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Jennifer Schimmel, MD and Leslie Cummins, DSW are psychoanalysts and Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY) affiliated with NYU School of Medicine.

Join us for a case presentation and discussion of a young woman's psychoanalytic journey. She was initially drawn to painful, humiliating, sadomasochistic relationships. Both her inner psychic world and her outside life consisted of only victims and perpetrators. Her gender identifications were entrenched and limiting. Through psychoanalysis she became capable of making different choices about relationships, and she avoided self-defeating behaviors. She developed over time the capacity to truly love and be loved.

TBA

After an introduction and overview by Dr David Frank, three of his close senior colleagues - Dr. Lawrence Friedman, Dr. Robert Glick, and Dr. Judy Kantrowitz - will reflect on Shelley's psychoanalytic legacy. Then brief vignettes of his personal impact will be offered by Drs. Jason Wheeler, Birgit Elias, Marina Mirkin, Jennifer Stuart, and Laurie Wilson. Dr. Orgel's son Jeremy, graduate analyst and an attending psychiatrist in McAuley Neuropsychiatric Institute at St. Mary’s Hospital, San Francisco, will share his reflections.  Finally, as a response to our presenters we will welcome discussion from the audience, with David Frank as moderator.

Dr. Jeremy Orgel is a graduate analyst and member of San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis; Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF School of Medicine. He is an attending psychiatrist at McAuley Neuropsychiatric Institute at St. Mary’s Hospital, San Francisco.

JOEL GOLD, M.D. is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. He evaluates and treats adults in his private practice in Manhattan. Dr. Gold practices both psychotherapy and medication management. Dr. Gold graduated Magna Cum Laude from Brown University, earning a B.Sc. in Neuroscience, with honors, and an M.D.C.M. from McGill University. He completed his residency in Psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital Center and New York University Medical Center. Dr. Gold is the co-founder of the Tibetan Support Group, which he led for five years, at the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. He was Unit Chief of the Inpatient Psychiatric Training Unit at Bellevue, became Bellevue's Director of Psychiatric Emergency Services and finally the hospital's Director of the Psychiatric Outpatient Division. Dr. Gold is a regular contributor to Edge.org and his work has been profiled in The New Yorker and The New York Times, on This American Life, and elsewhere. Dr. Gold has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Psychiatry, Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, The Journal of Traumatic Stress, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders, The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, and The American Journal of Epidemiology. His first book, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness was published in 2014.

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).

David G. Power is a founding member of the The Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies. He is Past President, Supervisory and Teaching Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is the co-editor with Howard Levine, of Engaging Primitive Anxieties of the Emerging Self (2017). He maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and supervision in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Resting on the contributions of Bion, Winnicott and the Barangers, Nino Ferro’s Field Theory marks an important contribution to analytic technique applicable to the treatment of all patients across the diagnostic spectrum. It is part of a broad movement at the frontiers of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking and practice that has helped move us from a predominant focus on uncovering unconscious contents to an additional focus on the creation and strengthening of psychic processes, such as waking dream thought and night time dreams, containment and affect tolerance and the production and containment of thought. 

Ferro’s Field Theory has sharpened analytic listening, allowed analysts a broader and more refined range of interventions, made some of what has been called the intuitive ‘art’ of psychoanalysis more describable and therefore more teachable to students as a matter of technique and helped more clearly define the intersubjective participation of the analyst in the analytic process. While applicable to the analysis of neurotic patients, Field theory has also proved useful in extending the reach of analytic treatment to primitive mind states, such as borderline and narcissistic disorders, addictions, perversions, psychosomatic disorders and the sequelae of early or massive trauma.

This panel will introduce and illustrate through clinical process material basic concepts relative to Ferro’s Field theory, focusing on their implications for analytic listening and  interpretive intervention (e.g., the Field as “emotional gps;” “casting of characters” and “signals from the field;” saturated and unsaturated interpretations; analytic discourse as the adult, verbal “Squiggle Game”). It will also touch on the relationship of Field Theory to certain undeveloped intimations in the work of Freud and some contemporary (non-Lacanian) French psychoanalysts, such as Andre Green.

Ellen Abrams, LCSW is a psychotherapist and Faculty member at PANY.

"in Treatment" is a thought provoking HBO televisions series about a psychologist, portrayed by Gabriel Byrne, and his weekly sessions with patients, as well as those with his own therapist, and offers a tantalizing peek at the psychopathology of everyday life. Ms. Abrams will show clips which highlight psychodynamic psychotherapy principles and use them as a springboard for discussion about technique. 

Douglas Van der Heide, MD is a Board-Certified Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst practicing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His work is grounded in the seminal discoveries of Sigmund Freud as well as later contributors including Klein, Lewin, Winnicott, and Meltzer. Dr. Van der Heide trains psychiatric residents, fellows and psychoanalytic candidates. He has numerous publications in the field

Since Freud's opus of 1900 the dream and the process of dreaming remain the royal road to the heart of our work. To know how to work with dreams is tantamount to knowing how to do psychoanalysis. This lecture will review the core discoveries of mind, starting with Freud, which explains the why and wherefore of dreaming with the goal of underscoring how to work with them in the office to enrich and deepen the therapeutic exchange.