NPSI September 2025 (Pre-EBOR) Scientific Meeting: "Why Birds Sing: True-Self as a Transitive Way of Being" presented by Peter Goldberg

Please join us for the fourth and final Pre-EBOR Scientific Meeting leading up to the Fourteenth International Evolving British Object Relations Conference: Live from Seattle – The Music of Psychoanalysis, taking place October 17–19, 2025 in Seattle, Washington (USA). Where do we locate the source of true-self feeling? Just as the concept of the unconscious has been taken to signify a kind of buried property of the individual psyche, so has the conception of “true-self” commonly been viewed as something domiciled in a private psychical interiority. But an alternative reading of Winnicott’s work suggests that authenticity and realness of self-experience depends not on the cultivation of an interior core, but on being able to live transitionally, in the movement between subjective and objective registers of perception. Extending this idea, we might describe true-self experience as essentially transitive – i.e., as a way of being in the world that rests on the ability to enter transiently into shared or collective states of being, thereby rejuvenating and expanding the sense of self. Music gives us a model for transitive modes of experience, and reveals, importantly, the psycho-sensory basis of shared experience. Considered in light of the function of transitivity, certain contemporary maladies (e.g., dissociative, attentional, and sensory disorders) can be understood in terms of the inability to shift states adaptively, hence the inability to access domains of “shared music”, leaving the individual isolated and dislocated. This picture has important clinical implications: it shifts our conception of the clinical process to one where state-transitions take on greater significance, and the analyst’s ability to enter more fully into shared psycho-sensory states becomes a central element in the clinical situation.