October 2024: "From Screaming to Dreaming: Notes on anxiety and its transformation" Presented by: Jeffrey L. Eaton, LMHC, FIPA, BCPsa

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. All these analysts have worked extensively with autism and this background informs their interest and focus on the earliest forms of anxiety. After reviewing this theoretical context, Eaton offers his own evolving formulation of the relationship between a floor for emotional experience and a background of emotional catastrophe. He suggests how this conceptual framework helps to appreciate the complexity of early self- development and psychopathology. A clinical vignette from a child psychotherapy is offered to illustrate the ideas. Learning Objectives- participants will be able to: 1.Describe the differentiation of pre-object relations from paranoid schizoid and depressive positions. 2. Recognize the importance of a floor for emotional experience and a background of emotional catastrophe and their influence on the early development of the self. 3. Describe the difference between the experience of the self as agent and the self as object.