“Master Clinicians at Work”
Friday, September 19, 2014
Allan Frosch, Ph.D.
“Monsters and Angels – Curses and Blessings: The Analyst’s Subjective Construction of the Clinical Situation”
In this presentation I explore the notion that a critical dimension of analytic work is the capacity for analyst and patient alike to experience the emotional intensity of the regressive transference – countertransference scenario and to struggle toward a more secondary process orientation where symbolization is possible. This idea is organized around clinicalmaterial in the analysis of a young woman whose efforts to get through to me made me uncomfortable enough so that I had difficulty distinguishing between seeing Ms. B as a monster intent on destroying the work or as an angel struggling to save the analysis. I argue that as analysts we need to be careful that we do not rule out patients for analysis because in doing their job as a patient, in trying to get through to us, they are making us uncomfortable. It is easy to mistake a blessing for a curse if we are caught up in the emotional turmoil of our archaic phantasy world.
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Dr. Allan Frosch is a Training Analyst and Supervisor at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) where he is on the Faculty, twice past president of IPTAR, former Dean of Training, and former Co-Director of the IPTAR Clinical Center. He is also on the Faculty at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education affiliated with the NYU School of Medicine. He is the author of a number of psychoanalytic articles and his most recent publications include an edited book – Absolute Truth and Unbearable Psychic Pain: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Concrete Experience, and a paper, “Psychoanalysis: the sacred and the profane,” published in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (2014).
Friday, Sept. 19, 2014, 2-3:30 p.m.
IPTAR West Conference Room
140 West 97th Street, NY, NY
Ellen Sinkman, Chair
RSVP: esinkman1@gmail.com