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Abstract:

This panel will serve as an introduction to the Mitchell Scholars as well as provide an opportunity for them to discuss their work and the impact that Stephen Mitchell’s thinking had on their development. The Mitchell Scholars are an internationally representative group of young psychoanalysts who, after being nominated by their respective community, were selected by the board of the Mitchell Scholarship Fund as having strong leadership potential within the field of relational psychoanalysis.

At the conclusion of this panel session conference participants will be able to:

1. Describe the way Stephen Mitchell’s work inspired the development of young professionals in psychoanalysis
2. Describe some ideas about the application of relational psychoanalysis to education in Israel.
3. Describe some ideas about the relationship between relational thinking and the religious roots of Winnicott and Fairbairn.

Abstract:

This panel presents and discusses, in the context of Mitchell’s questions about the analyst’s personal engagement with the patient, an idea of enactment as a developmental process. It proposes that such an understanding might form a useful bridge or connection among psychoanalysts of diverse denominational allegiances that have previously found it difficult to speak with each other, in part because their languages differ. Both interlocutors have devoted themselves to dialogue among psychoanalytic communities as well as within them, and will explore the possibility that this concept might help. Much turns on the question of what “developmental” means, and what elements of the psychoanalytic situation, and what attitudes, may prevent enactment from deteriorating into unmitigated negativity.

Educational Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to distinguish between enactment as a general feature of psychoanalytic work and enactments as described by Bromberg.
2. Participants will be able to give an example of a “developmental enactment.”

Abstract:

Gathering Time as Affect Regulation, Katie Gentile

In literature and cultural studies, theories of embodiment have renewed interest in time. In psychoanalysis Loewald advanced theory on time in development and Mitchell highlighted and expanded his ideas. This paper follows their lead, integrating Henri Bergson’s ideas about time and space and recent research in neuroscience, to explore further time’s foundational role of creating experience and regulating affect, thus, enabling us to come into being within relational spaces. For a detailed illustration I will be using one component of a larger project that collaboratively analyzed 18 years of one woman’s diaries. This part of the project has not been published elsewhere, and the diarist was never my patient. As will be outlined in the paper, the activity of being, is to be in temporal motion, spatially traveling from past to present to future, building layers of continuous and simultaneous experience. Here affect regulation is always relational and emerges simultaneously with the ability to place the present into a horizontal, nonlinear temporal context where a pattern of discomfort and relief has been established and accumulated and can be called upon to “self”-soothe. Here language and symbolizing processes function as temporal reminders, continually engaging us in re-creating past experiences. Using Hannah’s diary entry like a moment in a clinical session, I will provide an in-depth exploration of the temporal dimensions of affect regulation. Having her evolving process tracked in the diaries provides us with a unique window into the temporal foundations of affect regulation where it is clear that the innovative creation of embodied, relational self experience depends on our capacities to play with space and time.

Educational Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to identify the central roll our psychological constructions of time play in development.
2. Participants will be able to reflect on different forms of affect regulation and how they promote healing in the clinical relationship.

Rhythm'ning and Imagination, Steven Knoblauch

This presentation begins with a musical illustration (on saxophone) of how a certain progression of harmony in music, best known as the structure of "I Got Rhythm" can be approached in a novel way (using an example from the jazz artist, Thelonious Monk) where the rhythmic shifts and tonal directions take unexpected turns compared to the expected melodic patterning. The emotional impact of these shifts on the listener is briefly illustrated and discussed with the audience. This musical exercise becomes the point of reference for a comparative discussion of contemporary approaches for how an analyst can create or collapse timing and space for previously denied or dissociated emotional experience to emerge. With the first approach coming from contemporary object relations, the analyst uses attention to embodied registrations of experience to inhabit and open up space for imagination, for the patient to be able to think, feel, create and anticipate a future. This approach is then contrasted with several relational approaches for how an analyst can develop a mimetic identificatory experience entering, if not momentarily merging with a patient's embodied rhythms in interaction with the analyst's. With the first perspective, the analyst's attention to embodied participation opens up space for imagination. With the second perspective, the analyst's attention to embodied participation closes the distance or space between the two to find ways to break rigid repetition, creating the possibility for acting and imagining in new ways. A brief illustration is then offered in which both approaches can be compared for their limits and clinical usefulness.

Educational Objectives:

1. Participants will become more attuned to gestural and tonal communications in clinical work.
2. Participants will learn about the value of nonverbal clinical interventions.

Abstract:

Cutting Back: Inflicting and Sustaining Loss, Peggy Crastnopol
Ending Treatment in Another Key: The Patient as Supervisor to the Analyst, Jill Salberg

This panel will look closely at the truism that leave-taking and loss are an inevitable part of attachment. How we negotiate the cutting back, winding down, or ending of a relationship will retroactively color how the relationship is metabolized and internalized. The topic of termination has recently been taken up and reconsidered by Relational analysts and the two papers in this panel will further this exploration by looking at the vicissitudes of reducing and terminating contact, both in the psychotherapeutic setting and in “real life.” The panel will pose a range of inquiries, along the lines of: who evaluates a person’s desire to reduce or end contact as appropriate and timely or as resistance? What if the two parties involved disagree about that designation? Is rupture and injury inevitable when we detach or are other experiences conceivable? Do the issues of authority, self-determination, and the balancing of individuality with mutuality loom large at a decision point about altering or ending a relationship? Although cutting back sessions or ending treatment may reflect growth and change, it also inevitably implies loss. How are the relative values to be negotiated?

In the spirit of (and paraphrasing) Stephen Mitchell, we will consider, what does the analyst know and what does the patient need in order to make optimal decisions about separation, and to make letting go more helpful than harmful. The panel will look at multiple sides of these issues, both the constructive and injurious aspects. Clinical material will be used throughout, and our discussant will compare and contrast the presenters’ points and offer added perspective.

Participants will be able to:

1. Describe different understandings of analytic authority and how that authority impacts decisions around termination of the treatment.
2. Articulate techniques for utilizing playful curiosity as a means to foster analytic dialogue with the patient about endings.
3. List indicators that the patient is unconsciously ready for termination, whereas formerly those indicators might have been viewed as resistance or enactment.
4. Identify and describe subtle signs of self-withdrawal and its impact on the analytic dyad, whether it occurs in the analyst or the patient.
5. Articulate strategies for reducing the injury inflicted by unconscious tendencies to attenuate attachment, whether this is a characterological patterning or a situational occurrence, in the psychotherapeutic relationship or in everyday life.
6. Differentiate among diverse motivations behind “cutting back” and to explain the consequences of each for the termination process.

Abstract:

When A Disorganized Subjectivity Prevents the Building of an Authentic “Subjectuality,” Alioscia Boschiroli

This study focuses on the relationship between subjectivity, authenticity and the building of what I call our “subjectuality”, meant as the perception of one’s own subjectivity. I will use as starting point some philosophical premises (Husserl and Heidegger) and some psychoanalytical theories on subjectivity (and its processes and organizations) and on authenticity (as quality of selfperception of one’s self in internal and external intersubjective contexts). After a brief introduction of Sara, a patient I have been following for 6 years, I will try to understand what kind of relationship exists between the processes underlying and preceding conscious and unconscious experiences and creating what Mitchell calls “personal meaning” (or the transcendental structure of my subjectivity) and its perception: the perception of myself while I experience my subjectivity and the epistemological, aesthetic (and indirectly) ontological value of the constructions of meaning organized around me, both as object and subject. The aim is to explore how the experience of being ourselves, of being the person we are, of being and feeling our own “subjectuality” can be represented.

Educational Objectives:

After my presentation, the participant will be able to describe the difference between the concepts of subjectivity and “subjectuality”, the link between organization and processes of our subjectivity and authenticity and to explain the role of authenticity in shaping our perception of ourself and our selfhood.

Listening/Experiencing Perspectives and Analysts' Subjectivities: Controversies, Reassessments and Proposals, James L. Fosshage

As part of the epistemological transition from positivistic to relativistic science that had begun earlier in the twentieth century, Kohut attempted to update psychoanalytic thinking in formulating the empathic mode of observation. The purpose of this paper is to reassess, through a conceptual and historical lens, the considerable controversy generated by the empathic perspective. The author specifically addresses constructivist philosophical underpinnings, the use and impact of the analyst’s subjectivity, the inclusion of unconscious processes, the need for additional listening perspectives to comprehend the complex analyst/analysand interaction, and the influence of theoretical models in the organization of clinical data. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate the analyst’s rapidly oscillating use of three listening perspectives.

Educational Objectives:

1. To understand and explain the controversies and their origins concerning the empathic listening perspective.
2. To describe additional listening perspectives emergent within psychoanalysis at large.
3. To explain the usefulness of integrating the empathic, other-centered and analyst’s self listening perspectives.

Abstract:

Mutual Discoveries Emerging Out of Secrets, Lies, Deceptions and Truths, Linda Beeler

The author illuminates the examined life and journey of both analysand and the analyst. This paper is a clinical journey and sets forth the analysand’s history as it unfolded during the course of treatment. The clinical material describes the course of a six year treatment of a man with a rigid self-constricting way of life, and show the analyst's parallel shift toward more spontaneity and creativity. The compelling clinical work posed a challenge to the analyst, who ventured into the use of relational theory to help the analysand organize his expanding identity. The co-construction of the analytic dyad illuminates how the analysand and analyst mutually influence each other. The process of psychoanalytic treatment is explored through several interactions and enactments within the intersubjective field of the analytic dyad. Enactments, heightened affective moments, self and mutual regulation, moments of spontaneity, and exchanges within the analytic encounter promoted change within the analysand as well as analyst.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of this paper, the participants will be able to understand the bidirectional influence between analysand and analyst. They will be able to appreciate how the analysand has an impact and influence on the analyst, and be able to explain and illustrate how the analyst can use oneself as an object in the analytical space by using creativity and spontaneity within a relational context.

Listening to the Patient. Responsibility and Authenticity in the Analytic Treatment, Paolo Stramba Badiale

The paper addresses psychoanalytic listening as a space created by the analyst and patient together. The elements and features that make listening specifically psychoanalytic, hence respectful of the patient’s deep-rooted and unique subjective organization, are pointed out. In particular, three variables are considered: the analyst’s non-neutrality, empathy and authenticity, understood as aspects of the self experience of both participants in the analytic dialogue. These variables are discussed within the theoretical-clinical frameworks of the Relational Psychoanalysis, also as key concepts in the debate that is taking place in contemporary psychoanalysis regarding the specific nature of the requests and needs that emerge in the therapeutic relationship. Therefore, psychoanalytic listening is the result of the convergence of empathy, non-neutrality and authenticity, which are also understood as specific components of the therapeutic role and discipline. Within this framework, the implicit aspects of psychoanalytic relationality, intended as curative factors, are taken into consideration.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant will be able to improve the capacity to listen the patient in the analytic treatment; and explain the therapeutic role in the analytic treatment.

Abstract:

How Stephen Mitchell's Legacy Influenced My Work as an Immigrant Analyst, Ruth Lijtmaer

This presentation will illustrate my psychoanalytic development as an immigrant analyst being initially trained in the classical tradition. I will describe particularly my struggles with the concepts of selfdisclosure and neutrality; boundaries; transference and countertransferene and language and bilingualism.

At the conclusion of my presentation the participants will: 1) Understand the influence of race, culture and ethnicity in the individual’s life, particularly immigrants. 2) Recognize the significant role of the analyst’s values and cultural countertransference in the interactions with the patient.

Immigrant Subjectivity: On Being a Bicultural Analyst in North America, Glenys Lobban

In this paper I offer a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the psychic experiences of immigrants to the United States. My specific focus is the subjectivity of the immigrant analyst and the ways in which this shapes her relationships with her patients. I am an immigrant analyst. I came to New York when I was 27 to study Clinical Psychology. When an enactment occurred with my American patient Rachel where I found myself actively siding with her immigrant boyfriend and trying to explain his motivations to her, it made me realize that I needed to examine how I felt about my own immigrant status. I borrow the concept of “double consciousness” from W.E.B. du Bois and review the experiences of immigrants to North America through this lens. I use my own experiences to illustrate how an immigrant arrives in North America with one set of selves, which are then overwritten and refracted by her experiences in her new culture, and all of this shapes her consciousness, subjectivity and sense of identity. The immigrant’s experience is colored by the fact that American culture awards privileged status to those Americans who are born in North America, and who have parents who are American, White, and English speaking. Immigrants experience “double consciousness” when they judge themselves via the “American is best” lens, see themselves as “less than” Americans, and reject their foreign selves. When I examined the enactment that I participated in with my patient Rachel I realized I had my own unconscious “double consciousness”. I identified with Rachel’s foreign boyfriend and defended him because part of me felt like an “outsider” in America and I was speaking up that facet of myself. In spite of my aspirations to be a bicultural analyst I had developed a binary, bifurcated analyst self. With my American patients I tried to be an “insider” and I utilized a culture neutral, assimilated facet of myself. I showed a more spontaneous “outsider” self to my patients who were foreigners or immigrants. When I processed the enactment with my patient Rachel, this led to a resignification for each of us, where we redefined and expanded our self definition and experienced a new hybridity.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation the participant will be able to understand how “double consciousness” develops in immigrants to North America, the psychic toll that “double consciousness” takes on the immigrant and how the therapist can address this problem when she is treating immigrant patients; and understand the powerful role that social and cultural factors play in the development of subjectivity.

Abstract:

Bob Dylan's Creative Selves: A Wild Analysis, Hilary Grill

Stephen Mitchell’s legacy to psychoanalysis as it is thought about and practiced today is so rich that it is difficult to focus on one…or even two aspects of it. One aspect that calls out to me is the value he placed on all things creative—from creative approaches to theory, to the treatment situation, to the encouraging of patients to tap into their creativity, to the mind of the analyst. It takes a great and creative mind to be able to conjure the new viewpoints, ideas and theories that became the foundation of the Relational perspective in psychoanalysis. More broadly, in order to envision new dimensions of psychoanalysis, we analysts must operate creatively. Relationally, being inspired by others has creative resonance. I read Mitchell and am inspired. I listen to Bob Dylan and I’m inspired. Not necessarily to take a particular action—instead it is a feeling that I can do more, that I am open to more. Thus, the focus of my presentation will be a multi-layered exploration of creativity as told through a “wild analysis” of Bob Dylan. In conducting this faux analysis, I will conduct a study of a creative individual in order to understand creativity from a psychoanalytic perspective. At the same time I will be inspired by and incorporate many of Mitchell’s thoughts and theories along with psychoanalytic thinkers such as Winnicott, Bromberg, Knafo, MacDougall and others. Another layer will address the importance of the analyst’s own openness to creativity as I journey through the entirely creative venture of a fictional analysis of an artist. Understanding the development of a creative artist helps us to understand the ways in which we can nurture those parts of ourselves and our patients.

Educational objectives:

1. At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant will be able to explain that the dynamic analytic process is inherently creative, involving both analyst and patient in a reciprocal creative process.
2. At the conclusion of my presentation the participant will be able to describe the ways in which an individual’s developmental history informs their creativity.

Creativity in Psychotherapeutic Process (Or how Edward and Gaveston appeared), Marko Pejovic

This paper is a result of the need to articulate a product of relationship between two subjects in therapeutic work, when usual explanatory systems of psychoanalysis practice– transference, counter transference, working alliance - seem to be insufficient. Therapist can transcend standstill in therapeutic process by keeping his/her creative potentials alive. The right way is not to explain, but to re-create information, senses and emotions he/she gets in contact with the client. These senses and emotions are initially generated in form of mental image that becomes a medium through which our creative potential speaks. If the therapist is able to communicate this insight with the client, progress in client’s understanding of her/him-self will surely happen, as well as possibility of experience integration. I believe that such reaction of therapist is creative act and that it represents strong support for therapeutic practice.

At the conclusion of my presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Make difference between infantile and more mature forms of creativity by it’s function in human life;
2. Understand the importance of structure of mental images, that appear in therapeutic process;
3. Be familiar with the idea that real position of creativity in psychotherapy is between client and therapist.

Abstract:

Empty Arms and Secret Shame: Relational Trauma and the Fate of the Imagination, Zina Steinberg

threatens. It can therefore be an act of adaptive survival to foreclose imagination. This paper investigates relational trauma in a neonatal intensive care unit and the pervasive power shame plays in such trauma, its role in dismantling thinking and rendering imagination treacherous. Case examples of individual, couple and group consultations are used to illustrate the particular force of shame and the often positive effect when it is spoken. And just as this symbolized awareness can provide a vital affective connection for the parent, I give an example of how it also does the same for me, the analytic consultant.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation, the conference participant will be more attuned to the role of shame in relational trauma as seen in an intense medical setting; and able to describe how profoundly imagination can be constricted in relational trauma, yet also learn how adaptive that may at times be.

Can Love Last? Some Relational Perspectives in Family Counseling Work, Tomas Wange

"Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance over Time" became the title of Stephen A. Mitchell’s last book. Besides having a historical perspective and an insight in the importance of the human social context, Mitchell also had an interest in understanding things by integrating different disciplines and therapeutic schools. Margaret Black introduces us to Mitchell’s attitude to learning and knowledge: "Stephen assumes in his writing that the most powerful impact comes from the reader´s deeply personal engagement in the process. He simply asks you to think things through with him, to puzzle over the paradoxical nature of the human experience of passionate connection." I´ll try to follow this device in the presentation, based on my experience working as a family counsellor in the Swedish social welfare system, the last couples of years.

Educational Objectives:

1. Psychoanalysis and family therapy are rooted in quite different historical and social realities, and there has been a lot of tensions between these two disciplines. My presentation shows relational psychoanalysis compared to traditional psychoanalysis, has come closer to family therapy and counselling. After the presentation participants will be able to integrate these disciplines in a easier way.
2. Because of fast changes in our social ideology and postmodern culture, there are many different ways to live your life today. Intimate relationship also seems to be more difficult to sustain today. In the presentation some of these issues are discussed. After the presentation the participant will be able to better describe: how to construct a good relationship, what is robustness, and the contextual influence on our sexuality.

Abstract:

Building on the insights embodied in Stephen Mitchell’s critique of the metaphor of the baby and the developmental tilt, this paper examines the ways that relational theory has continued in important respects to build on a model of infantile prototypes and examines the limitations of such an approach to relational theorizing. Theorizing about the mother-infant interaction and about the analytic relationship and the events in the consulting room has rather thoroughly incorporated the insights of Mitchell and other relational pioneers, but conceptualizations about daily life have been less thoroughly relational. This gap in relational theorizing has also impeded understanding of the importance of this vast swath of everyday living, relegating it to a realm in which the patient’s psychological organization is reflected or enacted, but not appreciating its crucial role in whether proclivities laid down in early childhood are continued throughout life or later change or differentiate. Through probing of theory and clinical case illustrations, the paper attempts to carry forward more thoroughly an agenda implicit in Steve Mitchell’s foundational writings and to link Mitchell’s theorizing to a parallel theoretical arc arising out of examination of the relationship between the ideas and observations of psychoanalysts and those of therapists operating from other points of view.

Educational Objectives:

1. At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant will have a better understanding of the concepts of the developmental tilt, the metaphor of the baby, and the excluded middle relational theorizing.
2. At the conclusion of the presentation, the participant will better understand the dynamics and importance of the interactions of everyday life and the ways they strengthen or modify the proclivities arising from the experiences of infancy and early childhood.

Abstract:

Malignant Merger and the Mutually Dissociated Dynamics of Sadomasochism, Sarah Hill

This paper identifies a clinical phenomenon, which the author calls malignant merger, defined as a kind of clinical force field, pulling patient and analyst into a mutually dissociated sadomasochistic dynamic, whereby both members lose contact with the full multiplicity of their own selves and of the other and become stuck in interlocking defense. The author is specifically interested in the countertransference problem of how the analyst loses hold of a symbolic space internally as she struggles to separate herself from her patient’s concrete and non-symbolic negative transferences. Building on Balint’s work on benign vs. malignant regression, the author is interested in distinguishing between generative vs. destructive forms of merger. The author challenges the collective superego in the psychoanalytic field around the analyst’s omnipotent survival of the patient’s destructivesness and argues that there is not proper attention paid in analytic training or in the literature to the analyst’s management of her own personal limits and boundaries, which contributes to malignant mergers. The author explores creative ways in which the analyst might navigate the dyad through a malignant merger and focuses on the development of the analyst’s relationship to her own separate presence, psychically as well as somatically; certain bodywork modalities are described which support the process of embodied presence.

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant will be able to:

1. Identify the clinical phenomenon of malignant merger in his/her psychoanalytic practice.
2. Consider contributing factors to malignant mergers, both theoretical and personal, and explore methods of working with such clinical impasses.
3. Ideally experience a decrease in shame around personal limits and professional experiences of treatment “failures.”

Love's Life-Cycle: A Relational Treatise, Farrell Silverberg

Romantic love––love in the wild––has a life, beyond the life of the individuals within it. The life of a love relationship is an intersubjective one, is co-constructed by its two originators in an inbetween dimension (reminiscent of the ancient Tibetan concept of a bardo), and is fragile and fleeting in form. Deaprting from descriptions based on contained models of the mind, this model extends the intersubjective and relational bounds of the concept to include a more transcendent aspect. The shared co-construction of love has a life-cycle of its own, and is posited to exist in a space-time dimension that is accessible in the “now”––and is not just a memory of past jouissance. As Stephen Mitchell (2002) stated, “Romantic love became almost paradigmatic of the transcendent experience; it was at once both erotic and sacred” (p. 39). Love’s coconstruction brings down the walls between the conscious subjective, the unconscious, and the universal unconscious. Freud and Kristeva may be overstepping when they tell us that love can only stem from a self-mirroring way of relating, and when we acknowledge Eastern philosophies, it transforms the meaning of seeing yourself in another into a higher and more transcendent rather than infantile relation to love.

Educational Objectives:

1. At the conclusion of this presentation, the participant will be able to describe and explain a model of romantic love that is based on a relational co-construction in the “now,” formed of the colliding between two originator subjectivities rather than based on a search for past jouissance.
2. At the conclusion of this presentation, the participant will be able to illustrate, utilize new metaphors for, and, should he or she so wish, apply a more Eastern philosophical notion of a more transcendent dimension to the understanding of romantic love “in the wild” that can inform clinical work in issues of love and loss.

“We are designed, in ways that we are just beginning to appreciate, to be drawn into a wide array of reciprocally regulating interactions and shared affects with other human beings...” (from Relationality, 2000, pp 106-107)

Abstract:

Our History, Our Selves, or “You've come a long way Baby.”: How the Intersubjective Theory of Development Grew Up, Jessica Benjamin

Psychology recapitulates ontogeny as many currents converge in the growth of an intersubjective understanding of development. The process of theory building is like growing up, a relational process that takes a village. The new psychoanalytic developmental perspective on self and other grew out of many strands of thinking in the latter part of the 20th century. This talk will consider the way our theory grew up, how relational theory met developmental theory. Beginning by tracing my own intellectual history, I show my own process of developing an intersubjective perspective as part of a larger historical process. My own vision of intersubjectivity was embedded in and grew out of a matrix including many currents in philosophy, object relations (especially Winnicott), selfpsychology, attachment studies, infancy research, and later continued to incorporate work by relational analysts on affect regulation, dissociation, and multiple self-states. I will trace the development from the idea of “recognition and destruction” as a one-way process where the analyst survives, to a two-way process where the relationship moves from rupture to repair of the third. I show some points of divergence with Mitchell’s intellectual history, his original critique of “the developmental tilt,” as well as the later convergence with his embrace of intersubjectivity theory. Likewise, I show some of the divergence and convergence with the intersubjectivity theory of Stolorow, Atwood and Orange. I will illustrate the clinical use of a developmental perspective., as well as suggest further directions for relational developmental thinking in the future.

Educational Objectives:

1. Learn about the history of psychoanalytic developmental theory and infancy research in the last 30 years.
2. Understand key concepts in intersubjectivity theory such as rupture and repair, recognition and destruction, the third.
3. Learn about the clinical applications of developmental intersubjective theory and the key concepts.

Psychoanalytic Babies and Psychoanalytic Bathwater, Joyce Slochower

As Mitchell and his colleagues began articulating a relational perspective in conversation with competing theoretical models, they rather roundly critiqued the value of the maternal metaphor in the treatment situation. That critique, amplified by feminist writers, sharply skewed relational thinking toward a vision of the patient-as-adult and a view of the analytic dialogue as inherently intersubjective. Bringing my own Winnicottian/relational perspective to this critique, I proposed that we bridge the two models rather than throwing out the former by complicating rather than abandoning the maternal metaphor.

As relational theory has come of age, we've re-found the psychoanalytic baby, now filtered through attachment theory. As we address notions of mutual regulation we come, in a sense, full circle. The relational ideal of patient and analyst as two negotiating adults can coexists with an implicit maternal metaphor. Yes, Gertrude, there's a baby--or two--in the consulting room after all.

Objectives:

1. Develop a thorough understanding of the basis for the relational critique of developmental tilt models
2. Understand the theoretical and clinical basis for a relational holdling model
3. Explore how contemporary theory informs and shifts our view of developmental facts as they play out in the consulting room.

Abstract:

Vivienne's Songbook is an intimate and affecting portrait of the relationship between a mother and her talented artist daughter that at once revolves around and also transcends the Holocaust experience. As she explores her mother's traumatic past, Vivienne gradually reveals the true legacy of her mother's Holocaust experience, hidden deep beneath the layers of paint that make Vivienne's paintings both beautiful and haunting. Vivienne's Songbook is a study of transgenerational trauma and the ways in which it defines Vivienne's symbiotic relationship with her mother.

At the conclusion of the presentation of the film the participants will be able:

1. To describe how trauma can be transferred and experienced across generations and affect the core of a mother-daughter relationship.
2. To explain how trauma that hasn’t been processed by a first generation survivor can be metabolized by a second generation survivor through her artwork.

Abstract:

The Man Who Mistook His Patient for a Person, Susan Bodnar

This paper discusses the clinical legacy of Stephen Mitchell. Using her own relationship to Mitchell, the author elucidates what she considers to be key principles inherent to his clinical work. These principles differently illustrate Mitchell's capacity to recognize the humanity in any individual's psychopathology. Making use of examples and her own clinical work, the author wishes to highlight Mitchell's enduring clinical legacy.

The Wings of Daedalus: Teaching Mitchell's Writing to Seed the Relational Imagination, David Mark and Rachel McKay

Mitchell’s writing – its breadth, lucidity, and the excitement it generates in readers - makes it ideal as a way to introduce candidates to the paradigm shift entailed in working Relationally, and to locate Relational thought in the context of the history of psychoanalysis. In this paper, we reflect on aspects of the writings we assigned in a one semester course on Mitchell’s work, as well as on the ways in which students responded to these writings – especially in regard to being able to appreciate the implications for what happens in the consulting room. We note that while some students quickly grasp something about the clinical freedom that is being suggested and are eager to take the leap that this entails, others are more uncertain. In trying to understand the latter response, we conclude that Mitchell’s clinical stance, characterized by moving amongst theoretical strands without allying himself uncritically with any one, as well as priviledging what is most compelling in the interpersonal current over any theory at all in key moments, is different from the kind of predictability that students have come to expect from clinical theory. It is the very aliveness in Mitchell’s stance as theorist and clinician that is both challenging and freeing. The wings of Daedalus: Teaching Mitchell’s work to seed the Relational imagination.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of our presentation, the participant will be able to describe the place of theory and personal history (both the patient’s and the analyst’s) in Mitchell’s clinical work; and to provide several reasons why students, who are relatively inexperienced clinicians, often had difficulty articulating Mitchell’s clinical stance, despite the clarity of his writing and the openness with which he shared his clinical work.

Abstract:

In the hands of the Potter-Decay or Creativity in the second half of life, Gila Ofer

The age of wisdom (l’age de raison), (some refer to it as middle age), is a period in life which holds many possibilities alongside crisis and losses. It is the time of the many cracks built up during our life, alongside the seeds of becoming which allow for development and vitality. What will enable us to achieve creativity and integration a nd avoid despair and depressive sinking into ourselves? This lecture examines these issues while relating to clinical vignettes. My main argument is that in order to liberate ourselves from the binds of depression, despair and downfall, we must be creative and active (in the broad sense of these words). This is not a magical process, occurring all by itself, but an active sculpting of one’s life which facilitates the forces of living. The acceptance of limitation and finality on the one hand and creative living on the other are the key to staying vital and avoiding the withering associated with this age.

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participants will be able to better explain processes of adulthood; and to describe different types of creativity.

Creativity and Acts of Freedom in Midlife Crises, Avi Berman

There seem to be some common aspects in midlife crises. There is typical tension between selfworth of proven abilities and achievements and threatening experience of missing long-for wishes. Anxiety of time wasting away might confront time consuming crucial obligations. The urge for intimacy and friendship may become common for many men and women. As far as needs may become mothers of inventions these tensions seem to call for personal creativity. Interpersonal misunderstandings and escalations might be an outcome of unrecognized internalized social demands that become ego-syntonic and are not recognized as such. The need to rebel against the intrusion of social demands into one's private wishes might be displaced into couple relations and may create mutual projections and frustration. I suggest that couple confrontations, including gender issues are often enactments of inner call for changes. They may bear new ideas and solution that need to be deciphered. Analysis that takes into account that these enactments may hide some mutual unconscious creative ideas for change become useful tool for further development.

Educational objectives:

At the end of the presentation the participants will be able to explain couple processes in midlife; and describe mutual processes in couples.

Abstract:

This is a clinical and experiential account of a 7-year long, 4-session a week analysis in which relational components contributing to psychic integration and change are highlighted. It is an enriching experience of co-construction involving both analyst and patient – a 27-year old man (Ferran) – who from adolescence sporadically suffered crises of confusional anxiety, with feelings of depersonalisation and brief hallucinatory episodes. Starting with an unstable and “provisional” integration of his identity, Ferran uses the relational experience with his analyst as a loom on which to weave a mesh where he could anchor a more solid self-experience as well as permitting more fulfilling relationships. The analysis is a shared space in which existing implicit relational knowing that was blocking access to new and more satisfying relational experiences is put to the test and disproved. The genuine emotional experience of the relationship, integrated as shared reflection, re-writes the emotional memory associated with his past patterns, giving way to the creation of new meanings of self and other.

Educational Objectives:

1. The participant will be able to explore, using the clinical illustrations, how a psychoanalytic process became relational.
2. Attendees will be able to understand the intersubjective mechanisms that conforms a relational psychoanalytic process, those concerning mutuality, transference and counter-transference processes.

Abstract:

The ferment characterizing contemporary psychoanalysis, the explosion of relational theories, and the exciting findings of attachment studies and other developmental research have barely found their way into psychoanalytic theorizing about adolescence, at least in part due to the privileged place of “adolescent turmoil” in developmental theory. Anna Freud’s (1958) claim that turmoil is normative in adolescence blurred the distinction between healthy and pathological development for too long. This panel addresses the task of engaging adolescents in a psychoanalytic treatment where the primacy of the relationship powers the treatment process. Attachment issues as they impact upon the adolescent’s development and treatment will be explored in one of the papers on this panel. The nature of the bidirectional, dyadic, self and interactively regulated relational treatment process will be examined in the second paper. Each paper considers the specific, contextualized co-created treatment process between patient and analyst. The discussant will bring together the elements of a relational contemporary psychoanalytic approach to adolescent treatment.

“A Boy Likes ME!” Relational Psychoanalytic Treatment with Adolescents, Jacqueline Gotthold

A contemporary Relational Psychoanalytic approach to the treatment of adolescents is examined in the context of a treatment with a 15 year old. The questions that will be examined in considering the nature of the analytic treatment process are: How does the analyst make contact with and engage an adolescent in such a way that forays into the relational realm are mutative and developmental? The co-created, bidirectional, dynamic, dyadic, interactively regulated treatment relationship with an adolescent will be elucidated. Drawing from contemporary psychoanalytic literature ( Kohut, Stolorow, Atwood and Orange, Brandchaft, A. Freud, Beebe and Lachmann, and Stern et al(BSG))the concept of a layering of the multi-dimensional influences in the development of ‘theory’ will be illustrated.

Educational Objectives:

Participants will understand and explain the primacy of the psychoanalytic treatment relationship in working with adolescent patients; and explain the multi-dimensional approach of a co-created, bi-directional, interactively regulated analytic relationship.

A Relational View of Individuation in Adolescence: The Role of Attachment Status

The ferment characterizing contemporary psychoanalysis, the explosion of relational theories, and the exciting findings of attachment studies and other developmental research have barely found their way into psychoanalytic theorizing about adolescence, at least in part due to the privileged place of “adolescent turmoil” in developmental theory. Anna Freud’s (1958) claim that turmoil is normative in adolescence blurred the distinction between healthy and pathological development for too long. Although cognitive and experiential advances in adolescence lead to a more complex inner experience of the parents, if adolescent attachment to each parent is largely secure, the transition is relatively smooth. If, however, the tie to a parent is insecure or disorganized, the dramatic symptoms and the tumultuous family circumstances sometimes seen with adolescent patients are indications of the inadequacy of the attachment tie; events in this domain are better understood as vicissitudes of attachment-individuation than separationindividuation. Clinical vignettes illustrate this idea.

Educational Objectives:

Participants will be able to explain the difference between a separation-individuation and an attachment-individuation conceptualization of the adolescent passage; and recognize the link between psychological turmoil in adolescence and insecure or disorganized attachment and will be able, accordingly, to plan appropriate clinical interventions.

Abstract:

Weak Ties, Slight Claims: The Psychotherapy Relationship in an Era of Reduced Expectations, Steve Botticelli, PhD

Embodiment and the Nameless Subject, Sue Grand

Forgiving the Other, Forgiving the Self, Melanie Suchet

Traditionally, psychoanalysis extruded politics and culture from clinical process. Recently, relationalists have been illuminating the way culture shapes theory and clinical practice. Following Mitchell and Benjamin, we understand that ‘pathology’ is socially constructed. This panel extends that investigation, and asks: how does clinical impasse encode an inchoate cultural critique? How will our theory be re-shaped by listening to this cultural critique? The papers will have a clinical density, which calls upon the relational literature on therapeutic impasse.

Educational Objectives:

1. At the end of this panel, therapists will be able to query the cultural assumptions that inform the clinical impasses they experience.
2. At the end of this session, therapists will have new tools with which to break out of clinical impasses.

Abstract:

Creative Living, Creative Analysis, Richard Frankel

In this paper, I ask the question of what it would mean to conceive of analysis as primarily a creative practice. Winnicott’s thoughts about the origins of creativity and what he names ‘creative living’ form the backdrop against which I explore this question. Along the way, I draw from Bion, Ogden and Ferro in order to illustrate how the idea of creativity, not always explicitly thematized, is inherent to both their way of theorizing and practicing analysis. Finally, I explore the idea of locating therapeutic action in the experience of mutual creativity, what I come to call ‘being-creative-together’, that develops over the course of analysis. I show how this transforms our understanding of the ‘intersubjective third’ when it is viewed in the light of the overlapping of two creativities rather than two subjects.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant will be able to understand what it means to see analysis as primarily a creative practice; and explain the implicit expressions of creativity in the work of Bion, Ogden and Ferro.

Tensions Between Positive and Negative Feelings and Their Relationship to the Creative Processes of Feeling-What-Is-Happening, Michael Reison

There is an inherent tension between our uncomfortable experiences and our capacities to experience and hold onto positive experience. These tensions further affect our capacities to actively immerse ourselves in the process of creating new self-enriching experience. In this paper I will introduce the concept of feeling-what-is-happening as the medium through which we experience positive and negative feelings. It is in the experience of feeling-what-is-happening that we experience ourselves in a form of an ongoing relational squiggle game with our caretakers in order to develop a sense of ‘me-ness’. We have a need to both feel and express our positive and negative feelings in connection with emotionally present caretakers who can feel and tolerate our feelings as well as their own. Through this ongoing squiggle game of felt and expressed feelings we develop a sense of ‘me-ness’ and a repertoire for future creative moments.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant will be able to understand the relational concept feeling-what-is-happening; and understand how through an ongoing squiggle game of felt and expressed feelings between child and caretaker we develop a sense of ‘me-ness’ and a repertoire for future creative moments.

Abstract:

Lesbian Boy Meets Lesbian Girl: Toward A Fantastic Bid For Mutual Recognition, Deborah Sherman

Thought Destruction, Body Construction and the Transgendered Self, Sandra Silverman

Gender as Perversion, Mary Sonntag

Stephen Mitchell, in two of his earlier papers on the psychoanalytic theory and treatment of homosexuality (1978, 1981) challenged the widely held psychoanalytic view that homosexuality was inextricably pathological. In both of these articles, he is one of the first analysts to contest this assumption and to reclaim a non-authoritative stance of analytic inquiry in his approach to homosexuality. In the 30 years that have followed Mitchell’s papers, developmental and clinical theories of gender and sexuality have greatly evolved and emerged within a relational, intersubjective space; the way one might think about gender and sexuality as experience rather than structure, as emergent, not preprogrammed, as multiple and stratified forms and functions and subjectivities, not as a rigid binary. The three papers in this panel demonstrate that however much the climate in contemporary and analytic culture has changed, the terrible strain of phobic hatreds continue to be felt by analyst and analysand. The papers describe treatments in which the uncertainty, fluidity, and enigma of gender and sexuality carry profound experiences of shame, rage, and excitement that create powerful, destabilizing intersubjective effects. Each analyst is describing a clinical process in which she is immersed in potent transmissions that are intended to teach and to obfuscate, to evacuate and to be held. The clinical cases convey the courage it takes to be unsettled in one’s gender and sexuality where the body and bodily identity is sometimes speech, sometimes weapon, sometimes both. The task, in each treatment, is to be able to weather the storms that trauma, disruptions in attachment and identification and embodiment, have all befallen the patient.

Educational Objectives:

1. At the conclusion of our panel presentation, participant will be able to discuss contemporary relational ideas of gender and sexuality.
2. At the conclusion of our panel presentation, participant will be able to describe transference and countertransference experiences that may arise in treatment focused on gender and sexuality.

Abstract:

Stephen Mitchell and others have stated that relational psychoanalysis evolved as the result of integrating British object relations theory and interpersonal psychoanalysis. Because Michael Balint and Clara Thompson , major contributors, respectively, to each of these earlier traditions were each patients, students, close colleagues and enthusiastic supporters of Sandor Ferenczi, it is not surprising that the seeds for much of Mitchell’s work can be found in the writing of Sandor Ferenczi. This panel will explore some of the origins of Mitchell’s thinking in Ferenczi’s most important texts, review some of the differences between these two groundbreaking theorists, and use this understanding as the framework for exploring two extended cases. In “Confusion of Tongues: Trauma and Playfulness-From Ferenczi to Dialectical Thinking”, the presenter will explore ways in which patient and therapist use playfulness to collude in avoiding aggression in order to protect the tenderness that evolves in the treatment and prevent the retraumatization of both parties. In “Can Love Heal? The Therapeutic Action of the Analyst’s Desire”, the second of two presenters will build on Mitchell’s relational psychoanalysis and the later contributions of his colleagues and students, and use Ferenczi’s texts as a backdrop for exploring the role of the analyst’s erotic desire as an agent of therapeutic change. “Mitchell’s Ferenczian Roots” will be a discussion of these two papers and offer additional exploration of the panel’s theme.

Confusion of Tongues: Trauma and Playfulness From Ferenczi to dialectical thinking, Galit Atlas-Koch

This presentation explores the confusion of tongues that arises in the chasm and dialectic between the language of tenderness and the language of aggression as it appears in the therapeutic relationship. I will emphasize the way in which patient and therapist use playfulness to collude in avoiding aggression as a means of protecting the tenderness that evolves in the co-constructed third of the treatment and preventing the retraumatization of both parties. In referring to Ferenczi’s notion of the confusion of tongues, my focus is on the mutual interactional processes between analyst and adult patient, acknowledging the fact that they both speak the two languages and act unconsciously to satisfy needs on two corresponding parallel axes. Using this framework, I will present a case, discussing the therapeutic situation in which an unconscious collusion is co-constructed by the therapist and the patient, and focus on the dialectical way in which both therapist and patient speak both languages, i.e., the child’s tender language as well as the adult’s sexual and aggressive language. The confusion appears when the coexistence of the two languages threatens to disrupt psychic regulation. When this happens, aggression gets disguised as tenderness in an effort to avoid destroying the benevolent, tender parts of the treatment. This language shift becomes activated in response to an unconscious reminder of our patient’s—or our own—trauma. Discussing the case I will raise the questions about the analytic couple’s ability to work through these collusions.

Educational objectives:

At the conclusion of this presentation, participants will be able to describe what Ferenczi and presenter mean by the difference between the language of tenderness and the language of aggression; and describe at least one reason why the patient presented was unable to work or date successfully.

Can Love Heal? The Therapeutic Action of the Analyst's Desire, Steven Kuchuck

This presentation will examine Mitchell’s and Ferenczi’s overlapping interest in the relationship between analyst and patient as the main vehicle for therapeutic intervention. Building on Mitchell’s relational psychoanalysis and the later contributions of his colleagues and students, I will use Ferenczi’s “Confusion of Tongues” and other texts as a backdrop for exploring the role of the analyst’s erotic desire as an agent of therapeutic change. When it comes to matters of love, if the analyst is able to feel “irresponsibly” but behave “responsibly”, as Mitchell puts it (2000), tremendous opportunities for the patient’s growth can open up. Issues of gender, sexual orientation and paternal neglect will also be considered and an extended case example provided.

Educational objectives:

At the conclusion of this presentation, participants will be able to list at least two ways in which Stephen Mitchell and Sandor Ferenczi view the aims of psychoanalysis similarly; and identify one or more ways in which the analyst’s erotic countertransference feelings can be used therapeutically.

Abstract:

As Spoken by the Patient –Analysands Telling about their Analyses, Orna Kislasy

In this paper I explore stories about psychoanalysis written by analysands. It was interesting for me as a candidate in a psychoanalytic institute to know more about the analysand's point of view on this influential process. Drawing from books and papers written by analysands of: Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Irvin Yalom and De Muzan's , comparing them with famous analysts/theoreticians writing about their own analyses (Little, Guntrip, Bion) and contemporary analysts describing theirs (Simon), I tried to create a defintion of what is psychoanalysis. Drawing from these writers and from the relational perspective (Mitchell, Bromberg, Bass), psychoanalysis seems to be a process involving two subjectivities where the analyst asks “why”, where there is a negotiation on understanding. Some of these analysands who wrote these books and papers describe their experience as door opening, with words of their analyst that can touch, of mutual listening and analysts reacting creatively, with elasticity. For others, experiences were dissappointing, with important issues not being touched. I explore my own experience as an analysand, sharing a vignette as an analyst in the training process. Hidden in these stories, in this process of psychoanalysis, is a promise I came to realize each analyst offers to his/her analysand. This promise holds hopes and visions. This promise sets the basis for transformation.

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant will be able to know more and specifically on what are the variables that can be found in stories of different analysands about their analysis. By that he will have an option to define the analytic process; and look at the analyst' work from a point of view of making a promise and it's vicissitudes.

Being Railroaded: A Candidate's Struggle to Stay on Track, Matt Aibel, LCSW

How do we manage our feelings of doubt, shame, impatience, and despair in difficult treatments? How do we honor our gut feelings about what feels right clinically while remaining open to diverging suggestions from supervision and the literature? In a treatment saturated in unspoken issues of power and control, an analytic candidate struggles to find his way with a domineering patient. In parallel, the candidate grapples with a range of supervisory input intended to offer ways out of impasse but threatening to derail the candidate. How might struggles in the supervisory experience reflect enactments in the treatment? What can be discussed, what goes underground, and what is the pathway to change? Issues around holding, engaging, countertransference, and mutuality are explored in the context of enactment and parallel process.

1. Appreciate the challenges and complexities of integrating readings and supervisory input into one's own theoretical understandings and clinical approaches.
2. Recognize perils and facilitative options when enactments threaten to lead to impasse.
3. Appreciate obstacles to achieving intersubjective recognition (mutuality) in a treatment with a controlling patient.

Abstract:

Stephen Mitchell contended that “transformation occurs when the analyst stops trying to live up to a generic, uncontaminated solution, and finds instead the custom-fitted solution for a particular patient”. In this workshop, we will explore how the foundational perspectives of specificity theory reflect and deepen Mitchell’s assertion – how they transform clinical practice, and how they alter our view of traditional psychoanalytic concepts and principles. Participants are invited to share their own clinical experience for consideration from these perspectives.

Specificity theory is a contemporary psychoanalytic process theory whose focus is therapeutic effect. Specificity theory holds that each analyst-patient pair constitutes a unique, reciprocal relational system, and that its participants will co-create, through the specificity of their process, what is therapeutically possible for them. Specificity theory contrasts with traditional psychoanalytic theories that are based upon a structured concept of mind. Specificity theory is consonant with Gerald Edelman's neurobiologic process theory of brain formation and function: that the human mind is continuously formed and created through ongoing selective interaction with itself and its environment. Traditional structured psychoanalytic theories prescribe and proscribe responses, and designate techniques that offer methods and guidelines in order to obtain foreseen results. In contrast, specificity theory holds that the unique unfolding process of that particular therapist-patient dyad can illuminate a wide array of theoretical concepts that may, in this way, come more usefully into play. Specificity theory regards therapeutic effect as centrally a function of the capacities and limitations of the particular therapist and patient to understand and respond to each other at any moment in time and over the course of the treatment. Attention to the specificity of unfolding process between that patient and that therapist enhances possibilities for achieving maximal therapeutic effect, and clarifies why this may not be happening.

Recommended Reading:

The Power of Specificity in Psychotherapy: When Therapy Works – And When It Doesn’t”, H. A. Bacal, 2011. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield (Jason Aronson); Chapters 1 – 10.

Educational Objectives:

After participating in this workshop, participants should be able to:

1. Define specificity theory and understand its application.
2. Apprehend the implications for therapeutic effect of the shift from a treatment approach based on any particular structure theory to a theory based on the specificity of process.

Abstract:

Trauma, Dissociation and Transformation in Jane Campion's Film, “The Piano,” Margaret Dieter

The concept of dissociation has been increasingly embraced by clinicians because of its usefulness in understanding and engaging people who have experienced trauma, opening up discussions of multiple self states, the usefulness of enactments and the importance of deep personal engagement. The psychologically insightful and compelling film, The Piano, by Jane Campion (1991), deepens this inquiry by illuminating the links between trauma, dissociation and transformation while allowing the complexity of the therapeutic challenge to be held in the confined space and time of the film’s frame. Using the film, I will focus on the ways that trauma organizes, structures, and disrupts mental life through the mechanism of dissociation in three main characters. I will then show how a particular kind of interpersonal relationship can help to transform that experience for each of the characters. Implications for clinical practice that can be drawn from this analysis will be considered at the end.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant will be able to:

1. Describe and illustrate the way that dissociation works as an adaptive response of the mind to trauma
2. Describe and illustrate the way in which a relationship in which one person’s ability to give the self over to the other person’s reality can overcome the rigidity of pathological dissociation so that pain and loss can be tolerated and intrapsychic conflict experienced.

Good Girls Don't Get Angry: Dissociated Self-States Cope With Forbidden Affect, Sheldon Itzkowitz

Participants will have the opportunity to view 2 video clips that display Dr. Shelly Itzkowitz working with dissociated self-states in a patient diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. The audience will see how anger and aggression, previously forbidden affect, is permitted into awareness within the safety of the analytic relationship. Humor, spontaneity and enactments, afford self-states to engage feelings between the different states and in the transference. Dr. Elizabeth Howell will be discussing the video clips.

Educational Objectives:

At the end of my presentation participants will be able to recognize and explain what self-states are and what functions they can serve for individuals; and understand and explain how dissociated affect is compartmentalized in the mind and how to engage such material.

Abstract:

Narcissism, Mania, and the Analyst's Envy, Irwin Hirsch

The Power of Charisma: Lies, Guilt, and Collusion, Christopher Bonovitz

In the spirit of Stephen Mitchell’s invaluable contributions to psychoanalysis, this panel will honor his effort to deconstruct the analytic hierarchy and to question the historical emphasis on the pathology of the patient in contrast to the “morally superior and healthier” analyst. Through his writing and teaching, Mitchell brings forth a model of the analytic relationship as one between two flawed and thoroughly subjective co-participants. This panel will also highlight his successful attempt to bridge the intrapsychic and interpersonal realms of experience through the integration of object relations theories and interpersonal theory, and his keen ability to articulate the nuances of the analytic interaction in which the analyst inevitably becomes ensnared in the patient’s relational configurations.

The first paper in this panel will draw on pop culture (television show, ‘Mad Men’) and the analysis of a powerful, successful male patient in tackling the historical assumptions about mania that tend to pathologize and infantalize patients. This paper examines the analyst’s envy in relation to such patients that may manifest as a morally superior attitude in the analyst, an attitude that ignores the patient’s strengths and the analyst’s flaws.

The second paper will explore the psychology of charisma in certain patients, speculating about its origins and how the charismatic patient subtly seduces the analyst. This paper looks at the self-destructive tendencies (including lies and deceit) that often accompany charisma, and the collusions that took hold in a complicated analysis of a charming, witty young patient.

Educational Objectives:

1. To understand the diagnostic and character features of mania and narcissism.
2. To explain how the analysis of countertransference helps with treating manic, narcissistic patients.

Abstract:

Repetition, Reparation, Mourning and Generativity: The Psychic Replacement Child, Amy Schwartz Cooney

The Interweaving of Mourning, Destruction & Creativity in Psychoanalytic Realms, Lauren Levine

This panel will explore the interweaving of mourning, destruction, reparation, and the creation of the new in psychoanalysis. The first paper illustrates how the capacity to manage destructiveness and mourning is an aspect of creativity emerging through the analytic process. According to Bion (1970), change is a moment of catastrophe, and wrestling with catastrophic change is a fundamental aspect of psychic growth. Ogden (2000) asserts that mourning “centrally involves a demand that we make on ourselves to create something—whether it be a memory, a dream, a story, a poem, a response to a poem... (p. 65),” while Harris (2005) suggests that “melancholy is also the site of imagination, fantasy, and passion (p. 262).” Through the analytic process, the two patients in this paper slowly evolved from being haunted by their traumatized pasts to “dreaming themselves into existence” (Ogden, 2009). In the second paper the topic of mourning, reparation and the creation of the new is taken up again. The work of Klein (1975), Fairbairn (1952), Loewald (1960), Mitchell (1993), and Searles (1979) are particularly relevant. The treatment of a woman who has delivered a full term stillborn daughter is presented. She is struggling to loosen her ties to this baby (and all that she represents) and grieve so she can create the space to produce a new life, rather than engender a replacement child. This paper focuses on the tensions between loyalty toward the old and dead and commitment to the new and emergent. The role of hope for a progressive future will be explored considering the distinction between reparative/restitutive work and the creation/discovery of the new. Both papers resonate with Mitchell’s vision of psychoanalysis as a dynamic, vibrant process in which patient and analyst engage, sometimes with hope, sometimes in despair, ultimately with an eye on growth and the creation of new meanings and ways of being. Our discussant, whose writing has focused on the interaction of old and new and the place of the psychic future in the analytic relationship, will reflect on these papers from his own unique perspective.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of our presentation, the participant will be able to describe how managing destructiveness and mourning is an aspect of creativity that emerges through the analytic process; and integrate various theoretical ideas about the relationship between mourning and creativity in psychoanalysis, with particular emphasis on considering the interplay of reparative/restitutive and creative/expansive processes in the analytic relationship.

Abstract:

A Failure of Imagination: Trapped Between Fear and Desire, Judi Kobrick

Stephen Mitchell’s evocative words continue to profoundly transform, enrich and unlock the ambiguous, multifaceted and yet to be discovered nuances of the relational perspective sustaining creativity in our psychoanalytic work. In 1993 he wrote:

“ … psychopathology might well be considered a failure of imagination, a life that is stuck because old constraints foreclose the possibility of new experiences, new states of the mind.” (Hope and Dread, p.222)

New possibilities for experience and the analytic relationship can become trapped in repeated enactments of the familiar given the fear of venturing into the unknown, both for the patient and the analyst. Mitchell (1988) reminds us that the “adhesive devotion to the relational matrix” and the “deep loyalty to the familiar” is inexorably tied to the terror of losing oneself and sense of connection with others. The fear and desire for “imaginative reshaping” transported me back in time evoking the affective storms and tensions of an analytic treatment that has never left the recesses of my mind. There standing before me was the apparition of Christian proclaiming his “hubris” and “misogyny”, that he has trapped himself and I am there with him. Christian was 28 years old when he began an analysis that traversed the battlefields of his past searching for something new in something old.

Educational Objectives:

1. Participants will gain knowledge of relational psychoanalysis and its application to clinical material.
2. Participants will gain knowledge of the clinical implications of complex facets of enactment in the relational matrix.

Abstract:

“I Am Afraid of Seeing Your Face:” Trauma & the Dread of Engaging in a Twinship Tie, Koichi Togashi and Amanda Kottler

In this paper, from a contemporary self psychological perspective, the authors develop the idea of a correlation between twinship and trauma. They focus on dynamic systems in which traumatized individuals, having sought out others with whom they can share similar traumatic experiences, paradoxically, avoid acknowledging that these others are able to recognize similarities between them. With reference to a case vignette of a Japanese male who had been physically abused by his mother the authors illustrate how this plays out in the analytic dyad and the complexities involved in this process. As the analyst finds similarities between them the patient immediately expects that the differences between his analyst and himself will not be recognized or acknowledged. With this comes a dread that, if the patient does not immediately withdraw from the relationship, the analyst, to whom he has exposed the most vulnerable part of his subjectivity, will colonize his pain and suffering. The authors conclude that it is possible to keep this dynamic system open to transformation if the analyst focuses on the dynamic system’s rigidity and the delicate balance between the patient’s capacity to be closed or open to recognizing the multiplicity of an essentially curative twinship experience.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of the presentation, from a contemporary self psychological perspective, participants will have a better conceptual grasp of the correlation between trauma and a twinship experience. They will have a greater understanding of the complex nature of the dynamic system, and the need for the analyst to be exquisitely sensitive to the traumatized patient’s deep and intense longing for, but equally deep dread of an experience which allows for the mutual recognition of similarities and differences in the dyad.

Abstract:

When Daedalus fails Icarus: Male Narcissism in a Culture that Glorifies Masculinity, Fisek Guler

This paper takes its inspiration from Mitchell’s 1988 chapter titled “The Wings of Icarus”. There Mitchell uses the example of Icarus to describe narcissistic illusion as a learned way of human connection, that is, relationality. This presentation explores Mitchell’s ideas on narcissism within a cultural context, in an attempt to show how cultural values buttress parental “overvaluing” (1988, p, 180) resulting in a grandiose approach to life and relationships, that inevitably leads to relational difficulties. The focus will be on male experience in the Turkish context where grandiose narcissistic phenomena reflect more or less normative male experience. A discussion of the contributions of culture to the development of male narcissism will be given. This will be followed by a composite case example, showing how the addition of particular combinations of individual attributes and family dynamics to this context can lead to illusory developments that end in grief.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant will be able to see an example of how Mitchell’s ideas offer new possibilities for understanding personality disorders; and develop further understanding of the role of culture in the development of personality disorders.

Sophie's Return, Maria Pia Roggero Klutzer

In this work I will use Sophie’s case, drawn from Stephen A. Mitchell‘s Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (1993), to bring into focus how the Psychoanalysis of Relation in Italy (Psicoanalisi della Relazione), developed at about the same time but independently of Relational Psychoanalysis in the US. Since then, frequent and constructive exchanges have been going on between the two models which I will outline. The Psychoanalysis of Relation in Italy differs in several theoretical ways including: a) the notion of subject and b) the notion of psychopathology. These concepts are deeply interrelated. I will examine them by answering the three questions asked by Mitchell in the abovementioned book: 1) "What does Sophie need?" 2) "What does the analyst know?" Finally 3) "Where does the Analyst’s knowledge of the patient come from?"

At the end of my presentation, the participants will be able to describe:

1. The differences and the common points between Relational Psychoanalysis and Psicoanalisi della Relazione regarding the concept of subject and the concept of psychopathology.
2. The therapeutic effects of this different conceptualization of the subject.

Abstract:

Neither Guilt Nor Self-Pity: A Typology of Nostalgia, Catherine Hicks

In this paper, I am proposing that, in their less healthy manifestations, some kinds of nostalgia are like Mitchell’s concept of ‘guiltiness’, and others are like ‘pitifulness’ – and in each case, they permit a retreat from genuine experience of self, other and the reality of suffering. ). Although I see nostalgia functioning also as a beneficial mechanism, it is primarily this dimension that I’m trying to think about in this paper – nostalgia as retreat, as defense, in which the nostalgia may indicate how much a person is able to bear of diverse and conflict-inducing versions of the past, as viewed from the present vantage point. Building on Mitchell’s conceptualization, and integrating it with Margalit’s (2011) suggestions about good and bad types of nostalgia, I propose a typology of nostalgia, and within this, pay particular attention to a more extreme form – allied to Kammen’s description of nostalgia as “history without guilt” (1991), especially as it manifests in those of us who have been part of a repugnant racist past.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant will be able to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy forms and functions of nostalgia; and understand how some forms of nostalgia disable the capacity to bear guilt and complicity.

Licking One's Own Wounds: Suffering and Cycles of Shame and Self-Pity, Peter Shabad

Patients and analysts frequently become locked in enactments generated by their reciprocal dissociations. Emerging from this quagmire often entails the capacity of the dyad to confront each other and negotiate out of these impasses. When discussing the analyst’s role in facing her own dissociations much of the analytic literature refers to minor omissions or blind spots that are effectively dealt with by slight attitude adjustments toward the patient. I suggest that, in some instances, the therapist’s willingness to grapple with her deeper and more profound detachments while struggling and negotiating with her patient’s dissociations could lead to intense mutual influence and spirited enlivening collaboration between the two, including invitations to participate in architecting the therapy itself. This thoroughgoing relational process could be further advanced by broadening the analytic frame to include external environmental factors. A detailed case vignette is presented.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation the participant will be able to illustrate the advantage of embracing a more comprehensive relational and environmental approach to therapeutic action. There are two educational objectives in this:

1. The therapist’s willingness to grapple with her deeper and more profound detachments while struggling and negotiating with her patient’s dissociations could lead to intense mutual influence and spirited enlivening collaboration between the two, including and especially invitations to participate in architecting the therapy itself.
2. This thoroughgoing relational process could be further advanced by broadening the analytic frame to include external environmental factors.

Abstract:

Imaginations at the Threshold: Psychoanalytic Consultation in Newborn Intensive Care, Susan Kraemer

In “Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis” Steven Mitchell proposed that a patient who is suffering from a “failure in imagination” may be helped through her relationship with the analyst to “envision other ways of being and being with.” True to the spirit of the relational turn, Mitchell pointed out that the analyst’s imaginative capacities are also at play, as is the analyst’s “personal stake” in the process. I consider these ideas within the context of my work as psychoanalytic consultant in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU), an environment in which imagination can feel treacherous and hope and dread live in uneasy relation. Here, mothers’ minds are places where ghosts and aliens hang about and destructive fantasies may be realized. In an effort to make sense of my experience of feeling like a “trespasser” in the NICU I explore the critical link between failures in imagination and failures in empathy within the analyst and the inherent shame that can accompany these states of mind. I describe how I come to “re-imagine” the ways in which my own narratives of birth and death inevitably shape my listening and how this has enabled me to appreciate the relational and reciprocal tensions inherent in these “failures.” In particular I develop my understanding of how shame and imagination in the NICU are intermingled with fears of trespassing onto maternal states of mind and are impacted by the mothers’ own mix of fear, guilt, and shame, as well as history of perinatal loss. Through vignettes I describe how I come to know that holding back from imaginative engagement is sometimes a form of destructiveness, and sometimes, an expression of care.

Educational Objectives:

Participants will have a unique opportunity to consider the complexity of psychoanalytic consultation in an intensive medical setting. At the conclusion of my presentation the listener will have been helped to:

1. Think more deeply about the ways in which the analyst is impacted by those with whom she works, and will be able to use these clinical vignettes as a means of understanding the ways in which the analyst is embedded in the analytic process and how this in turn impacts the patient and the work (Mitchell, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, 1993).
2. Will be provided with experientially near examples that elaborate Stephen Mitchell’s commitment to thinking about dialectic tension and paradox as inherent to clinical theory and practice.

Building Motherhood, Andreja Poljanec and Barbara Simonic

The commitment and physical and emotional availability of parents will from the day their child is born determine the breadth and depth of the child's social and relational world; after all, this primary relationship undermines how the newborn will develop. The first three years of the child's life are fundamental for the development of the child's brain. As the brain is not yet a fully formed organ at birth, it develops and grows in response to the spontaneous relationships experienced within the environment. Experiences from the early formative years of the child's life are the most consequential. The child's primary relationship, especially with the mother, thus provides the basis for how the circuitry for emotional processing will draw up in the child's brain; this circuitry will also determine the individual's greater or lesser capacity to enter into emotional relationships later in life. This is the essence of why it is crucial for the mother and child to be able to mutually co-create the kind of connection that will allow this. In this contribution, we will look into the fields recognized by mothers attending a young mother's group as vital to co-creating a happy and fulfilling motherhood.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of our presentation, the participant will be able to:

1. Understand the process of building a maternity and its meaning for healthy child development;
2. Identify the essential elements of successful motherhood.

Abstract:

Dealing with Emerging Creativity Between Grandiose Illusion and Catastrophic Failure, Ingrid Pedroni

The report of the treatment of a talented young woman with severe problems of self-regulation in bodily and relational terms, highlights how clinical paradigms of self psychology and relational psychoanalysis are necessary to respond to different stages of the analytic process. In the first years of the analysis a soothing, protecting and silently mirroring attitude led to a condition of increased well being, while an interpretative effort meant to underline the systemic nature of disruptive interactions in the family helped in the acquisition of a deeper and more mature selfother representation. But a similar analytic stance became ineffectual when the patient’s new needs and different state of self caused a relevant change in the therapeutic relation signalled by the analyst’s countertransferential reaction. If these new and unexpected countertransferential reactions are not taken into account and understood as the surfacing of conflicting new and old self-states, listening and mirroring is deprived of its authentic, empathic significance. The casting aside of the interpersonal dimension led to an impasse, which resulted in a radical, but resolutive enactment. Mitchell’s theoretical and clinical suggestions are considered in delineating possible alternative paths that may have avoided the impasse.

Educational Objectives:

At the end of my presentation, the participant will be able to explain:

1. How effective a mirroring and holding analytic stance can be in cases of severe disturbances in self- and self-other regulation.
2. Why the same attitude may lead to an impasse and to unexpected enactments, when in a new stage of the process interpersonal dimensions and a different countertransferential experience of the patient are not taken into account and how essential is, therefore, the theoretical and clinical teaching of Mitchell in envisaging a different outcome.

Oh No! Who Are You? Struggling with the Analyst's Loss of the Idealized Patient, Sandra Salerno

This paper picks up a strand of thought first explored by Stephen Mitchell in Influence and Autonomy, that of the conflicting desires of the analysts to help patients locate and express their individual personhood and to shape them in the form of the analyst’s vision of a psychologically, emotionally and socially healthy individual. Questions are raised regarding the values that underlie such visions. Also, the vision that the analyst creates of the patient is explored in an expansion of the concept of the idealized patient, a mosaic created through each interaction and laid down to create in the analyst’s mind’s eye a picture of who the patient is. When the analyst’s vision of the idealized patient is challenged, and the mosaic falls apart, the analyst is left to pick up the pieces emotionally and clinically. This paper will illustrate such an occurrence through two case examples, one historic and one derived from the author’s clinical experience.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of this presentation, the participant will be able to:

1. Explain the potential danger in the idealization of the patient.
2. Describe how he or she may be influenced by personal, social and psychoanalytic values to react in the event of the loss of the idealized patient.

Abstract:

Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances: The Impact of Affective Improvisation in Psychoanalysis, Arthur Gray

Improvisation in psychoanalysis has heretofore been defined by a theater games model in which the emphasis is on a creative exchange of dialogue. In this paper, I expand the concept of improvisation by drawing on the contributions of Sanford Meisner. His model is characterized by two improvisers maintaining affective contact. He described this process as “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” Clinical case material illustrates how Meisner’s model of affective improvisation can be applied to circumstances in which the analyst is pushed beyond familiar analytic comfort zones. In such situations, affective improvisations provide the analyst with an additional resource with which to respond to these challenging moments in ways that facilitate increasing intimacy between patient and analyst. I spell out how affective improvisations impact therapeutic action in psychoanalysis.

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participants will learn what affective improvisations are; and learn to recognize how affective improvisations can be relied on to engage complex challenging moments that occur in an analysis.

Abstract:

Postcards from Hell: The Act of Creation as a Relational Process, Michael Pariser

In the midst of a two-and-a-half year analysis marked by an intense romanticized transference, the therapist was facing the all-too-common problem of frequent extra-session communication. Voice mail messages, text messages, and emails from the patient detailed the emotional horrors she suffered as a result of the analyst's refusal to allow the relationship to become more personal, and the analyst found himself growing increasingly resentful and disconnected. Then, noting the patient's dissociative process at work and wishing to bridge her discontinuous worlds of experience, he came up with the idea of playing the patient's voice messages back to her in session. After initial resistance on the part of the patient and clumsiness by the analyst, they were eventually able to use the process to stand more in the spaces between the patient's dissociated self-states. At that point, progress, which had stalled, began again to move forward. In the process, the analyst began to reconnect better to his own disconnected emotional experiences in relation to the patient. This creative act is illuminated as a psychoanalytic process that may have utility for other analysts in this age of electronic communication, and the creative process that produced it is examined as a profoundly relational process involving the therapist, the patient, and the therapist's growing range of contemporary theoretical influences.

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participant should be able to:

1. Identify those situations in which it might be useful to play a patient’s voice mail messages in session.
2. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.
3. Explain the relational elements that constitute the creative process.

Abstract:

Analytic Knowing: Holding Horror & Working Towards Change, Lisa Lyons

Relational psychoanalytic literature is filled with discussion regarding how the concept of intersubjectivity has enhanced the space between and within patients and analysts. As the relationship between the dyad expands and contracts, prior traumatic experiences become ripe for reenactment. Several theorists have posited that there is a fluidity between the positions of persecuted, persecutor, and bystander/rescuer. Patients who have been abused may be more likely to project sedimented aspects of this trauma into the analyst. Unconscious motivations may include gaining a sense of empowerment, disavowing feelings of shame and inferiority, or mastering feelings of abandonment or misattunement experienced by a Third who either stood by or was unable to rescue the patient from being abused. Traditionally understood as "identification with the aggressor," a relational view of this pattern understands the implicit relational knowledge that becomes activated when placed in a situation reminiscent of prior experiences of abuse. The vicissitudes of each particular therapy dyad are complex in such cases, but what happens when the analyst is a trainee and the supervisor reenacts the abuse experienced by the patient onto the trainee? Can the analyst/trainee withstand such "identification with the oppressed?" When the enactment extends beyond the dyad and moves into the triad, how can the trainee/analyst move beyond her own feelings of persecution, using this shared experience to create agency for both herself and the patient? As a trainee, she is particularly vulnerable to devaluation, criticism, and being placed in the position of "Other" in terms of her lesser status in the training environment. In my case illustration, the setting was an art institute’s counseling center, and the patient a sculptor. Bullying and sadism were projected into the analyst/trainee so that she could share the patient’s shame and anger. Resultantly, this regression to a shared intersubjective space of juvenile bullying led the trainee to take risks in the treatment, enraging her supervisor for "breaking the frame." Feeling bullied by both patient and supervisor led the trainee to further enter the subjugated space of the patient, ultimately empowering both to “sculpt” a relationship that moved them out of such constricted roles.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of this presentation, the participant will be able to describe the ways in which early traumatic experiences may be reenacted within the treatment dyad. Specifically, participants will develop a greater understanding of the sequelae of early childhood sexual abuse on the relational matrix within the dyad.

Also, the participant will be able to explain how as a trainee, a supervisee may be hierarchically placed in a subjugated role while training. Therefore, she may experience a greater susceptibility to enacting with the patient the dynamics of perpetrator/victim/rescuer-bystander that often is at the relational core of abuse survivors.

"Touching the Tar Baby:” On The Dialectic Interplay of Dissociation & Imagination, Shaily Wardimon

This paper will present the case of Lea, a Holocaust survivor coming to therapy for the first time in her life. The general lines along which the treatment went so far will be described, portraying the unique dynamics of severe past trauma, old age and structural dissociation. After discussing the ways in which this clinical material invokes Donnel Stern and Philip Bromberg's separate, but similar, conceptualizations of dissociation and its relation to a failure of imagination, I will attempt to show, following vignettes from the work with Lea, that dissociation and imagination can sometime maintain a dialectic relationship, without necessarily negating each other. Using a dialectic line of thought which finds its inspiration in Stephen Mitchell's conceptualization of the dialectics of hope and the role of imagination, the apparent contradictory qualities of imagination and dissociation will be shown as coming together in certain circumstances to form an intricate relational reality, which needs to be held by therapist and patient, so as not to collapse back to an either-or way of thinking.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation, the participate will be able to:

1. Describe the dialectics of dissociation and imagination, understanding that despite their appearance as two opposing forces that negate each other, they sometimes must operate simultaneously, creating a very intricate relational reality that needs to be contained without a collapse into an either-or way of thinking.
2. Feel more familiar with the unique charecteristics of working with Holocaust survivors today, struggling with the complex interlock of old age and PTSD.

Abstract:

Memoir Writing and Analytic Work: The Analytic Witness, Ann D’Ecole

Noting a dearth of writers from the Italian-American community and of scholars interested in that experience, the author discusses the self-integration process of writing a memoir about growing up Italian-American in Post WWII America. The author explores the role of witness in telling ones story.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my presentation the participants will be able to describe some of the psychological challenges of the Italian American experience in Post WWII America and their generalizability to other immigrant groups; and illustrate how memoir writing provides a potential for sustaining creativity in psychoanalytic work.

Relationally and Creatively, Colette Rayment

Last year I left the San Francisco IARPP Conference and my newfound American colleague and returned to Sydney, primed to write in the creative genre of life writing. The work flourished through that autumn until it was interrupted in the winter by a desire to write a more academic paper for a Congress in Sydney on World Dreaming. All this while by Skype, my American colleague held the creative project up to my mind, showing her interest in what I might have to say on Aboriginal art and trauma, but never letting me forget the creative venture. Striding both projects through the winter, I realised that the paper on Aboriginal art and Dreaming and my life writing were two arms of one enterprise: both projects were talking about the same thing: an engagement with creativity (art and writing respectively) as vehicle for, and metaphor for, the integration of trauma. This proposed presentation is a reading from some of that writing.

Educational Objectives:

At the conclusion of my paper together with that of my panel colleague, the participant will further appreciate the power of the unconscious in the creative writing process. The enterprise of writing creatively will be understood as a relational interplay between conscious and unconscious enterprises, between academic and literary projects and between ‘mentor’ and writer. Additionally the participant will be able to recall certain images of various indigenous art works to trope concepts of unintegrated and integrated trauma and to forge her/his own creative visuals for these concepts.