On Boundaries: A Nonlinear View Presenter: Robert Galatzer-Levy, M.D. Discussant: Adrienne Harris, Ph.D. Tuesday, March 27, 2018 at 8 pm New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute 247 East 82nd Street, NYC (btwn 2nd and 3rd Aves) Boundary concepts pervade psychoanalytic thought and practice from the "repression barrier" to gender and to institutional expectations about professional behavior. Yet analytic discussion of boundaries often proceeds without a clear conceptual framework and on the basis of intuitive but ill-founded notions about them. In his paper Galatzer-Levy shows how, starting with Leonardo Da Vinci and continuing through the work of twentieth-century mathematicians, a rich and useful conceptualization of boundaries called fractal geometry has emerged. This conceptualization is directly applicable to psychoanalysis. The paper demonstrates how older, implicit conceptualizations have limited analytic thinking in this area and shows how fractal concepts provide important insight into the nature, development, and management of boundaries. Application to clinical and institutional issues will be discussed.  General Admission: $20 Student Admission (non NYPSI): $10 No charge for NYPSI Members/Students To register, click HERE , visit nypsi.org   or call 212.879.6900 Lois Oppenheim, PhD,  Scientific Program Chair Robert Galatzer-Levy, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago and a Faculty Member of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute where he is a training, supervising, and child and adolescent supervising analyst. He is the author of seven books and 140 papers and books chapters on topics ranging from clinical psychoanalysis to forensic psychiatry to nonlinear systems theory and psychoanalysis. His most recent book Nonlinear Psychoanalysis: Notes from 40 years of Chaos and Complexity Theory was published in 2017 by Routledge.  Galatzer-Levy grew up in New York where he went to Bronx Science, NYU, and finally NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences starting at age 19. A little earlier he had started an analysis which, he reports, enabled him to go to medical school "even though my mother wanted me to." As with most analyses this one was incomplete and to this day he struggles between the pull of psychoanalysis and that of mathematics, a conflict that is partly resolved through his applications of nonlinear dynamics systems theory to psychoanalysis.   This evening he will talk about a central theme of psychoanalysis, boundaries, as seen through the lens of nonlinear dynamics and fractals. Adrienne Harris, Ph.D. is Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is an editor of  Psychoanalytic Dialogues,  Studies In Gender and Sexuality, and of the IPA ejournal: Psychoanalysistoday.com.  She co-edits the Book Series: Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, a series now with over 70 published volumes.  In 2009, along with Drs. Lewis Aron and Jeremy Safran, Dr. Harris established the Sandor Ferenczi Center at New School University. Dr. Harris is a member of an NGO which the IPA developed to work with the UN and she has been doing education and development on the problem of human trafficking.  She has written on topics in gender and development, analytic subjectivity, and the analytic community in the shadow of the First World War.  Her current work is on analytic subjectivity, on intersectional models of gender and sexuality, and on ghosts.

 

The Elusive Good Object Presenter: Lynne Zeavin, Psy.D. Discussant: Richard Zimmer, M.D. Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8 pm New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute 247 East 82nd Street, NYC (btwn 2nd and 3rd Aves) There are two distinct ways in which Melanie Klein writes about idealization.  Insofar as she maintains that "The whole of [the infant's] instinctual desires and his unconscious phantasies imbue the breast with qualities going far beyond the actual nourishment it affords," and her  increasingly stressed conviction that the libidinally invested breast, when introjected, forms 'the core of the ego',  Klein is suggesting that the original good object must be experienced as ideal.  Nothing less than this would adequately address 'the whole of [the infant's] instinctual desires.'  In this view, the infant projects his entire loving capacity, as well as his capacity for pleasure, onto the object and this is then introjected, together with the object's actual goodness, to become his very core. At other moments,  though,  idealization is  different, for Klein also asserted that much of what the infant experiences as positive is in fact due to idealization as a psychological defense: In this view idealization  is seen as the result of a defensive exaggeration of the object's goodness: "Idealization is bound up with the splitting of the object, for the good aspects of the breast are exaggerated as a safeguard against the fear of the persecuting breast";  that is, a defense against persecutory anxieties stemming from the infant's projection of hateful impulses and hate-filled parts of the self into the (bad) breast/mother. Case material will be used to describe idealization as it permeates and governs the analytic relationship.  The analyst's eventual capacity to discern the workings of idealization, in the second sense in which Klein means it, brought about significant change for the patient. General Admission: $20 Student Admission (non NYPSI): $10 No charge for NYPSI Members/Students To register, click HERE , visit nypsi.org   or call 212.879.6900 Lois Oppenheim, PhD,  Scientific Program Chair Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in full-time private practice in New York City.  She is on the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute where she teaches Melanie Klein and the Contemporary Kleinians.  Dr. Zeavin has published widely on various subjects but she has a particular interest in Kleinian theory and the nature of the object in psychical experience.  In addition, with three colleagues, she has founded Green Gang, a group devoted to the study of psychoanalysis and our human relationship with the natural world.  Chair of the Fellowship Program of the American Psychoanalytic Association, she also serves on the editorial boards of JAPA, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and Division/Review. Dr. Richard Zimmer is Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center.   He is on the Editorial Boards of the  International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and has published papers in numerous areas of interest, including perversion, creativity and the creative process, and field theory.  His latest paper, "Common Sense - Its Uses, Misuses and Pitfalls," will appear in a forthcoming edition of the  International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Suppression of Affects and Psychosomatic Balance in a Dyad: Mother-Child Therapy with a  Two-year-old Boy Presenting Behavioral Issues and Skin Disorder  Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, M.D., Ph.D. Wednesday, April 4, 2018 at 8:00 pm New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute 247 East 82nd Street, NYC (btwn 2nd and 3rd Aves) $15 - General Admission $10 - Student Admission No charge for NYPSI members/students Register HERE, visit nypsi.org or call 212.879.6900  A toddler who was running non stop and banging his head on the floor when emotional had eczema rashes as soon as he was calm. The very concrete, repressed way of thinking of the mother, who was overwhelmed and depressed, made a containing capacity to hold the child impossible, a situation that improved when working in analytic psychotherapy. 2 CME/CE credits offered Christine Anzieu-Premmereur  is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in NYC who works in private practice with adults and children, parents and their babies. A member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, she is on the faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research, where she directs the Parent-Infant Psychotherapy Training Program, and she is Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at Columbia University. Dr. Anzieu-Premmereur is a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and she chairs the discussion group Parent-Infant Programs at Psychoanalytic Institutes at the American Psychoanalytic Association meetings.  In French she has co-authored books on play in child psychotherapy and on psychoanalytic interventions with parents and babies.  She co-edited with Vaia Tsolas the recently published  A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World  (Routledge, 2018). In 2017, Dr. Anzieu-Premmereur published the chapter "Attacks on Linking in Parents of Young Disturbed Children" in  Attacks on Linking Revisited: A New Look at Bion's Classic Work .