A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Overwhelming Emotion
The work of Bion and Meltzer
Recorded Saturday 17 December 2022
With Avner Bergstein and Judy Eekhoff
CPD Credits: 3 hours
Our speakers will delve into unrepresentable, ineffable and often unknowable realms of the human mind. Primarily drawing on the thinking of Bion and Meltzer, our speakers Judy Eekhoff and Avner Bergstein will take us into the privacy of their consulting rooms, and the encounter with emotional experience that cannot be verbally communicated and dynamically interpreted but must first be lived in the here and now of the analytic setting.
READ MORE...Patients whose thinking and dreaming capacities are deficient compel us to find new ways for getting in touch with an overwhelming, unverbalisable emotional reality. We are called upon to reach into deeper levels of our own psychic functioning and rely on our psychoanalytic trained intuition in order to make contact with the patient’s as yet unmentalised emotional experience. Thus, we might expand the patient’s and our own capacity to tolerate the pain entailed in the struggle to truthfully apprehend reality.
CPD – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.
Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.
FULL PROGRAMME
Judy K Eekhoff
The Spark of Life
Some patients do not trust their own experiences. Since they cannot trust themselves, they look to others to show them what to do. Mimicry and “as if” behavior become the means for survival in a world that feels alien to them. Their ability to use personal truth for psychic nourishment is compromised. Desperate and isolated, they deaden themselves in order to get by. Worse still, their deadness may also indicate a developmental deficit that leaves them feeling as if they do not exist. Often, they describe themselves as going through the motions of life, but not living it. Feeling they are not fully alive, they come to analysis looking for what is missing. The analyst must find true life within the mimicry presented.
Q&A
Avner Bergstein
Violent Emotions and the Violence of Life
Avner Bergstein discusses the violence of emotions and the violent retaliation against the mind as a way of protecting oneself against overwhelming pain. Leaning on Bion’s thinking, he suggests that violence may be an outcome of a quantity of excitation that the individual is unable to elaborate mentally. This violence is often dormant, covered by a veneer of civilization. Thus, in analysis we may repeatedly be deluded by the patient’s seemingly non-psychotic functioning. Prenatal experiences that were never mentally registered serve as a model for overwhelming, undreamt and undreamable experience, which may be encapsulated in an unrepressed unconscious. Such unmentalized emotional experience may be forcibly discharged, either outward through physical violence, perversions, addictions, etc., or inward into the body. However, it is not only the overwhelming experience that one tries to expel, but also the perceiving mind itself, which is attacked and fragmented in order to evade awareness of an intolerable emotional reality. Detailed clinical material will illustrate the temptation to remain blind to the violent emotions lurking behind, and the massive forces, in both analyst and patient, working against getting in touch with painful psychic reality.
Q&A
Discussion with Q&A