DAY 1:
Saturday, November 2, 2024 | 9:30am - 12:00pm
Location: The Carondelet Center 1890 Randolph Ave St. Paul, MN
Continental breakfast will be served at 9 a.m.
2.5 CEU credits
Title: Is Anti-Democratic Politics Organized Crime? Democracy, The ‘Rule Of Law,’ And Psychoanalysis Or The ‘Good Object’ Reconsidered
The sudden eruption of Donald Trump into the mainstream of American politics alarmed the mental health community. Ensuing psychiatric descriptions of Mr. Trump as a malignant narcissist, anti-social personality, or dangerous psychopath, were very well-supported by the public record, even if these diagnoses violated the so-called “Goldwater rule.” But they remain strangely beside the point and have proved politically ineffectual. Why? What is going on?
After framing the concept of criminality from a psychoanalytic perspective, with brief discussions of Freud, Klein, Bion and Rosenfeld, I shall argue that within the terms of democracy, certain forms of ‘politics’ are more usefully defined as criminal, even as they are extremely difficult to prosecute within the spirit of the democratic rule of law. To help illustrate these ideas, my presentation will include a brief history of post-Nixonian Republicanism, together with examples of the normalization of anti-democratic politics from around the world. In closing, I shall argue that the “democratic dilemma” (how can democracy defend itself against willful destructiveness without itself flouting the rule of law?) has important implications for the practice of psychoanalysis.
DAY 2:
Sunday, November 3, 2024 | 9:30am - 12:00pm
Location: Semple Mansion Carriage House 104 W Franklin Minneapolis, MN 55404
Continental breakfast will be served at 9 a.m.
2.5 CEU credits
Trauma as a Way of Life in a Psychoanalytic Institute
Drawing on a chapter of the same name published in Traumatic Ruptures: Abandonment and Betrayal in the Analytic Relationship (Routledge, 2014), Dr. Levin will discuss his explorations of the underlying connection between these three significant problem areas in the psychoanalytic profession: (1) the difficulties in the governance and transmission of psychoanalysis, (2) the slipperiness of psychoanalytic ethics, and (3) the relation of the profession to the psychological conundrum of trauma. Dr. Levin attests that the deadening in psychoanalytic thought of attention to traumatic rupture as a relational phenomenon has allowed the profession, until recently, to continue splitting off and disavowing the trauma of its own institutional life. Everyone connected to the psychoanalytic community suffers from this crippling dissociative process in one way or another, but on the professional side it is the candidates who are affected the most (Wallace, 2007). Their psychological abuse by the training analyst system constitutes the greatest loss to the future of psychoanalysis, with all its varied potential to contribute to human welfare.
On Sunday morning, November 3rd, Dr. Levin will present and discuss his 2016 book chapter, "Trauma as a Way of Life in a Psychoanalytic Institute." He generously outlines his experience and reflections on the authoritarian structure and practices of training institutes and psychoanalytic societies. Dr. Levin illuminates similar themes around power structures -- of organizations and of self -- and the repetition of traumatic ruptures in psychoanalytic communities. The book chapter, is available to read before the event.
Access the Book Chapter
About Charles Levin:
Charles Levin, Ph.D., FIPA, is a training and supervising analyst in private practice in Montreal. He has served over many years in a variety of capacities at the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, including director of training and editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is currently on the International Advisory Board of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. In addition to clinical psychoanalysis, his work focuses on issues related to culture, aesthetics, and psychoanalytic ethics. His publications include ‘The mind as an internal object,’ Psychoanalytic Quarterly (2010), Art in the offertorium: Narcissism, psychoanalysis and cultural metaphysics (Rodopi, 2012) and the edited volume Social aspects of sexual boundary trouble in psychoanalysis (Routledge), which received an award from the APA Division 39 in 2021.
MPSI