Scientific Program featuring Howard B. Levine, MD

Interpretation in a Changing Landscape

Presented by Howard B. Levine, MD

Hybrid via Zoom or In-Person

Registration Fee: $60*
 

*Free admission and CE/CME credits for PCC members, LDC staff and board, full-time students with ID, and trainees in the Departments of Social Work, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Mental Health Counseling.

Bion (1965) noted that “… no one can ever know what happens in the analytic session, the thing-in-itself, O; we can only speak of what the analyst or patient feels happens, know what the participants say happens, or the emotional state engendered by the verbalization of analyst or patient in the listener.” (p. 33). In regard to what we might interpret, what we hope that our interpretations will do and our assumptions about the very epistemological ground on which we stand, our understanding of the psyche, language, therapeutic action and much, much more has shifted seismically. This paper will begin to address the complexity revealed by this shift and some of the implications and changes for our understanding of interpretation and the interpretive process, especially when working with patients and psychic organizations that lay beyond neurosis. A clinical illustration will be drawn from the published account of Harry Guntrip’s analyses with Fairbairn and Winnicott.

About the Speaker

Howard B. Levine, MD is a member of APSA, PINE, the Contemporary Freudian Society and Pulsion, on the faculty of NYU Post-Doc’s Contemporary Freudian Track, on the Editorial Board of the IJP and Psychoanalytic Inquiry, editor-in-chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series and in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is the author of Transformations de l’Irreprésentable (Ithaque 2019) and Affect, Representation and Language: Between the Silence and the Cry (Routledge 2022) and editor of The Post-Bionian Field Theory of Antonino Ferro (Routledge 2022), The Freudian Matrix of Andre Green, Towards A Psychoanalysis For The 21st Century by André Green (Routledge/IPA 2023) and Andre Green’s On The Destruction and Death Drives (Phoenix/Karnac 2023). His co-edited books including Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac 2013); On Freud’s Screen Memories (Karnac 2014); The Wilfred Bion Tradition (Karnac 2016); Bion in Brazil (Karnac 2017); The Clinical Thinking of W.R. Bion in Brazil (Routledge 2024); Andre Green Revisited: Representation and the Work of the Negative (Karnac 2018); Covidian Life (2021 Phoenix); Psychoanalysis of the Psychoanalytic Frame Revisited: A New Look at Bleger’s Classical Work (Routledge/IPA, 2022); On the Destruction and Death Drives by Andre Green (Phoenix 2023), and Autistic Phenomena and Unrepresented States: Explorations in the Emergence of Self  (Phoenix 2023).