Sessions 3 & 4:
Weekend of November 6 – 7, 2021
Session 3: Gender Matters/Thalassa
Date: Saturday, November 6th 12 Noon, NY time
(For webinar hours in your time zone click here)
Presenters: Adrienne Harris and Jô Gondar
Moderator: Aleksandra Wagner
Summary: Gender studies are part of the contemporary epistemological landscape, questioning some notions with which psychoanalysis works, such as masculine and feminine. Two questions can be asked in this regard: Can gender studies teach something to psychoanalysts? And, could Sándor Ferenczi, an analyst so ahead of his time, contribute to gender studies? Ferenczi was a clinician who was always in tune with minorities, wherever they were. In this webinar, we will examine Ferenczi’s powerful but under-circulated book on sexuality and gender, Thalassa. We will consider both the book’s wartime context and its unusually radical thesis, tying sexuality to the evolutionary work of Lamarck, not Darwin, to build a uniquely complex model of embodied experiences of excitement and subjectivity.
Learning Objectives: After this session participants will be able to:
- Describe and analyze the creative contributions of Ferenczi to better understand sexuality and development.
- Compare and contrast models of sexuality and gender in which biology, social phenomena, and developmental process may all contribute to developmental outcomes.
Bios:
Adrienne Harris, Ph. D. (Presenter), is Faculty and Supervisor at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is an editor at Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. In 2009, She, Lewis Aron, and Jeremy Safran established the Sándor Ferenczi Center at the New School University. She is also an editor of the IPA e-journal: Psychoanalysis Today.
Jô Gondar, Ph. D. (Presenter), is a full member of Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, Doctor in Psychology, Full Professor of Postgraduate Studies in Social Memory at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Brazil. Research coordinator of the project “Ferenczi and the social disavowal.” Co-author of Com Ferenczi. Clínica, subjetivação, política [With Ferenczi. Clinics, subjectivity, politics]. Member of Grupo Brasileiro de Pesquisas Sándor Ferenczi [Sándor Ferenczi Research Brazilian Group]).
Aleksandra Wagner, Ph. D. (Moderator), is a psychoanalyst affiliated with the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), New York City, where she serves as a faculty member, and Professor Emerita at The New School. She is also on the Board of the Sándor Ferenczi Center at the New School.
Session 4: Disavowal, Confusion of Tongues and Social-Political Denial
Date: Sunday, November 7th 12 Noon, NY time
(For webinar hours in your time zone click here)
Presenters: Daniel Kupermann and Raluca Soreanu
Moderator: Clara Mucci
Summary: The main purpose of this session is to present the relational dimension of trauma according to Sándor Ferenczi, as well as what can be considered as ethics and politics in psychoanalysis when facing situations of social trauma and violence. From the analysis of social and political events that took place in Brazil during the first year of the pandemic, we will try to demonstrate the forms of denial that tend to occur in interpersonal social relationships of contemporary democracies.
Learning Objectives: After this session participants will be able to:
- Understand the relational, social and political dimension of the Ferenczian theory of trauma.
- Recognize the potential of Ferenczian thought to understand contemporary forms of social bonds.
Bios:
Daniel Kupermann, Ph. D. (Presenter), is a psychoanalyst and a professor at the Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo. He is currently the president of the Sándor Ferenczi Brazilian Research Group and a member of the board of the International Sándor Ferenczi Network. He has authored articles published in French, English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and books published in Brazil.
Raluca Soreanu, Ph. D. (Presenter), is a psychoanalyst, active member of Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, and Reader in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. She is the author of Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018), She is the editor of the Journal of the Balint Society and an Academic Associate of the Freud Museum London, where she has taught a series of courses on the work of Ferenczi.
Clara Mucci, Ph. D. (Moderator), is full professor of Dynamic Psychology at the University of Bergamo, Italy, after having been full Professor of English literature (Shakespeare). She is a psychotherapist in private practice in Milan and Pescara, Italy, an associate member of the SIPP (Italian Society of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy) and a training analyst for SIPeP-SF, Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy-Sandor Ferenczi. She is the author of many books, in the field of psychoanalysis and literature and most recently on trauma and borderline disorders, among which Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma. Intergenerational Transmission, Psychoanalytic Treatment and the Dynamics of Forgiveness (Routledge, 2013), and Borderline Bodies. Affect Regulation Therapy for personality Disorders (Norton, 2018). She is co-editor (with G. Craparo) of Unrepressed Unconscious, Implicit Memory and Clinical Work (Karnac, 2017).
