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 how the dream work transforms latent dream thoughts into manifest distortions. 

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

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Participants will be able to:

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Ira Brenner, MD

Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College Training and Supervising Analyst at Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia

This paper will focus upon the ubiquitous but elusive nature of dissociation. This phenomenon has been in the shadows of our psychoanalytic understanding of the mind since Freud’s early days. Illustrated by clinical material in which a profound dissociative disorder became evident during the course of analysis, the author will present his views on dissociation and dissociative identity disorder. He will describe an approach to transference based treatment based on an integration of classical and more contemporary models of the mind.

Participants will be able to:

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For many years, the construct of therapeutic action has been somewhat elusive. Much of the controversy has arisen from the debate around whether or not the therapist's interpretation is the key to improvement in the treatment, or, simply the therapist's way of relating to the patient. This debate has now become far more complicated as we have learned that there are many factors contributing to improvement, including dissociation, projective identification, analyst self-disclosure, and patient-therapist match.

Participants will be able to:

 1. To understand the current controversy regarding therapeutic action
2. To be able to identify various forms of therapeutic action in the process of treatment
3. To be able to articulate a definition of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis