Abstract
From the perspective of pathogenesis, a good deal of attention has been placed on frustration, loss, disappointment, lack of receptivity and the many forms of mis-attunement and failure of provision by the infant and child’s primary object and external environment. This has led to the valorization of the sense and concrete forms in which the analyst can become a new and better object for the patient. Successful treatment, however, may require more from the analyst than providing a ‘better’ corrective emotional experience than that originally offered by the patient’s primary objects. At some points during the analysis, the analyst may also have to accept and actualize to some extent the role of the negative transference object.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to…
1. Participants will be able to describe the importance of relative ‘failure’ in the thinking of Winnicott and Freud and its necessity as a way station in the treatment of all patients.
2. Participants will be able to recognize and discuss Freud’s (1920) description of the repetition compulsion and its implications for treatment.
Biography
Howard B. Levine, MD., is a member of APSA, PINE, the Contemporary
Freudian Society, on the faculty of NYU Post-Doc’s 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 is the author
of Transformations de l’Irreprésentable (Ithaque 2019) and Affect,
Representation and Language: Between the Silence and the
Cry (Routledge 2022) and editor of The Post-Bionian Field Theory of
Antonino Ferro (Routledge 2022) and The Freudian Matrix of Andre Green.
Towards A Psychoanalysis For The 21 st Century by André Green
(Routledge/IPA forthcoming). 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); Andre Green Revisited: Representation and the
Work of the Negative (Karnac 2018); Covidian Life (2021 Phoenix);
and Psychoanalysis of the Psychoanalytic Frame Revisited: A New Look at
Bleger’s Classical Work (Routledge/IPA, 2022).
References
Levine, H.B. (2022). Affect, Representation and Language. Between the Silence and the Cry. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge.
Levine, H.B. (2018). The Interplay of Emotions in the Analytic Session. Canadian J. Psychoanal., 26(1):5-18.
Levine, H.B. (2021). Further Thoughts On Trauma, Process and Representation. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 81:164-177.
