2024-2025 Psychoanalytic Society Colloquium Series

Psychoanalytic Synthesis and Innovation in Times of Upheaval

September 20, 2024, at 7:30pm
Patricia Gherovici, PhD
The And/Or of Gender – a Psychoanalytic Perspective
Abstract:
In 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, a novel in which the protagonist changes sex in the middle
of the story. A century later, writer and activist Paul B. Preciado sends a filmed letter to Virginia
Woolf in Orlando, My Political Biography (2023). Following the premise that the body is not a fixed
entity but entails a process of embodiment, a becoming-body, this lecture takes as point of
departure Preciado’s recent docu-fiction to explore how those analysands who exist beyond the
so-called traditional gender norms as well as those who consider themselves non-binary or outside
heterosexuality are helping us rethink gender. Thinking gender outside of the either/or of
traditional binary opposition, one subverts the fixity of identitarian claims while reorienting
psychoanalytic practice.
Bio:
Patricia Gherovici, PhD is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and recipient of the 2020 Sigourney
Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. She is a
trustee at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic
Psychosomatics.
Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize),
Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of
Transgenderism, and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference.
She co-authored with Chris Christian Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the
Unconscious (Gradiva Award and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize.)
She edited with Manya Steinkoler Lacan On Madness: Madness Yes You Can’t, as well as Lacan,
Psychoanalysis and Comedy, and most recently, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From
Feminism to Trans* (Gradiva Award for Best Edited Collection).
Learning Objectives (2):

Discuss ways to learn and unlearn about gender as it emerges in the clinical practice.
Explain the difference between sex, gender, and sexual difference.
References:

Gherovici, Patricia (2023), “The Monsters within and the Monsters Without: Gender Dissidents
and the Future of Psychoanalysis”, Psychoanalytic Perspectives.
Gherovici, Patricia (2022), “Beyond Fear and Pity”, Psychoanalytic Review.
Gherovici, Patricia (2021), “Does the Father Need to be a Man? Trans* Embodiments and
Parenthood” in Weissberg, Liliane Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family, Palgrave,
Macmillan.
Gherovici, Patricia, and Steinkoler, Manya (2023), “Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Gender, and
Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans*”, Routledge.

Friday, November 1, at 7:30pm
Daniel Pick, PhD
Paranoid States: Reflections on Psychoanalytic Thought, Conspiracy Theory, and Political Life.
Abstract:
It is a truism to say that today we live in a world of ultra-suspicion. But what is the appeal of that
world? How has it arisen and where are we heading now? Why is every major news story
shadowed by myriad conspiracy theories as well as claims and counter-claims about mass
brainwashing? In addressing these issues, Daniel Pick’s will revisit classic psychoanalytic ideas
about paranoia, alongside famous historical works, case studies and works of cinema. He will ask
how far past theories and stories may help us make sense of the dark times we are living in now.
Daniel Pick, PhD is a psychoanalyst and historian, and recipient of the 2023 Sigourney Award. He
was educated at Cambridge, and taught for many years at London University. He is a training and
supervising analyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society, and professor emeritus at Birkbeck,
University of London. His books include Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918;
War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age; Svengali’s Web: he Alien
Enchanter in Modern Culture; The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind; Psychoanalysis: A Very Short
Introduction; and most recently, Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control. 2014-21, From
2014 to 2021, he ran a team-based project, on behalf of the Wellcome Trust, focusing on the
history of hidden persuasion and brainwashing.
Learning Objectives (4):

To understand key psychoanalytic ideas about paranoid states of mind, as developed by Freud,
Klein and others.
To learn about the history of endeavors to apply those psychoanalytic ideas to cultural, social
and political phenomena, past and present.
To consider the opportunities and potential difficulties of applied psychoanalytic thought in
historical inquiries.
To investigate how historians and cultural theorists have developed their ideas about the
paranoid style’ in political thought, and to compare and contrast past and present analyses of the
popular appeal and political exploitation of conspiracy theory.
References:

Freud, Sigmund (1911), “The Schreber Case”.
Tausk, Victor (1919), “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia”
Hofstadter, Richard (1964), “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”
Trotter, David (2001), “Paranoid Modernism. Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the
Professionalization of English Society”
Mbembe, Achille (2019), “Necropolitics”

Two-Part Event
Wednesday, December 4, at 8:00pm, and Thursday, December 5, at 11:45am
Joshua Durban, FIPA
Wednesday, December 4, at 8:00pm
Revisited: Home, Homelessness, and Nowhere-ness in Early Infancy
Abstract:
The construction of a sense of home in early infancy is a complex achievement. It is intertwined
throughout life with the child’s pursuit of a safe physio-mental coverage. This process will be
described as an interaction between: (a) a safe dwelling in the body-as-mother (constitution); (b)
the internalization of the mother-as-me (internal object space); and (c) the establishment of
Oedipal triangular space, which is responsible for the capacity to move between narcissism-as-a-
home and the world-as-a-home.
The construction of a home as an interplay between these two elements is accompanied by
distinct anxieties and unconscious fantasies. Disruption in the early process due to deficit, internal
object relations, or environmental factors, might lead to severe withdrawal, mindlessness, hatred,
violence, and murderousness. A distinction will be made between these mental states of being-at-
home, homelessness, and nowhere-ness based on the corresponding levels of early
developmental and typical anxieties.
Home and homelessness are seen as more developed states of object relating accompanied by
some capacity for depressive feelings of loss, mourning, and longing. Nowhere-ness, however,
stems from early states of anxiety-of-being and osmotic/diffuse anxieties, which are characterized
by confusion between self and object, by a lack of orientation and of a sense of agency, as well as
by nameless grief, nameless dread, and devastation. The varieties of home, homelessness, and
nowhere-ness will be discussed along with clinical material from the analytic treatment of a
refugee child on the autistic spectrum and of his father. The role of psychoanalysis and of the
psychoanalyst in promoting the creation of an internal home will be described in reference to
technique.
with Tammy Kaminer, PhD, Moderator
Thursday, December 5, at 11:45am
Supervised Clinical Presentation
A case will be discussed with a focus on new diagnostical and technical considerations gained from
working with neurodiverse infants and adults.
Joshua Durban, FIPA is training and supervising child and adult psychoanalyst at the Israeli
Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (IPA); and a research analyst and
instructor at the Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC) in Los Angeles. He is the founder and the
clinical director of the Vista Autism Center (VAC) at the Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services
(VDM) in Los Angeles, which provides psychoanalytic treatment for infants, toddlers, adolescents
and young adults on the autism spectrum and their families. He is on the faculty of the School of
Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, The Psychotherapy Program, Post-Graduate Kleinian Studies and the
Early Mental States track. He is the editor (together with Dr. Merav Roth) of the Hebrew edition of
the collected works of Melanie Klein. He is a member of the IJPA international editorial board and

of the IPA inter-committee for the prevention of child abuse. He has a private practice in Tel-Aviv
and Los Angeles and specializes in the psychoanalysis of ASD and psychotic children, adolescents
and adults. He is currently also teaching and supervising in the UK, Germany, Australia and the
USA. His research on autism, trauma and early development has been published and translated
internationally.
Learning Objectives (4):

Discuss the origins of a sense of home in early infancy
Name two types of anxieties characteristic of neurodiverse infants
Describe the dynamics of early infantile trauma
Demonstrate clinical work with post-traumatic autistic withdrawal
References:

Brenman Pick, I. (2018) “Bringing Things Together.” In Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic
Encounter
Durban, J. (2017a) “The Very Same is Lost”: In Pursuit of Mental Coverage When Emerging From
Autistic States.” In Engaging Primitive Anxieties of the Emerging Self: The Legacy of Frances Tustin,
edited by H. B. Levine, and D. G. Power, 129–150. London: Karnac.
Durban, J. (2018) “The Pipe Child” Paper read at the Psychoanalytic Institute Berlin, 28 th
September 2018.
Klein, M. (2017) Lectures on Technique, edited by J. Steiner. London: Routledge.
Rhode, M. (2018) “Object Relations Approaches to Autism.” The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 99 (3): 702–724.

Friday, January 24, at 7:30pm
Nancy Kulish, PhD
A Case of Infantile Trauma and the Question of Resilience
Abstract:
The author presents a case of early infantile trauma. Experiences of severe neglect during infancy
came to life in this woman’s analysis through dramatic bodily experiences on the couch. The case
touches upon technical and theoretical questions about the recovery and reconstruction of early,
non-verbal memories and how they arise within the transference/countertransference. Of
particular interest are questions that the case raises about psychoanalytic ideas of development
and resiliency in surviving early and continuing trauma, given this woman’s high-level functioning
in many areas of her life. The author draws upon Winnicott’s views on the infant’s share in “going-
on-being” and argues for a more questioning approach to understanding how individuals
overcome and transcend early trauma.
Nancy Kulish, PhD is Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Wayne State Medical School and
Adjunct Professor of Psychology, University of Detroit/Mercy. She received her psychoanalytic
training at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute where she was past president and is a Training
and Supervising Analyst. Currently she is on the Editorial Boards of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly
and the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and serves on the IPA Steering Committee for
Working Parties. She has published and presented on topics ranging from female sexuality,
gender, transference/countertransference, termination, and supervision. With Deanna Holtzman,
she is the co-author of A Story of Her Own, The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and
Renamed (2008), and co-editor of The Clinical Problem of Masochism (2014). She is in private
practice in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Learning Objectives (2):

Discuss how early bodily memories of infantile trauma may be expressed in the
transference/countertransference in psychoanalysis
Evaluate the factors that may contribute to resilience to early trauma.
References:

Blum, H. P. (2018) “Reconstruction in the Present Two-Person Psychoanalysis: The Wolf Man
Case Reconstructed” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 66:479-492
Erreich, A. (2017) “Unconscious fantasy and the Priming Phenomenon” Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association 65: 195-219.
Meszaros, J. (2014) “Ferenczi’s “Wise Baby” Phenomenon and Resilience” International Forum of
Psychoanalysis 23:3-10.

Friday, February 28, at 7:30pm
Donnel Stern, PhD
Interpellation and Dissociative Enactment: The Continuity of the Social and the Individual
Abstract:
A great many psychoanalysts today share the view that the traditional emphasis in psychoanalytic
theory and practice on the individual person needs to become more fully integrated and
imbricated with the social. But despite our embrace of the social turn, much work remains if we
are to develop phenomenologically compelling and clinically satisfying ways of understanding
exactly the contribution of the social order to the shaping of individual subjectivity (González,
2020) While psychoanalytic writers have addressed these problems for generations (we think
immediately of the very different approaches of writers such as Lacan, Fromm, Sullivan, and
Pichon-Rivière), notably writers on race (e.g., Fanon) and gender and sexuality (e.g., Butler),
psychoanalysis will profit from all the accounts of the relation of the individual and the social that
we can create. It is in this vein that the author offers an account of the previously unremarked
relationship between dissociative enactment, which is a model of clinical process, and
interpellation, a way of conceptualizing the creation of subjectivity via individual participation in
the tropes of power that define crucial cultural meanings and transactions.
Donnel Stern, PhD is Training and Supervising Analyst, and Faculty at the William Alanson White
Institute in New York City; and Adjunct Clinical Professor and Clinical Consultant, New York
University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is Founder and Editor of
the “Psychoanalysis in a New Key” book series from Routledge, which has 90 titles in print. He is
former Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has published five books, the most
recent of which has just appeared: On Coming into Possession of Oneself: Transformations of the
Interpersonal Field. He has also co-edited four books about the theory and practice of
interpersonal psychoanalysis. He is in private practice in New York City.
Learning Objectives (2):

Explain how to apply the idea of the social turn in contemporary psychoanalysis to their work
with patients.
Discuss ways to apply to their work with patients the link between dissociative enactment and
interpellation.
References:

Althusser, L. (1971) “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes toward an integration)”
in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Bromberg, P. M. (1998) “Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and
Dissociation Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Bromberg, P. M. (2006) “Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys” Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic
Press.
Bromberg, P.M. (2011) “The Shadow of the Tsunami: And the Growth of the Relational Mind”
New York and London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997) “The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection” Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Davis, N. (2012) “Subjected subjects? On Judith Butler’s paradox of interpellation” Hypatia 27:
881-897.
González, F. (2020). “Trump cards and Klein bottles: On the collective of the collective of the
individual” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 30: 383-398.-
Stern, D.B. (2004) “The eye sees itself: Dissociation, enactment, and the achievement of conflict”
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 40, 197-237.
Stern, D.B. (2009) “Partners in thought: A clinical process theory of narrative” Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 78: 101-131.
Stern, D.B. (2017) “Dissociative enactment and interpellation” In: J. Petrucelli & S. Schoen (Eds.),
Unknowable, unspeakable and unsprung: Psychoanalytic perspectives on truth, scandals, secrets,
and lies. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 42-49.

Friday, April 4, at 7:30pm
Dominique Scarfone, MD
The Sexual Drive for Power – The Passion for Ever More
Abstract:
In this paper, the author explores what part is played by the human drives in the contemporary
crises that assail humankind: global warming, inequality, racism, rape and feminicide epidemics,
opioid crisis, war and other forms of violence. Psychoanalysts usually refer to two classes of drives:
erotic and aggressive. But in the face of the inextricable mixture of sex and violence, one begins to
wonder if we are not dealing with two sides of a single drive which we could call “a sexual drive for
power” in which the sexual drive meets exacerbated narcissism. The Freudian roots of this sexual
drive for power are explored and the notion is examined in relation with both individual and
societal issues. The mechanism of allostasis is invoked as a possible central feature, a link between
the many aspects of the topics explored.
Dominique Scarfone, MD is honorary professor at the Université de Montréal, member emeritus
of the Montreal Psychoanalytic Society (French branch of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society,)
and honorary member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. He was an Associate Editor of the
International Journal of Psychoanalysis for several years, recently retired from practice, and
continues teaching, writing, and presenting. He has published extensively, authoring various books
and contributing numerous book chapters, as well as original papers in journals internationally. His
most recent book is The Reality of the Message. Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche
(New York: The Unconscious in Translation, 2023.)

Learning Objectives (3):
1) Discuss the role of drives in the problems afflicting individuals and society in our troubled times;
2) Situate the process of allostasis by contrast to homeostasis as a fundamental mechanism
operating at the individual and social level;
3) Discuss a possible reformulation of the drive theory in view of points 1) and 2).

References:

Ansermet, F & Magistretti, P. (2014), Les énigmes du plaisir, Paris, Odile Jacob.
Freud, S. (1896) Letter of December 6, 1896, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to
Wilhelm Fliess, J.M. Masson Ed., Cambridge, The Belknap Press, 1985, p. 207-215.
Freud, S. (1905) Three Essays on Sexual Theory. Standard Edition, (7), p. 125-245.
Freud, S. (1914) “On Narcissism : An Introduction.” Standard Edition (14), p. 67-102.
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. Standard Edition (21), p. 57-146.
Klein, M. (1940) “Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states”, International Journal of
Psycho-analysis, XXI/2, p. 125-153.
Koob, G. F. & Le Moal, M. (2001) Drug Addiction, Dysregulation of Reward, and Allostasis,
Neuropsychopharmacology, VOL. 24, NO. 2, 97-129.
Koob, G. F. & Le Moal, M. (2008), Addiction and the Brain Anti-Reward System, Annual Review of
Psychology, 59 :29–53.
Laplanche, J. (1987) New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, (Translated by Jonathan House) New
York : The Unconscious in Translation, 2016.
Laplanche, J. (1997) “The so-called death drive : a sexual drive”, in Between Seduction and
Inspiration : Man, Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, New York : The Unconscious in Translation, 2015, p.
159-182.
Major, R. (1993) Le goût du pouvoir, TRANS, n° 3, https://revue.dscarfone.com/wp-
content/uploads/2023/05/3-Major.pdf
Scarfone, D. (2021) «Trauma, Subjectivity and Subjectality», The American Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 2021, 81, (214–236).
Valéry, P. (2023) Cours de poétique. Vol. I. Le corps et l’esprit. Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque des
idées.
Winnicott, D. W. (1953) Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena, The Collected Works
of D. W. Winnicott, vol. 4, Oxford University Press, p. 159-174.

Friday, May 9, at 7:30pm
Gregory S. Rizzolo, PhD
The Significance of the Interpretant in the Field of Speech
In his classic paper, The function and the field of language and speech in psychoanalysis (1953),
Lacan wrote that psychoanalysis had abandoned its original interest in speech. This concern, which
has animated the Lacanian tradition for nearly 75 years, has found more recent expression in an
empirically-oriented sector of American psychoanalysis. Litowitz (2011) argues that the turn to
infant observation in America has led to an emphasis on visual-behavioral evidence over aural-oral
data. The Lacanian tradition links the retreat from language with the rise of countertransference
as a vehicle of insight in the Anglo-American schools. The danger, as Fink (2010) emphasizes, is
that we might fall into “me-centered attention” instead of listening to language. There is,
however, another way to think about countertransference, one that suggests an alternative
approach to speech, grounded neither in Lacan, nor in Saussure, but in Charles Peirce’s theory of
signs. The author argues that when we use the countertransference, we are engaging a dynamic
interpretant, often an indexical icon, to register the force and effect of a communication. Far from
abandoning speech, we find ourselves immersed in the work of signification. The author illustrates
this approach through my reading of the recent case of Eliot (Busch, 2014).
Gregory S. Rizzolo, PhD is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association (JAPA) and a faculty member at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. His work has
appeared in Psychoanalytic Psychology, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, and The Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), among others. In 2017, he received the JAPA
Prize for the best paper of the year in the journal. He is the author of The Critique of Regression
(Routledge, 2019).
Learning Objectives (2):

Participants will explain how to apply Charles Peirce’s theory of signs (icon, index, symbol) to
everyday countertransference reactions
Participants will discuss how to use these reactions in interpreting the patient’s speech patterns.
References:

Hook, D. (2023). On the Role of Speech in Psychoanalysis: Revisiting Lacan’s “Function and Field”.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 71(5), 855-881.
Kirshner, L. (2023). The Reception of Lacanian Theory and Practice by American Psychoanalytic
Training Programs. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 71(5), 843-853.
Lichtenstein, D. (2023). The Reflexive Function of Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, 71(6), 1107-1126.
Litowitz, B.E. (2014). Peirce’s Semiotic and Psychoanalysis: Commentary to the Article of Vera
Saller. Journal fur Pscyhoanalyse: Charles Sanders Peirce und die psychoanalyse, (55) 48-55.
Ogden, T. (2024). Transformations at the Dawn of Verbal Language. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association
Rizzolo, G.S. (2024). Narrative capacity. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
Wilson, M. (2020). The Analyst’s Desire. New York: Bloomsbury