Multiple Personalities and Possessing Entities by Adam Crabtree (PDF)
Models of the Mind by Adam Crabtree (PDF)
Mourning and Melancholia by Jackie Herner (PDF)
The pain of loss is an inevitable part of the human condition. Mourning is the natural response to such loss, whether it is of a loved person, an ideal or a vision of the future, or of liberty and security. The work of mourning can be long and painful, but it is not without value to the one who grieves. In some instances, the work of mourning goes awry, and turns instead to melancholia. This paper explores various perspectives on working with grief and depression, drawing on the works of Freud, Guntrip, Bowlby, Loewald, Klein and Winnicott.
Photography and Interiority by Sharon Bedard (PDF)
Photography, as a visual medium, is often understood to be capturing something “out there”. This narrows photography’s potential and its capacity to enliven a conversation between the different dimensions of self experience and self expression. Photography is generative. It creates a link between what is out there and what is interior. The psyche of an adult is rich with imagery, symbolism and imagination. Photography allows us to create expressions of that interiority and furthers the development of self-expression, communication, discovery and creativity. Cross modal and multimodal experience can be explored through photography and writing. As human beings we are regularly ordering and navigating our inner world; and striving to form meaningful and rewarding external relationships. This paper explores a number of connections between photography and writing as inter-animating fields of self awareness. I will be drawing on the works of Bollas, Freud, Grotstein, Loewald, Mitchell, Segal and Stern.
Evermore Now: Daseinsanalysis and Early Development by Dr. Paula Thomson
Sexuality, Gender and Sexual Orientation by Sharon Bedard (PDF)
Sexuality is a psychodynamic creation and a provisional proposition. As such sexuality is not an end product; it is the ongoing aliveness of our transference and counter-transference recapitulations, our various object-relations, defensive organizations, our conflicts and self structures. Psychodynamic, as the term insists, is not a static arrangement. Rather, sexuality is labile, subject to repression or dissociation, available and capable of a disappearing act.
Why is this important? As therapists, when we sit with another person, the presentations of their sexualities, their gender and their sexual orientation can be as fleeting as watching a rapid slide show. Just when we feel we have something stable and complete, our clients will change our mind for us.
This lecture examines sexuality, gender and sexual orientation with the following question in mind – What is the purpose of the Oedipal Complex? Not the theory, but the experiential process of it.
In one sense it is to help a child move from an auto-erotic into an allo-erotic sexual life.
In another sense, it is to help the child, through their sensual experiences and multiple identifications, to form a sense of how to relate to a larger world as an agent in that world.
As an agent a child develops a capacity for self reflection through the development of a sense of subjectivity and as a subject the ability to hold the self as an object of consideration. This is the foundation for self-reflectivity.
In yet another sense, it helps the child establish a sense of their gender as related to how they claim, inhabit and move in their own body.
Also, it helps the child orient their sexuality to those others for whom they feel an erotic attachment and from whom they feel a welcoming response.
Finally, it teaches a child to hold out for a future by tolerating the pressures and frustrations of a present without relapsing into erotic withdrawal.
Theories are a way of seeing; psychotherapy is a way of listening for both parties, and being a therapist is a way of speaking; a way of entering into a conversation. The many theoretical developments with regard to gender and sexual orientation by other theorists since Freud allow us as therapists to develop our capacities to listen to our clients freshly as they explore their sexuality, gender and sexual orientation.
This lecture draws on the following theorists: Sigmund Freud, Adrienne Harris, Judith Butler, Jessica Benjamin, Maggie Magee and Diana Miller, Ken Corbett, Hans Loewald, Adam Phillips, Christopher Bollas, Jonathan Lear, Thomas, Ogden, Lewis Aron and others.
Writing – A New Beginning by Sharon Bedard (PDF)
To live is to battle with the trolls
In the heart of vault and brain.
To write: that is to sit
In judgement over one’s self.
Robertson Davies – The Manticore
We are all heirs to a psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic tradition and we enter that tradition to take up our full membership and responsibility. Psychoanalysis and more specifically psychodynamic psychotherapy is at one dimension an oral tradition – we talk and we listen, not merely as a matter of practice, but as a manner of training – we are in personal therapy, group therapy, individual supervision, group supervision, dream groups, seminars and concentrations – in other words we are with others and we talk. But we are also writers – this is communicated to us immediately as we write our autobiographies when we apply to CTP. We go on to write our application to the formation years, our application to supervision and our regular supervision updates, and we write our case histories – by which we mean the development of our self as therapists against the background of our work with this other human being who plays the supporting cast as our client. We are writing about our ability to think, theorize and remain humanly present – not just in our therapeutic clinical work – but in our writing as well. We join a tradition and an ongoing dialogue carried out through the medium of the written word. We are trained to be writers as a subsidiary task to our training as psychotherapists.
We have entered now into a tradition and forum for writing in order to talk with each other. These alumni presentations poise us between our training, our clinical experience, our capacity for unique thought, our collegiality; and our development as writers.
I am interested in the form and meaning that our, and specifically my writing takes. I am interested in writing generally – from the perspective of a lively and ardent reader, from the perspective of conversation as it occurs in my reading group, and from the perspective of why I write. I write with multiple agendas and multiple audiences. I am interested in autobiographical writing and memoir; I am interested in clinical writing, thinking and theory building; I am interested in writing as a form of musing; and I am interested in the form that writing itself takes.
So I see this paper as moving between those worlds of interest.
Why is it that I want to talk to you about writing? Why do I write? What is personal? What is theory? What have any of those to do with psychoanalytic writing? What does autobiographical writing have to do with rigorous psychoanalytic writing and clinical thinking? How do the lines between healthy narcissism, solipsism, self reflection, experience, theory, clinical development and honesty intersect? These questions direct my writing.
1900—The Dawning of Psychoanalysis by Sharon MacIsaac-McKenna (PDF)