The Relational Pulse: The Candidate on the Wave of the Enactment

Hillary Offman
Co-Chair Candidates Committee

Alioscia Boschiroli
Co-Chair Candidates Committee

Dear IARPP Students, Candidates, and early-career Analysts,

Our next conference is approaching: From June 25-28, 2015, the members of IARPP will be gathering in TORONTO, CANADA for “The Relational Pulse:
 Controversies, Caricatures and Clinical Wisdom.” We are all very excited about this wonderful opportunity to meet with colleagues and explore relational perspectives from around the world.

The IARPP Candidates Committee—whose members represent Australia, Canada, Chile, Israel, Italy, Spain, and the USA—works to provide a “home base” for analytic candidates within the association, facilitating their contact with colleagues throughout the world, and supporting their professional development. (To clarify: For this Call for Papers and all IARPP Candidate Webinars the committee considers a candidate to be someone who is either currently in analytic training or within five years of graduation, certification, or registration.) Over the years, the committee has honored outstanding work by candidates through its sponsorship of the Stephen A. Mitchell Author’s Award and, more recently, panel presentations at our annual conference. Last year’s panel, “Working Interculturally: Unique Challenges of and Possibilities for Intercultural Treatment,” featured four outstanding presentations by Edna Bor (Israel), Cynthia Chalker (USA), Margarita Khan (Italy/Argentina), and Rachel Sopher (USA).

This year, in keeping with the conference’s theme of exploring international crosscurrents in relational psychoanalysis, the Candidates Committee is creating a panel entitled “The Relational Pulse: The Candidate on the Wave of the Enactment.” Many important theoretical issues in relational thinking are hard to fully understand and know how to implement when one is beginning clinical practice. One of these issues is the concept of enactment. It is a key element in thinking about relational theory and clinical process, often distinguishing this approach from others. Yet for the newer clinician it can seem conceptually complex and clinically intimidating.

For this panel, we invite papers on the subject of enactment from a relational perspective. Some questions that may be considered (although you may have others you would like to use) include: How do you use the concept of enactment clinically? Is it a central or peripheral concept in your thinking and practice? How can we teach candidates to manage this relational, affective, cognitive, behavioral, interpersonal, and intersubjective concept? What is the relationship between enactment, spontaneity, and authenticity in clinical practice? And how do candidates and early-career analysts manage this complexity?

In an effort to encourage broader participation in the conference by those who have more recently joined our profession, our panel will feature three presenters (15-minute presentations) followed by a response from a senior analyst in the field, which should make for a very engaging discussion.

All submissions must be explicated within clinical work and examples.

Through the exploration of these and other questions, we hope to bring out “the relational pulse” from analysts in training and those relatively new to the field, as we strive to expand our capacity to cope with the complex theoretical and clinical concepts that make our work so rich and so challenging.

Interested? Then let us hear from you! To be considered for the panel, please submit a proposal no longer than one typed, double-spaced page (or roughly 250 words). Presentations should be written (and given at the conference) in English. THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS SEPTEMBER 7, 2014.

Please send all questions and proposals to the Candidates Committee co-chairs:

alioscia.boschiroli@gmail.com and offmanh@rogers.com

See you in Toronto!

The IARPP Candidates Committee:

Alioscia Boschiroli (Italy), co-chair
Hilary Offman (Canada), co-chair
Kim Bernstein (USA)
Maria Jose Mezzera (Chile)
Gadit Orian (Israel)
Gerard Webster (Australia)
Sandra Toribio Caballero (Spain)
Margaret Black (IARPP Board Sponsor)