May 23-24, June 27-28 and October 10-11 2021 on GOTOMEETING PLATFORM
Co-Sponsored by:
The Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis & The New York University, Silver School of Social Work
Schedule
IPA 2020 Conference, Part I (May 23-24) PROGRAM
SATURDAY MAY 23
8:30-8:55 am GoToMeeting orientation
8:55 am Intro by IPA President Ken Fuchsman
9:00–10:00 am Carol Tosone, Politics, Religion, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Shared Trauma: Clinicians’ Practice Perspectives on the Legacy of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland
10:00-10:10 am Ten minute break
10:10–11:10 am Paul Elovitz, Psychobiographical Insights on Biden and Trump and the Psychohistory of a Presidential Election in the Shadow of COVID-19
11:10-11:20 am Ten minute break
11:20 am – 12:10 pm Moderated whole conference discussion on the 2020 election
12:10–12:25 pm IPA Business Meeting; Election of Officers
12:25 pm–1:15 pm Lunch
1:15–2:15 pm Michael Maccoby, Ph.D., The Presidential Leadership We Need
2:15-2:25 pm Ten minute break
2:25–3:20 pm Moderated whole conference discussion on presidential leadership
3:20-3:30 pm Ten minute break
3:30-4:30 pm Moderated whole conference discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic
4:30-4:40 am Ten minute break
4:40-5:30 pm Group Process
8:40-9:00 am GoToMeeting orientation
9:00–10:00 am Samuel K. Cohn, Epidemics’ socio-psychological side effects from Antiquity to COVID-19
10:00-10:10 am Ten minute break
10:10–11:00 am Moderated whole conference discussion on pandemics past and present
11:00-11:10 am Ten minute break
11:10 am–12:10 pm Howard F. Stein, “Who’s on First?”: What I Have Learned from Studying Boundaries, Us/Them Distinctions, Tribalism, Retribalization, Revitalization Movements, Nativistic Movements, Crisis Cults, etc. from 1968-2020
12:10-1:00 pm Lunch
1:00-2:00 pm Moderated whole conference discussion on tribalism
2:00-2:10 pm Ten minute break
2:10–3:10 pm Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., The Pandemic through Three Ecologies: Natural, Mental, Social
3:10-3:20 pm Ten minute break
3:20-4:10 pm Moderated whole conference discussion on psychoanalysis in the context of COVID-19
4:10-4:20 pm Ten minute break
4:20-5:00 pm Group Process
ABSTRACTS AND BIOS
Samuel K. Cohn, Epidemics’ socio-psychological side effects from Antiquity to Covid-19
ABSTRACT: This talk challenges a dominant hypothesis that epidemics across time and space spur hatred and blame towards ‘the other’ and victims of disease. I will instead chart the rich and variegated history of epidemics’ socio-psychological side effects, arguing that impulses towards compassion have been more common than acts of violence and blame. From this history, certain characteristics of some diseases have more readily led to division and hatred but even with these diseases, the targets of blame have not been universally or usually marginal populations or the victims of disease.
BIO: Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Ph.D. is Professor of History at the University of Glasgow. He specializes in the history of popular unrest in late medieval and early modern Europe and in the history of disease and medicine. His books include Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS. Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance. The Black Death Transformed. He has taught at Wesleyan , Brandeis and since 1995 at the University of Glasgow.
Paul Elovitz, Psychobiographical Insights on Biden and Trump and the Psychohistory of a Presidential Election in the Shadow of COVID-19
ABSTRACT: Joseph R. Biden and Donald J. Trump are two septuagenarians with very different personalities and values who have taken contrasting routes to the 2020 presidential election. Their family backgrounds, childhoods, defense mechanisms, life crises, personalities, and values will be compared and contrasted. Trump and Biden’s relationship with the electorate in a time of massive fear, economic collapse, and pandemic is examined in the light of their styles of leadership and ability to inspire others.
BIO: Paul Elovitz, Ph.D. is Founder (1994) and Editor-In-Chief of Clio’s Psyche and founding Director/Convener (1982) of the Psychohistory Forum. He took his doctorate in history at Rutgers University, trained and practiced as a psychoanalyst, and has presented at every IPA conference. Elovitz taught at Temple, Rutgers, and Fairleigh Dickinson universities before becoming a founding professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He published the first history of our field, The Making of Psychohistory (Routledge, 2018), and has published over 30 articles on psycho-politics including eight on Trump.
Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., The Pandemic through Three Ecologies: Natural, Mental, Social.
ABSTRACT: In this talk, I want to draw on psychoanalytic theory in conversation with social theories to consider both the individual and collective reaction to our current experience of pandemic. Psychoanalytic work on environmental crises is surely sparse, but not actually totally absent. Tracking the work of Searles and Fenichel and the contemporary work of Lifton, Allured, Dodds and Orange, all of whom stress the powerful interactions of ecological, social and psychic contingencies, I want to hold in tension both a psychoanalytic investigation AND a discussion of social action, trying to heal the split of these two aspects of intellectual and psychic labor. From a psychoanalytic perspective, we can examine the mixture of denial, guilt and terror at the confrontation of primary helplessness.
BIO: Adrienne Harris, Ph.D. is Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is on the faculty and is a supervisor at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. In 2009, She, Lewis Aron, and Jeremy Safron established the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School University. She writes about gender and development, about analytic subjectivity, about ghosts, and about the analysts developing and writing around the period of the First World War.
Michael Maccoby, Ph.D., The Presidential Leadership We Need
ABSTRACT: What qualities are needed in a president during a pandemic in this age of anxiety and distrust? During a devastating plague, Pericles of Athens outlined four leadership qualities needed. Two of our greatest presidents, Lincoln and FDR, demonstrated these qualities. Donald Trump does not. Lincoln and FDR had visionary personalities and humanistic philosophies. Trump is a marketing narcissist with a self-serving philosophy. Few observers saw the strengths in Lincoln and FDR before they were elected. Joe Biden is the likely Democrat presidential candidate. How does he rate according to Pericles’s qualities? What is his personality and philosophy?
BIO: Michael Maccoby, Ph.D. directed the Program on Technology, Public Policy and Human Development at the Kennedy School from 1970-90. He graduated from The Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis where he studied under Erich Fromm and with him wrote Social Character in Mexican Village. He is author of The Gamesman, The Leader, Sweden at the Edge, Why Work?, Narcissistic Leaders, The Leaders We Need, lead author of Transforming Health Care Leadership, and author of Strategic Intelligence. He is co-editor of Psychoanalytic and Historical Perspectives on the Leadership of Donald Trump which is being published by Routledge on May 20, 2020.
Howard F. Stein, “Who’s on First?”: What I Have Learned from Studying Boundaries, Us/Them Distinctions, Tribalism, Retribalization, Revitalization Movements, Nativistic Movements, Crisis Cults, etc. from 1968-2020
ABSTRACT: The title for this talk comes from the vaudeville comedy routine, introduced by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in 1937, often revised, and adapted to become known world-wide. Scarcely beneath the surface of the humor is a misunderstanding, failure to listen to and inquire about what the other person means, and endless digging in. It is all great fun for the observing audience, but anguished desperation for the comedian Costello.
The comedy routine is my metaphor for the succession of competing ideologies, intellectual silos of closed thinking, failures to listen, that I have encountered in more than five decades of my effort to study, as psychohistorian and applied psychoanalytic anthropologist, issues central to the human condition, such as identity and its ideologies, boundaries, us/them distinctions, tribalism and retribalization, nativistic movements, the constancy of culture change – including catastrophic change such as been triggered by the COVID-19 scourge –, and complicating all of these, the language people use, and make an idolatry of, in their interpretations and explanations of these issues. I hope to sort out much of this, offer historical as well as psychodynamic perspectives on it, likely raise more (I hope) productive questions than provide definitive answers, and stimulate thought, feeling, and conversation among participants in this virtual conference.
BIO: Howard F. Stein, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center. He is an organizational consultant, poet, psychohistorian, and is an applied, psychoanalytic, medical, and organizational anthropologist. Dr. Stein is the author of The Ethnic Imperative: examining the New White Ethnic Movement, Listening Deeply, Centre and Circumference, and many other works.
Carol Tosone, Politics, Religion, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Shared Trauma: Clinicians’ Practice Perspectives on the Legacy of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland
ABSTRACT: This presentation will address the history of the Troubles, a thirty year period (1968-1998) of ethno-nationalist sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and its impact on the personal and professional lives of clinicians. Based on interviews with clinicians living and working in Northern Ireland during the period, the presenter will discuss the shared trauma and legacy of the Troubles on contemporary practice and clinical education. Shared trauma, distinct from secondary or vicarious trauma, refers to the dual exposure to trauma, both as citizen of the impacted region and as a clinician exposed to the trauma narratives of others. This presentation will also draw from the presenter’s prior research of Manhattan clinicians post-9//11 and New Orleans clinicians post-Hurricane Katrina to understand the nature of shared trauma and the history of its development.
BIO: Carol Tosone, Ph.D. is a professor of social work and recipient of the NYU Distinguished Teaching Award. Dr. Tosone, who joined the NYU Silver School of Social Work faculty in 1993, is a Distinguished Scholar in Social Work in the National Academies of Practice in Washington, DC. Dr. Tosone was selected for a Fulbright Senior Specialist Award for teaching and research at the Hanoi University of Education in Vietnam. She also taught as Distinguished Visiting Lydia Rappaport Professor at Smith College for Social Work. Dr. Tosone received her certification in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy from the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, where she was the recipient of the Postgraduate Memorial Award.
IPA 2020 Conference, PART II: JUNE 27-28 PROGRAM
8:30-8:55 am – GoToMeeting Orientation
8:55 am – Intro by IPA President Brian D’Agostino, PhD
9:00 am to 12:20 pm – Panel: Ethnic Conflict and Intergenerational Trauma through the LENS of Psychohistory, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema Analysis
12:20–1:00 pm – Lunch
1:00-2:00 pm – (#4) Individual Presentation: The Founding and Evolution of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: A Personal Journey that Grew Out of Psychoanalytic History (Susan Kavaler-Adler PhD, ABPP, D.Litt., NCPsyA)
2:00-2:10 pm – Break
2:10-4:20 pm – Panel: Frankenstein: A Metaphor for Malignant Trauma from an Individual, Familial, and Cultural Perspective
4:20-4:30 pm – Break
4:30-5:30 pm – Group Process
8:40-9:00 am – GoToMeeting Orientation
9:00 AM to 12:20 pm – (#8) Panel: “FIVE SESSIONS,” the PLAY: CLINICAL REFLECTIONS on CLASS, RACE and GENDER, Jaime A. Estades, MSW, Esq. and Ovita Williams, Ph.D., LCSW
12:20-1:00 pm – Lunch
1:00-3:10 pm – Panel: Psychodynamics of Capitalist Ideology
3:10-3:20 pm – Break
3:20-4:20 pm – Moderated Discussion for Saturday and Sunday Presentations
4:20-4:30 pm – Break
4:30-5:30 pm – Group Process
TITLE: Shadows of Trauma in the Widening Grave: The Psychology of Vigilantism and its Psychohistorical Causes
PRESENTER: Claude Barbre, Ph.D., L.P.
ABSTRACT: A vigilante is often defined as a “civilian or organization acting in a law enforcement capacity (or in pursuit of self-perceived justice) without legal authority”. Thus, “vigilante justice” is “often rationalized by the concept that proper legal forms of criminal punishment are either nonexistent, insufficient, or inefficient. Vigilantes normally see the government as ineffective in enforcing the law; such individuals often claim to justify their actions as a fulfillment of the wishes of the community” (Harris, 2001) As Segal (2013) notes, in societies where there is a loss of external, central control twinned with the rise of multiple conflicts between various communities, there is a declining ability of customs to regulate conflict: “In sum, in a society where the threats of danger appears on all sides, and the legal system retreats before these dangers, violent trauma is likely to promote a never-ending spiral of aggression…The result is a great rise in post-traumatic stress disorder, and the consequent increase of institutionalization of vigilante behavior.” In this presentation we will explore the causes of vigilantism, in particular the psychosocial roots and psycho-historical forces that forge these destructive frames of social character. As Stephen Frosh writes, “The potential value of psychoanalysis for people concerned with politics lies in its ability to provide an account of subjectivity which links the ‘external’ structures of the social world with the ‘internal’ world of each individual (Frosh, 1987). Drawing from the writing of Vamik Volkan and Sabby Sagall, not only will we will explore the political and economic influences that divide communities and activate vigilante justice, we will also explore the links between psychology and history, the objective and subjective reasons for vigilantism, exploring the causes of despair and humiliation that seeks its own justice through murderousness and self-hate, as well as the forces of irrational dehumanization of the other that often emerges from intergenerational conflict and unresolved, unspeakable suffering and injustice.
TITLE: Relational Trauma, Authoritarianism, and State Capitalist Ideology
PRESENTER: Brian D’Agostino, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: This paper traces the etiology of authoritarian attitudes and ideology to relational trauma resulting from punitive parenting. The ideology at issue revolves around political symbolic objects that serve as scapegoats (minorities, the poor, and public officials tasked with addressing their needs) and sacred cows (U.S. military power and capitalist arrangements). I build upon survey and clinical research pointing to anger displacement and identification with the aggressor as core sources of the ideology. The paper examines the role of punitive parenting in the etiology of this psychological complex and concludes with implications for clinical and social practice.
TITLE: “Five Sessions:” Clinical Reflections on Class, Race and Gender
CO-PRESENTERS: Jaime A. Estades, MSW, Esq. and Ovita Williams, Ph.D., LCSW
ABSTRACT: The play “Five Sessions” follows a 24-year-old Caucasian female, a recent Ivy League graduate and therapist, and her first client, a blue-collar suicidal Latino man in his mid-50s, through an agreed-upon five sessions to confront his issues. Through the tensions of macro and micro practices, political correctness, socio-economic differences, and passion, we watch the two characters explore each other’s personal struggles and triumphs as they fight to save his life. After a screening of this work, playwright Jaime Estades will lead an interactive discussion of the social, clinical, and existential issues it raises.
TITLE: Frankenstein and his monster: A clinical and cultural perspective
PRESENTER: Sue Grand, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: This paper inquires into the memory of annihilation and asks how that memory is lived, shared, and silenced in the relational nexus of evil (Grand, 2000), and embedded in our social and cultural surround. In particular, I am preoccupied with the way annihilation’s memory is transmuted into the perpetration of evil and the transmission of transgenerational trauma and destruction. I ask, and I propose, how atrocity transmogrifies the surviving victim. Will his/her lived memory be a force of justice and a refusal of the “bestial transformation” (Ibid., 2000) or a renewal of violence? Psychoanalytically, we can understand destruction as unleashed instinct, a perverse hungering for an object, and, I propose, a shared encounter with the no-self in mindless repetition.
TITLE: Finding Frankenstein: A Clinical Entry into a Minefield of Annihilation and Intrapsychic Catastrophe
PRESENTER: Rose Gupta, PsyD, LCSW
ABSTRACT: This experience-near paper focuses on the inevitable prospect of entering the unspeakable mental terrain of traumatized patients while also managing the analytic task of staying alive and enlivened. I envision the inevitable collision with a patient’s unrepresented state as one comprised of a dissociated, collapsed self and an uninscribed, unsymbolized object. I describe the shape, energy, and affect of one such uninscribed object in the form of Victor Frankenstein. Also, I demonstrate a greater use of the analyst’s mind in moving from the unspeakable to the spoken.
TITLE: The Founding and Evolution of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Integrating British and American Clinical Theory
PRESENTER: Susan Kavaler-Adler, Ph.D., ABPP, D.Litt., NCPsyA
ABSTRACT: On July 4th, 1991, our Independence day, Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler sat down and wrote a radically new curriculum, which would become the basis for the founding of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ORI), and for its New York State charter in 1993. Eventually the teachings of ORI would expand to teaching professionals all around the U.S./World. Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s inspiration for the curriculum was to teach the contributions of the British Psychoanalytic Theorists, as well as the seminal work of the American Object Relations Theorists, and to teach how such theories are applied to Clinical work. A further intent of Dr. Kavaler-Adler was to integrate British theorists (e.g. Klein and Winnicott) and to integrate British and American theories, overcoming divisive polarities.
UNABRIDGED PAPER: click here
TITLE: Destruction and survival in a dangerous journey
PRESENTER: Ruth M. Lijtmaer, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: Through the examples of two films, “El Norte” (1984) and “Fire at sea” (2016), the presenter will show how the trauma of escaping dangerous living conditions, changed and did not change in 32 years. “El Norte” shows the journey of two teenage siblings, who manage to escape the massacre in Guatemala and decide to start a new life in USA. “Fire at sea”, describes how many men, women and children packed into the battered vessels that ply the waters near Lampedusa, Italy, suffer from hunger, exposure and illness.
TITLE: Capitalism and Its Discontents
PRESENTER: David Lotto, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: This paper starts with a description and critique of our current economic system of free market capitalism. It goes on to examine the popular and tenacious mantra in the United States lauding the benefits this system and explores some unconscious motivations that may underly it. The paper closes with some possible solutions to the problems and flaws of unfettered capitalism and why it is such an uphill struggle to make the necessary changes.
TITLE: Multigenerational Trauma of German-Speakers in Italy’s Alps
PRESENTER: Peter W Petschauer, PhD, Dr. h.c.
ABSTRACT: South Tyrol or Alto Adige in Northern Italy’s Alps is troubled by latent and open hostilities of Italian-speakers toward the German-speaking minority whose ancestors were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1919. Much to their deep emotional hurt, great-power arrangements after WWI and WWII assigned them to Italy. Although the Italian government has granted considerable autonomy, the minority continues to be affected by the trauma of the separation of what previous generations knew as their homeland.
TITLE: Frankenstein: Monsters in the Tri-Personal Field – Coupleland
PRESENTER: Claire Beth Steinberger, Ed.D.
ABSTRACT: Clinical work with couples highlights the vulnerable aspects of psychic development, reflecting the continuous interweaving of “self-identity” with manifest and latent forms of familial, multigenerational and cultural experience. Psychic growth is a transformative process, beginning within the matrix of infant-caretaker relating and affect-driven states of being and “knowing”. When the early environment fails to provide sufficient instinctual, emotional and cognitive support, memory traces can appear in psychic eruptions and trauma-fueled enactments (Bollas,1987). In this way, the struggles of adult intimacy show up in the tri-personal field, where the “relational unconscious” holds monster elements aroused by catastrophic loss and reactive regression and destruction. The transitional space welcomes Frankenstein – the foreboding imagoes embedded in past, present and future time (BCPSG, 2013; Eigen, 2005; Winnicott, 1971).
IPA 2020 Conference, PART III: OCTOBER 10-11 PROGRAM
8:30-8:55 am – GoToMeeting Orientation
8:55 am – Intro by IPA President Brian D’Agostino
9:00-10:00 am – (#11) A Language of Hope and Moral Clarity: Toni Morrison and Psychohistory (Claude Barbre, PhD, LP)
10:00-10:10 am – Break
10:10 am-12:20 pm – Panel: Donald Trump in Our Consulting Rooms
12:20-1:00 pm – Lunch
1:00-3:10 pm – Panel: Quest for a Scientific Psychology: Historical Investigations
3:10-3:20 pm – Break
3:20-4:20 pm – Moderated Discussion on Saturday Presentations
4:20-4:30 pm – Break
4:30-5:30 pm – Group Process
8:40-9:00 am – GoToMeeting Orientation
9:00-10:00 am – (no CE) Is Sex Worth Going to Prison? The Psychodyamics of Sex Offenders, Treatment Modalities and Outcomes (Carol Jaxon-Jager, Ed.D.)
10:00-10:10 am – Break
10:10-11:10 am – (#16) From Tribal Womb to Nourishing Womb: A Journey from Persecution to Psychic Birth (Padma Desai, LMHC, LPC)
11:10-11:20 am – Break
11:20 am -12:20 pm (#18) Psychological Trauma in the COVID-19 Pandemic and in War (Kenneth A. Fuchsman, Ed.D)
12:20-1:00 pm – Lunch
1:00-3:10 pm – Women in Red: Attraction, Power and Patriarchy
3:10-3:20 pm – Break
3:20-4:20 pm – Moderated Discussion on Sunday Presentations
4:20-4:30 pm – Break
4:30-5:30 pm – Group Process
TITLE: A Language of Hope and Moral Clarity: Toni Morrison and Psychohistory
PRESENTER: Claude Barbre, Ph.D., L.P.
ABSTRACT: Throughout Toni Morrison’s novels, essays, speeches, and meditations, the insistent refrain of hope and goodness in the company of evil, an unflinching gaze on harrowing experience… “race inflected, gendered, colonialized, displaced, hunted” (Morrison, 2019). Yet, she writes, in this vision are “traces of divergent imaginaries between the sadness of no more time, or the sense of time as only a past, and an imaginary of growing expectations of time with a relentless future” (2019). She concludes: “One looks to history for the feel of time or its purgative effects; one looks through art for its signs of renewal” (2019). Even as she underscores that to engage these imaginaries is the peril of the writer’s work, “the rescue we extend to others through art is a generosity to ourselves” (2019)—a generational transmission of love. This presentation will explore Morrison’s diverse imaginaries of hope in her last collection, The Source of Self-Regard—a gathering of essays devoted to psychohistory and memory through the lens of language and story. For example, I will explore her writing on resistance and renewal in the liminal and uncanny spaces of traumatic induction; agencies of spirit in the evening lands of forced or chosen migration; care as fierce resistance to dehumanization and hermeneutical violence—themes that Morrison conveys with a unblinking eye and singular voice fired in the kiln of imagination and art.
TITLE: From Tribal Womb to Nourishing Womb: A Journey from Persecution to Psychic Birth
PRESENTER: Padma Desai, LMHC, LPC
ABSTRACT: This paper will discuss the internalized experience of both groups and culture as persecutory objects enshrined in an individual womb limiting psychic birth and subjectivity of the nascent Self within. Subjectivity will be examined from the perspective of holding and containing, internalization, regression, destruction, and psychic survival that resulted from the process of becoming. A clinical vignette will trace the movement from a closed intrapsychic system experienced by the Self as “larger than life” tribal family/group, to the eventual escape and freedom as a subjective Self able to retain elements of the tribe on the way to full psychic birth.
TITLE: Psychological Trauma in the COVID-19 Pandemic and in War
PRESENTER: Kenneth A. Fuchsman, Ed.D.
ABSTRACT: Times of mortal stress can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in the United States acute stress is prevalent for front line health care workers who deal directly with patients ill with this virus. Domestic abuse and call to mental health hotlines have also dramatically increased while families are together nearly 24/7. Current traumatic conditions resemble the stress of a combat zone. This paper compares wartime PTSD and the experiences of this pandemic.
TITLE: On the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis: Benjamin B. Rubinstein and his friends
PRESENTER: Juhani Ihanus, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: The presentation concerns the Finnish-born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Benjamin B. Rubinstein (1905–1989), who started his practice in New York in 1954. He is a significant representative of the philosophy of psychoanalysis and a critic of metapsychology. He co-founded the interdisciplinary annual Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science (1972–76), which also published articles on psychohistory and psychobiography. Rubinstein was an early predecessor of neuropsychoanalysis because he emphasized that the psychoanalytic concepts must not conflict with the results of the neurophysiological studies.
His circle of friends and colleagues in the U.S. included Adolf Grünbaum, Robert R. Holt, George S. Klein and Emanuel Peterfreund. They all reformed psychoanalytic theories by including current scientific research and models while also reflecting on how to advance sensitive and innovative psychoanalytic practice that applies flexible and interdisciplinary approaches. Two ways of talking in psychoanalysis, a “person” view and an “organism” view, supplement each other. The former is typical of psychoanalytic clinical theories and practice and the latter is typical of the natural sciences and psychoanalytic metapsychology. Rubinstein proposed that it is possible to be both a “materialistic” scientist and an experience-near “realistic” psychotherapist at the same time.
TITLE: Is Sex Worth Going to Prison? The Psychodyamics of Sex Offenders, Treatment Modalities and Outcomes (no CE)
PRESENTER: Carol Jaxon-Jager, Ed.D.
TITLE: Patriarchy Today: Does Backslide Have an Upside
PRESENTER: Judith Logue, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: Patriarchy is a societal system, from which women are excluded, wherein the father is head of the family and descent is traced through the male line. The progressive agenda promotes a system that embraces equivalence of opportunity and/or “equality.” A psychoanalytic perspective differs in that it acknowledges both the advantages and disadvantages; the losses and gains and can thus enable us to change from internalization and externalization of patriarchal attitudes and practices to humanistic attitudes and behaviors.
TITLE: Through the Mirror of Narcissism and What Trump Found There
PRESENTER: Marcie Newton, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: Donald Trump is the first president to harness social media platforms like Twitter to make public his opinions, humiliate his opponents, forward his political agenda, and strengthen his fan base. Trump’s tweets also display his own resistance to humiliation. This is evident in tweets by those who feed and feed off Trump’s larger-than-life ego with unwavering loyalty and those who attempt, often unsuccessfully, to rupture that loyalty. Trump has walked through the mirror of narcissism and is exploring a new world on the digital side. However, to what extent is Trump’s larger-than-life ego dangerous for our youth — the future of our nation — many of whom form their identities through the image of the other on social media platforms? Utilizing insights by Freud, Lacan, and Volkan, I seek to examine Trump’s social media presence to answer this important question.
TITLE: Search for the Unholy Grail: Genes, Behavior, and the War of the Researchers
PRESENTER: Faye Snyder, PsyD
ABSTRACT: This paper critically re-examines the history of the “nature-nurture” debate in psychology, that is, the debate over the primacy of genes vs. childhood experiences in determining human behavior. It tells the story of unfolding science trying to find its place in psychology. Topics include the influence of 19th century racialist ideologies on behavioral science, the impact of Mendel’s research on the inheritance of physical traits, and the 20th century discovery of DNA and its repercussions. Specific ways in which genetic determinist ideology have distorted behavioral research will be discussed, as well as the emergence of scientific knowledge in spite of such distortion.
TITLE: “His Majesty the Baby”: Trump in The Consulting Room
PRESENTER: Stefanie Teitelbaum, MSW, LCSW
ABSTRACT: Political comedian Samantha Bee called Mr. Trump a tyrannical 70-year-old toddler; a nice riff on Freud’s (1914) little narcissist, “His Majesty the Baby”. In his musings on narcissism and megalomania, Bion (2018, 1990), said change cannot occur unless room is made for newness by letting go of some infantile defenses. I will discuss similarities and differences of Bion’s and Freud’s thinking about narcissism – particularly focusing on potential efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment in the presence of narcissism and megalomania. Bion (2018, 1990) said that without common sense, fantasy can be “felt as fact”.
With my patient’s generous permission, clinical moments will be presented. “Felt as fact” impacts my patient’s Trump rage. He is often unable to believe that Trump might believe some of the things that come out of his mouth. Screaming matches between my patient’s and Donald Trump’s “felt as fact” obliterated potential transformative work. Additionally, I explore the impact of being bombarded by “felt as fact” beta bombs in my reverie bunker. I had to cope with a range of often primitive affects in the face of helplessness. “Her Majesty the Baby” does not like to be helpless. When I could, I mused and struggled with raw elements which later drove me to explore Bion’s (2018/1971) differentiation of lie and falsehood.
TITLE: Trump’s Women: Narcissistically Attached to Power
PRESENTER: Ellen Toronto, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: The devoted followers of Donald Trump, though a disparate population, appear to share in common the capacity to tolerate his misogyny. Historically, this type of adaptation was exemplified by courtesans who attached to rich and powerful men, providing sexual fulfillment in exchange for vicarious access to power. Through examples of women, modern-day courtesans, I will illustrate, however, that, as with women’s relationship to Trump, the apparent subordination is in fact, self-serving and a means of fulfilling the depleted self.
Please note that you will only be able to claim hours actually attended live virtually.
For Continuing Education activities, this course is co-sponsored by New York University Silver School of Social Work and Amedco.
New York University Silver School of Social Work is recognized by the NYS Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed Social Workers (provider #SW-0012).
New York University Silver School of Social Work is recognized by the NYS Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Counselors as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors (provider #MHC-0083).
Psychologists Nationwide
Amedco is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Amedco maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Up to 22 CE hours.
New York State Board for Marriage & Family Therapists
Amedco is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists. #MFT-0032. Up to 22 hours.
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