2021 Scientific Meeting Recordings

October 20, 2021

“Autoimmunity as a Response to Analytic Change” with Nancy Winters, MD, FIPA, ABPsa

“The danger of death does not become acute until it is clear to every beholder that a resounding success is at hand.” Bion, 1991

As Bion reminds us, growth and change in a successful psychoanalysis are likely to be experienced unconsciously as a catastrophe. This ‘catastrophic change’ can result in dysregulation and chaos at every level of a person’s existence. In this presentation, a case illustration will be used to explore a catastrophic response in the body, an autoimmune illness. In other words, the immune system’s rebellion against the self.

Surprisingly, an examination of autoimmunity at a cellular level reveals self-destruction to be an innate capacity, even tendency, lending support to Freud’s death instinct. Yet our existential capacity for self-destruction is also necessary for tearing down and building new structures, both physically and psychically. This understanding of the immune system’s capacity for destruction and rebuilding has even more meaning in the time of COVID-19. We will discuss how the analyst can work with catastrophic change and the tenuous balance between life and death instincts towards new levels of organization and vitality.

Please select your payment option, Non-member or Member, to view this recording. Once your payment has been received, you will be emailed a link and password to access the video. You will also receive a link to evaluate the meeting and obtain your CEU certificate to print out.

November 17, 2021

"Embodiment, Dissociation, and the Rhythm of Life" with Peter Goldberg, PhD, FIPA

The way one lives in one’s body is a decisive factor in psychical life. It vitally affects the sense of ‘realness’ of our existence and of the world around us. But how are we to take account of the life of the body in the clinical situation? Traditionally, psychoanalysis has thought of the body mainly in terms of what the mind does with it (e.g. managing the drives through repression, or using the body for symbolic purposes, as in hysterical conversion symptoms). However, in the wake of Winnicott’s recognition of psyche-soma, we may now wonder about the psychical life of the body itself. Can we conceive of the body’s distinctive patterned existence along the lines of patternmaking, contiguity, rhythm, tone, texture, and coloration?

With this theoretical backdrop in mind, Goldberg’s presentation explores two themes. First, the fact that the body is, of course, not a singular thing. His concern is not so much with the biological body of the drives or with socially constructed specular body identities. Rather, Goldberg's interest is the psycho-sensory dimension, where bodily experience is fundamentally trans-individual, shaped as habitus in the cultural domain of unconscious communal perception. Second, he considers the clinical challenges posed by body-mind dissociation or disembodiment and the ways in which the analyst is called to respond through embodied engagement, enabling a re-induction of shared psycho-sensory experience with patients who have been cut off from the rhythms and patterns of communal sensoriality.

December 15, 2021

"Body as Enemy: The Risk of Coming Alive" with Drew Tillotson, PsyD, FIPA, BCPsa

Being and staying emotionally alive in the clinical hour is not always easy nor a welcoming experience. At times the analyst’s aliveness collides with patients’ anxieties, their psychic walls, or dead spaces. Hopefully, these encounters penetrate psychic barriers and awaken nascent or truncated development. For some patients the process of enlivening is experienced as dangerous, risky, destabilizing: a Bionian ‘catastrophic change.’

In this presentation, an analytic case is used to illustrate the impact of a chronic bodily illness on the patient’s object world and its interdigitation with struggles to come alive, both psychically and bodily. For Tillotson's patient, illness sealed an early object identification with a dead parent that preserved an un-mournable object tie, blocking emotional aliveness and bodily vitality. Thus, coming alive engendered significant risks. Transformations were unconsciously dreaded due to an inability to mourn an object tie that shaped the patient’s internal life. To successfully mourn and become psychically alive, the patient had to face anxieties linked to bodily pleasure, mental excitement, and experiencing the analyst as an enlivening object. The ensuing catastrophic change involved relinquishing deadening object ties and manic flights into a phantasied disease-free body.