NPSI Special Event
“Premonition: Hope and Dread in the Analytic Hour”
Judy K. Eekhoff, PhD, FIPA, BCPsa
The counterpart of the preconception is the premonition. Directly observed emotional states are significant only as premonitions.” — Wilfred Bion (1963)
We are pleased to offer this special 3-hour program—an extended learning experience designed to go beyond the scope of our monthly scientific meetings and allow for a deeper, more immersive engagement with a central concept in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking.
Tailored for psychoanalysts, candidates, and psychotherapists, this presentation brings theory vividly to life through its application to both psychotherapy and psychoanalytic practice. Participants will have the opportunity to refine their clinical listening and expand their capacity to work with the subtle, often elusive dimensions of the analytic field.
Focusing on the process of meaning-making in the analytic hour, the program explores how premonitions and intuitions—felt before they can be thought—serve as vital precursors to emotional understanding and symbolization. As forms of unconscious communication, they deepen internal and external object relations and give rise to the emotional links of Love, Hate, and Knowledge.
When early trauma disrupts the development of this premonitory capacity, primitive somatic defenses may interfere with symbolization, leading to a constricted, concrete experience and a diminished imaginative life. Without access to these early forms of knowing, patients may struggle to trust their own experience and retreat from relational engagement. By working with the emergent experience of hope and dread within the analytic field, clinician and patient can begin to restore emotional capacity and reanimate lost potentials.
A detailed clinical example will anchor these ideas in practice, offering participants a compelling view of how this approach can transform both psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
Learning Objectives:
After this presentation, participants will be able to:
1. Differentiate perceptual identity from thought identity;
2. Distinguish symbolic language from language used as somatic defense;
3. Discern when concrete action substitutes for, or defends against, emotional linking.
About the Presenter
Judy K. Eekhoff, PhD, FIPA, BCPsa is a highly respected psychoanalytic author, teacher, and presenter, and a longstanding member of the NPSI faculty. An IPA-certified training and supervising psychoanalyst and licensed child psychologist, she maintains a private practice in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Eekhoff has published extensively in leading psychoanalytic journals and is the author of three influential books on trauma, primitive mental states, and the work of Bion. She serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
About the Moderator
Caron Harrang, LICSW, FIPA, BCPsa is a board-certified psychoanalyst with a full-time private practice in Seattle, Washington. She is an IPA training and supervising psychoanalyst on the faculty of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and teaches throughout North America. Her recent publications include co-editor and chapter author of the Gradiva Award–winning Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond (2021); “Introduction. Truth and Lies: Psychoanalytic Perspectives” (2023); “On Grotstein’s ‘Truth’ in Bion’s Theory of ‘O’” (2023); Nancy C. Winters, Caron Harrang, and Stefanie Sedlacek, “Transformations in O Online: Group Process in the Virtual Realm” (2024); “Earthquakes in the Analytic Field: A Post-Bionian View of Negative Therapeutic Reaction” (2025); and “Binocular Vision as a Function of the Analytic Field” (in press). For additional information, see www.caronharrang.com.
