There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died.
(Rose, 2021, p. 4)
The majority of Covid deaths have occurred in the isolation of the hospital room, not in a home. We– none of us — are allowed to touch the dying for fear of our own dying.
Massive death, even when unseen and blocks/cities away, infects our state of mind in myriad ways. In this weekend we will explore our upended experience of time: “Grief brings time shuddering to a halt” (Rose, 2021. p. 8).
We ask what is the mental impact of living in time and space brought to a halt: losing one’s bodily and mental space, no longer able to move freely in the inside or outside world; simultaneously losing the free flow of time, creating a version of mental claustrophobia. In the days and weeks after George Floyd’s death, his unheard plea “I can’t breathe” echoed in so many of us, a haunting echo of the violence inherent in structured racist policies. Saidiya Hartman (2002) asks: “How might we understand mourning, when the event has yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased happening?”
We are required to “wait.” It is in the time of waiting that all is held in balance. We wait to find normal again only to slowly apprehend it is not coming back, rather something we call “the new normal” will take its place. As the old is replaced by the new we wait in uncertainty. This is a most painful state of mind, an extraordinary demand the pandemic has placed on us.
And yet in waiting there is work to be done. It makes all the difference in the world if we hold onto hope, or what we as psychoanalysts call the “good object.” In this weekend’s presentations and discussion we will focus on the conflict between hope and despair, love and hate, life and death. Can we as individuals and in the larger societal sense, face the hurt, the loss and hatred and resultant painful frustration to instill and maintain a sense of “mattering” in our relations. (Baraitser, 2020). How we come to develop a sense of mattering—or not, and whose lives matter- whose lives are “grievable” (Butler) ?
* Title from Jacquelyn Rose, London Review of Books, 12/7/21
Coordinator: Lynne Zeavin, Ph.D. and Shelley Rockwell, Ph.D.
GUEST FACULTY:
Lindsay L. Clarkson, M.D. , a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, is an emerita training and supervising analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, and a member of the Humanities and Psychoanalysis Study Group at Dartmouth. The Kleinian/Bionian tradition has greatly informed her work, as a teacher, analyst and supervisor. From this perspective Dr. Clarkson has explored the details of clinical analysis, narrative and environmental literature, poetry, and biography to extend the purview of psychoanalytic listening and developmental theory to include the place of our relationship to the natural world/environment in our inner worlds. She is involved in interdisciplinary efforts to address the unfolding climate catastrophe. Recent book essays include: “Trees and other Psychoanalytic Matters” (2021) and “Locating ourselves in Relation to the Natural World” (2017).
M Fakhry Davids, M.Sc. (Clin Psych), is a psychoanalyst in full-time clinical practice. He qualified as a clinical psychologist in his native South Africa, and travelled to London to train as a psychoanalyst. He is a Fellow and Supervising and Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society, Honorary Associate Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, and the current Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. He is a Visiting Lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic, London and a founding Board Member of Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities, PCCA (www.p-cca.org), which pioneered the use of the Group Relations method to address societal atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakbah. He supervises, teaches and lectures widely. He has published papers on different topics, and a book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference. He also co-edited Irma Brenman Pick’s Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter, and has another co-edited volume, Working with the Aftermath of Atrocities, in preparation. He is on the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He chairs the IPA Liaison Committee to the South African Psychoanalytic Society and is a member of the EPF Forum on Migration and Cultural Identities.
Kay Long, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New Haven, CT. She is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Psychiatry Department of the Yale School of Medicine and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, where she is active in teaching and supervising. At the Western New England Institute, she chairs the Progression Committee and is Director of the Scholar’s Program. Her teaching and writing interests involve contemporary Kleinian approaches to therapeutic process and change. She serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and is co-editor (with Penelope Garvey) of The Kleinian Tradition: Evolution of Theory and Practice (Karnac 2018). She is working on a memoir about longing for home told through her search for her ancestor’s frontier story in 19th century West Texas.
Donald Moss, program chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association, is the recent winner of the Haskell Norman Prize for excellence in psychoanalysis, and the Elizabeth Young-Bruehl prize for his work against prejudice. He is the author of four books, most recently “Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year” (Routledge 2022), and over 60 articles, with a focus on the use of Freudian theory to account for structured forms of hatred– racism, homophobia, misogyny, and trans-phobia. He is on the faculty of the NY Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He has been in private practice in New York for 45 years.