Impulse is a community newsletter produced by the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP) and distributed electronically at no cost to subscribers. We envision Impulse as an integrative source for local news, events, and thinking of interest to the psychoanalytically inclined. Our goal is to be your guide as you explore the Bay Area's rich array of analytic resources.
We invite you to become a member of NCSPP, if you are not already. And, we welcome you as a subscriber to Impulse. Join us as we highlight the exceptional diversity of psychoanalytic thought and practice in Northern California.
by June Lin-Arlow, AMFT
This month at Impulse we are thinking about power structures that are implicitly, silently embedded in dominant discourses. In Potential Space, Rebekah Tinker talks about this in the context of patriarchy, where highlighting the female voice and form in the name of feminism may still be performed within a context of male dominance when the historical context is left unexamined. I’ve also been thinking about these questions around race, immigration, and culture both in my clinical work and personal life.
***Spoiler Alert: The following paragraphs contain descriptions of the movie Everything Everywhere, All At Once, so read at your own discretion.
I recently saw Everything, Everywhere All at Once, which is a film about the relationship between Chinese American daughters and their immigrant mothers. Joy, the daughter, has internalized her mother to establish a sense of self, but as a result her self-structure is compromised by the tyranny of her mother. Her mother is self-involved, focused on appearances, homophobic (Joy is queer), and intrusively hypercritical, especially of Joy’s body. Oh, the fat shaming. In her wish for freedom, she wants to kill off the internalized mother, but that also necessitates killing off herself. Matricide is suicide. But then she also needs a mother to have a self, which is why she is also looking for her mother. It’s all very Freudian, if you ask me.
by Rebekah Tinker, ASW
EVEN AS WE TRY TO BE FEMINISTS…
Paul B. Preciado, Ph.D. published an essay in Les Éditions Grasset (Paris) in 2020 entitled, “Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts.” Preciado is a trans-masculine writer and philosopher. He called out the academy for emphasizing female voices within psychoanalytic research. This emphasis, he says, is a blatant act of sexism against the female intellect. That, rather than lifting up female voices, we must first acknowledge the voices of cis-White males that are intrinsically dominating the field. By pedestaling the female we bypass the necessary deconstructive work on intellectual sexism, and thereby are performing/faking gender inclusivity, rather than embodying/practicing it.
He read his essay to a crowd of 3,500 analysts in the fall of 2019 at the 49th Study Day of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne on the theme, “Women in Psychoanalysis” (Preciado, 2020). He was escorted off the stage a quarter of his way into the presentation. Analysts in the audience applauded and cheered, calling him Hitler. His rhetoric, the reaction of the audience and Academy, and the larger discourse on sexism he presents, brings to mind the function of silence and who benefits from it.
by June Lin-Arlow, AMFT
Impulse is looking for a new Editor-In-Chief! The editor is a member of the Board of Directors at NCSPP, schedules staff writers, and coordinates the production of this very newsletter on a monthly basis. If you are interested or know someone who may be a good fit, please email June at jlarlow@ncspp.org.
LOOKING FOR PSYCHOTHERAPISTS/ANALYSTS who have decided to retire in the near future and would be willing to be interviewed regarding the anticipation of their last hours with patients. Contact genealexander@att.net if interested.
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Supervisors Colloquium
Sat, Jun 11 / 9:00 am - 11:00 am / Zoom
TPI / (510) 847-7005 / A. E. Lipscomb, Psy.D., LCSW, et al. / $45 - $95