Scientific Meetings

Donald Moss, MD presenter
Stathis Gourgouris, PhD discussant

Over the last fifty years, prominent French analysts have been developing a new theory and clinical technique to facilitate the treatment of patients with somatization. Drawn from Freud’s second topography (tripartite model), this clinical work derives from the theory that somatization primarily results from the patient’s difficulties in their capacity for representation. Dr Aloupis will be discussing via clinical material, the enigma of pain from the perspective of the interplay between psychic and physical pain. Dr Gerber will discuss this presentation from a neuropsychoanalytic/attachment theory perspective. This lecture will be held at the New York Academy of Medicine, 2 East 103rd Street at Fifth Avenue.
Panos Aloupis, MD presenter
Andrew Gerber, MD discussant

Danielle Knafo, PhD • presenter
David Lichtenstein, PhD • discussant
Desire and perversion have evolved in our era of the internet, robots, mechanical thinking, and social isolation. Danielle Knafo, author of The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture (2017), writes: “Freud considered the unconscious a site of repressed wishes and desires whose influence extends to the farthest reach of conscious life. Today, such desires find new expression on the internet, which allows anonymity and accessibility. Replacing ‘real world’ skins with digital ones, users create virtual personas to promote their secret passions. The virtual space of consciousness is well matched to the virtual space of the web, though sexual and social enactments within the latter can have dangerous real world consequences. Examining the darker side of the marriage between desire and communication technology, focused through the phenomenon of ‘catfishing,’ this presentation raises questions about the nature of the human self, love, transference, and the role they play in deception. Understanding how patients use the internet provides access to their unconscious desires.”

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, MD • presenter
Lissa Weinstein, PhD • discussant

From her vast experience working with children and parents, Dr. Anzieu-Premmereur examines the impact of technology on contemporary children’s capacity for symbolization and relatedness.

Dr. Anzieu Premmereur is the director of the Parent-Infant Program of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

Dr. Weinstein is a psychologist and psychoanalyst and full Professor of Psychology at City College of New York. Her research focuses on the measurement of changes in linguistic structures such as pronoun use, repetition, and metaphor as indicators of modifications in psychological structure during therapy with young children.

Richard Ledes documentary filmmaker
Luca Flabbi, PhD, Gabriella Pediconi, PhD, Glauco Genga, MD
discussants

Since the beginning of 2014, 1,112,332 refugees crossed the borders of Greece. The documentary No Human is Illegal will be presented, illustrating the drama of the refugee as s/he arrives ‘spit out’ by the sea on the coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. An international group of three analysts, Pediconi, Genga and Flabbi, will discuss with the film director, Richard Ledes, the theme of hate and the surge of nationalism in the world as a social phenomenon of our days. Next, Anna Christopoulos, drawing from her clinical experience with several of her colleagues within the group “Doctors of the World,” will present a qualitative research study seeking to understand the internal experiences of refugees. She will review the findings from this study to date and then present two interviews which illustrate intra-psychic processes involved in coping, as well as inner changes that can come about in the refugee experience. This panel aims to intertwine the social and the clinical starting with the worldwide surge of nationalism, continuing with working with trauma clinically as it relates to transgenerational transmission of disassociated hate.

Roosevelt Cassorla MD, PhD • Presenter

Brazilian analyst Dr. Roosevelt Cassorla discusses fanaticism both as a social phenomenon and as a phenomenon that may arise in the analytic field. Several hypotheses about fanatic aspects of the analytic field are put forward. Aspects of early symbiosis which are remobilized primarily in adolescence are examined, as are container/contained relationships in early childhood which are experienced as fraudulent. Defensive narcissistic organizations which are mobilized in relation to these early experiences are shown to lead to fantasies that manifest themselves as fanatic adherence to various social systems, including religions and political ideologies.

Roosevelt Cassorla is a widely published authority on Psychoanalytic Field Theory. A training analyst at the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of São Paulo and the Campinas Psychoanalytic Study Group, and member of editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, his current book, The Psychoanalyst, the Theater of Dreams and the Clinic of Enactment, was published by Routledge. He received the Sigourney Award in 2017.

Diane O’Donoghue • Presenter

Freud’s collection of “antiquities” is well known, but is most commonly imagined as shown in the famous photographs, taken in May 1938, by Edmund Engelman. But this was the collection in literally its last moments in Vienna, just prior to Freud’s forced exile to London. As the over 2000 objects that filled his working spaces, we know this assemblage at its end far better than its start. Based on a chapter in Professor O’Donoghue’s recently published book on the role of art and archaeology in the shaping of Freud’s theories of the unconscious, this presentation will investigate when, and perhaps why, this collection began, relating it to a moment of tumult in Freud’s work – in the autumn of 1897 – when fragments of history took a highly consequential turn for him, and for the construction of psychoanalysis to follow.

Mitchell Wilson, MD Presenter

Avgi Saketopoulou, PhD presenter
Stan Coen, MD discussant

This presentation brings together Freud, Laplanche, and Bersani to offer a psychoanalytic way of thinking about consent. It proposes a different kind of consent that can be at work in sexual encounters, and also in the analytic encounter: limit consent. In contrast to its affirmative counterpart, limit consent does not seek to reproduce a known experience of satisfaction. It aims, instead, towards a new experience. Limit consent is intimately connected to the rousing of the sexual life and death drives (Laplanche). When these escalate without interruption or modulation to move beyond the pleasures principle, a state of overwhelm can ensue. An extended clinical example will help illustrate how analytic work with such states can lead to psychic transformations.