BENJAMIN; BRAGIN; MOSKOWITZ; REICHBART
THE DIVERSITY COMMITTEE OF IPTAR PRESENTS
MARTHA BRAGIN, Ph.D.
Saturday morning Dec. 10: 9:30am -12:30pm
Winner of the International Psychoanalytic Association Hayman Prize
PEDRITO: BLOOD OF THE ANCESTORS
“Spirits and demons . . . are only projections of man’s own emotional impulses. He turns his emotional cathexes into persons, he peoples the world with them and meets his internal mental processes again outside himself.” Sigmund Freud (Totem and Taboo)
MODERATOR: MICHAEL MOSKOWITZ, Ph.D.
DISCUSSANTS: JESSICA BENJAMIN, Ph.D.
RICHARD REICHBART, Ph.D.
In Angola, as in other African nations such as Uganda today, child soldiers were recruited in a bloody 27 year war between opposition groups and the government. Pedrito, an Angolan youth, became a child soldier in a rebel army at 8 years of age. At 20, demobilized, he suffered uncontrollable rages and nightmares and subsequently became depressed and listless. He was helped by an arduous therapeutic process, in which traditional healing techniques, involving herbal remedies and symbolic manipulations by a curandeiro, were creatively supplemented by social interventions involving his community and family.
This remarkable case is recounted by Dr. Bragin, who shows how the creative healing techniques to deal with Pedrito’s considerable traumas can be understood by invoking psychodynamic concepts. She draws on Bion, Winnicott, and Klein to help explicate why the treatment was helpful to Pedrito.
The Diversity Committee hopes that in looking psychoanalytically at the way traditional healers, as part of a treatment team, function, and by stretching our psychoanalytic concepts, we might enrich our psychoanalytic work when confronting survivors of extreme violence. What does this case tell us about therapeutically helping diverse populations — from combat veterans to inner city children to immigrants and refugees from various cultures, whom clinicians increasingly treat in practice today?
Dr. Bragin received the Hayman Prize of the IPA for work with trauma in children and adults.
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Registration and Coffee: Saturday, December 10, 2011, at 9:30am
Place: Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
140 West 97th Street, New York, N. Y.
Suggested donation at door: $10 cash or check payable to “IPTAR”
RSVP (seating may be limited): reichbart@earthlink.net
Dr. Bragin is Associate Professor and Chair of the Global Social Work and Practice with Immigrants and Refugees at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, CUNY, and author of numerous journal articles on the effect of war and violence on children and adults. She is a candidate at IPTAR.
Dr. Benjamin is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the author of the books The Bonds of Love; Like Subject, Love Objects; and Shadow of the Other. She has written numerous articles and is known as a ground-breaking thinker in the areas of intersubjectivity and gender studies.
Dr. Moskowitz is a member of IPTAR, and associate professor at the Silver School of Social Work at NYU. He is co-editor of three text books including Reaching Across Boundaries of Culture and Class: Widening the Scope of Psychotherapy, as well as co-editor of the journal Organisational and Social Dynamics. He has written articles on psychoanalytic theory, organizational dynamics, morality, and race and ethnicity.
Dr. Reichbart is a Fellow (Training and Supervising Analyst) at IPTAR, Co-Chair of the IPTAR Diversity Committee, and formerly worked as an O.E.O. legal services attorney on the Navajo and Hopi Reservations in Arizona and New Mexico.