Scientific Meetings

Robert Glick, MD presenter

Eve Caligor, MD and Seth Aronson, PsyD • presenters
Dr. Caligor will discuss empirical developments in the understanding of psychopathology and psychotherapy outcome that inform the development of contemporary models of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This presentation will suggest various ways that psychodynamic clinicians can make use of evidence-based principles and recent developments in psychotherapy research in their psychotherapeutic practice. Central elements to consider include completing a comprehensive assessment and sharing a diagnostic impression with the patient, explicit discussion of treatment goals and frame before treatment formally begins, tailoring the treatment to severity of patient pathology, and focusing the exploratory process on the here-and-now with the objective of promoting reflective capacities within the patient. Dr. Aronson makes the case that psychoanalysis is “The App Every Smart Clinician Should Have.” He will describe the application of psychoanalytic principles to work in the public sector. Clinical examples will illustrate the importance of teaching psychoanalysis for its utilization in the psychotherapies. In demonstrating application of psychoanalytic concepts to work with a child and an adolescent, Dr. Aronson will show how critical it is that we analysts teach what we hold to be true to mental health professionals, showing how alive and meaningful such concepts are to so many fields.

Eve Caligor M.D. is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is Director of the Psychotherapy Division, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She serves as vice-president of the International Society for Transference-Focused Psychotherapy.

Seth Aronson, Psy.D. is Director of Training, Training and Supervising Analyst and Fellow at the William Alanson White Institute. At Long Island University, he teaches childhood psychopathology and child/adolescent psychotherapy. Selected papers include “Balancing the fiddlers on my roof: on wearing a yarmulke and working as a psychoanalyst”; “Only connect; the mutuality of attachment “; “Through a glass clearly”; “Analytic supervision; all work and no play?” and with Craig Haen, is co-editor of the Handbook of Child and Adolescent Group Therapy.

This event was designed by the APM and the Columbia University Center for Training and Research to welcome the graduates of the Psychotherapy Division to the monthly Scientific Meeting program.

Theodore Shapiro, MD, Eric Marcus, MD, Marina Mirkin, MD, Panelists
Christine Anzieu Premmereur, PhD, MD Moderator

PLEASE NOTE DIFFERENT LOCATION • 247 East 82nd Street • New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

Reception with wine and cheese will open the event
For years psychoanalysts have been so invested in proving that psychoanalysis is a science that they have all but forgotten that it is an art of a kind. There have been many attempts to tease apart creative and scientific aspects of psychoanalysis. Bowlby famously made a distinction between “the art of psychoanalytic therapy and the science of psychoanalytic psychology.” Is such separation possible? Is it useful? This panel will discuss different aspects of creativity in everyday psychoanalytic work. Dr. Shapiro will consider various definitions of creativity and explore their applicability to art and psychoanalysis. He will investigate the use of the psychoanalytic setting as a creative integrative opportunity to facilitate the treatment. Dr. Marcus will take up the issue of creativity in science and apply these thoughts to creativity and science in psychoanalytic work and research. The claim will be made that psychoanalytic work is inherently creative and can be scientific. Examples from dream interpretation with patients and use of dreams in social science research will be used to illustrate his ideas. Dr. Mirkin will discuss the transformative role of creativity in therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. She will outline the analyst’s contribution – the analyst’s own creativity – to the treatment and suggest that the development of the patient’s creative capacity is a measure of the progress of the treatment. The panelists will engage in discussion amongst themselves and with the audience to further our understanding of these complex issues.

Eric Marcus MD, Training and Supervision Analyst at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and author of Psychosis and Near-Psychosis (3rd ed. 2017).

Theodore Shapiro, MD a psychoanalyst and researcher in the areas of language disorders, developmental disorders such as Autism and PDD, anxiety disorders, panic psychopharmacology in children, psychoanalysis, and linguistics at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Patrick Miller, MD presenter
Rosemary Balsam, MD discussant

“It has become a habit to say that the analytical pair is a couple. If such is the case we need to further our understanding of the kind of copulation that is taking place, the different aspects of the intercourse, and how it ends up being either sterile or procreative,” Patrick Miller will argue in this presentation.

A visiting scholar from the Societe Psychanalytique de Recherche et de Formation and prominent psychoanalyst, Dr. Miller will focus on the role of apres coup in the construction of genital sexual life. His presentation will revolve around deepening of his notion of penetrability and permeability (early shapes of sexuality), connecting it with adult sexuality using two substantial clinical vignettes to discuss the possibility of thinking about a drive-related container/contained as it pertains to the analytic couple.

We are so fortunate to have this opportunity to welcome Patrick Miller, MD whose scholarship and clinical work convey his deep understanding of the complexity of Freud’s theoretical and clinical ideas. Dr Miller uses his close reading of Freud to delve into the nature of the analyst’s “psychical reality” and the challenges the analyst faces in the daily work. He looks carefully at the analyst’s stance and reconsiders the fundamental concepts of free association, free floating attention, neutrality, and analytic listening to examine the functioning of the analyst’s mind from different perspectives as he draws upon Winnicott, Bion, Aulagnier, Lacan and Ferenczi. Dr. Miller’s scholarship revolves around the themes of sexuality, the body and the psyche-soma dynamic as well as to the effects of early trauma. He vividly describes his clinical work to make his theoretical ideas come alive.

Patrick Miller, M.D. is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He completed his analytic training in Paris, where he studied both with Piera Aulagnier and Andre Green. He co-founded the Societe Psychanalytique de Recherche et de Formation in Paris in 2005, and he served as president from 2007-2011. Dr. Miller is an IPA training analyst and a member of CAPS in Princeton. He has authored numerous papers in international journals, and has published two books, Le Psychanalyste pendant la Séance (2001) and Driving Soma: A Transformational Process in the Analytic Encounter (2014). He has a psychoanalytic practice in Paris.

Rosemary H. Balsam F.R.C.Psych. (London); M.R.C.P. (Edinburgh); is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Yale Medical School; Staff Psychiatrist at the Dept. of Student Mental Health and Counseling; Training and Supervising Analyst at Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. Her special interests are in gender, sexuality and body issues, especially female development.

Levy Goldfarb Lecture Eugene Mahon, MD

​In this lecture I define childhood symbolic play, free association and enactments as distinct entities despite the important strands of connective tissue that binds them psychologically. To Freud’s definition of play being the same as fantasy except for play’s need to use props and playthings to actualize itself, I add action as an obvious but yet nevertheless neglected component. I suggest that the potential for free association begins with the achievement of formal Piagetian cognitive processes in early adolescence and that it needs no props or actions to set it in motion since words and ideas generate further spontaneities in a creative flow of associations. In adult psychoanalytic process enactments enlist the props and playthings of play again as a too abstract, exclusively verbal free associative affective process fails to express the whole affective analytic communication. I illustrate all of this with psychoanalytic process from a four to six year old child in analysis, that same child again age twelve to fourteen and fully able to free associate creatively and productively, and then from an adult analysis in which free associative process failed to carry the full burden of affective meanings and enactment was enlisted to play a profound role in the full expression of analytic affective communication. In adult analysis I suggest that enactment is a creative regression to the play mode of props, playthings and action to express what words alone could not communicate.

Eugene Mahon has published many articles on a great diversity of psychoanalytic topics and is the author of four published books: A PSYCHOANALYTIC ODYSSEY; RENSAL THE REDBIT; BONESHOP OF THE HEART; SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ( in press). He is a training and supervising analyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He is a child and adult psychoanalyst and practices in New York City.

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

After attending this session, participants should be able to:

1. Recognize the role of play as a form of communication in child analysis.
2. Describe the role of Piagetian cognition (especially formal cognitive achievements) in the development of the capacity for free association.
3. Explain the role of development in the understanding of clinical work with enactments in adult psychoanalytic process.

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, PhD presenter
Graciela Abelin-Sas Rose, MD discussant

Dr. Ansieu-Premmereur will present on Didier Anzieu’s notion of the skin ego to explore identity confusion in our days in working with children and families. Dr. Abelin-Sas Rose will discuss identity confusion and skin ego in her clinical experience of working with couples.

Dominique Scarfone, MD presenter

Andrew Lotterman, MD presenter
Paolo Mieli, MD discussant

This presentation will describe the roles played by consciousness and conceptual thought in the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. It will examine the structure of the system Unconscious and system Conscious and the evolution of thinking from the subsymbolic to the verbal-concept system.