Upcoming Events

Presenter: Sally Swartz, CTPSPG member
Topic: Rediscovering the Unconscious Through Relational Theory: Who’s Afraid of Melanie Klein?
Date: Thursday evening 15th October
Time: 19h30 – 21h10
Where: Hybrid – Zoom and in person

Free to CTPSPG Members

This will be the second of two seminars that Sally Swartz is presenting for us. This seminar is about the many ways in which envy pervades all aspects of our clinical work, both in patients’ material and in our professional lives.

Overview of Seminars:
The seminars began with a brief overview of relational psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to serve as context for the exploration of death, reverie, surrender and envy that follows. My aim is twofold: (1) to breach the wall often erected between relational theory and its Freudian and object relations ancestors; and (2) to suggest ways in which relational technique might lend itself to sightings of the unconscious. The seminars focus on relational paths to rebirth, aliveness and healing, common goals of all psychotherapies, but centred here on psychoanalytic theory and technique.  My exploration will be unconscious-bound, tethering itself to the ways in which relational work opens, surrenders to and renews itself through terrain in view only on the edges of awareness.

In brief, relational theory and practice is a loosely configured grouping, and has not been organized around the writing of a single leader as a point of origin. In this sense it differs from Freudian, Kleinian and Kohutian schools, all of which have a canon of classical theory, as well as later developments and departures that acknowledge where the threads began. Relational theory draws from multiple schools and traditions, depending on the affinities of the theorists. It does however cohere broadly around the following principles: attachment as a primary organizing force in establishing features of relationality; the dynamics of recognition and attunement; enactment and interpretation; authenticity and therapist self-disclosure; identification of self-states and dissociation; and the significance of repetition in understanding traumatic states.

My seminars will take these principles as my point of entry; I will use them to think relationally about aggression, aliveness, the death drive, and envy. My readings of these three concepts will draw on the work of Donald Winnicott, Emmanuel Ghent, Christopher Bollas, Thomas Ogden, and Michael Eigen, all of whom place discovery of unconscious impulses and anxieties as central to their work as psychoanalysts. Projection, splitting and the vagaries of identification will be key to the argument.

Brief Bio:
Emeritus Associate Professor Sally Swartz (University of Cape Town) is a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has a particular interest in the field of relational psychoanalytic theory. Recent papers have had decolonisation of mind as a central focus. She has published widely in the areas of history of psychiatry, colonialism and relational psychoanalytic practice. She is the author of three monographs. Homeless Wanderers: Movement and Mental Illness in the Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century was published in 2015, and Ruthless Winnicott: The Role of Ruthlessness in Psychoanalysis and Political Protest in 2019. In 2022, she published Psychoanalysis and Colonialism: A Contemporary Introduction.

Reading:

• • Gerhardt, J. (2009). The roots of envy: The unaesthetic experience of the tantalized/dispossessed self. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19(3), 267–293.