About The Event:
Part One: Friday, Nov. 2: Dr. Sloate will introduce her work on transforming the sadistic superego in psychosomatic illness. A sadistic superego is often a primary force in the painful bodily states characteristic of psychosomatic disorders, yet its influence is frequently overlooked. In this talk, Dr. Sloate will trace the main historical issues that have shaped our current thinking about psychosomatics and our clinical practice. She will illustrate how the analysis of one patient's sadistic superego facilitated her transition from somatic and concrete modes of experience to symbolic and intrapsychic ones, until the patient became able to make use of a fully metaphorical interpretive process.
Part Two: Dr. Sloate returns on Saturday, November 3 at 10:00 am for an in-depth discussion of the psychoanalytic process. Participants will have the chance to engage in extended dialogue with Dr. Sloate and explore the difficult technical issues that arose over the course of this analysis, including modifications determined by the patient's ego strength, the centrality of transference analysis, and the crucial significance of the countertransference in the analyst of a provocative and pain-ridden patient. Advance Copies: The clinical case details have been published as "Superego and sexuality: An analysis of a psychosomatic solution," in Psychoanalytic Inquiry 30: 5, 457-473. Copies are available from the author at plsloate2@gmail.com
About The Speaker:
Phyllis L. Sloate, PhD, FIPA, is the Chair of the Psychosomatic Study Group of the American Psychoanalytic Association; Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty at the Contemporary Freudian Society; Faculty and Supervisor, Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Director, IPTAR Society Board; and Faculty and Supervising Analyst, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. In recognition of her contributions to the field of psychosomatics, Dr. Sloate was asked to present the fall 2011 C. Philip Wilson Memorial Lecture at PANY. She edited and contributed to a recent volume on psychosomatics for the journal series Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and she is an invited contributor to Graeme Taylor's special issue on psychosomatics for the Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry. She is especially interested in the transformative processes by which psychoanalysis facilitates movement from the concrete and external to a more developed capacity for symbolic, metaphoric, and interpretive thinking.
*RSVP to Barish@WCSPP.org
