Integrated Child & Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (ICAPP)
2021-22, 4th Block — Mondays, 6:30-7:45pm
Ann De Lancey, PhD

View Whole Syllabus

Introduction

I am excited to join you in reflecting on the issues of loss, mourning, and termination. These topics hold some of the most profound and basic issues that we as humans face: issues of existence and non-existence, life and death, love and loss, human and clinical limitations.  Analytic wisdom on facing and dealing with all losses (developmental steps, transitions, separations, relationship endings, injury, illness, aging, termination, and death) is rich and varied. Some of the most moving ideas about what is helpful and mutative involve the processes of interpretation, internalization, transformation, and creation. A relatively recent ontological shift reflects a fundamental commitment to the principle of being and becoming in the experience rather than epistemological exploration.

Reading

When you engage with each article, try to let yourself float into the experience the words, stories, and images spark in you. What dreams (night or day) do they engender? What pictures form in your mind? What movies do they call forth? What associations? Personal memories? Anything goes. Please jot down (or hold in your mind) at least three of these associations that you have to the article.  (I have only assigned one article with the exception of the last meeting. I’d rather we go deep and free with one paper than two. For the last meeting I also have assigned a YouTube seminar, which you can just listen to as a podcast. You may want to listen to that sooner, as it addresses the issue of who we are as a person/citizen and the relationship between the role we had in our family and the person we are now.)

Process

I’d like for us to try to create a space for us to inch our way into what each of us feels and thinks about losses, how to best get through them, deal with them, learn from them, grow from them. What in your bones do you feel is mutative? I would prefer, rather than a heady conversation about theory X or Y, that we ground ourselves in what each of us believes from our personal experience, our own self-reflections and therapy, clinical work, observation, these readings and our discussion.

Let’s see what wisdom our individual and group unconscious sheds on these existential issues. Let’s leave room to sit with your own feelings of being together over this course and the last two years. What do you mean to one another? How has it been to be learning from one another? What role have you taken in this cohort, this seminar? How does that compare to the role you have had in your family of origin? How have you taken in one another and this learning? Where do you want to go?

Goals

One major issue I’d like for us to wrestle with is the question of the relative merits of epistemic knowledge and experiential knowledge. L. A. Paul writes, “… Experiences, as I shall discuss them, have two ways of being transformative. They can be epistemically transformative, giving you new information in virtue of your experience. And they can be personally transformative, changing how you experience being who you are. Some experiences may be epistemically transformative while not being personally transformative, like tasting a durian for the first time. Some experiences may be personally transformative without being epistemically transformative. “

What is your theory and conception of best practices in dealing with loss? And how do you sit with it with someone other than one’s own race, culture, background, privilege?

Learning Objectives

At the end of this course, participants will be able to:

1. name two or three formulations of mourning and melancholia
2. describe two contemporary psychoanalytic ideas about racial dissociation and racial enactments
3. describe two useful clinical approach to minimize racial enactment of avoidance or race and racial differences
4. cite several aspects of our vulnerability working with loss and endings
5. name three modes of change and growth as one faces loss of any kind
6. describe the arc of ideas about what is mutative in facing a loss
7. name three new pieces of information about various aspects of loss, including the experience of loss and change in diverse populations
8. develop one’s own idea of what is mutative

Clinical Impact of the Knowledge or Skills Gained

Clinicians will:

1. have a greater ability to name, tolerate, and put into perspective their patients, and their own, feelings about defenses against loss, endings, mortality
2. be able to face their own losses, endings, and mortality with a greater sense of peace and tranquility
3. open themselves to varieties of loss including developmental, cultural, racial, minoritarian, etc
4. enact more creative responses to loss

April 11, 2022 — Mourning and Melancholia Reconceived Racially

[22 pages]

Freud’s paper, “Mourning and melancholia”, (1917), Standard Edition, 14, 237-258 is, of course, the classic analytic paper on loss. Greatly oversimplifying, if one can mourn a loss and take the “shadow of the object” into one without self-reproach, one can avoid melancholia, depression. Weaving in critical race theory and building upon Freud’s and other’s conceptions of mourning and melancholia, David Eng and Shinhee Han explore what they describe as processes of racial melancholia and racial dissociation in U.S. society. Immigration, assimilation, and racialization all involve losses that are not just difficult to mourn but often socially disavowed. They contend that these dynamics are often reproduced and reenacted in the consulting room, rendering Asian Americans either as invisible or as “model minorities.”

Eng, D.L. & Han, S. (2019). Racial melancholia: Model minorities, depression, and suicide. In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. Durham, Duke University Press, pp34-55.