WBCPS 2022 ASM :
At the Frontier of Psychoanalytic Oneness:
On Working analytically in the Throes of the Unthinkable
Featured Speaker Dr. Ofra Eshel
Dr. Eshel believes that contemporary psychoanalytic approaches can extend the reach of psychoanalytic treatment to more and the most disturbed patients, to more deeply disturbed aspects of all patients’ personalities and experiences, and to difficult treatment situations. She holds that working analytically with non-neurotic patients and states of mind challenges traditional theory and practice, requiring an emerging fundamental dimension of presence and analytic oneness that 21st-century psychoanalysis must continue to deepen into in order to cope with its clinical challenges.
Dr. Eshel has proposed a spectrum of varying degrees of analytic oneness within different unconscious or unknown states in analytic work, according to the extent of the patient’s traumatization and their resulting incapacity to represent, since representation has been disrupted, regressively lost, or failed to develop. Beyond Freud’s repressed unconscious, she describes the unrepressed unconscious of non-neurotic patients and states of mind that consists of psychic material that could not be repressed, the unconscious in the realms of unbearable and catastrophic psychic trauma. This ranges from the unrepressed realm, level I, that is traumatically dissociated and unknown, to the deeper unrepressed and unrepresented realm, level II, of the most traumatic unknown and unknowable, unthinkable psychic reality, the deepest traumatic issues of human life.
Dr. Eshel will describe her unique clinical approach to patients who experience these states of mind. Some patients’ psychic functioning is largely characterized by these experiences. They are some of our most difficult and difficult-to-reach patients. Others, considered to be healthier patients, still have circumscribed areas of their minds characterized by these states that need to be addressed therapeutically. Dr. Eshel’s approach will enhance the work of all psychodynamically- and psychoanalytically-oriented therapists.
Art credits: Artist: Carolyn Steinberg Title: “Two Entities” Date: 2022 Medium: Oil in cold wax
Ofra Eshel, PsyD, is a training and supervising analyst and faculty member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), an honorary member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP), Los Angeles, and former vice-president of the International Winnicott Association (IWA). She is founder and head of the post-graduate track “Independent Psychoanalysis: Radical Breakthroughs” at the advanced studies of the Program of Psychotherapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University. Her papers have been published in psychoanalytic journals and book chapters, translated into five languages and presented at national and international conferences. She received the Leonard J. Comess Fund grant at NCP (Los Angeles, 2011), the David Hammond grant at MIP (Boston, 2016), was a visiting scholar at PINC (San Francisco, 2013), a visiting lecturer and supervisor at the advanced international training program in Winnicott’s psychoanalysis (Beijing, China, 2018); the lecturer at PCC’s 8th Annual Wilfred Bion Conference (Los Angeles, 2018), and the 2021 Robert Stoller Lecture speaker (NCP, Los Angeles, 2021). She was awarded the 2013 Frances Tustin International Memorial Prize, the 2017 Symonds Prize, and the 2022 Leonard J. Comess Award, and in 2012 was featured in Globes (Israel’s financial newspaper and magazine) as sixteenth of the fifty most influential women in Israel. She is the co-editor of Was It or Was It Not? When Shadows of Sexual Abuse Emerge in Psychoanalytic Treatment (Carmel, 2017), and author of The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2019). She is in private practice in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Learning Objectives:
After each unit of this course, participants can expect to be able to …
- Apply psychoanalytic principles of “presencing” and analytic oneness when working within massively traumatic, unthinkable and unrepresented unconscious states
- Demonstrate increased capacity to bear counter-transference challenges with the patient’s unbearable psychic reality
- Apply an understanding of Winnicott’s and Bion’s late writings to their own clinical work
Registration is closed.
Please email info@wbcps.org for late registrations.
Annual Scientific Meeting Outline
9:00 Welcome | Dr. Elizabeth Wallace, President WB-CPS
Introduction of Dr. Ofra Eshel | Judith Setton-Markus
9:15 Dr. Ofra Eshel
Into the Depths of a “Black Hole” and Deadness: Being-with and a Moment of “At-one-ment”
10:25 Discussion | Dr. Paul Steinberg
~ 10:55 Break ~
11:05 Breakout Groups
11:35 General discussion
12:05 Clinical presentation | Dr. Carolyn Steinberg
~ 12:55 Break ~
1:05 Discussion | Dr. Ofra Eshel
1:35 General discussion
2:05 Concluding remarks | Dr. Carolyn Steinberg
