The Victoria chapter of the Western Branch Course Committee is pleased to offer a series of eight seminars designed to investigate the topic “The Infantile” in preparation for the 52nd IPA Congress, “The Infantile: Its Multiple Dimensions” to be held in Vancouver, B.C., July 21-24, 2021. This Victoria course will focus on earliest human experience, the ‘always and never’ quality of the infantile state of mind that burns forever as a state that never ends and always drives the wish for an infancy that never was. The unthinkable that has never found a home in thought or word may be conceived and made meaningful in a shared experience within the analytic relationship. The infantile experience holds the depths of early breakdown and core catastrophe where unthinkable agonies lie buried – unknown, unexperienced and unlived until or unless at-one-ment can be achieved through emotional realization with another.
We will explore the possibility that the ‘presencing’ of the therapist and the ‘withness’ of the intersubjective experience may provide the spark to usher in emergence of a beginning longing to be conceived.
Living Creatively:
Whatever definition we arrive at, it must include the idea that life is worth living or not, according to whether creativity is or is not a part of an individual person’s living experience. To be creative a person must exist and have a feeling of existing, not in conscious awareness, but as a basic place to operate from. Creativity is then the doing that arises out of being. It indicates that he who is, is alive. Impulse may be at rest, but when the word ‘doing’ becomes appropriate, then already there is creativity.
D. W. Winnicott
Home is where one starts from.
As we grow older
The world becomes stranger,
The pattern more
Complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.
TS Eliot ‘East Coker’ Four Quartets
Photo credit: Maarten Schaddelee | “Twisted Eight” | 2019 | Carrara Marble base with turntable
Course Outline:
Seminar 1: October 29, 2020
Faculty: Catherine Young Ph.D., F.I.P.A.
Readings: Winnicott, D. W. (1988). A Primitive State of Being: Pre-Primitive States. In: Human Nature (pp.131-140). London: Free Association Books.
Winnicott, D.W. (1988). Environment. In: Human Nature (pp. 152-159). London: Free Association Books.
Eigen, M. (2009). Primary Aloneness. In: Flames From The Unconscious (pp. 11-17). London: Karnac Books Ltd.
Supplementary Reading: Winnicott, D.W. (1974). Fear of Breakdown. International Review of Psycho-Anal. 1: 103-107.
Seminar 2: November 26, 2020
Faculty: Janet Oakes, MA, BC-ATP, FIPA
Readings: Ogden, T. (1989). The Autistic-Contiguous Position. In: The Primitive Edge of Experience (pp.47-81). London: Aronson,Inc.
Seminar 3: January 28, 2021
Faculty: Catherine Young, PhD, FIPA
Readings: Meltzer, D. (1975). The Psychology of Autistic States and Post Autistic Mentality. In: Exploration In Autism, A Psychoanalytic Study. London: Karnac Books. (pp. 223-238).
Anzieu, D. (1993). Autistic Phenomenon and the Skin Ego. Psa Inq., 13: 42-48.
Seminar 4: February 25, 2021
Faculty: Janet Oakes, MA, BC-ATP, FIPA
Readings: Bollas, C. (1987). The Transformational Object. In: The Shadow of The Object. (pp.13-29). New York: Columbia University Press.
Bollas, C. (1987). The Unthought Known. In: The Shadow of the Object (pp.277-283).
Seminar 5: March 25, 2021
Faculty: Catherine Young, PhD, FIPA
Readings: Grotstein, J. (2013). ‘Orphans of O’: The negative therapeutic reaction and the longing for the childhood that never was. In: Primitive Mental States, A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Origins of Meaning. Ed. by Van Buren, J., Alhanati, S.
Seminar 6: April 29, 2021
Faculty: Janet Oakes, MA, BC-ATP, FIPA
Readings: Ferenczi, S. (1933). Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and The Child. In: Ferenczi 1955. Pp. 156-167.
For further interest: Scarfone, D. (2014). The Three Essays and the Meaning of the Infantile Sexual. In: Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic.Q. 83(2) 327-344.
Seminar 7: May 27, 2021
Faculty: Catherine Young, PhD, FIPA
Readings: Eshel, Ofra. (2004). From the “Green Woman” to “Scheherazade” The Becoming of a Fundamentally New Experience. In: Psychoanalytic Treatment. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 40(4):527-55.
Seminar 8: June 24, 2021
Faculty: Catherine Young, PhD, FIPA and Janet Oakes, MA, BC-ATP, FIPA
Readings: Eshel, Ofra. (2013). Patient-Analyst “Withness”: On Analytic “Presencing”, Passion, and Compassion in States of Breakdown, Despair, and Darkness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 82(4):925-963.
