MPSI at the Movies
The Lost Daughter
Saturday, March 26, 10:00-11:30 AM
The Lost Daughter is a 2021 Netflix film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Italian writer Elena Ferrante (2015), which follows a middle-aged professor of literature who confronts an unsettling past after meeting a woman and her young daughter while on vacation in Italy. Her obsession with this mother, daughter and the daughter’s doll stirs uncomfortable truths and emotions pushed away from early motherhood.
Join us for a discussion on maternal ambivalence. What impact does that first bond have on subsequent female relationships, including mothering? Why is envy so rife? What role does a doll (or transitional object) play in the process of separation and construction of female identity?
This event is open to the public.
Please watch the film prior to the discussion.
Zoom link provided in registration confirmation email
Free for Members of MPSI; $10 for Non-Members
No CEU's will be offered for attendance
DISCUSSANTS
Caitlin Spies, LICSW, is a mother, a psychotherapist, and a Clinical Associate Faculty member at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. Her first encounters with psychoanalysis were through literature, literary criticism, and film. She studied psychology and creative writing at Macalester College, after which she pursued work in both fields of mental health and the literary arts. After completing her master’s in social work at the University of Chicago, she received post-graduate training in contemporary psychoanalysis at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. Her interests in film, fiction, history, and music often intersect around the uncanny, gender and sexuality, gothic, and horror. Motherhood has helped her grow as a therapist, and as a person, more than any training she has received; psychoanalysis has helped her as a mother, and as a person, in immeasurable ways. Literature, film, and music continue to help hold and enhance it all in vivid color. She lives and practices in Minneapolis.
Ingrid Tucci, LPCC, started her career in a methadone clinic, treating opiate dependent individuals struggling with severe trauma histories. Blood, urine, nudity, and decomposing body parts were part of this work, occurring in a treatment frame that stretched between office, bathroom, parking lot, and hallway. The permeable body, along with the elasticity of space and time, all conveyed the primitive and disorienting nature of severe and early trauma. It was in this space that she began to develop a therapeutic self, discover a desire to connect with these states of mind/being; to see if they could find a way through the darkness together. Ingrid has a background in philosophy and theology, but is an atheist. She is a mother of two children, ages 10 and 6, who are constantly teaching her about being human.
Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon is co-founder & Editor at Stillpoint Magazine and a writer and Doctoral Candidate in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Her first novel Nothing was released in 2013, and she has since published works of short fiction in various publications. Her current research focuses on expressions of (inter)subjectivity, non-nature, community-building across difference, and transformative destruction in Anglophone Slipstream fictions of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Check out our recent conversation with Anne Marie on Analysis, Art & Activism.
