expanding psychoanalytic passion: a conference in memory of and inspired by Christina Emanuel

presentations

Autism is the Treatment: Suturing the Rupture Between Body and Mind by Leon Brenner, Ph.D: Autism is commonly characterized as a developmental disorder in mainstream contexts. However, when viewed through the lens of psychoanalysis, all forms of subjectivity appear disordered, perpetually restricted in a state of arrested development. This lecture aims to reconceptualize autism not as a disorder, but as a unique approach to bridging the deep rupture between body and mind. Drawing on Dr. Brenner’s extensive research in Lacanian psychoanalysis, we will present autism as an existential perspective that healthcare practitioners ought to embrace and support, rather than seek to modify or eliminate. By actively listening to autistic individuals and creating a space for their voices to be genuinely heard, we can shift our focus from curing to caring.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Substance Use and Mis-use by D. Bradley Jones, Psy.D, LCSW: Traditional psychoanalytic theorizing and discourse has had a long history of bifurcated thinking around substance use and misuse. Just as the narcissist was deemed un-analyzable for many years, the substance user was also excluded from traditional psychoanalytic treatment until they were able to manage sobriety. Traditional substance use treatments and the tenants of Alcoholics Anonymous are equally burdened with problematic assumptions about the character of the substance user. Traditional treatments propound inarguable ideas about what will help people shift from addictive action. When these programs work, they offer great benefit to our patients. When they do not work, what can the psychoanalyst keep in mind to help motivate their patients to stay engaged in psychoanalytically informed treatment rather than succumbing to a therapeutic stance that implicitly blames the patient because they will not stop using? How do we help the patient to start considering their substance use without requiring them to stop? This aim of this lecture is to stimulate a discussion about the psychoanalytic treatment of substance use and misuse and other self-harming behaviors.

Placement, Displacement, Replacement: Where the Social and the Unconscious Interpenetrate by Steven H. Knoblauch, Ph.D.: This event will consist of a series of private and shared reflections on how we and our patients experience our place in relation to others, how we describe this experience and the motions/emotions of these experiences including being replaced and/or displaced.

On Using Metaphors In the Analytic Conversation by Giuseppe Civitarese, M.D. Ph.D.: Within post-Bionian analytic field theory, metaphors have a special status. For they represent a way of talking to the patient that does not saturate meaning – it is less about “giving interpretations” and more about having a meaningful conversation, i.e. one that aims to strengthen the bond. In short, it is about privileging being over having, developing function over possessing knowledge, transforming into O rather than K, in Bion’s jargon. Not only that, but metaphor can be a way of communicating to the patient, without necessarily making it explicit, that the analyst takes responsibility for listening to the signals of the analytic field from the point of view of the We and not from that which keeps the I/you split active. To illustrate these points, some clinical vignettes will be briefly discussed.

Metaphors and Their Storylines by Daniel Goldin, M.F.T, Psy.D.: Aristotle believed that having a grasp of metaphor was a sign of genius, as it “implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilarities.” Freud saw this metaphoric grasping together in the art of the dreamer, who compresses into a single story a day’s worth — perhaps even a life’s worth — of important stories. He compared the metaphoric mandate of condensation implicit in the dream work to the task an illustrator faces in coming up with a single illustration to represent the day’s headlines. This talk aims to trace the hidden imaginative process behind this process of augmenting through reduction, of compressing dissimilar ideas into one working parable. Both the dreamer and the analyst follow invisible immaterial schemas or storylines that serve as a kind of procedure for the telling of a story but are not the story itself. Like the symmetry of a group of marbles, a storyline has no existence of its own — symmetry cannot be separated out from the grouping of marbles nor a storyline from its story — and yet both have the power to organize other groupings and other stories. They have an immaterial coding power. We psychoanalysts have divided ourselves into tribes, each arguing in favor of one site of psychoanalytic change — the here-and-now — the transference — the so-called real relationship – dreams — trauma — infancy — the self-self-object matrix — moving from dissociation to conflict — but our true art lies in following a structural invariant that invisibly organizes our imaginings together in all these realms, following it wherever it may lead with a certain faith in the rule of metaphor.

Interpretation: Voice of the Field by Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D.: To patients, the most memorable moments in psychoanalytic treatment are seldom the contents of the analyst’s interpretations, but the feeling of being understood. Interpretations are most meaningful, I argue, not because of what they say, but because each one is evidence that the analyst, who generally becomes someone of great significance to the patient, knows the patient more than they did the moment before. I call this process “witnessing” (Stern, 2009, 2012, 2022, 2023), and as a result of it patients not only know and feel—they also “know and feel that they know and feel.” They can feel their roles in authoring their own experience. Therapeutic action results: Patients “come into possession of themselves.”

Interpretations are the outcome of shifts in the interpersonal field, which reveal this new freedom to think and feel. This allows creation of the analyst’s interpretations, which therefore are a sign of the new way of being that has now become possible between analyst and patient. Field shifts are jointly created, without conscious intention; and interpretations arise from field shifts. Interpretations are therefore not created independently by the analyst, but are instead the voice of the field. The article ends with a clinical illustration of these ideas.