By Rina Lazar (Israel) and Adrienne Harris (USA),
Co-chairs, Colloquium Committee
On November 6-19, 2017, we will present our next online colloquium featuring a paper by Boaz Shalgi (Israel) entitled, “When Time Stands Still: The Non-interactive Interaction in the Psychoanalytic Encounter,” currently in press at Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Shalgi, who will participate in this colloquium, sees the most basic endeavor with which therapists and their patients struggle as that of entering into the realm of death with open eyes. In his paper the term “death” means both psychic death and actual death, the cessation of both psychic life and actual life.
The panelists for this colloquium will include:
Shlomo Beinart (Israel)
Janine de Peyer (USA)
Alejandro Ávila Espada (Spain)
Juan Francisco Jordan (Chile)
Sam Gerson (USA)
Robert Grossmark (USA)
Judit Meszaros (Hungary)
Peter Shabad (USA)
Sally Swartz (South Africa)
Eng-Kong Tan (Australia)
We are looking forward to broad international participation in this discussion among the author, the panelists, and the larger community, and wish to urge careful and thoughtful responses from the IARPP community. We recognize that there is always a place for difference, for critical judgment, and for emotion in these discussions, but our ways of responding and interacting need also to be careful and respectful. The moderators are tasked with taking care of the community—the author, panelists, and IARPP members—but we must all try and do this job of caretaking. Also, as a reminder, we are limiting posts to no more than 500 words.
During our most recent colloquium, in which we discussed Harold Searles’ prescient and groundbreaking 1972 paper on the ecological crisis, we noted both intense interest and deep conflict. In a way, Searles might have predicted that his paper would produce intense and anxious states in readers and interlocutors. The participants in this online discussion engaged in a strenuous consideration of the paper, its depth, its demands on the reader, and its often despairing and trenchant conclusions.
It seems to us that both the content of the colloquium discussion and its form stirred intense feelings, leading us to think hard about how to maintain civility and respect difference. In concluding his review of the process we all experienced during the colloquium, Colloquium Committee member and panelist Mitchel Becker (Israel) quite fittingly wrote, “As I ponder the process that occurred I can hear Searles laugh at the self-evident notion that being human entails endless processes of destruction and love.”
Rina Lazar, PhD
Ramot Naftali 9
Tel Aviv 69278 Israel
Email: rlazar@post.tau.ac.il
Adrienne E. Harris, PhD
80 University Place, 5th floor
New York, NY 10003 USA
Email: adrienneeharris@gmail.com
