Past Meetings

Summary of our past meetings

2023

Thursday 31st August 19h30-21h00, via Zoom

  • Presenter: Jill Gardner, Chicago psychoanalyst
  • Topic: Forms and Transformations of Empathy: The Subtleties and Complexities of Empathic Understanding
  • No reading prescribed

From Jill about her talk:

I’ll be talking in a very concrete and experience-near way about the things that I think facilitate effective empathic communication. Everyone knows that we put central emphasis on empathic observation and response. But people don’t always know how to translate this theoretical understanding into effective practice. So I will first be contextualizing our focus on empathy in our theoretical understanding of development and treatment; and then detailing and illustrating several principles that I think enhance the effectiveness of empathic communication and advance the therapeutic process. I’m looking forward to being with your group.

Thursday 27th July 19h30-21h00, Goodwin Room at the Athenaeum, Newlands

  • Theme: Mourning
  • Facilitator: Kim de la Harpe
  • Readings:
    • Yadavalli, S. (2022). Mourning and The Capacity To Be Alone: Cultural and Existential Rituals in Loss, Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context, 17, 243-254.
      • Note: This paper was discussed at IAPSP’s online Colloquium earlier this year. It explores Mourning in relation to Freud, Winnicott, the capacity to be alone, Meditation & Yoga and, connected to these, how the task of mourning can be possible even without a social holding environment. Yadavalli ends with clinical implications.
    • Discussion paper by Michael Reison, which links Yadavalli’s paper to Self Psychology
Thursday 25th May 7:30pm-9pm, Goodwin Room at the Athenaeum, Newlands
  • Theme: Embodiment
  • Facilitator: Kim de la Harpe
  • Reading: Cates, L. (2014). Insidious Emotional Trauma: The Body Remembers. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology , 9:1, 35-53
Thursday 25th April 7:30pm-9pm, Goodwin Room at the Athenaeum, Newlands
  • Theme: Embodiment
  • Facilitator: Kim de la Harpe
  • Reading: Nebbiosi & Federici (2022). Miming and Clinical Psychoanalysis: Enhancing our Intersubjective Sensibility. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 42:4, 266-277 
Thursday 30th March 7:30pm-9pm, Goodwin Room at the Athenaeum, Newlands
  • Theme: Embodiment
  • Facilitator: Kim de la Harpe
  • Reading: Brothers, D. & Sletvold, J (2022). Talking Bodies: A New Vision of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 42:4, 289-302 )  Note: This comes from a recently published Embodiment issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and connects with the Embodiment workshop that Doris Brothers and Jon Sletvold held at the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP) Conference in 2022.
Thursday 23rd February 7:30pm-9pm, Goodwin Room at the Athenaeum, Newlands
  • Postponed to 30th March

2022

Sunday 27th October 7:30pm-9pm, Zoom
  • Theme: Climate
  • Presenter: Donna Orange
  • Reading: NA
Sunday 4th September 9am-1pm, Zoom
  • Theme: Ethics Workshop: The Many Faces of Loss : Ethical, Clinical and Practical Considerations in Managing Losses in a Mental Health Practice
  • Presenter: Judith Ancer
  • Reading: Reeves, Andrew (2017). In a search for meaning: challenging the accepted know-how of working with suicide risk, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 45:5, 606–609 
Thursday 25th August 7:30pm-9pm, Zoom
  • Theme: discussion about race, white privilege, homelessness, and our South African context, while thinking self psychologically about twinship and alter-ego selfobject experience
  • Presenter: Amanda Kottler
  • Readings:
    • Kottler, A. (2021). Can we stay home long enough to confront and dismantle the truth – That all humans are equal, but some are more equal than others, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 41, 418-425 
    • Adrienne E. Harris (2021) The Pandemic in America: A Crisis for Democracy, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 41:6, 363-377
    • Alison McGrath Howard (2021) Uncharted Territory: Clinical Practice in the Time of a National Pandemic and Cultural Revolution, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 41:6, 378-387 
Thursday 28th July 7:30pm-9pm, Zoom
  • Theme: Haunted: Psychoanalysis, Colonialism and the Struggle to Be Free
  • Presenter: Prof Sally Swartz
  • Readings: NA
Thursday 26th May 7:30pm-9pm, Zoom
  • Theme: Symptoms of Long Covid, What is Long Covid, What we know so far, Treatment avenues going forward
  • Presenter: Dr Gert Jaco Laubscher, a Specialist Physician and Researcher based at Stellenbosch Mediclinic, involved in local and international research regarding Long Covid and possible treatments for it. He has given various youtube talks and published regarding the topic.
  • Readings: To help ground us in self psychology, here are two articles dealing with chronic illness and Covid. Importantly, one focuses on what it is like when the therapist is chronically ill.
    • Doren L. Slade (2019) OH NO, NOT AGAIN: CHRONIC ILLNESS IN AN ANALYTIC PRACTICE AND THE CO-CREATION OF ATTACHMENT NARRATIVES, Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 14:4, 445-460
    • Darren Haber (2021) Reflections in the Fog: Transferential Challenges and COVID-19, Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 16:3, 253-263
Thursday 28th April 7:30pm-9pm, Zoom
  • Theme: Self Disclosure and Self-Revelation
  • Facilitator: Kim de la Harpe
  • Readings: From author’s note: “This paper was selected to be the Keynote Presentation at the 2017 IAPSP International Conference… The narrative is clinical and personal, an effort to represent my efforts to reach an extraordinary patient and make a difference in his life. Theory of course informed all I did…but this account endeavors to body forth the immediate experience of the work rather than to reflect on the largely self psychological ideas that undergird it…” And briefly, from the abstract: “”This paper describes in narrative form the unusual treatment… A shared passionate interest in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a trilogy that brought the patient’s deepest selfobject longings into sharp relief, led them to consider traveling to London to see it performed at the National Theater when it was adapted for the stage, which they ultimately did. How the idea of this journey evolved and what occurred during it and in its aftermath is discussed. As is the question of what constitutes therapeutic action.”
    • Stern, J. (2020). The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Therapist and Patient Journey to London, Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context, 15, 117-126 
    • Stern, S. (2020). Discussion of Jeffrey Stern’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress”: Needed Relationships as an Orienting Principle for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context, 15, 127-132 
Thursday 30th March 7:30pm-9pm, Zoom
  • Theme: Self Disclosure and Self-Revelation
  • Facilitator: Kim de la Harpe
  • Reading: This is a paper reflecting on a theatre piece performed by the author and analyst, and the implications regarding self-disclosure with his patients. From the abstract: “In a recent choice to create and perform in a well-publicized musical autobiography entitled Dr. Bradley’s Fabulous Functional Narcissism, I had to consider that my audiences would be partially made up of my patients. What would they make of the tell-all intimate disclosure that made my show so compelling? This paper discusses the surprisingly powerful positive impact my musical autobiography had on their psychotherapy with me.”
    • D. Bradley Jones (2022): Revitalization, Growth, and Fabulous Functional Narcissism, Psychoanalysis, Self and Context
Thursday 24th February 7:30pm-9pm, Zoom
  • Theme: Self Disclosure and Self-Revelation
  • Facilitator: Amanda Kottler, who was invited to speak on this topic on the panel at the IARPP online Colloquium in May 2022
  • Reading: This is a paper reflecting on a theatre piece performed by the author and analyst, and the implications regarding self-disclosure with his patients. From the abstract: “In a recent choice to create and perform in a well-publicized musical autobiography entitled Dr. Bradley’s Fabulous Functional Narcissism, I had to consider that my audiences would be partially made up of my patients. What would they make of the tell-all intimate disclosure that made my show so compelling? This paper discusses the surprisingly powerful positive impact my musical autobiography had on their psychotherapy with me.”
    • Philip Bromberg (2006). “The Analyst’s Self Revelation: Not Just Permissible but Necessary”, Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys, NJ: The Analytic Press, pp 128-150