Psychoanalysis, Ethics, and the Meaning of Psychosis- 3-3:30pm Bearing the Collapse and Opening of Space in the Engagement with Psychotic States: Bion, Wittgenstein, and Davoine/Gaudillière as Navigators through Catastrophic Change - James Ogilvie, PhD
- 3:30-4pm In Defense of Psychosis - Kendra Terry, PhD
- 4-4:30pm The Subject Refused: Foreclosure, Trauma, and the Ethics of the Real - Christopher William Wolter, Licensed Psychoanalyst, Doctoral Candidate
Bearing the Collapse and Opening of Space in the Engagement with Psychotic States: Bion, Wittgenstein, and Davoine/Gaudillière as Navigators through Catastrophic Change - James Ogilvie, PhD
A patient repeatedly traces his finger around the tiles on the ward hallway wall. Where am I here, he asks. Where is there space for me. No space here — as though the wall were a map he searched for a place that is not on it. But the one thing a map cannot show is how it is to be applied; that can never be given by the map.The voices of our navigators speak to us: Wilfred Bion, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Françoise Davoine with Jean-Max Gaudillière. They meet at just this point — the gap between a map and its application, between conditions and the act they do not compel. Bion called his work applied philosophy, saying psychoanalysts need philosophy more than the philosophers; they need it in the moment and under duress. His writing enacts this, withholding the saturating link so as to induce in the reader the negative capability it declines to describe — so that one comes to see what one needs, one enters the space from which what is needed might emerge. Davoine and Gaudillière name the task as preserving the space in which the unsayable might speak — a space no method secures, where the analyst does not interpret but bears witness, holding open the place from which a trauma cut from history and struck from the social link might address us, prior to narrative. Wittgenstein seeks to offer an approach to philosophy that offers us the impetus to turn around the axis of our real need, to a place where the limit of what can be said shows itself to us in a way that allows it to open another space, one closer to the rough ground where we need to be. All three navigators, bring us to places of fragmentation and collapse where we lose our way. In this talk we will encounter the forms of engagement these clinical navigators use to reveal the nature of our problem, to show through clinical, historical and philosophical instances, the possibilities of collapse and opening of space offered in our engagement with the limits of what can be said and known as these present themselves in working with psychotic states. Our capacity to “see what we see” as Bion puts it can only grow through a process of realization through catastrophic change. This process requires patience and a repeated encounter with our problem, seeing it, in Bion's language, from multiple vertices. In this talk we will engage directly with select texts of these writers with the aim of becoming more at home in the clinical catastrophes they describe and, more importantly, as we may find, that they evoke.
In Defense of Psychosis - Kendra Terry, PhD
This paper calls into question our weaponized desire, our dehumanization, and our fascist tendency to pathologize at the expense of trying to better understand - our patients, our taxonomies of madness, and the human mind more broadly. In Defense of Psychosis draws a geometrical comparison between the psychical movement of madness and the movement that takes place at Anne Carson's "edge" in her discussion of Eros. The psychotic individual reaches across this edge, this social link, this disalienation, the society's fracture, where breath breaches the boundary that separates internal from external, self from other, and temporarily exists in the space where metaphor conjoins the two in hallucination, finding here a psychosis that attempts to knit together a solution to the unsolvable problem of our existence.
The Subject Refused: Foreclosure, Trauma, and the Ethics of the Real - Christopher William Wolter, Licensed Psychoanalyst, Doctoral Candidate
Trauma-informed care has transformed clinical practice by insisting that symptoms make sense — that what appears as disorder is in fact a legible response to an illegible world. This paper extends that insight further by proposing that the clinical figure who most confounds trauma-informed approaches is not a failed case but its most clarifying one.The patient for whom the traumatic event does not pass, cannot be mourned, and will not yield to any approach organized around integration or recovery is not suffering from a deficit. They are a subject who has, from the beginning, maintained a particular relationship to the organizing fictions of the social order — one of refusal rather than submission. What the Lacanian tradition calls foreclosure (Verwerfung) is not a failure of symbolization but its rejection: a stance in which the grounding fantasy that sutures the subject to the social link is declined in favor of something else, something more immediate, more exposed, and in certain respects more honest about the nature of the Real. The subject of trauma is a subject of foreclosure, which is to say, psychotic.This reframing has consequences for how we understand both psychosis and trauma. If foreclosure is a refusal rather than a deficit, then the traumatic event is not the origin of the subject’s suffering but the moment when the world violently reasserts the very fiction that was refused — when the social order, having been declined, returns in the Real to demand compliance. Trauma, in this account, is the social link’s revenge.This also means that the social fractures the conference theme asks us to examine are not merely the backdrop against which psychosis occurs. They are its very content. The psychotic subject does not misrecognize the contradictions of a society organized around alienation, exclusion, and structural violence. They live those contradictions without the insulation that neurotic compromise provides. Psychosis, in this reading, is not an expression of society’s failure to include — it is a form of witness to what inclusion requires one to not see.The paper illustrates this through two clinical cases drawn from private practice with psychotic patients, examining what a clinical orientation looks like when it begins from this ethical and political premise. What emerges is not a rival to trauma-informed care but its necessary theoretical ground: a practice organized not around the recovery of what was lost but around the creation of a space — what the ancient Greeks called a temenos — in which what has never been approached might be circled, dramatized, and in the best cases, assumed as one’s own. The analyst here is not a technician of regulation but a dramaturge. And the subject who finds a form for what was waiting in them is not cured. They are, for the first time, in their drama rather than merely subject to it.
