NEW YORK PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY & INSTITUTE:
THE A. A. BRILL LIBRARY
Marianne and Nicholas Young Auditorium
247 East 82nd St., between 2nd & 3rd, NY, NY, 10028
212-879-6900
www.psychoanalysis.org
www.nypsi.org
Thursday, November 13, 2014, 7 pm
Screening & Discussion of Michael Haneke’s
The Piano Teacher “La pianiste” (2001)
Screening followed by a discussion with
Christopher Christian, PhD
PURCHASE TICKETS HERE or VISIT nypsi.org
Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher is an intensely evocative movie, based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize laureate and Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, that provides an unusual glimpse at female sadomasochistic perversions. The novel and movie make an incidental contribution to psychoanalysis as a case study insofar as women with severe sadomasochistic perversions rarely come to psychoanalysis and when they do they represent, as Bernhard Berliner (1940) once wrote, “one of the most complicated subjects in psychoanalytic theory and one of the most difficult problems in our therapeutic work” (p. 322). The main thesis to be presented is that in certain cases where the father by his absence has not facilitated the daughter’s differentiation and separation from an all-engulfing mother, the child attempts such differentiation by becoming the father vis-à-vis the mother, and embracing the realm of the paternal symbolic order.
Chris Christian, Ph.D., FIPA, is an Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology at the New School for Social Research; Director of the New School – Beth Israel Center for Clinical Training and Research; and Co-Director of the Norbert Freedman Center for Psychoanalytic Research at IPTAR. He is co-editor with Michael J. Diamond of The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives in Therapeutic Action (Karnac Books); and co-editor with Morris Eagle and David Wolitzky of the forth-coming Conflict and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Reassessment (Routledge). Dr. Christian maintains a clinical practice near Gramercy Park, where he works with adults conducting psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. His paper, “The Piano Teacher: A Case Study in Sadomasochism,” from which this presentation will draw, was published in The Psychoanalytic Review.
NO CME OR CE CREDITS
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