The Western Branch of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society presents
2020 Annual Scientific Conference
“Aftermath of Trauma”
Howard Levine, Judy Eekhoff and Dominique Scarfone
The impact of trauma, especially if experienced early in development, can mark the psyche and result in PTSD symptoms such as nightmares, flashbacks, panic, and psychosomatic symptoms triggered by environmental representations of the initial traumatic situation. Treatment may be challenging since these presentations are not symbolically represented and the exploration of past traumas often causes a repetition of the original trauma resulting in a vicious cycle of re-traumatization.
The WB is pleased to have three of the foremost psychoanalytic researchers in the field present their reflections on and ways of working with patients suffering the aftermath of trauma. This conference will be useful for mental health clinicians working with patients suffering from the impact of various forms of trauma in their psychic development.
Photo credit: Jean-Pierre Lafrance | Untitled 2015 Oil on Canvas
Howard Levine: Further Thoughts on Trauma, Process and Representation
Beginning with Freud, throughout his work and in most if not all psychoanalytic formulations, the concept of trauma has been associated with the disruptive effects of excess excitation on psychic regulatory processes and psychic development. Foremost among these are the capacities for emotional containment and representation. The restoration, strengthening or acquisition for the first time of these capacities can take place intersubjectively in a successful analytic therapy and lies at the heart of the therapeutic action.
Learning Objectives:
1. Participants will come away with a broadened and unifying view of various analytic formulations of the psychic nature of trauma based on the general perspective of trauma as an excess of unbindable excitation in the mind that disrupts psychic processes and further psychic development
2. Participants will have a better understanding of the kinds and levels of interventions, different from that needed in the treatment of neurosis, that are necessary in the aftermath of pre-verbal, infantile and massive psychic trauma.
Howard B. Levine, is a member of APSA, PINE, the Contemporary Freudian Society, on the faculty of the NYU Post-Doc Contemporary Freudian track, on the editorial Board of the IJP and Psychoanalytic Inquiry, editor-in-chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series and in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts. He has authored many articles, book chapters, and reviews on psychoanalytic process and technique and the treatment of primitive personality disorders. His co-edited books include Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac 2013); On Freud’s Screen Memories (Karnac 2014); The Wilfred Bion Tradition (Karnac 2016); Bion in Brazil. (Karnac 2017) and Andre Green Revisited: Representation and the Work of the Negative (Karnac 2018). He is the author of Transformations de l’Irreprésentable (Ithaque 2019).
Judy K Eekhoff: No Words to Say It: Trauma & Its Aftermath
Trauma survivors suffer from unmediated access to primal undifferentiated positions of the psyche. This access, unmediated by symbolic representation, but represented in the body, disrupts the normal trajectory of development and of relationship. Survivors have no words to communicate this experience. Without words, trauma torments them, because it cannot be borne, grieved, and released. Without access to the usual defenses against unpleasant feelings and ideas, survivors are left isolated and confused. These primal states are an aftermath of trauma resistant to treatment because they are outside the symbolic positions of the mind. Clinical examples will be used to demonstrate.
Learning Objectives:
1. Participants will distinguish between the symbolic order of language and the somatic order of the primal undifferentiated position.
2. Participants will develop a capacity of being with unmediated psychic pain and finding words to express it to the trauma survivor
Judy K. Eekhoff, PhD, FIPA is an IPA certified training and supervising psychoanalyst and a licensed child psychologist. She is a full faculty member of Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society & Institute and Seattle Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. She has a private practice in Seattle, Washington, USA where she teaches, writes, and consults. She is the author of numerous papers, book chapters and a book entitled Trauma and Primitive Mental States: An Object Relations Perspective. Her second book Between the Real & the Imaginary is nearing completion. Dr. Eekhoff is on the editorial board of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Dominique Scarfone : Translational psychoanalysis and the question of trauma. From subjectivity to subjectality.
The psyche is an apparatus devoted to constructing meaning. It normally deals with events in its environment by making sense of them i.e. it restores its normal functioning by translating/repressing the signs left behind by the events. Translation/repression thus normally leads from presentation (the direct image of the event) to representation and discourse, which feed back on– and consolidate the psyche of the subject.
Trauma results from events that exceed the translational/repressive capacity of the psyche thus impeding the formation of representations and evolutive discourse about them. The translational/repressive process is however unstoppable and cannot help but try evermore to deal with the residual presentations. This yields the repetitive patterns that are the usual consequence of trauma. The subject is thus prey to the repetition compulsion which creates a vicious cycle of re-traumatization.
The task of the analyst is to allow for the repetition to operate within the analytic setting. This happens in the form of transference. Transference, indeed, while not yet a representation, re–presents (presents again) the repetitive patterns of trauma, but this time within a relationship which can elicit the active participation of parts of the subject that were not paralyzed by the trauma. It is a matter of assisting the patient’s lifting from passive subjectivity to active subjectality. These two terms will be clarified in the course of the presentation.
Learning Objectives :
1. To formulate a translational model of the workings of the psyche and of the psychoanalytic process.
2. To formulate a notion of trauma consistent with the translational model.
3. To make an operational difference between subjectivity and subjectality.
Dominique Scarfone, MD is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a training/supervising analyst in the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (Montreal French Branches). He recently retired from his tenure as full professor at the Université de Montréal. A former Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, he is on the Editorial board of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and on the scientific advisory committees of various journals.
He is the author of numerous book chapters and journal articles on psychoanalytic topics. He has authored many books in French and translated in various languages. His most recent books in English are Laplanche: An introduction and The Unpast. The Actual Unconscious, both published in New York by UIT (The Unconscious in Translation). He also co-edited Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac, 2013).
He was one of the keynote speakers at the 2019 IPA Congress in London, UK, and a speaker at the Meeting for the Centennial of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, also in London.
He is regularly invited to give lectures as well as clinical and theoretical workshops throughout North America, Europe and Latin America.
