PRESENCE, ABSENCE, AND DREAD: 
A Shared Reality
Reyna Cowan, Psy.D.
September 9, 23, 30; October 7, 14, 21, 28; November 4

We have entered a world of shared trauma and catastrophic loss both internal and external. In this decentered world, how do we use different parts of ourselves to engage? Should we differentiate issues of the internal and external world? How can we think about unconscious conflict versus the reality of our racist world? This course will explore how we address loss and trauma by looking at tenacious internal losses: those ambivalent about separating; not being seen; odes to the dead mother (and the dead father); those who are receptacles for other's unprocessed loss; and those who protect themselves from pain by cutting off from any alive feeling within. We will explore the pressures concomitant in our current world. Using both our unconscious and conscious, in a present non-intrusive way, we will think about developing ways to engage in the consulting room.

CENTERING LIVED EXPERIENCE AS A PATH TOWARDS TRANSFORMATION:
A Decolonial Take on Psychoanalysis
Molly Merson, LMFT
November 18; December 2, 9, 16; January 6, 13, 20, 27

Psychoanalysis has long been delinked from the social, much to its own detriment as well as practitioners and patients. Disavowing our cultural context—including policy, social hierarchies, “white minority rule” (Kyles, 2021), and structural injustice—perpetuates the very splits we psychoanalytic clinicians hope to mend. This course will help center us as subjects within a patriarchal, white, cisheteronormative culture-at-large, and understand how pain and erasure are perpetuated interpersonally and structurally. Can we love the thing we are trying to dismantle? Can we tell the truth out of love and healing? Can we use that which we are attempting to dismantle to dismantle it? How do people and communities find healing when the pain is still perpetuated?

RUPTURE OF PSYCHE AND SOMA:
An Exploration of Mind-Body Dissociation
Tom Wooldridge, Psy.D., ABPP, CEDS
February 3, 10, 17, 24; March 3, 10, 17, 24

Beginning with Winnicott (1949), who described how the mind may turn away from the body to establish mental functioning as a “thing in itself,” a fertile investigation has focused on what  mind-body dissociation. Whereas in health the mind “listens to” the body, ruptures in this all-important link may contribute to a variety of psychopathological conditions, including hyper-mentation, deficits in symbolic capacities, and false-body syndromes. While we investigate various conceptions of the role of trauma and dissociation in psychic life during this course, including in the object relational and relational psychoanalytic literatures, we will focus on the mind-body relationship: how the link between mind and body fails to develop or is disrupted by trauma and how that link is catalyzed in analytic treatment, leading to the emerging unrepressed unconscious and the infusion of mental life with realness and vitality.

GEOGRAPHIES OF RUPTURE:
Displacement and Becoming Home
Carolina Bacchi, Psy.D., and Adam Beyda, Psy.D.
March 31; April 7, 14, 21, 28; May 5, 12, 19

In a world disrupted by upheavals, from pandemics to injustices to threats of environmental collapse, we feel impact in our sense of well-being. Holes in the early environment can rupture our indwelling; social and cultural traumas also generate experiences of dislocation, disorientation, disconnection, and fragmentation. In this course we will address how sociocultural ruptures interweave with our early infantile experiences, inscribing one’s inner geography while establishing an “absence” that reverberates into the community. We will discuss the function of the Other in intergenerational transmission and the role of processes both clinical and social in promoting figuration and subjectivization of “absences,” which allows for the co-construction of a trauma narrative. We will also address repairing and (re-)constructing the architecture of inner spaces, building a home into which one could move. We will focus on the analytic collaborative work and process of narrativization, which allow reclaiming personal and collective geographies, thus (re-)instituting our indwelling and belonging in the world with others.