27th ANNUAL UC/NCP IPC MEETING
UCLA CONFERENCE CENTER, LAKE ARROWHEAD, CA
May 3-5, 2019
Process Notes: Thinking With and Working Through
Influential Psychoanalytic Texts
For this year’s meeting, we depart from the usual thematically-organized weekend. Instead, we will revisit a selection of seminal psychoanalytic texts, thinking with and working through them in light of the group’s current theoretical, clinical, and social concerns. The goal is to revive the original mission of UCNCPIPC, finding ways to bridge the distance between the academy and the analytic clinical world through engagement with core issues in psychoanalytic theory and practice.
All Participants – Download/View Readings for Sessions you plan to attend!
Links for each session’s readings are provided in the schedule below. When you click the link, a new window will open on the TinyUpload site. Just click on the title of the article and it will download to your computer.
Download all the readings in a single zipped folder (click here)
A printable copy of the full schedule is also available here.
“At-a-Glance” Schedule available here.
Color Key:
Day = Red
Plenaries / Breakout Sessions = Blue
Free Time/Social Activities = Green
Meals = Black
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
FRIDAY, MAY 3
4:00-5:00pm— Hotel Registration and Check-In (Check-in begins at 4pm on Friday)
Location: Main Lobby
5:00-6:30pm—Cocktail Hour: Wine and Cheese in the Tavern
Location: The Tavern (off the main lodge dining room)
6:30-7:45pm—Dinner
Location: UCNCPIPC reserved area of the main lodge dining room
7:45-8:45pm—Opening of the Meeting and Introductions
Location: Iris
8:45-10:15pm — Plenary Session I – A Psychoanalyst Listens: Cruel Treatment of Asylum Seekers
Location: Iris
Facilitator: Gilbert Kliman, MD (The Children’s Psychological Health Center, Inc.
San Francisco, CA)
Description: Gil Kliman is an experienced forensic expert in civil litigation concerning psychological damages. Beginning in May 2018, he recruited and trained colleagues to respond to the problems of asylum-seekers. He specifically focused on parents and children separated from each other at the U.S. Mexican border. During the plenary, Dr. Kliman will present two cases, including a videotaped interview of a child. The findings provide evidence of a group psychological process involving organizationally orchestrated cruel treatment of children and parents as part of efforts to discourage asylum seeking.
Readings:
1. No Readings
SATURDAY, May 4
8:00-8:45am—Buffet Breakfast
Location: UCNCPIPC reserved area of the main lodge dining room
8:45-10am – Breakout Sessions I, II & III (Note: Session I-III are concurrent. Choose which one you will attend)
• Breakout Session I: The Loss of Pleasure, or Why We Are Still Talking about Oedipus
Location: Iris
Facilitator: Harriet Wolfe (UCSF/APsaA)
Description: Gilligan and Snider’s article brings psychoanalysis to the fore in grappling with the question: Why does patriarchy persist? It highlights the psychological function of patriarchy as a defense against loss by connecting Gilligan’s research on development with Bowlby’s studies of attachment. In this session, we will discuss the social and psychoanalytic themes in the paper, as well as the psychodynamics of patriarchy and gender ideologies as experienced and understood by a seasoned female leader in psychoanalysis.
Readings:
Gilligan & Snider 2017 – The Loss of Pleasure, or Why We Are Still Talking about Oedipus
• Breakout Session II: Secret Passageways Towards the Unconscious
Location: The Tavern
Facilitators: Matthew Elgart (NCP)
Description: First delivered at the 2010 meeting of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, “Secret Passages toward the Unconscious” by Stefano Bolognini offers an evocative, even poetic exploration of the psychoanalytic process and the unconscious. In musing on the “long patient living-together” between patient and analyst, Bolognini beautifully articulates what we ask of our patients and ourselves: great patience and willingness to live with uncertainty and not-knowing, comfort with being uncomfortable. Through metaphor, Bolognini approaches the magic and mystery of the discovery possible in analysis. Among the questions we might discuss: How can we talk about what we do? How can we best accompany our patients and read “between the lines” of their stories? And how can creative processes – like poetry and music – provide insight into the dynamics of the analytic process?
Readings:
Bolognini 2011 – Secret Passages towards the Unconscious: Styles and Techniques of Exploration
Breakout Session III: Fanon on “Psychopathology of the Negro”
Location: Jacaranda
Facilitators: Christopher Chamberlin (UC Berkeley)
Description: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is an urtext of black studies and a signal work of psychoanalytic thought. Few texts have left as diverse and divisive a wake of engagement as this explosive analysis of the psychopolitics of racism—postcolonial theorists, Black Power activists, and feminist thinkers alike have repeatedly returned to the text to draw out new insights and mark new limits to its thought. And few figures embody the historical dialectic of theory and practice more than Frantz Fanon—clinical psychiatrist, analytic theorist, and anticolonial revolutionary. The sixth chapter, “The Negro and Psychopathology,” represents Fanon’s closest reading of the psychoanalytic field and his most thorough application of the Freudtextian apparatus to the colonial situation. This text is timeless not only because it has been repeatedly reclaimed and reinterpreted over the last seven decades, structuring even today major divisions in black studies, but because it constitutes itself a paradoxical reading of psychoanalysis that renders psychoanalysis timeless in the process of historicizing it. Because Fanon is interested in accounting for the subject of the unconscious in the analysis of oppression, this text is a palimpsest of clinical, theoretical, and political matters. This session will introduce “The Negro and Psychopathology” in the wake of changes in the social order (to the postcolonial condition that Fanon feared and foresaw), the theory with which Fanon engages (the development of the work of Lacan especially), and recent engagements with this chapter (chiefly in the work of David Marriott). Initial emphasis will focus on the following core question of this chapter: What is the nature of the “Negro myth”? What is its unconscious, social, and historical function? What prevents its dissolution?
Readings:
Fanon 1952 – The Negro and Psychopathology (Chapter 6 of Black Skin, White Masks – required reading only through page 30)
10-10:30am – Coffee Break (Iris)
10:30am-12:00pm — Plenary Session II: Winnicott on Fear of Breakdown
Location: Iris
Facilitator: Vincent Rafis
Description: In this session, we will discuss the importance of Winnicott’s classic article, “Fear of Breakdown.” I will open with some reflections on the impact this article has had on my own thinking, identifying the ways it has marked my journey in both my clinical practice (when faced with its most extreme limits) and my very existence (when it needed to be supported with a thought that would make it bearable). It is this inextricable link between the analyst’s intimate path and their practice that Winnicott acknowledges. After him, I will be asking the question with which our job relentlessly confronts us: “How to live?”
Readings:
Winnicott 1974 – Fear of Breakdown
12:00-1:00pm—Buffet Lunch
Location: U.C. I.P.C. reserved area of the main lodge dining room
1:15-2:30pm – Breakout Sessions III, IV & V (Note: Breakout Sessions are concurrent. Choose which one you will attend).
• Breakout Session IV: Freud on Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
Location: Jacaranda
Facilitator: Robert Pynoos (NCP)
Description: In the main body of “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” Freud redefined anxiety. He also transformed psychoanalytic theory by introducing a layering of a developmental progression of internal dangers, referred to by Brenner as the “four calamities of childhood.” This discussion will elaborate on a selection of rich, yet sketchy passages in part B of the “Addenda” that uses this newfound focus on development and the child’s mind to revisit the nature and consequences of traumatic situations. They have served as a source of inspiration for much of my own work in elaborating on the activity of children’s minds during and in the aftermath of traumatic experiences. I will invite participants to examine the fuller meaning of Freud’s brief reframing of abreaction and repetition compulsion after traumatic experiences, his emphasis on the generation of traumatic expectations, his evolutionary perspective on human limitations in addressing external threats, and the critical importance of protection in childhood. This provocative addendum suggests that a future psychoanalytic framework must include a developmental and experiential characterization of the appraisal and response to external threats, and the intricate interplay of internal and external danger if it is not to remain incomplete.
Readings:
Freud 1926 – Addenda to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (only Section B – Supplementary Comments on Anxiety is required reading)
• Breakout Session V: Karen Horney and Feminist Psychoanalysis
Location: The Tavern
Facilitators: Nat Newton (CSUF)
Description: Karen Horney, a contemporary of Freud, was a pioneer in feminist psychoanalysis writing in direct conversation with (and often in opposition to) early classical psychoanalytic theories. In the paper we will read for this session—“On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women” (1923)—she forwards one of the first sustained feminist critiques of Freud’s oedipal complex and penis envy, arguing that Freud’s model of gender was symptomatic of a pervasive male bias in psychoanalysis. Ahead of her time, she proposed significant social and cultural factors in the psychiatric disturbances that early analysts claimed existed in women. This piece laid the ground for her eventual proposition that men’s “womb envy” was an unconscious driver for social inequalities such as sexism. In this session, we will explore Horney’s flagship text “On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women” (1923) in relation to Freud, Abraham, and early psychoanalytic writing on gender and sexuality. We will also explore the political context of Horney’s “neo-Freudian” criticisms of orthodox Freudian theories, which ultimately led to her resignation from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute before forming other psychoanalytic institutes in the United States.
Readings:
Horney 1922 – On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women
• Breakout Session VI: Axel Honneth on Recognition and Personal Identity
Location: Iris
Facilitator: Jeff Prager (UCLA/NCP)
Description: Discussion of Axel Honneth’s “Recognition Theory,” with particular focus on the psychodynamics of morality, insult, humiliation, disrespect, and shame. (Full description coming soon)
Readings:
Honneth 1995 – Personal Identity and Disrespect: The Violation of the Body, the Denial of Rights, and the Denigration of Ways of Life (Chapter 6 in The Struggle for Recognition)
2:30-2:45pm – Coffee Break (Iris)
2:45-4:15pm—Plenary Session III: Laplanche on Responsibility and Response
Location: Iris
Facilitators: Susan Derwin (UC Santa Barbara) and Gaby Schwab (UCI)
Description: Few would dispute Jean Laplanche’s seminal importance as psychoanalyst, philosopher, and translator of much of Anglophone critical theory. Many of Laplanche’s most significant works—including the seven-volume Problématiques and the collected writings of the 1990s—were, however, inaccessible to an English-speaking audience until the recent publication of the first volumes of the complete translation of Laplanche’s oeuvre into English. “Responsibility and Response” provides an opportunity to think through contemporary (political) subjectivity and conflict in light of the traumatic temporality of après coup. Laplanche’s understanding of the implantation of the message emanating from the other as instrumental in the self-construction of the human accounts for his focus on response – “answering to” – when considering questions of responsibility, “responding for” — something that has occurred. Our discussion will explore Laplanche’s characterization of the unconscious as the repository of messages coming from the other in relation to issues of strangerness, internal attack, and signification; repression versus translation; caring (Heideggierian Sorge) and the capacity for concern (Winnicott) in relation to guilt; and human violence in relation to the sexual. Laplanche’s theory of subjectification not only underscores the primacy of the other; it also posits a concrete other: another subject who, like oneself, possesses an unconscious that can obscure communication and contaminate the possibility of identification or affiliation. Could this inform the anxiety and phantasmatic attachment that undergirds expressions of racism and xenophobia? How can we take account of the work of fantasy while acting responsibly and politically, and how might Laplanche aid in thinking through the kinds of obligations that bind us to others unlike ourselves?
Readings:
Laplanche 1999/2015 – Responsibility and Response (Chapter 6 in Between Seduction and Inspiration: Man)
4:15-5:30pm—Free Time
5:30-6:30pm—Cocktails and Appetizers
Location: the Tavern (off the main lodge dining room)
6:30-7:45pm—Dinner
Location: UCNCPIPC reserved area of the main lodge dining room
8-10:30pm – Film Screening: Vertigo (1959, directed by Alfred Hitchcock; 129 minutes). Discussion led by Apurva Shah (Kaiser)
Location: Iris
Description: Viewing and discussion of psychoanalytic themes in Vertigo.
Readings:
The Dizzying Array of Psychoanalyses of Vertigo – Shah
10:30pm-12:00am—Open Mic and Social Hour (open to anyone to anyone)
Location: Iris
Facilitator: Jamey Hecht (NCP)
Description: Impromptu performances, poetry readings, etc. If you play an instrument, bring it! If you do anything, do it here!
SUNDAY, May 5
8:00-8:45am—Breakfast
Location: UCNCPIPC reserved area of the main lodge dining room
9-10:30am—Plenary Session IV: Ferenczi’s Confusion of Tongues
Location: Iris
Facilitators: James Fisher (UCLA/NCP) & Richard Weiss (NCP)
Description: In this session, we discuss Ferenczi’s paper “Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and The Child.” In this landmark article, Ferenczi explores the impact of childhood sexual trauma on the developing personality and elaborates a clinical method that anticipates contemporary Relational approaches. Insisting that the analyst adheres to a friendly and maternal stance, he cautions against the coldness, detachment, and arrogance of the therapist’s attitude. He deciphers forms of professional hypocrisy. He urges the good-enough analyzed analyst to be aware of her resistances. He privileges experience-near clinical approaches over excessive reliance on theory. Many of these ideas represent an implicit critique of classical analysis as it had become codified by the 1920s. Possible themes for discussion include Ferenczi’s understanding of trauma, its relationship to splitting in the personality, and to varieties of dissociation in children and adults.
10:30-11:30am—Plenary Session V: Memorial Plenary for Helene Moglen
Location: Iris
Facilitators: Gaby Schwab (UCI)
Description: Helene Moglen, who passed away last year, was a longtime member of the consortium. In this memorial session, we consider two of Moglen’s later articles, discussing her contributions to both psychoanalysis and the humanities, focusing on her work in feminist psychoanalysis, the analysis of conflict, and psychoanalytic approaches to ageing.
Readings:
1. Moglen 2008 – Ageing and Transageing: Transgenerational Hauntings of the Self
2. Moglen and Namir 2006 – War and the Dis-eases of Othering (Optional)
Also, for those who are interested, the UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Lecture Series video, featuring Helene Moglen’s talk “From Facebook to Frankenstein” (Optional).
11:30-12:00pm – Conference Wrapup (Business Meeting & Planning for Next Year – all welcome!)
Location: Iris
Facilitator: Jeff Prager (UCLA/NCP) & Kevin Groark (Macquarie University/NCP)
Description: Official closing of the meeting, and a general discussion of the weekend and any outstanding business. Will also discuss possible themes for next year.
12:00-1:00pm – Buffet and Cookout Lunch / Checkout (Lodge is locked at 2:30pm Sunday, so be sure to check out before this time)
Location: Deck of the main lodge dining room (in bad weather, the reserved area inside)
UC-NCP IPC 