Vancouver: The Infantile in Analysis: Regression and Healing | January – May 2021

The Vancouver chapter of the Western Branch Course Committee is pleased to offer a series of eight seminars designed to investigate the topic of “The Infantile”, inspired by the theme of the upcoming Vancouver IPA Congress. This course will focus on earliest human experience, the ‘always and never’ quality of the infantile state of mind that burns forever as a state that never ends and always drives the wish for an infancy that never was. The unthinkable that has never found a home in thought or word may be conceived and made meaningful in a shared experience within the analytic relationship. The infantile experience holds the depths of early breakdown, and core catastrophe where unthinkable agonies lie buried – unknown, unexperienced and unlived until or unless at-one-ment can be achieved through emotional realization with another.
We will explore the possibility that the ‘presence-ing’ of the therapist and the ‘witness’ of the intersubjective experience may provide the spark to usher in emergence of a beginning longing to be conceived.
Analysis provides the opportunity through regression in the analytic space, for the analytic couple to relive in the here-and-now, long buried and unrepresented states, and with a new, more benign object relationship, the possibility of a new beginning that heals the scars sustained in early development, opening up aspects of one’s being as yet unlived.

Living Creatively:

Whatever definition we arrive at, it must include the idea that life is worth living or not, according to whether creativity is or is not a part of an individual person’s living experience. To be creative a person must exist and have a feeling of existing, not in conscious awareness, but as a basic place to operate from. Creativity is then the doing that arises out of being. It indicates that he who is, is alive. Impulse may be at rest, but when the word ‘doing’ becomes appropriate, then already there is creativity.
D. W. Winnicott

Home is where one starts from.
As we grow older
The world becomes stranger,
The pattern more
Complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.
TS Eliot ‘East Coker’ Four Quartets

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_{Photo credit: : Richard M. Markus | Cosmos (Body Parts Series) | January 23, 2016}

Course Outline:

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Seminar 1: Jan 15
Faculty: Judith Setton-Markus
Readings:

• Winnicott, D. W. (1988). A Primitive State of Being: Pre-Primitive States. In Human Nature (pp.131-140). London: Free Association Books.
• Winnicott, D.W. (1988). Environment. In: Human Nature (pp. 152-159). London: Free Association Books.
• Eigen, M. (2009). Primary Aloneness. In: Flames From The Unconscious (pp. 11-17). London: Karnac Books Ltd.

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Seminar 2: Jan 29
Faculty: Darren Thompson
Readings:

• Ogden, T. (1989). The Autistic-Contiguous Position. In: The Primitive Edge of Experience (pp.47-81). London: Aronson,Inc.

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Seminar 3: Feb 19
Faculty: Karen Holland Biggs
Readings:

• Meltzer, D. (1975(. – The Psychology of Autistic States and Post Autistic Mentality in Exploration In Autism, pp. 223-238.
• Anzieu, D. (1993). Autistic Phenomenon and the Skin Ego. Psa Inq., 13: 42-48.

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Seminar 4: Mar 5
Faculty: Paul Steinberg
Readings:

• Bollas, C. (1987). The Transformational Object. In: The Shadow of The Object. (pp.13-29). New York: Columbia University Press.
• Bollas, C. (1987). The Unthought Known. In: The Shadow of the Object. (pp.277-283).

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Seminar 5: Mar 19
Faculty: Elizabeth Wallace
Readings:

• Grotstein, J. (2013). ‘Orphans of O’: The negative therapeutic reaction and the longing for the childhood that never was.
• In Primitive Mental States A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Origins of Meaning. Ed. by Van Buren, J., Alhanati, S.

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Seminar 6: Apr 9
Faculty: Coleen Gold
Readings:

• Ferenczi, S. (1933). Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and The Child. In Ferenczi 1955. Pp. 156-167.
• For further interest: Scarfone, D. (2014). The Three Essays and the Meaning of the Infantile Sexual
• in Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic. Q. 83(2) 327-344.

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Seminar 7: Apr 23
Faculty: Carolyn Steinberg
Readings:

• Eshel, Ofra. (2004). From the “Green Woman” to “Scheherazade” The Becoming Of A Fundamentally New Experience IN Psychoanalytic Treatment”. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 40(4):527-55

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Seminar 8: May 7
Faculty: Endre Koritar
Readings:

• Eshel, Ofra. (2013). Patient-Analyst “Witness”: On Analytic “Presencing”, Passion, and Compassion in States of Breakdown, Despair, and Darkness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 82(4):925-963.

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