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Socrates maintains, in Plato’s Phaedrus, that eros is the highest form of divine madness. The central queries of my presentation are: is there a divine kind of madness? What is the meaning of eros construed as divine madness? Following, but diverging from, Plato’s Symposium, I propose that eros, understood as divine madness, is the capacity ... Read more

Sponsored by The Svenson Lectureship Fund for Psychoanalysis and the Arts in collaboration with Xavier University of Louisiana and The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is considered to be one of the greatest literary artists of the 20th century. His genius as a playwright, however did not save him from tragic emotional ... Read more

Participants will be introduced to existing approaches to race in psychoanalysis. In order to address a dearth of psychoanalytic theorizing on multiracial identities and experiences of racial passing, Dr. Chavez will use an interdisciplinary lens to consider these topics while integrating case material and personal reflections and suggest new directions for conceptualizing work with patients ... Read more

Participants will view and discuss the movie “My Dinner with Andre.” In this movie, two old friends talk about their life experiences and ideas about art in ways that encapsulate two fundamental approaches to existence: the romantic/Dionysian, and the classical/Apollonian. These different approaches have developmental roots in infancy and express very different self-states. The vicissitudes ... Read more

In the therapeutic process, we encounter impasses where one must seemingly harm or be harmed by the other, and it feels as though there is only room for one psyche to live. This constellation was already implied by Klein’s writings, but this presentation will juxtapose her views to an intersubjective perspective: contrasting the intrapsychic idea ... Read more

Privilege is not just an aspect of identity that bestows impersonal, unmerited benefit and maintains the dominant status quo. Privilege is also a subjective experience that shapes and resonates within one’s experience of self and the world. Drawing upon Bach’s Narcissistic States and the Therapeutic Process along with more recent work on grandiosity and subjectivity, ... Read more

At the present moment, it would behoove psychoanalytic practitioners to remember that psychoanalysis is a strange, minority discipline in relation to the rest of the world. Yet the psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as a group, regularly fail to employ their power to penetrate the surface, their customary stance of curiosity and their capacity for insight vis-a-vis their ... Read more

Lacan and Winnicott both believed that mirroring was very important in early development, but focused on different aspects and outcomes. Lacan theorized that when a young child first views her reflection in a mirror and sees her image as complete, her anxiety about her actually undeveloped and unintegrated state is relieved; henceforth she imagines herself ... Read more