The Analyst’s Loss of Self-Experience.
Date: June 18, 2022
Details: IARPP Conference: Expanding Our Clinical Experiences: The Spoken, Unspoken, and Unspeakable in Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Los Angeles, CA
Sullivan conceptualized the self-system as being formed through our interpersonal interactions—our selves are revealed to us through our interactions with the other. From this it follows that the loss of any relationship necessarily entails not only the loss of our ongoing experience of the other, but also the loss of the unique self-experience we had with that individual. Wolstein explains that every patient is unique, every analyst is unique and every dyad is unique. Given the intimacy of our relationships with our patients, what happens when a patient leaves treatment? Or more subtly, what happens when a patient makes a change in their way of being that deprives us of an accompanying self-experience to which we have grown attached? What defensive illusions do we employ to protect ourselves from being aware of these unique self-experiences of love and loss? Although this loss can be discussed in supervision, in consultation with colleagues or even written about and presented at a conference, in a deep and visceral way our self-experiences with patients remain forever in the isolation of the consulting room—unspoken.
Date: October 13, 2017
Details: White Society Colloquium, New York, NY
Freud’s paternal principle is an unconscious presence that functions independent of the actual person of the father of childhood. As the third to the mother-infant dyad, this paternal function is of singular importance, while simultaneously placing the subjective experience of the father in the muted position of being an absent authority. As the paternal principle suggests, the father is largely a transference phenomenon enacted by the child to imbue the person of the father with his power, rendering him paradoxically in a vulnerable position. Furthermore, his power, dependent on the perception of the child, is often eventually attributed to others. Despite a patriarchy in decline, the patriarch of the father’s own childhood remains as a paternal bastion holding men accountable to this archaic ideal, while no longer being perceived as powerful by his children and without the support of the patriarchal systems of the past. The paternal principle has direct implications for the treatment setting modeled on developmental theories of the mother-infant relationship.
From Stonewall to Scruff: Four Generations of Gay Analysts Take On Modern Gay Sexuality
Date: April 28, 2017
Details: DIVISION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS (39) 37TH ANNUAL SPRING MEETING, New York, NY
Norms around gay sexuality have evolved since Stonewall, and psychoanalysts of different generations experience these developments differently. For this panel, case material involving modern themes will be presented, and four gay psychoanalysts, ranging from a senior training analyst to a pre-doctoral intern, will explore their personal and clinical responses.
Queering Psychoanalysis: Working with Modern-Day Sexuality and Gender
Date: October 22, 2016
Details: William Alanson White Institute, New York, NY
Presenting a paper that explores the application of key concepts of Queer Theory and Laplanche in work with cis-gendered and heterosexual patients. As societally imposed gender and sexual narratives encourage us to split-off irreconcilable self-experiences, they become manifest in the form of enigmatic messages. Learning to appreciate the complexity of our gendered and sexual self-experiences and identifications allows us to minimize splitting and appreciate the full-breath of our complexity.
Knowing Me, K(no)wing You: Identification, Dis-identification and Embeddedness in the Wake of the Orlando Massacre
Date: August 11, 2016
Details: Joint International Conference, Reykjavik, Iceland
There is a knowing that is inclusive that we intuit. It is outside of the realm of intellectual understanding and the politics of identification, Wilner refers to it as being embedded in the immediate psychological context. It is the knowing of emersion of giving ourselves over to unbidden experience with the other, allowing ourselves to be effected on a deeply emotional level.
A Detailed Inqueery: In-sight of the Queering Gaze (Gays)
Date: May 4, 2016 8:30 pm
Details: William Alanson White Institute, NY, NY
Dr. David Braucher, L.C.S.W., Ph.D., will explore how some key concepts from Laplanche and Queer Theory contribute to the interpersonal tradition of the detailed inquiry. These theories are applied to the analysis of an ostensibly heterosexual, cis-gendered, female patient anxious to achieve the hetero-normative goals of having a monogamous marriage and children conceived through intercourse. The concept of 'queering' implies the acceptance of the ubiquitous participation of the analyst’s subjectivity, while also appreciating how this particular gaze can liberate the patient from societally-imposed narratives alienating her from her incompatible self-experiences. Dr. Braucher argues that the alienation of our queer self-experiences does not facilitate but rather interferes with hetero-normative pursuits. Irreconcilable self-experiences in this case are misrecognized as doubt regarding the choice of a mate rather than appreciated as evidence of a more complex nonconforming series of self-experiences and identifications.
Dr. Strangelove Or: How I learned to Stop Trying to Help and Love the Frame
Date: December 9, 2014
Details: William Alanson White Institute, NY, NY
Clinical Presentation of the First Two Years of an Analysis
Date: July 4, 2014
Details: International Joint Conference, Florence, Italy
Despite the common belief that we must be devoted to our lover with a single-minded passion, thinking only of them, we are an accumulation of self-experiences with multiple loves both romantic and platonic. All of our past loving/sexual experiences are part of us and are present to varying degrees when we love.
This paper will discuss case examples illustrating how patients use fantasies of past loving and sexual experiences to access their loving and sexual selves in the present.
The past experience with the other is the symbol for the experience of self. The true goal of the fantasy, the symbolized, is the activation of their loving or sexual selves. It is a transitional phenomenon in that it uses a memory of an object in fantasy; the object from a real world experience is used to engage the self’s creative capacity to recreate past self-experiences. These fantasies create questions regarding some common taboos about relationships. Patients often understand the fantasies discussed above as indicating that they have not adequately mourned a past love, leading to feelings of shame, guilt and confusion. They may also feel they are being unfaithful if they use memories of a past lover to access our sexual self with a present lover. The recreation of these relationships in fantasy has implications for the interpersonal relationship of an analysis. Self-experiences that emerge in the crucible of a mutually loving analytic relationship become memories of self-experience that may be recreated for use outside the consulting room. This is one crucial way that the analytic relationship contributes to an ever-expanding sense of self.