2022 Scientific Meeting Recordings

January 19, 2022

"Dreaming into Death" with Rikki Ricard, LMHC, FIPA

Introduction by Jeffrey Eaton, MA, FIPA, BCPsa

In his foreword to Rikki Ricard and Adrian Jarreau’s chapter, “Dreaming into death,” in Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond (Routledge), Jeffrey Eaton asks, “How often have you been invited into a significant conversation, one that challenges you to think, feel, reflect, question, and imagine?”

In this presentation, participants are invited into the authors' intimate conversation to share in their process of ‘dreaming into death’ as Jarreau's end-of-life approaches. A death presaged by two dreams of his death before consciously knowing he was ill. This dreaming is not only the body’s nocturnal dream as the messenger of its somatic state but also conscious dreaming in the Bionian sense, opening both authors (also a married couple) to the reality of death and the emotional truth of the aliveness remaining. Colleagues are offered a rare opportunity to learn from Ricard and Jarreau's searching, painful, and ultimately enlivening journey.

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.

February 12, 2022

"The Body Vanishes? Preliminary thoughts on Bodily Experience and the Identity of the Analyst in Remote Analysis" with Andrea Marzi, MD, PhD, FIPA

The accessibility of the digital world and of remote analysis via Telehealth poses ever more cogent questions for psychoanalysis. Remote analysis provides an opportunity to study in a novel way the nature of the analyst’s identity, the ‘digital’ body, and the psychoanalytic relationship within the analytic field.

To do this, Marzi suggests we must bear in mind that the analytic process is a dimension in which sensations and emotions infiltrate or invade the perceptual field and are welcomed in the space where the encounter takes place—the analytic field—to permit transformations which initiate symbolic and representational activity. These transformations involve affective states that have not been represented and are therefore asymbolic inside the body. It is a digital body that attracts countless non-metabolized elements
incarcerated in this digital body itself, and which need to be signified by the working analytic couple.

In this presentation Marzi provides some preliminary reflections on the fate of the body in the digital world of remote psychoanalysis. He describes the vicissitudes of the body in relation, above all, to the proto-mental system using clinical vignettes that illuminate his conceptual understanding. Marzi offers an open and reflective attitude concerning remote analysis and proposes that it is not destructive to previous psychoanalytic concepts, but rather enriches established theory.

March 16, 2022

"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.

April 20, 2022

“On Grotstein’s ‘truth’ in Bion’s theory of ‘O’” with Caron Harrang, LICSW, FIPA, BCPsa

In this presentation Caron Harrang discusses Grotstein’s (2004) “The seventh servant: The implications of a truth drive in Bion's theory of ‘O’” and its relevance to the theme of EBOR 2022: Truth and Lies.

From his highly creative reading of Bion’s later work emphasizing transformations in ‘O’, Grotstein proposes the existence of an emotional truth drive to explain why analysands can accept the analyst’s interpretations even as they often reveal painful psychical realities. According to Grotstein, this drive constitutes Bion’s mysterious ‘seventh servant’ and a truth principle (analogous to Freud’s reality and pleasure principles in a different model). Our need of truth is parallel to our love of knowledge (epistemophilic drive). Grotstein says this drive meets evolving O (absolute truth and ultimate reality) halfway within us and helps calibrate our ontological reliability.

Not mentioned in Grotstein’s paper, yet relevant to his inquiry, are Bion’s observations described in “On Arrogance” (1958) pointing to anxieties stimulated by the analyst and analysand’s curiosity, expressive of a truth drive. Bion’s reading of the Oedipus myth suggests that pursuit of the truth “at any cost” emanates from an unconscious attitude of arrogance and its underbelly, stupidity. How then to differentiate healthy expression of what Grotstein views as a universal human drive from its pathological manifestations?

A gripping clinical vignette provided by Grotstein illustrates his response to the abovementioned question. Utilizing his reverie, the analyst ‘becomes’ the analysand’s “inner, thwarted truth that she [previously] could not bear.” In so doing, “raw indifferent truth” is transformed into personal emotional truth which Grotstein believes is the major aim of analytic process.

Briefly discussed and relevant to the EBOR theme, is Grotstein’s explanation of Bion’s observation—perplexing for many—that all thoughts, as they are ordinarily known, are false. If the quest for emotional truth is universal as Grotstein suggests, what can this possibly mean?

May 18, 2022

“Truth is the thing between us: Thomas Ogden’s attempt to locate emotional verity in the clinical setting” with Dana Blue, LICSW, FIPA

In this age of misinformation, the Thirteenth International Evolving British Object Relations conference occurring online this fall is devoted to the allied subjects of truth-telling and lying.

The May Pre-EBOR Scientific Meeting features Dana Blue's facilitation of a discussion of Thomas Ogden’s 2003 paper “What’s true and whose idea was it?” Psychoanalysis mainly, though not exclusively, employs the medium of spoken language. Language can be used to further analytic exploration or it can be misshapen to serve other ends, at times with catastrophic consequences. Additionally, the pull to evade suffering, upon which learning and growth depend, is strong. Ogden’s paper represents an early attempt in the field of psychoanalysis to clarify the domain of unconscious intersubjectivity. Through consideration of a detailed clinical report, he offers navigational tools and helps us to appreciate the importance of emotional truth as the foundation of psychological growth.

May 2022 Scientific Meeting Recording

June 15, 2022

"Can a liar be psychoanalyzed?" with Rikki Ricard, MA, FIPA

Paradox of the Liar: "A man says he is lying. Is what he says true or false? If true, it is false; if false, it is true." (Footnote from O'Shaughnessy's paper).

In this beautifully written, rich clinical paper, Edna O'Shaughnessy explores the question of whether or not a liar can be psychoanalyzed. She touches on the notion of the paradox inherent in the question, noting that "Psychoanalysis is founded on truthfulness, yet for a liar to be himself, he must lie in his analysis..." Her conclusion is that, yes, it is possible, although challenging.

O'Shaughnessy explores the confusions, turmoils, and pitfalls of undertaking such an analytic endeavor. With clinical vignettes, O'Shaughnessy takes us into the world of a habitual liar whose primary object is a liar. The use of countertransference becomes essential in understanding what is trying to be communicated through the use of falsehood and lying. The excitement, aggression, and despair of this journey for both analyst and analysand are vividly portrayed through O'Shaughnessy's clinical material.

June 2022 Scientific Meeting Recording

November 16, 2022

“Embodied Attunement & Participation: Working within an aesthetic matrix” -Henry Markman, MD, FIPA

Until recently, psychoanalysis has primarily been concerned with meaning and interpretation within a hermeneutic tradition. Markman views this as an unbalanced
account of what we actually experience in ourselves, in the world with others, and in our analytic work. Much of what matters to us; what we search for in art, music, and in
relationships as well as what we actually experience (not think about) in psychoanalysis happens in the embodied world of being, sensing, and moving in a
shared space with others. This is a presence world that has clinical and ethical implications.

It follows that recognizing the analytic relationship as embodied brings with it significant clinical possibilities for widening analytic attention, participation, and
therapeutic action. Through two detailed clinical examples, Markman shows us how the analyst’s embodied attunement and participation opens up new modes of engagement and therapeutic possibilities. The analyst’s embodied awareness of two bodies together and their interpersonal rhythm is the analytic tool used to gauge the
pulse and vitality of connection and the particular rhythmic qualities of a uniquely shared world. This attunement provides a read on the most elemental way the dyad shares emotional experience (or fails to). The analyst’s embodied way of being and acting is not focused on interpretation or finding hidden meanings. Rather, she
contributes to an atmosphere of freedom and growth through her embodied being, attuning, and participating. However, there is always a pull to move toward meaning,
just as an abstract painter feels the pull (which he must resist) toward figuration in the search for emotional truth. The artistic renderings and writings of Robert Motherwell and Jonathan Palmer serve as vividly informing examples of working within an embodied aesthetic matrix.

Nov 2022 Scientific Meeting Recording

December 2022

“The Psychoanalyst as Improvisational Accompanist” -Henry Markman, MD, FIPA

This presentation explores the musical dimension of the “presence world” in psychoanalysis. The idea of different human, cultural worlds and experience comes from literary critic Hans Gumbrecht who describes a “meaning world” involving symbolization, interpretation, and hermeneutics. A presence world, on the other hand, involves being, emotion, body, movement, space, and mood. As Markman noted in his scientific meeting presentation last month, the presence world has been rather neglected in psychoanalysis until recently. Experiencing the analytic relationship as embodied and in the realm of the presence world implies significant possibilities for clinical engagement and therapeutic action.