30th Annual Forum Conference - Me/NotMe/#MeToo
Please note: This year's conference will be held at the Mercer Island Community and Events Center, which is a new location for us. Directions to the Center can be found at http://www.mercergov.org/files/micec_directions.pdf.
Morning presentations explore the theme of Me/NotMe/#MeToo from a variety of perspectives. In the afternoon, we are pleased to present a plenary with special guests Tim Dean PhD and Karol Marshall PhD focused on sexual boundary violations in psychoanalytic and academic communities.
Registration: 8:30 am - 9 am
First Sessions: 9 am -10:30 am
Presenter: Robert Bergman, MD - "Love and Exclusion”
Loving one another, as desirable as it is, has undesirable consequences for each of us and for humanity in general since we are instinctually inclined to cement our attachments with hatred of those not included and to form warring tribes.
Presenters: Joan Fiset, MA LMHC, Erica Rubin, PsyD - “Tuning In: Trauma’s Overtones and Elusive Frequencies”
Participants will discover ways to attune to internal feeling states including a sense of mute disconnection and the isolation trauma can result in. Poetry and right-brain writing strategies will assist us in learning to sense and get to know this elusive yet powerful region of emotional terrain.
Presenter: Shierry Nicholsen, PhD, LMHC, FIPA - “After Wrongdoing: On Moral Injury, the Complexities of Apology, and the Case for Reparations”
After wrongdoing, victims, perpetrators, and bystanders may hope for some kind of reconciliation or for restoration of a “just world.” This paper explores the complexities of these hopes and of efforts in this direction at both the private and public levels.
Presenters: Melissa Meade, PhD & Michael Allison, MA, LMHC - “The Horror of Self and the Horror of Others: Psychoanalytic Connectivity in the Films of David Cronenberg”
David Cronenburg’s early films use metaphors of disease, technology, and hallucination to elucidate the productive horrors of intersubjectivity and psychoanalytic connectivity. Drawing on psychoanalysis and film theory, transgressive and transformative subjectivity will be explored through film analysis and discussion.
Second Sessions: 10:45 am - 12:15 pm
Presenter: Margaret Crastnopol, Ph.D - “The Psychoanalytic Therapist’s Achilles’ Heels: Owning and Offsetting the Clinical Impact of our Intrinsic Flaws”
The psychoanalytic therapist is likely to have certain characteristic “Achilles’ heels” that are under-recognized or disavowed, as they arouse a “defective-me” sense of self. This presentation explores how such all-too-human flaws can be teased out and worked with, thereby promoting better psychotherapeutic functioning.
Presenter: B. Mason Judy, MA - “Fantasy of the Flesh”
In this creative writing workshop, participants will express and explore the Me/Not-Me in the formation of their sexuality guided by an excerpt from Sandra Simonds’ poem “Orlando.”
Presenter: Carol Poole, MA, LMHC - “How do you fight in the depressive position?"
What might it mean to fight in the depressive position? If fighting is a necessary part of health, how can we use our understanding of psychological depth to help us and our patients learn to fight well in urgent times?
Presenter: Kris Wheeler, MA, LMHC and Frank Dauer, PhD - “The art of becoming and being “me”
Aesthetic experience - its somatic basis and its significance to growth of the mind - will be discussed drawing upon a confluence between psychotherapy, somatic studies (especially developmental movement patterning) and postmodern performance art. Demonstrations vivify and stimulate imaginative participation.
Catered Lunch and Annual Meeting: 12:30 pm -1:45 pm
Plenary: 2 pm - 3:30 pm
Untouchable: A Dialogue between the University & Psychoanalysis
The Alliance 2019 forum plenary will center on two talks and a public dialogue between Karol Marshall, PhD, and Tim Dean, PhD, focusing on sexual boundary violations in psychoanalytic and academic communities.
Dean's paper, "Untouchable," draws on his experience as student and professor witnessing incidents of sexual harassment, seduction, and stalking. He will offer his observations about the institutional culture that attempts to make such incidents invisible, forgettable. Dean develops a psychoanalytic framework to make sense of some of this, drawing on Freud, Lacan, and Laplanche, as well as feminist and queer theory.
Marshall’s talk, “Sex and power,” will overview some of the destructive processes she has observed in professional psychology and psychoanalysis in the Northwest during the last half century. Times have changed; in fundamental ways, people haven’t. Marshall considers how Dean's reflections can be brought back to our psychoanalytic discipline to help us illuminate boundary violations in our own disciplines.
Conversation between the two speakers will address problems inherent in the effort to build and maintain coherent social structures in face of the incoherence that lies within us all.
Tim Dean, Ph.D., is a scholar of human sexuality with a broad background in psychoanalytic theory and queer theory. He has taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Washington, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently Professor of English. At SUNY-Buffalo he was director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. His books include Beyond Sexuality (2000), Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (2001), Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009), and Porn Archives (2014).
Karol Marshall, Ph.D., was the founding Director of the Northwest Alliance. She is Board Certified in Psychoanalysis, and a faculty member with the Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Seattle. Marshall practices psychology and psychoanalysis in Seattle. She has published in a variety of professional journals including: “Contemporary Psychoanalysis,” “Psychoanalytic Dialogues,” and “Psychoanalytic Psychology.” Many of her publications have to do with aspects of sexuality, including clinical boundary violations. She is coleader of a creative non-fiction writing group for therapists. Recent writing has concerned the subjectivity of color and sex.
