Community Events (non-Alliance)

In this workshop, we will consider how discussions of race are avoided in interracial couples. The interracial couple’s dissociation from racial stratification leaves the couple ensconced in the paranoid-schizoid position, where internal and external pressures contribute to the couple enacting a monoracial identification aligned with white dominant norms. These racialized dynamics have an impact on mixed-race children.

Please join us at SPSI's new location in Eastlake for an evening of visual art, music, and poetry/prose by SPSI members, friends, and family. Food and drink will be provided.

The lecture presentation is based on Daniel Benveniste’s book, Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud’s Totem and Taboo. It leaves behind Freud’s psycho-Lamarckian assumption, and looks for analogous relations between libido development, psychopathology, prehistoric cultural evolution, myth, and ritual. Benveniste considers human social instincts in relation to primatology and Hominin evolution and finds their manifestations elaborated in the artifacts of prehistoric culture.

Many colleagues are familiar with the forms of anxiety associated with Klein’s ideas of the paranoid schizoid and depressive positions. In this presentation, Jeffrey Eaton looks at the work of several psychoanalysts who have described primordial forms of anxiety “below or before” the paranoid schizoid position. Eaton returns to the work of Seattle psychoanalyst Ivri Kumin who proposed the idea of ‘pre-object relations’. He links Kumin’s work with that of Anne Alvarez, Joshua Durban, Didier Houzel, and Suzanne Maiello.

Presenter: Eric Borgh

Presenter: Margarita Lalayan

Presenter: Katie Wilson

Presenter: Collin McFadden
Discussant: Terry Hanson

In recent years there has been a growing demand for psychoanalytic perspectives on the underlying dynamics of political figures and social phenomena. Dr. Koritar’s compelling and timely paper exemplifies this trend. Rather than investigating the individual psyche, he explores the relationship between psyche and the culture of the populace (i.e., the polis), delving into the complex underlying dynamics of leaders' hypnotic influence and the creation of an alternate reality.

In contemporary psychoanalysis, it has become popular to accuse the clinical field of hating sex, hating pleasure, and being generally – both in its theory and in its techniques – hostile and averse to sex and sexuality. Although this isn’t a particularly new argument – French psychoanalysis has been accusing American psychoanalysis of this in one form or another for the past seventy-five years - the argument has taken on new momentum with the popularization of queer theory, and alongside recent attempts to radicalize psychoanalytic theory and practice. In this presentation, Dr.