Events

Madelon Sprengnether has had to postpone her talk with BPS, originally scheduled for December 1, 2018, to Saturday, January 26, 2019. Therefore on December 1, we will hold a Group Discussion on the place of the Nonrepresentational and the Nonverbal in Psychoanalysis. Drs. Beattie and Katz will introduce the subject.

Dr. Castrillon will present a selection of his research on Psychoanalysis in California derived from the theoretical and clinical formulations developed in his forthcoming book California Psychoanalyst: Subjectivity and Clinical Praxis in the Far West. Inclusive of both the historical development and the Californication of psychoanalysis and grounded in his attention to the subject of the unconscious, […]

"I had no choice. I would be dead if I hadn't transitioned - I would have killed myself." Drawing on her clinical experience as a psychoanalyst working with gender-variant analysands, Gherovici argues that those compelled to change gender often do it because they are facing the most crucial issues of life and death. What is […]

The Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society is pleased to promote psychoanalytic understanding in the public sphere. As we mark the one year anniversary of the current administration, we invite you to participate with a panel of prominent academics and psychoanalysts to explore and elucidate psychical processes and cultural forces at play in the risks we now face […]

Wagner's grand and lyric Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg transports us into a waking and sleeping dream of its characters. Wagner's opera embodies his vision that creativity occurs in the depths of the unconscious and is accessible to us in our dreamlife and through interpretation. Steven Goldberg, MD, and Jeanne Harasemovitch, LCSW, will each present their […]

Language changes in psychosis. Words become the floating signifiers of a mad Other who takes up a place in speech. Speech elements connect to nothing, have no meaning whatsoever and disrupt the meaning that was unfolding. These elements, whether heard or spoken, are foreign to the speaker, and create a profound sense of disorder with […]

The presidential election and inauguration, and their aftermath, have exposed cracks in the foundations of our democracy. Assaults on the rule of law, free speech, equality, freedom and truth have revealed deep rifts and tensions in American society. Domestic pressures, globalization, and mestastasizing conflicts produce closer and closer encounters with the Other and lead to […]

Dr. Marcus Coelen will begin his talk with a passage from a letter by Freud to Jung (December 6, 1909) in which Freud contends that "healing" in psychoanalysis is a matter of "love".  Dr. Coelen will then move into the perennial question of identification, the question of affect and the notion of "love" in Freud. […]

Most people have an internal object that gathers their unconscious assumptions about the future. As an object, the future serves multiple functions during the course of a lifetime and is therefore subjected to shifting cultural axioms about the future. Currently, the expansionist promise of globalization seems counter pointed by the death drive that annihilates the […]

Drs. Markman and Katz will each elaborate on the fundamental ideas of the death drive: Dr.  Markman in the work of Freud and Klein,  and Dr. Katz clarifying the differences between Laplanche and Green - or possibly presenting on the varieties of jouissance. Both presenters will include clinical experience as well as artistic, literary, and […]