who wish to advance their knowledge and expand their skill base in psychodynamic clinical work.

Refund Policy: Refunds less a $35 handling fee will be given up until three weeks before the presentation. 

This program, when participated in its entirety, is available for 2.5 continuing education credits.  Division 39 is committed to accessibility and non-discrimination in its continuing education activities.  Division 39 is also committed to conducting all activities in conformity with the American Psychological Association's Ethical Principles for Psychologists.  Participants are asked to be aware of the need for privacy and confidentiality throughout the program.  If program content becomes stressful, participants are encouraged to process these feelings during discussion periods. If participants have special needs, we will attempt to accommodate them. Please address questions, concerns and any complaints to John Allemand at 253-509-8302.  There is no commercial support for this program nor are there any relationships between the CE Sponsor, presenting organization, presenter, program content, research, grants or other funding that could reasonably be construed as conflicts of interest.  Participants will be informed of the utility/validity of the content/approach discussed (including the basis for the statements about validity/utility), as well as the limitations of the approach and most common (and severe) risks, if any, associated with the program's content.