2002 IARPP One-Day Conference – New York City
Saturday, November 23, 2002
8:15am – 4:30pm
The registration brochure is now available.
For more information call 1-212-353-3229 or email sdorfanos@aol.com
Psychoanalytic interest in sexuality has recently returned to the clinical and theoretical center, bringing old issues and new questions to the fore. Taking the road less traveled, this conference explores aspects of sexuality hitherto underexamined in clinical practice and theory.
Contemporary psychoanalysis, recognizing the co-constructed nature of the analytic encounter, has broadened the scope of inquiry into the analyst’s experience, viewing that subjectivity as an inevitable and highly relevant aspect of the clinical process. As a result, the field’s long-standing prohibition against an open acknowledgment of countertransference experience has been essentially undone, resulting in a much-needed and deepening exploration of the analyst’s own thoughts, feelings and actions when doing clinical work. Against the backdrop of this more open atmosphere, largely the result of shifts in theory that reconfigure analytic “reserve” and analytic “involvement”, it becomes possible to isolate areas in the analyst’s experience which continue to resist exploration, despite the telltale signs of anxiety they generate.
Not surprisingly, many of these unexplored areas call up personal as opposed to theoretical prohibitions, an avoidance prompted by feelings of repugnance or uneasiness, or by concerns regarding personal exposure or awkwardness in approaching the topic with one’s peers. This conference will offer analysts and therapists the opportunity to come together around two such areas of experience. In her paper, “Sexuality and Suffering, or the Eeew! factor,” Muriel Dimen describes and explores a specific class of feelings of repugnance and disgust that can arise in the context of a sexual countertransference. She describes, with ample clinical illustration, the complex psychological and philosophical issues intrinsic to all our sexual experience, trying to explicate some less frequently explored and more distressing aspects inherent in experiences of sexuality. Our two discussants, Mark Blechner and Ruth Stein, will offer formal responses to Dimen’s presentation, followed by an open discussion with those in attendance moderated by the panel chair, Neil Skolnick.
Our afternoon session features an innovative presentation format designed to encourage meaningful dialogue in the area of sexual identity, both as it affects the co-created experience of patient and analyst and as it affects our personal experience in the professional community. We will hear descriptions of analytic work that has taken place in two clinical dyads in which the stated sexual orientation of analyst and patient are not the same. We will look searchingly at the intersubjective impact of this difference. The analysts, Sheila Ronsen and Eric Sherman, will discuss their personal reactions to this difference in sexual identity and speculate about its impact on the patient, the dyad and the treatment. Their presentations will give rise to intriguing questions that we will use as a springboard for discussion. The clinical presentations will be responded to by a distinguished panel of analysts, Jack Drescher, Hazel Ipp, Sandra Kiersky and Jonathan Slavin, selected for their diverse orientations and perspectives. We will then move into an open discussion, with panelists, presenters and the audience, chaired by Virginia Goldner. We expect that there is a great deal we can learn from each other in this area of clinical experience that is rarely the focus of direct investigation.
The goal of this conference is two-fold. First, we hope to identify and investigate, from a relational perspective, some new areas regarding the role that sexuality and sexual identity play in our analytic work. We also hope to build on the open and amazingly generative experience of our first IARPP conference last January, continuing to emphasize the building of a community of colleagues who can meaningfully tackle essential issues in psychoanalysis in an atmosphere of intellectual excitement and mutual respect. We very much hope you will be a part of this process.