Grieving Existential Trauma in Development and Psychoanalysis
Dr. Malcolm Slavin, Ph.D.
Saturday, May 14, 2022
10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST
A Virtual Zoom Conference Event
About The Day
Morning Session
We’ll start with a rather scary story about the troubling bedtime fears that emerged in the complicated relationship of a mother and her child. As they address those fears and navigate the developmental tensions in their relationship we see what I believe Winnicott implicitly recognized as the larger, universally human, existential and relational issues that underlie the capacity for connection, aloneness and the vital use of the other in development as well as in the therapeutic process.
Afternoon Session
We will go on to consider the way that many of our patients probe us in order to come to know our capacity to bear our own, as well as their anxieties around what is finite, mortal, and rife with issues around otherness in human relating. We will consider how an open engagement in the reciprocity of that process may foster the creation of a complex, relationally achieved, form of empathy.
References:
Slavin, M. O. (2016), Relational psychoanalysis and the tragic and existential dimension of the human condition, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 26:537-548.
Slavin, M. O. (2010), On Recognizing The Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Other: Discussion of “Recognition as: Intersubjective Vulnerability in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue” by Donna Orange, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 5:273-292.
