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Other/Wise Uncut, the online journal of the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education (IFPE), concludes its 2014 edition with this third collection of presentations from Transience and Permanence, our 24th annual interdisciplinary conference, in Philadelphia, PA, October 31 to November 2, 2013.
Judith E. Vida and Farrell Silverberg served as Conference Co-chairs, and also as co-editors of this 2014 edition of the journal. We would like to acknowledge the expert editorial assistance of Lois Ehrlich in preparing these issues of Other/Wise Uncut for posting online.
Each of the previous two issues featured papers that were grouped together based upon closely shared thematic resonances. The papers in this final issue are more topically variegated, offering seven unique and distinct responses to the conference theme.
Sy Coopersmith uses a clinical vignette to demonstrate that masochism as a function of sadism is amenable to resolution through working with transference, in contrast to the entrenched intrapsychic mechanism posited by the notion of “primary masochism.”
Rochelle Kainer tweaks the old platitude that immortality is the aim of art in her journey through a contemporary art practice she characterizes as “Flash art”, ranging from DADA to Happenings to the ephemera of Andy Goldsworthy, and concluding with the extraordinary sand painting created during the conference and destroyed
at its conclusion.
Elisabeth Crim calls upon her own experiences to offer a deepened perspective on what is transient and what is permanent in the related streams of personal and professional development over the life span.
Oren Gozlan makes a compelling argument to propose transsexuality as “a placeholder for the incommensurability between gender and sexual difference,” using a monumental sculpture of Anish Kapoor to personify a space which is neither transient nor permanent, and from which emerges a sense of beauty as an affect.
From the platform of time perception studies, Victoria Grinman uses the contemporary thinking of Thomas Ogden, Temple Grandin, and her own clinical experience to question long-held notions of the immutability of “autism spectrum disorders,” but also to burrow further underneath prescriptions of what constitutes “normal.”
Leticia Castrechini-Franieck grounds us briefly in her research approach and then takes us, via transcriptions of interviews, into the world of street children in Sao Paulo State, Brazil, examining circumstances of “high adversity” where “transience” and “permanence” have no counterpart in the emotional vocabulary of her subjects.
Finally, Ken Silvestro invites us into an extended meditation on archetypes of transience/permanence, and of illusion/reality, toward the contemplation of a new global sense of reality––approachable by jettisoning reliance on purely Western notions of consciousness, and by acknowledging that the new frontiers of physics that are already beckoning us there.
Farrell Silverberg and Judith E. Vida
Co-Editors
www.IFPE.org