Those 45 Minutes Completely Changed My Life!
Freud’s consultation with ML and what 21st Century Therapists can learn from it
Presenters: Jonathan H. Slavin, Ph.D., ABPP and Miki Rahmani, M.A. in Toronto
and Mia Medina, Psy.D., in Istanbul, Turkey
ABOUT THE DAY:
“Those 45 minutes completely changed my life!” So said 88 year old Margarethe Lutz, an Austrian artist, to her interviewer. She was talking about her single session with Sigmund Freud 70 years before, in 1936, when she was just 18 years old. The astonishing account of Margarethe’s one session with Freud was published in the respected German weekly Die Zeit in 2006. But it has never before been published or discussed in the psychoanalytic literature.
Margarethe’s description of her meeting shows us Freud working in a way that we almost never hear about, far different than the common idea of how psychoanalysis or psychotherapy is supposed to happen. Most important, we witness vividly what can happen in even one meeting when two minds meet and touch.
Two minds meeting is not the usual way we think of Freud’s views. Indeed we “know” that Freud’s thinking was designed to take psychoanalysis in the opposite direction; to objectify the process and to avoid both the analyst’s personal influence and the powerful efforts of the patient to affect the analyst, described dramatically in his paper “Observations on Transference Love.”
In this workshop we undertake to have a new look at the evolution of Freud’s views, not as the familiar classical analyst, but to witness the uncanny emergence of frankly relational themes and ideas. We do this by examining two of his most important clinical papers during the last 20 years of his work and in discussing the revolutionary way he worked with Margarethe.
Since we will discuss these papers in detail, we ask you to read, or re-read them, even if you know them. Our discussion will proceed seminar-style and will assume that everyone is fully conversant with them. A third paper (Slavin) is suggested to provide an updated account of the question of the analyst’s influence in a relational perspective. All papers will provided to registrants.
Reading Sequence: (all papers will be provided to advance registrants and are also available online). It would be helpful to bring copies with you.
Freud, S. (1915). Observations on transference-love Standard Edition, 12:159-171. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.
Freud, S. (1937). Constructions in analysis. Standard Edition, 23:256-269.
Slavin, J. (2010). Becoming an individual: Technically subversive thoughts on the role of the analyst’s influence. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 20:308-324.
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