We all feel stuck at therapists. This may be difficult to admit (and seldom do we tell our patients). But rest assured, the experience is universal. Feeling stuck has been discussed.....(click for full description of OPC event)
Freud wrote that “the initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives.” If caring for the newborn, a stranger on arrival in this world, is our most primal human ethic, it serves the survival of the group. The biblical command that “you shall not wrong nor oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” and the admonition “to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares,” express core values of compassion for the vulnerable in the Judeo-Christian faiths (as well as in other matriarchal religions).
The renewed and revitalized interest in the body in contemporary psychoanalysis has occurred within a socio-cultural context that simultaneously demands our consideration of the social determinants of psychic life. In particular, the murder of George Floyd, overturning of Roe v. Wade, and increased violence against both Asian-American and LGBTQ individuals raise important questions regarding how fantasies about bodies are generated, inscribed, and perpetuated as well as what purpose such fantasies serve.
The COVID pandemic has infused the clinical encounter with the risk of transmission. Negotiating this risk with my patients has revealed how we use group identities to manage our sense of vulnerability. Each group’s risk strategies are interwoven with other values that are core constructs of identity. How do we navigate these interrelated, overdetermined constructs in the treatment room?
Discussing the experience of voice in analytic listening, this paper describes the central role of the voice in psychic development as well as in the therapeutic process, focusing on two psychopathologies: the vocal adhesive identification, which is characteristic of autistic states, and the psychotic split between voice and meaning.
Ferenczi's mutual analysis with Elizabeth Severn is one of the most controversial and consequential episodes in the history of psychoanalysis. Routinely attacked by conservative commentators as a boundary violation and an exploitation of the patient, Rudnytsky defends Ferenczi's experiment on both counts and argues that mutual analysis serves as a paradigm for the two-person model of relational analysis, as Freud's self-analysis is a paradigm for the one-person model of classical analysis.
The Impact on the Psyche of Not Belonging: Part 2 of The Recognition and Non-Recognition of Women Artists, Yayoi Kusama. The SPSI Art Salon Committee presents a screening of the film, "Kusama: Infinity: The Life and Art of Yayoi Kusama. This will be accompanied by a presentation and audience discussion led by John Olson, MD and Mary Sacco, LMHC. The program will occur on Zoom.
Some patients do not trust their own experiences. Since they cannot trust themselves, they look to others to show them what to do. Mimicry and “as if” behavior become the means for survival in a world that feels alien to them. Their ability to use personal truth for psychic nourishment is compromised. Desperate and isolated, they deaden themselves to get by. Worse still, their deadness may also indicate a developmental deficit that leaves them feeling as if they do not exist. Often, they describe themselves as going through the motions of life, but not living it.
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”* ~C.G. Jung