Scientific Meeting: Let the patient strum you: the use of aesthetic sensibility in ontological psychoanalysis | February 7, 2026

Registration closed. Questions? email info@wcpsi.org

Music, beyond the aural sense, is the rhythm and pattern of how we humans exist with each other in space and time—not a product of an individual’s unconscious.  The ontological outcomes of psychoanalysis—that is, how we come into being and feel more alive—depend on the quality of the ‘music’ of the analytic field, as conducted by the analyst through her aesthetic sensibility.  Drawing on the ideas of Donald Winnicott, Christopher Bollas, Thomas Ogden, Peter Goldberg, Michael Levin, and Adam Blum, this presentation aims to illustrate how the analyst’s aesthetic engagement widens affective connectivity within the analytic field and alters the existential state of the analysis, making new views of the unconscious possible. The audience will be invited to engage and free associate through an immersive clinical example involving music, poetry, and visuals.

Alice X. Huang, MD MS is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist in private practice in Portland, Oregon. She is a faculty member at the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute, and the current Chair of Continuing Education at the Oregon Psychoanalytic Center. Her current psychoanalytic interests are in music, film, frame, trauma, creativity, and ontological psychoanalysis; she has published on aesthetic sensibility, Laplanche, and Barbie. She sometimes teaches courses at Hollywood Theater’s Movie Madness University (Portland, OR).

Stephen Purcell is a psychoanalyst currently living in Portland, Oregon. He has an eclectic theoretical background and has published papers and book chapters on a variety of topics that include dissociation, the analyst’s way of being, theory as a source of countertransference, termination, and technique in the treatment of perverse character structures. His current interests focus on the treatment of the sequelae of early relational trauma and on non-verbal aspects of therapeutic process. He is on the Faculties of the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute, the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.

After this presentation, participants can expect to:
1. Describe how aesthetic sensibility can be used as clinical data
2. Contrast ontological psychoanalysis with epistemological psychoanalysis
3. Define the living frame as it applies to sensing and interaction in the clinical encounter

Recommended readings (Optional)
Ogden, T.H. (2019). Ontological psychoanalysis or “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 88(4):661-684.