22 Weeks | November 8, 2024 – May 9, 2025
Fridays | 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

PSYCHOANALYSIS: Breakdown and Breakthrough
 

The Negentropic Clinic:
Breakdown and Breakthrough in the Entropocene
Daniel G. Butler, Ph.D., LMFT
November 8, 15, 22; December 6, 13, 20, 2024; January 10, 17, 2025

According to the late philosopher Bernard Stiegler, we live in an era of rampant social and political breakdown that he calls the Entropocene. For certain segments of 21st-century society, breakdown has become so routine that fearing it increasingly seems pointless. Technological innovations promise to deliver society from breakdown by proffering breakthroughs ironically diminishing the 21st-century subject’s capacity to live a psychically rich life. Contemporary psychoanalysis contends with the ways these social forces dissociate psyche from soma and reduce the drive to live to an instinct to survive. Affect eludes many of our devitalized patients for whom both fear of  breakdown and faith in breakthrough seem like abstract notions rather than felt experiences. To become affectable subjects, our patients must reckon with a social entropy that demands their dissociative mentation if they are to keep pace with an accelerating society. Although the Entropocene is considered a global phenomenon, our patients reckon with its effects in psychically and socially specific ways. Focusing on primary texts from psychoanalysis, philosophy, and adjacent fields, this course aims to delineate what a reckoning with the Entropocene might clinically entail. Our comparative approach will engage Freudian, Fanonian, Lacanian, Kleinian, Bionian, and Winnicottian perspectives.

Breakdown and Breakthrough in the Therapeutic Dyad
Susana Winkel, Ph.D.
January 31; February 7, 14, 21, 28; March 7, 14, 21, 2025

This course will examine elements involved in the emergence of a potential breakdown and its subsequent breakthrough within the psychoanalytic dyad by developing a systematic way to describe and understand different aspects of the clinical situation. This seminar will emphasize the rigorous distinctions between conjecture and observation. A combination of open-mindedness regarding observable clinical material and a steady focus on the distinction between theoretical concepts and clinical observations will prepare the participant for the double task of theoretical soundness and clinical proficiency. 

Rupture and the Terror of Disruption
Deborah Melman, Ph.D.
April 4, 11, 18, 25; May 2, 9, 2025

Whether we’re concerned with breakdown or breakthrough, we’re in the terrain of rupture. In both cases, a “threat to the self”, as it is known, and to its provision of a protective shell provides an illusion of living in a predictable world. This course will consider the clinical impact of such ruptures and the fears they engender: the horror of losing definition, identity, or dropping into discontinuity with no sign of a way back; or the glimmerings of moments where what breaks through is the possibility of being alive.