2024 Scientific Meeting Recordings

January 2024

"Freud Animality" presented by Bruce Reis, Ph.D., FIPA, BCPsa

In this presentation, Dr. Reis explicates how, for Freud, being human involves consigning animality to “not-me” states in favor of adult non-neurotic functioning. Disidentification with the animal produces wide-ranging effects beyond the discontent of having to give up instinctual aims in favor of living in a civilized society. What hangs in the balance for Freud is what he will claim to be unique to man—what separates him from the animal world—which Reis will illustrate he precariously rests on an identificatory process. Thus, man is the animal that must not identify as such. Supported by higher level defenses meant to distance the individual in part or in whole from his own animality, Freud relies on a bricolage of a narrative he creates out of strands of evolutionary theory and anthropology to craft what, in effect, becomes a mytho-scientific theory of man’s difference to the animals. On the basis of this narrative, Freud gives an account of how humans came to differ from other animals to establish culture, by which he means “everything in which human life has risen above its animalistic conditions and in which it is distinguished from the life of animals". However, this elaborate and fanciful narrative functions as a McGuffin, as it is not evolution—cultural or biological—that for Freud differentiates man from animal, but the psychological operation of identification supported by a host of defenses, the aim of which is Oedipal resolution.

Learning Objectives

1) Participants will be able to demonstrate Freud’s ambivalence around the concept of animality in humans.

2) Participants will be able to describe the role Freud proposed for Oedipality as concerns animality.

3) Participants will be able to describe how Freud’s conception of the id represented his solution for the problem of human animality.

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 2024:

“On Taking Sides: Clinical Encounters With Nonbinary Genders” presented by Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD

This presentation revolves around genders that self-describe as nonbinary, while also tracking the particular types of anxieties and difficulties that many analysts confront when encountering such patients who identify.

Dr. Saketopoulou offers a psychoanalytic way of thinking about nonbinary genders, not through the idea of gender identity—a concept she will discuss as wildly problematic and even dangerous—but through the rubric of Laplanche's notion of self-theorization and with help from trans of color critique. When working with trans nonbinary patients, the analyst, she will propose, is asked to take sides: but with what? And how do we know that such side-taking stands to expand rather than foreclose psychic possibilities? With ample time for engagement with the audience, this talk offers a fresh perspective on thinking about gender overall.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to explain why the concept of gender identity is problematic and even dangerous.

Participants will be able to discuss nonbinary gender, what it is and what it's not.

Participants will be able to explain the concept of "taking sides" and to list two reasons why such side-taking does not foreclose but in fact expands psychic possibilities.

Participants will be able to describe two countertransferential problems analysts face in working with nonbinary patients.

March 2024:

"The body/mind as an internal group: Voices from Bion’s 'The Dawn of Oblivion'” presented by Nancy C. Winters, MD, FIPA

The body and mind in relation (body/mind) is regarded in this presentation as an internal group. This provides the basis for a new perspective on somatopsychic phenomena. While previously the internal group was limited to psychical representations, the body here becomes a significant participant in the internal group. Building on René Käes’ (2016) related concept of psychical groupality, Dr. Winters formulates the idea of body/mind groupality.

To clarify these ideas, she discusses Bion’s famous dialogue in “The Dawn of Oblivion” (1979), in which various body/mind states speak together as an internal group; and presents a case of an evolving pain syndrome, illustrating the transformative functions of body/mind groupality.

This will open us to reflect on those difficult situations theoretically and clinically of body/mind dissociation and deepen our analytic understanding of perplexing psychosomatic conditions.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to discuss how the body/mind functions as an internal group.

Participants will be able to describe the concept of body/mind groupality.

Participants will be able to show how Bion’s “The Dawn of Oblivion” can be read as an internal group dialogue.

Participants will be able to reflect on the role of body/mind groupality in transforming psychosomatic phenomena.

April 2024:

“A Psychoanalytic Approach to Addiction: The Analyst’s Internal Frame as a Technical Tool” presented by Caron Harrang, LICSW, FIPA, BCPsa

In this presentation Caron Harrang examines the psychoanalytic treatment of addiction noting that it has historically been seen as inappropriate for treatment by analysis unless or until the patient has achieved abstinence. As a result, with some exceptions, a psychoanalytic understanding of addiction has languished, leaving the analyst ill prepared when it is discovered that the patient is engaged in a pattern of psychoactive substance use that endangers their somatopsychic health and wellbeing. Summarizing the major psychoanalytic contributions to an understanding of addiction, she concurs with Ramos (2004) that a compromise of paternal function is a common feature amongst patients experiencing severe substance use disorders. Not infrequently, the analyst may unconsciously collude with this compromise by failing to directly address indicators of problematical substance use (e.g., the patient arriving to session intoxicated). If recognized, these moments of compromise can facilitate (re)attunement of the analyst’s attention the patient’s emotional experience, helping to restore a sturdier analytic frame. Clinical vignettes drawn from Ramos (2004), Brady (2016), and the presenter’s clinical encounters with addiction illustrate how these cycles of compromise and recovery, may over time, through a process of unconscious identification with the analyst’s paternal function, strengthen the patient’s capacity to weather somatopsychic turbulence without returning to the false promise of freedom from unbearable psychic pain via the use of psychoactive substances.

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will acquire an understanding of the major theories of addiction in the psychoanalytic literature over the past century.

2. Participants will learn what is meant by the analyst’s internal frame and how it may be influenced by one’s theoretical model(s) of addiction.

3. Participants will acquire an understanding of the concept of paternal function and its significance as a technical tool in working with substance use disorders.

May 2024:

On Trauma and Mourning: Après-coup in the psyche-soma, presented by Drew Tillotson, PsyD, FIPA, BCPsa

Years ago in the author’s life, a sudden, violent sound below his consulting room (a gunshot) is registered in the author’s psyche-soma. First, the author - then his patient running late for their hour - stumbles onto the aftermath of a gunshot/suicide. The author shields his patient from seeing the traumatic scene. A paper (“Trauma and the Fate of the Angel” – unpublished) is written soon after with the theme of the shattering of the fantasy of the analyst’s omnipotence in the face of his being witness to a traumatic experience and it’s perforating his containing capacities. In the paper, the author recounted a series of experiences telescoping trauma related to the violent sound; an après-coup process during which dreams, mourning and memories were evoked in the act of mentalizing-through-writing. Employing the metaphor of an analytic angel, and Bion’s container-contained, the author incorporated memories, dreams and clinical vignettes to form a narrative of a traumatic witnessing and its aftermath, and ideas about the analyst’s omnipotent healer fantasies and containing function under extraordinary duress.

In this presentation, a new writing process is offered and described. Using Laplanche’s ‘spiral’ as a metaphor for après-coup, the author revisits the old paper, reflecting on the former writing process in writing a new paper: an après-coup of an après-coup. A briefer version of the original paper is interwoven into a reflective process inviting the audience to listen to the presentation as a dream, as described in Ferro’s post-Bionian field theory: an experience of après-coup together with the author in the present moment.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will acquire an understanding of Laplanche’s ‘spiral’ as a metaphor for apres-coup as it relates to the processing of traumatic experiences and the ongoing-ness of mourning.

2. Participants will be able to apply Bion’s container/contained to learn what is meant by the author’s use of ruptures in the containment process.

3. Participants will acquire an understanding of the concept of psyche-soma through Ogden’s exploration and clarification of Winnicott’s use of that term.

June 2024:

September 2024:

October 2024:

November 2024:

December 2024: