Edward R. Shapiro, M.D.

Edward R. Shapiro, M.D., medical director and Chief Executive Officer of the Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, will present DSPP's Fall Workshop: Lost in Familiar Places. In modern society, individuals struggle to maintain joy and meaning in their lives. The struggle to preserve reflective space in the midst of rapid change represents a fundamental challenge of our times.

Dr. Shapiro will address change inside and outside the consulting room and will focus on the impact of massive societal change on the therapist/patient relationship. He will deal with the meaning of the gradual disappearance of accepted settings for reflection (e.g., family structure, religious ritual, rigorous education, etc.) and the dynamic process of creating new meaning from experience. He will examine how changes in society have influenced the ways people become "lost" in the very structures that once supplied essential meaning and refuge.

Dr. Shapiro's will apply his vast experience with families, couples, and adolescents to case material presented by Ronald Schenk, Ph.D. to help illustrate Shapiro's work with the patient's internal world within the context of external life.

Dr. Shapiro is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, director of the Erik H. Erikson Institute for Education and Research, a charter member of the American Family Therapy Association, the Founder and former Director of The Adolescent and Family Treatment and Study Center at McLean Hospital in Boston, and a former board member of the A.K. Rice Institute.

Topic: Lost in Familiar Places

Myrna Little,Ph.D.

At the October meeting, Myrna Little, Ph.D., President Elect of DSPP, presented a riveting description of Wilfred Bion's life and work in her paper: Who's afraid of Wilfred Bion? She included case material, woven seamlessly through the presentation to illustrate Bion's brilliant but not easily accessible theoretical position. Describing Bion's writing as enigmatic, obtuse, dense, and full of obscure references and publication errors, Dr. Little also spoke convincingly of his genius, "profound and inspiring." Donald Meltzer, assessing Bion's contribution, wrote: "The whole area of thoughts and thinking, as against emotional responses, phantasy, and conflict, is a new area to psychoanalytic investigation, opened up by Bion and explored thus far almost single-handed. It is a feat of imagination to divide thoughts on the basis of co-determination by growth in abstract level and organization linked to use... It gives cogency to the view that thoughts are initially empty and must be filled with meaning." Bion's thinking about thinking originally evolved from his work with schizophrenics. "He was the first to investigate phenomena which imply the destruction of linking of thought and experience, of symbol formation and verbal intercourse, of attacks which damage the functions which make thought possible."

His model of the evolving structure of thought includes: alpha elements, beta elements, and alpha function. Alpha elements are basic units of thought, concrete thinking about events. Beta elements are raw sensate body experiences. Alpha function is the process of generating meaning out of sensations. A thinking apparatus evolves which becomes structure and increasingly is able to abstract and make theories. Failure of alpha function leads to beta elements locked in somatization or evacuated in verbal vomit or dumping. When alpha function successfully converts sense data, beta elements are digested, abstracted, transformed into thoughts with a thinker. "Much sensate experience, the beta elements, is hard-wired -- expectation, which seeks a realization, such as the mouth looking for the nipple." The mouth finding the nipple is a "mating" of expectation with realization, the protomental situation, a coming together to create something new. It is the "first primal scene which anticipates all other development, from the most primitive mental experience, to complex structure and scientific theories... Learning from experience then is the essence of Bion's theory of thinking." Dr. Little noted that for Bion emotional experience cannot be isolated from relationship. He regarded the links between people as few: Love (L), Hate (H), and Knowledge (K) as well as their negatives: -L, -H, -K.

Next, Dr. Little described Bion's treatment method, resting on the pillars of "the container/contained" and "reverie." "The therapist is the container of the patient's spoken and unspoken material. The patient is the contained. Reverie is that sojourn of the split-off parts of the patient into the therapist's unconscious which can be experienced, metabolized, and given back to the infantile self in a digestible form. Reverie requires emotional immediacy, a constraint of memory or desire ... Reverie is the opening of the therapist's mind to the communication of the patient."

Dr. Little illustrated these points with case material from her patient, paralyzed by loss and uncertainty that any self-hood existed at all. She presented with perseverative verbalizations of concrete events and sensate experience locked behind a "wooden body" and a "frozen smile."

Dr. Little went on to describe Bion's own rather tragic history and its formative influence on his psychoanalytic thinking. Born in India in 1897, Bion was raised by a nanny, misunderstood by his sensitive father, and in awe of his distant mother. Sent to preparatory school in England at age 8, he described the time as "that appalling period of my life." He did not distinguish himself in the classroom but read widely in fields of interest to him. At age 19, Bion became a tank commander serving in France in WWI. Decorated for valor in combat, he objected to but obeyed orders to lead his troops into suicidal missions from which few returned. Bion, himself, suffered from symptoms of trauma. Demobilized in 1919, Bion entered Queen's College, Oxford to study History and Philosophy. The day he first read Freud, he decided to become a psychoanalyst. He began medical school at University College, London in 1923 and joined the staff of Tavistock Clinic in 1932. In 1940, he met and married an actress and returned to the army as one of two military psychiatrists in Britain. He treated shell-shocked soldiers, wrote his first papers on group treatment, and developed the successful method used in selection and training of officers. Serving in Normandy, he learned of the birth of his daughter and three days later the death of his wife. Following WWII, Bion began his analysis with Melanie Klein. He eventually served as Chair of the Executive Committee at Tavistock.

In discussing Dr. Little's paper, Stephen Scherffius, M.D. described Bion as idiosyncratic, obtuse, tangential, loose, and abstract. "People see him as wonderful and love him as a genius or simply regard him as crazy." Saying that he doesn't care if the analyst is crazy as long as he makes a contribution, Dr. Scherffius described several of Bion's important advances of the art as well as the science of psychoanalysis. For example, Bion recommended that the therapist approach each session with each patient without memory, desire, or understanding, so that each session provides a new moment where intuition and reverie can develop. He helped us to understand how to engage the patient in ways that make true contact, ways that empathize with the patient and allow intuition and reverie to occur. He contributed to our understanding of a pre-symbolic phase of sensate bodily experience and of the emerging capacity to form symbols. Dr. Scherffius described Bion's "wonderful" notion of the container/contained as: "the mother containing the mental contents of and being empathic with the child so that a re-introjection can take place, a sort of metabolism." Finally, Bion's evocative notion, that in groups we are all in the body of the mother, informs our understanding of group process.

DSPP ELECTIONS

The Executive Committee has voted to change the schedule of elections of DSPP's officers. Previously, officers have been elected after the close of the organization's program year, i.e., early in the summer, and have taken office immediately. To allow officers time to prepare for the duties of their positions, the Executive Committee has decided to hold elections in November each year for officers whose terms will begin the next summer.

You can expect to receive a ballot for next year's officers in November, 1998 along with associated by-laws changes recommended by the Executive Committee.

COMMUNITY RELATIONS COMMITTEE

The DSPP/Fairhill Scholarship Competition, in its second year, will now include two $1000.00 cash awards, one for undergraduate student papers and one for graduate student papers. A flyer on this year's competition is included in this Bulletin.

The CRC is putting together a list of DSPP members who are willing to assist the media by providing commentary and/or information on various issues. They may also be willing to appear on various television and radio programs addressing topics within their areas of expertise. For more information, contact Bill Gordon III, Ph.D. at: 972 233 1026 (telephone), 972 233 8205 (fax), WKGIII@aol.com (e-mail)

DSPP has a new Web Site. Check it out at: http://www.dspp.com

Elena Blum, MA, LPC has taken over as Chair of the Continuing Education Committee. Look for her at the registration table each month to ask your questions about continuing education credits.

RIBBONS ON AND OFF THE PAGE

Gallery Show and Talk

Mexican Spirit House Ribbon and Pastel Paintings

by

Wendy Faris, Ph.D.

1547 Eastus Drive,Dallas, Texas 75208

Cocktails and Hors-Oeuvres

Dr. Faris will exhibit her paintings and comment on their inspiration and development. Her interests include "magical realism", a movement which provides "an infusion of spirit into everyday life." She has published a book on the topic: Ecstatic Flights: Magical Realism as Shamanistic Narrative. Her spirit houses draw on magical realism; the archetype of the house as the residence of the self, spirit, or soul; and artistic/psychological explorations using fabrics, pastel chalk, and stitch work.

Professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas - Arlington, Dr. Faris holds a B.A. in Spanish Literature from Stanford and master's and doctorate degrees in Comparative Literature from Harvard. She is the author of: Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction. and Carlos Fuentes.

Take I-30 west to the Sylvan Lane exit. Go south on Sylvan; take immediate left on Kessler Parkway. Go one block; turn right on Eastus Drive. For information call: Judith Samson (214 750 7692) or Wendy Faris (214 948 1828).

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD

Directed by Dan Ireland.

Based on Novalyn Price's memoirs of her complex relationship with pulp fiction writer, Robert E. Howard.

hosted by

Sandra Pitts, Ph.D.

5017 Swiss Avenue, Dallas, Texas 75214

214-826-0583

Discussion on psychoanalytic issues will follow.