TICP Scientific Meetings

The onset of a life-threatening disease is the most common severe trauma that humans face, although this circumstance has received relatively little attention in the psychoanalytic literature. Trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy dominates the research literature on the treatment of traumatic stress, but its applicability to the treatment of posttraumatic states in the context of a life-threatening illness may be limited. We have shown that a relational and mentalization-based approach can be effective in ameliorating these states and that the search for meaning soon emerges in the therapeutic process. The inescapability of trauma that emerges from within the body and the associated threat to life may contribute to distress in this context, but also to the need to make sense of the trauma and to find new meaning in life. Psychotherapeutic approaches developed by our team for the treatment of individuals facing a life-threatening illness will be described, as well as their broader implications for psychoanalytic approaches to the fundamental problem of finitude in human life.

The AI revolution promises historically unprecedented advances. While artificial intelligence agents already demonstrate practical value by providing companionship, assistance, and expanded access to information, they present both promise and peril—a classic pharmakon that functions as both remedy and poison. This workshop explores how the psychoanalytic tradition, with our commitment to truth, embodied consciousness, human intimacy, and the complexities of the unconscious, can help navigate these dual potentials. Through the lens of an emerging psychoanalytic activism for the AI age, we will examine the accelerating AI revolution from several critical perspectives: What risks does AI pose to our experience of self and interpersonal relationships? What human needs are being met, and which ones are being co-opted or distorted? How will AI transform clinical practice and psychoanalytic care? As we consider what we are becoming, we remember that our future remains unwritten.

In this talk I revisit Fromm’s pivotal book from 1955, the second year of President’s Eisenhower’s administration. The book had a profound impact on the ideas and agendas of social activists during the 60s and 70s, including this author. Its central theses were that the middle-class prosperity characteristic of that era masked a “pathology of normalcy”, and that capitalism transforms active citizens into passive consumers by compelling people to fill their material needs in ways that are at variance with their existential or human needs. The result is a dramatic diminution of their critical faculties, an atrophy of conscience, and the proliferation of a “marketing character”, a kind of alienated, hedonistic lifestyle whose emptiness is palliated by the consumption of ever larger quantities of consumer goods. Fromm’s analysis still rings true in some respects, but the middle-class prosperity and bland uniformity of opinion he critiqued began to wane in the late 1970s, gradually giving way to sharp extremes of poverty and wealth. The resulting political polarization has now reached a critical point, where the future of American democracy – or what little is left of it – is now in peril. So, as we approach 2025, Fromm’s analysis of America in the mid-20th century must be updated and modified to fit the contours of contemporary social realities. In so doing, however, we discover that American society is even more alienated, more atomized and fragile than it was in Fromm’s day.

Erotic desire and the need for security, upon which attachment is based, are fundamental to the experience of love and the formation of long-term couple relationships. Sustained, gratifying sexual activity over time rests on the integration of these needs, whereby safety provides the partners the freedom for an erotic life and sex enlivens a sense of stability. Yet, many couple relationships suffer from problems that interfere with or arrest their sexual relations. The popular media and couple therapy literature are replete with cases of the loss of sexual desire in long term couple relationships. The narrative explanation most frequently offered is that the biology of sex and attachment are incompatible; good sex requires novelty; and familiarity over time equates to death in the bedroom. Thus, attachment based needs for security and erotic desire are positioned as reciprocally negating. From this viewpoint, a couple’s inevitable drift toward predictability in the service of security also signals the decline of excitement and erotic love. Love is confused with merger, and this must be countered by efforts to create novelty and opportunities for separateness. But when considering couple relationships, is it necessary to view attachment in direct competition with erotic love? In this paper, I propose that sustained sexual desire within a long-term couple relationship can be conceptualized as a complex experience that is best understood as an integration of attachment needs and erotic desire. I describe aspects of the theoretical legacy that have contributed to a split between attachment and sexual desire. I argue that the origins of attachment and sexuality are not easily or usefully separated into distinct categories in either infantile or adult experience.

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