Stop in and say hello.

Dr. Aneil M. Shirke, M.D., Ph.D, is on the faculty of PANY and NYU. He is a board-certified psychiatrist and graduate psychoanalyst. He has worked for the Visiting Nurse Service of NY, and has taught at Columbia University and Mt. Sinai. He has a private practice in the West Village. He enjoys conversing between different psychoanalytic theories of mind to understand better the experiences of patients and trainees alike. 

Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-S is Chair in the Department of Psychology at Golden Gate University as well as a psychoanalyst and board-certified, licensed psychologist. He has published journal articles and book chapters on topics such as eating disorders, masculinity, technology, and psychoanalytic treatment. His first book, Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males, was published by Routledge in 2016 and has been praised as “groundbreaking” and a “milestone publication in our field.” His second book, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak, an edited volume in the Relational Perspectives Book Series, was published by Routledge in 2018. His third book, Eating Disorders (New Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis), will be released in 2022. In addition, Dr. Wooldridge has been interviewed by numerous media publications including Newsweek, Slate, WebMD, and others for his work. He is on the Scientific Advisory Council of the National Eating Disorders Association, Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP), an Assistant Clinical Professor at UCSF’s Medical School, and has a private practice in Berkeley, CA.

Williams (1997) describes a subgroup of patients with anorexia nervosa who have been on the receiving end of intrusive maternal projections and consequently develop a no-entry system of defense. This paper explores how deception may function as an aspect of this system. First, deception may serve as a self-preservative effort to evade emotional contact with the maternal object, experienced as inimical, and to attenuate accompanying persecutory anxiety. Second, rumination – painful thoughts, feelings, and sensations – about the deception being discovered by the object functions as an aspect of body-mind dissociation by leveraging the mind’s hypnoid capacities to construct an omnipotently generated container for the self that further protects the patient from emotional contact with a maternal object felt to be overflowing with projections. These ideas are illustrated with a clinical case of a patient who engaged in frequent deception. 

Ellen Abrams, LCSW is a psychotherapist and Faculty member at PANY.

"in Treatment" is a thought provoking HBO televisions series about a psychologist, portrayed by Gabriel Byrne, and his weekly sessions with patients, as well as those with his own therapist, and offers a tantalizing peek at the psychopathology of everyday life. Ms. Abrams will show clips which highlight psychodynamic psychotherapy principles and use them as a springboard for discussion about technique. 

Eugene Mahon was born in the West of Ireland where the wind accents the human voice with Atlantic fury and the human voice itself accents the wind in return with the abiding lilt of its own defiance. He is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst on the faculty of Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He is a member of the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies, Princeton N.J. He is a child psychiatrist, an adult psychiatrist and practices adult and child psychoanalysis in New York City. He has published three books on psychoanalysis (A PSYCHOANALYTIC ODYSSEY. Karnac Books, 2014 , RENSAL THE REDBIT, Karnac Books, 2014); and SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry with an introduction by Theodore Jacobs (IPBOOKS 2022) as well as a volume of poetry BONE SHOP OF THE HEART and more than fifty articles on a wide variety of analytic and literary subjects: (Dreams, Mourning, The Discovery of the Oedipus Complex, Insight, Screen Memories, The Invention of Purgatory, The Painted Guineapig, The Golden Section, Play and its Vicissitudes, Working Through, Shakespeare, Dante, Sophocles, Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce). He has published plays in Art Criticism (SUNY, Stony Brook Press), and poetry in The Antioch Review, The Irish Times, Room a sketchbook of Analytic Action, as well as nine poems in BETWEEN HOURS, Ed. Salman Akhtar, Karnac Books, 2012. One of his poems Steeds of Darkness was set to music by the American composer Miriam Gideon.

For years after the publication of the Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 the dream was considered exceptional in psychoanalysis, the royal road to the unconscious. As the twentieth century proceeded the exceptional status of the dream in clinical process may have waned.  By 1970 Greenson, in his AA Brill Memorial Lecture, was decrying this neglect.  In the fifty years since Greenson’s Lecture (published later in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly) it is hard to say whether the dream is considered exceptional or not.  This lecture will address this controversy by focusing on two dreams that might be considered exceptional by some analysts and merely part of the totality of dynamic analytic process by others. I have chosen dreams with exceptional manifest content. In one dream there is a pun whose meaning is gradually exposed as the latent content is revealed.  In another dream the uncanny appears in manifest content baffling the dreamer at first but gradually yielding its meanings to the collaborative work of the analytic dyad.  These dreams will then be used as a springboard for discussion of this intriguing topic.     

Participants will be able to:

1. Describe of the ingenuity of the dream
work as it transforms latent dream thoughts into
manifest distortion.

2. Describe how the dream work can press
unusual features such as puns, pronunciation, the
uncanny, into the service of disguise.

3. Explain whether the dream itself can claim
an exceptional status in psychoanalytic clinical process
or is it only the dream work that can claim such a status