No Body, Never Mind: Conceptions, Preconceptions, and Misconceptions about Body-Mind

GURMEET KANWAL, MD

Discussant ROGER FRIE, PsyD

Friday, February 10th from 8:00-9:30PM/Eastern
All events in this webinar series are live-streamed and take place in Eastern Daylight or Eastern Standard time.

ABOUT THIS EVENING’S TALK

Psychoanalytic inquiry of the body started before psychoanalysis, with Charcot. In that sense, psychosomatics is the progenitor of psychoanalysis. Freud then shifted his focus more and more to the intra-psychic. Is psychoanalysis suffering from the Streetlight Effect? Conceptions of Body and Mind have changed in Western cultures over time, and the speed of that change has only been accelerating. The Body is held differently in Mind, and Mind is constructed differently in Body, in different cultures. Our culturally determined Mind constructs a view of our Body while remaining ignorant, selectively inattentive, or unconscious of many realities of our Body. How can we understand the culturally/politically/historically determined relational space between Body and Mind? How might a better understanding of Body, and its relationship to Mind contribute to psychoanalytic work? In this talk Dr. Kanwal will explore some disparate but interconnected ideas about the Body-Mind Complex.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gurmeet S. Kanwal, MD, is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute. He is a past President of the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society and an Editorial Board Member and Fellow of the College of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Editorial Board Member of Psychoanalytic Discourse. Dr. Kanwal is co-editor (with Salman Akhtar) of the books, Bereavement: Personal Experiences and Clinical Reflections (Karnac, 2017) and Intimacy: Clinical, Cultural, Digital and Developmental Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). His papers have been published in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Neuropsychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Review, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Psychoanalytic Perspectives and the Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy. In addition to teaching in the U.S., Dr. Kanwal has lectured on psychoanalysis in India and he is on Faculty at HamAva Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Tehran, Iran.

ABOUT THE DISCUSSANT

Roger Frie, PsyD, is Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University and Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and Associate Member of the Columbia University Seminar on Culture Memory and Faculty and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute. He lectures widely on themes of cultural memory, historical trauma and ethical responsibility. Dr. Frie is an award-winning author, has published many books, and is co-editor most recently of Culture, Gender and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: Breaking Boundaries.

To view the entire schedule for this year’s series, click here