Repetition and Reception

2 CE credits for Licensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers

Practitioners and General Public: $40 

Add to Cart

Students: $10 

Add to Cart

This talk will be about the power of creative transformation found in Freud’s observation of his 18-month-old grandson’s fort/da game, which is not simply about mastery. Rather than approach repetition as a difficulty to be transcended, Bruce Reis will argue that repetition is the vehicle of its own transcendence: If action is not to be separated from the psychic processes of the patient (which are themselves forms of action [Loewald]) or from the psychoanalytic dyad (within which action is a constant variable [Reis]), then this gives us license to explore the possibility of outcomes for the resolution of repetition other than symbolic thought. Reis will draw on the work of René Roussillon, Christopher Bollas, and Donald Winnicott to find in repetition the creative forms of its transcendence, and return to Freud’s original thesis in Beyond the Pleasure Principle concerning other motive forces “which push forward towards progress and the production of new forms.”

Bruce Reis, PhD, FIPA, is a Fellow and Faculty Member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, New York; an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor in the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; and a member of the Boston Change Process Study Group. He is the North American book review editor for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and serves on the editorial boards of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is the co-editor (with Robert Grossmark) of Heterosexual Masculinities (Routledge, 2009).

Download flier