2-Year Certificate Program (2YCP)
2023-24, 3rd Term — Mondays, 6:30-7:45pm
Karen Weisbard, PsyD
Michal Inspektor, LICSW
Table of Contents
Introduction
This course is going to focus primarily on sociocultural traumas. We believe that traumas cannot be addressed, held, and possibly healed if we continue to see the individual as the victim, and some Other as the perpetrator. Most of these readings and discussions will allow us to go further than this binary, and usher in positions such as “Implicated Subject” (Rothberg, 2019) and the Moral Third (Benjamin). In our current therapeutic world, there is much written about the brain’s response to trauma: fight/flight/freeze, dissociation, mindfulness, the body keeps the score, and so on. We believe these concepts are essential to addressing trauma, and our patients resonate with and use these tools to help them regulate. This course will take us beyond these tools, hopefully, to new ones that are often silenced or missing from our consciousness, and therefore from our patients’ ability to understand and transform their traumas.
February 5, 2024
[15 pages]We begin with our accounts of how we are speaking or not speaking of war in our sessions with patients. Why are we drawn to do so? Why do we feel we should not? Who is waiting to begin these conversations? Who feels they are necessary and who feels they are not appropriate in psychotherapy/psychoanalysis? How is it that some wars feel easier to speak of, and others feel forbidden? These are just some of the questions that we hope to engage, and speak about regarding our clinical work.
Levine, L. (2022) Interrogating Race, Shame and Mutual Vulnerability: Overlapping and Interlapping Waves of Relation. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 32:99-113
(As a reference/argument for why we therapists might need to be bringing up issues, not waiting for the patient to do so, but not the primary focus of our discussions.)
February 12, 2024
Presenter: Karen Weisbard, PsyD
[61 pages]We will read excerpts from: Davoine, F. & Gaudilliere, J.M. (2004). History Beyond Trauma. New York: Other Press.
We will discuss what comes up for us individually, and what clients come to mind. Read these writings as a poem or story, and let your imagination take you to re-membering.
Fromm, E.G. (2004). Foreword in History Beyond Trauma (Davoine, F. & Gaudilliere, J.M.; eds) pp xi-xv
Davoine, F.; Gaudilliere, J.M. (2004). Preface in History Beyond Trauma, pp xvii-xxx
Davoine, F.; Gaudilliere, J.M. (2004). Chapter 5, “Proximity: Constructing Space in a Boundless Space” in History Beyond Trauma, pp121-162
February 19, 2024
Presenter: Karen Weisbard, PsyD
[75 pages]Grand, S. (2023). On Hatred: Perpetrator Fragments and Totalitarian Objects. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 33, 543-560
This article speaks to the dialectic of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and considers how we might go beyond them to deal with historical, embodied traumas.
Stoute, B.J. (2021) Black rage: The Psychic Adaptation to the Trauma of Oppression. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Handout, 17:395-422.
From the 1st Freud class.
Powell, D.R. (2018). Race, African Americans, and Psychoanalysis: Collective Silence in the Therapeutic Conversation. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 66(6):1021-1049.
Recommended
White, K.P. (2002). Surviving hating and being hated: Some personal thoughts about racism from a psychoanalytic perspective.. In Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 38, pp. 401-422
February 26, 2024
Presenter: Michal Inspektor, LICSW
[16 pages]Silverman, S. (2015). The Colonized Mind: Gender, Trauma, and Mentalization. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 25 (1) 51-66.
This is a beautiful case study for how we might try to hold all the pieces of another’s expression of traumas.
March 4, 2024
Presenter: Michal Inspektor, LICSW
[23 pages]Peltz, R. (2020) Going to Where the World Ends: When the Bodies of Children Speak Who is Listening? Psychoanalytic Dialogues 30:166-179.
This is an astounding story translated through an analytic lens on how healing of individuals or the collective happens with changes in and by the outside world.
Tummala-Narra, P. (2020) A Discussion of “Going to Where the World Ends: When the Bodies of Children Speak Who is Listening?” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 30(2):193-201
March 11, 2024
Presenter: Karen Weisbard, PsyD
[6 pages]Bromberg, P.M. (2012) Credo. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 22:273-278.
No class on traumas would be complete without Philip Bromberg’s contributions on dissociation and multiple self-states. And this syllabus is certainly not complete!
March 18, 2024
Presenter: James Basinski, MD
[34 pages]Reisner, S. (2003) Trauma: The Seductive Hypothesis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 51:381-414
Great history of trauma in psychoanalysis.
March 25, 2024
Presenter: Michal Inspektor, LICSW
[22 pages]Davies, J.M. (2004). Whose Bad Objects Are We Anyway? Repetition and Our Elusive Love Affair with Evil. Psychoanal. Dial., 14(6):711-732.
This is a highly read paper so if you have already read it more than once, we will switch in something else!
Additional Information
Altman, N. (2022) Unpacking and Reworking Trauma, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 32:6, 683-690