by PINC 

CONTEMPORARY READING OF ‘REGRESSION TO DEPENDENCE’ IN THE LANGUAGE OF FERENCZI 

Saturday, April 17, 9:00 am - 12:00 pm, via Zoom 
Register at http://pincsf.org/events 

International Visiting Scholar Hayuta Gurevich reconsiders Winnicott's regression to dependence in light of the groundbreaking work of Sandor Ferenczi. Early developmental trauma is imprinted in the psyche as fragmentation and pathological dissociation, which inevitably arouse survival modes of self-holding. Winnicott's ideas about 'regression to dependence' suggest that in analysis such regression enables the patient to relinquish self-holding, yet this process revives the early malignant relations with the analyst. Re-reading Winnicott through Ferenczi's conceptualizations, and understanding Ferenczi in hindsight through contemporary theories about the intra-psychic impact of early trauma - may help us deal in analysis with the compulsive repetitions of early malignant relations. The focus will be on enactments in which the analyst is being the 'bad object' in the concrete analytic relationship, and on the need of the patient to work through this repetition in order to enable a development of an ambivalent relation to a 'good object'.