The New Directions weekend will explore forms of human relating that are not reducible to speech, that exceed and sometimes undo what can be said. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, the arts, and embodied practice, we will consider how people affect and transform one another through affective qualities such as tone, rhythm, timing, movement, and intensity— dimensions of communication that operate implicitly, at the level of the procedural unconscious and often without recourse to explicit meaning. Rather than treating language as the privileged site of relational truth, we will consider speech as just one aspect of a broader field of embodied relational exchange.

Psychoanalyst Henry Markman will describe analytic relating as unfolding in time and without prescribed outcome, creating a shared emotional field that is shaped as much by rhythm, pacing, and responsiveness as by words. From this perspective, the analytic situation becomes a lived, temporal encounter—an I am with you enacted through cadence, pause, and responsiveness rather than interpretation alone. Henry’s work invites participants to consider how such nonrepresentational dimensions of experience shape clinical work, writing, and scholarly inquiry, and how newness and potentiality emerge within relational time.

The weekend will include two experiential sessions with musician, actress, and educator Abena Koomson-Davis and educator and improv actor Sam Tanner. Abena will help us explore the embodied qualities of lullaby—voice, rhythm, repetition, and breath—as forms of connection that often precede words. Her work will help us experience lullabies as forms of attunement, regulation, cultural memory, and parental address. Sam will lead structured improvisational exercises that highlight responsiveness, timing, and the risks of meeting one another without a script, and he will reflect on how improvisation informs his work as a writer. Both sessions will include audience involvement (in addition to Q&A time) that will serve as invitations to experience directly how tone, pacing, sound, and movement shape relational space. Together, Abena and Sam offer a way to explore dimensions of encounter that clinicians and writers regularly rely on in their work but may not often have the opportunity to examine explicitly.

Weekend organizer Gail Boldt will present a paper exploring how her work with children ranging from 3- to 9-years old undid her confidence in the power of speech and representation as primary actors in learning and change. Drawing from case materials, she will explore the action of non-representational sound and play with materials as processes that shape relational experience and open possibilities for change without relying on interpretation or verbal insight.

Weekend Coordinator – Gail Boldt

Speakers: 

Henry Markman, MD is a Supervising and Training Analyst, Faculty Member, and Co-chair of Dialogues in Contemporary Psychoanalysis at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and Faculty, The Wilhelm Reich Center for the Study of Embodiment.  His recent book (2022) is Creative Engagement in Psychoanalytic Practice published by Routledge. Among topics in his published work are play in adolescent analysis, embodied attunement, aesthetic experience, musical accompaniment in psychoanalysis, Bion’s late work, the analyst’s ethical commitments, and the relevance of Ferenczi’s mutual analysis. His most recent paper, in press, is The Analyst’s Embodied Presence: Working Within an Aesthetic Matrix.  He is in private practice in Berkeley, California, where he also consults and leads study groups.

Abena Koomson-Davis is a performer, educator, and wordsmith. She originated the role of Fela’s mother in the Off-Broadway run of FELA! The musical and reprised her role many times in the TONY Award-winning Broadway production. She has performed with Natalie Merchant, Angelique Kidjo, and many other luminaries. Abena is the founding musical director for the Resistance Revival Chorus and currently serves as Ethics Chair in the Middle Division of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. 

Samuel Jaye Tanner, Ph.D., is a Professor of English Education at the University of Iowa. His books Whiteness, Pedagogy, Youth and America: Critical Whiteness Studies in the Classroom and Storytelling and Improvisation as Anti-Racist Pedagogy have won scholarly awards. Sam has also written works in science fiction, memoir, humor, and theology. Sam has been teaching, directing, and performing improv theater for 25 years. He is a co-founding member of Happy Valley Improv. Sam taught high school English and Drama before becoming a professor. He is also a creative writer and an improviser.

Gail Boldt is a Distinguished Professor of Education at Penn State University and a psychotherapist who has had a clinical practice focused on young children. She is currently completing a book entitled Vital Literacies: Relational Dynamics of Learning and Change (Routledge, 2027) that explores how working with young children dramatically challenged her faith in the role of language and the representation of ideas in learning and change, leading her to attend to how sound and materiality, often operating outside conscious intention, are central to relationships, to what is learned, and to how it is learned. Gail is the Senior Editor of the Bank Street Occasional Papers.