Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives- 3-3:30pm Unsettling Self: Working with Divergent Self-Experiences in Psychosis - Chris Nadler, PhD, LP-D, Saskia Nislow, MAT
- 3:30-4pm Synchronicity, Psychosis, and the Social Link - Robin S. Brown PhD
- 4-4:30pm Psychosis in Totalitarian Regime and the Mind - Masha Yaglom LCSW, MS
Unsettling Self: Working with Divergent Self-Experiences in Psychosis - Chris Nadler, PhD, LP-D, Saskia Nislow, MAT
In order to turn away from thinking about psychosis as a problem of the individual, the idea of the individual itself must first be problematized: rather than bringing an examination of the social into the analysis of the individual—constraining our thinking of the social within the already problematic theoretical and political conceptions of the individual—the presenters on this panel draw instead upon our theory of what we call inside outside relations. In doing so, we offer a new psychoanalytic perspective wherein we emphasize clinical work that addresses issues “prior” to object relations; this primary level of relation, we argue, is where the self, rather than being an already-bounded individual, is constructed in a continuous process of binding and containing through the body’s interactions with the social and physical environment. We draw upon literature outside of psychoanalysis—particularly Sass and Parnas’s work on schizophrenia—to situate psychosis as a manifestation of a self disorder; this is not a problem of the individual or a pathological personality, but a divergence in the movement between and within inside and outside, presenting in variations in the construction, maintenance, and experience of the self. In explaining this framework—and our own clinical examples—we provide ways of working with psychotic patients to alleviate distress and suffering that are not predicated on pathologizing or eradicating the psychotic self-experience, and instead attend to the difficulties in making use of one’s mind within the particularities of one’s own relations of inside and outside. Having reframed psychosis as an issue of self, this presentation concludes with linking the theoretical and clinical interventions related to the concept of the self back to the social so as to attend to the analysis of social problems without placing us back in problematic limitations of the individual and psychosis.
Synchronicity, Psychosis, and the Social Link - Robin S. Brown PhD
Experiences of synchronicity—meaningful coincidences—are typically conceptualized in psychiatric frameworks as ideas or delusions of reference, understood as misattributions of significance to neutral events. This presentation asks why such experiences occur more frequently in psychosis, and reconsiders synchronicity not as a cognitive error, but as a shift in embodied and temporal attunement. Drawing on Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity and Yasuo Yuasa’s theories of embodied cultivation and image-thinking, I suggest that this pattern reflects a disruption in the mediating bodily, symbolic, and relational structures through which shared reality is ordinarily stabilized over time. In this context, synchronicity may be understood as a form of relational openness in which the boundary between self and other becomes less distinct. Clinically, I argue that approaches focused primarily on reality-testing risk enacting the metaphysical assumptions of a Western scientific worldview in which reality is presumed to be fully separable, objectively given, and independent of participatory meaning. I suggest instead that clinical work is strengthened when it supports the restoration of a shared embodied and social field in which experience can be held without becoming overwhelming or fixed.
Psychosis in Totalitarian Regime and the Mind - Masha Yaglom LCSW, MS
There is a deep connection between the “madness” of a totalitarian regime and the destruction of the psychic apparatus in psychosis.The presenter will describe the connection and interaction between the two applying Wilfred Bion’s understanding of psychotic processes focusing on psychotic attacks on linking and inability to “suffer”, metabolise pain and mourn.Distortion of reality ( lies, propaganda, brainwashing) ,ban on thinking ( emphasis on ideology) and on experiencing life fully ( ban on travel, freely interacting with people etc)are just a few examples of the processes that lead to turning people to automatons and their psyche into a “container of madness”. The presenter will describe in detail the life in a totalitarian regime and will show how it resonates with the life in psychosis.
