The Psychoanalytic Instrument: Possibility, Form, and Risk (Online Presentation)

2 CE credits for Licensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers

Practitioners and General Public: $40 

Add to Cart

Students: Free [click to register]

Historically, psychoanalysis has underestimated, watered down, even denied the inherent risks of the clinical situation.  This combustible arrangement invites the patient’s passionate attachment and desire, with the abstinent analyst functioning as a deliberately incendiary human lure.  That mortal vehicle is always vulnerable (analysts can die) as well as fallible (they can err). Paradoxically, the humanness of the analyst is not only a source of tragic potential but, at the same time, the method’s fundamental engine.   As a means to understand why, and how, this clinical situation works, the paper explores Freud’s beautiful brief essay “On Transience.” Freud’s phrase there – “scarcity value in time” – is at the heart of that engine, the power of the psychoanalytic form.  Form limits and, at the same time, increases possibility for meaning. Examples, in addition to “On Transience,” include a poem by Ben Jonson, Freud’s classic narrative known as “fort-da,” Winnicott’s “set situation,” and the clinical process itself.

Ellen Pinsky, PsyD, came to psychoanalysis as a second profession following 25 years as a middle school English teacher.  She says her experience in the classroom with 12- and 13-year-olds taught her most of what she needed to know to become a creditable clinician.  About her book, Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts (Routledge, 2017), Thomas Ogden writes, “Mortal Gifts is a necessary book—necessary for analysts and necessary for the analyses they conduct.  In it, Ellen Pinsky addresses a long-neglected issue in the practice of psychoanalysis: the analyst’s failure to include in the very fiber of the analysis the fact of his or her mortality.”  She is on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute, from which she graduated in 2006.  In 2014 she was awarded BPSI’s Deutsch Prize for her essay “The Olympian Delusion” (JAPA, 2011).

A zoom link for this online event will be emailed to registrants a few days before the event begins.

Download Flier

Practitioners and General Public: $40

Add to Cart

Students: Free [click to register]