Abstract

In this presentation, I consider the transformative power of stories and storytelling in psychoanalysis to create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved loss and trauma. I draw on film, dance, poetry, literature, and dreams as frames for experience that often exceed what words can capture. In analysis, we dwell in stories, in associations and reverberations, in the enigmatic and ineffable. As psychoanalysts, we listen for the cracks and voids, interstitial spaces, the presence of an absence. Stories get told, untold, and retold, as memory expands and collides, as dreams and

remembrances float to the surface, or dissociated shards of trauma pierce through our consciousness, crashing unbidden into awareness.

As a psychoanalyst and writer, I’m interested in the stories we tell, individually

and collectively, as well as what gets left out of the narrative, disavowed and dissociated by experiences of relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma. I’m concerned as well with whose stories get centered and whose get erased, silenced, and marginalized. This crucial question, what gets left out of the narrative, and the potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help patients reclaim their memory and creative agency and become the storyteller of their own lives, is at the heart of my book, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Identify and explain how stories in psychoanalysis foster shared symbolic meaning and coherence in the aftermath of loss and trauma.

2. Evaluate the role of creativity as a dimension of aliveness and authenticity, and its function as a source of therapeutic action.

3. Recognize and discuss what may be disavowed, dissociated, or disrupted by relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma.

Biography

Dr. Lauren Levine is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and the author of Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis, published in April 2023 as part of Routledge’s Relational Perspectives Book Series. The book has been translated into Spanish, and Dr. Levine has been invited to teach from it in South America. Dr. Levine teaches and presents nationally and internationally, and her publications explore themes of creativity, mourning, intergenerational and relational trauma, and resilience. Dr. Levine is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, where she previously served as Co-Director of the One-Year Program in Relational Studies. She is also Visiting Faculty at the Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy in Athens, Greece, and at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society. Dr. Levine maintains a private psychoanalytic practice in New York City.

References

Atlas, G. (2021). Emotional inheritance: A therapist, her patients, and the legacy of trauma. Little, Brown Spark.

Stephens, M. (2022). Relational racialization and segregated whiteness. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 32(2), 114–120. 

Vaughans, K. (2022). Commentary on Lauren Levine’s “Interrogating race, shame, and mutual vulnerability.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 32(2), 126-129.