• September 12, 2018 (Monthly Meeting)
  Title of Presentation: The Birth and Death of Desire in Light of DSPP's Creation and Legacy
  
  Units of CE/CME offered: 1.5
  
  What desire led to the birth of DSPP? What desires maintain it? Every organization has an origin story. We will explore together our birth and development. Come prepared to actively participate as we discuss the role of curiosity and narcissism in the activities of our collegial learning organization.
  
  Presenter(s) Name(s): Dale Godby, Ph.D.
  
  Presenter bio: Dale C. Godby, Ph.D., was the fourth president of DSPP and has been an active member over the years; reaping the rewards of our stimulating academic community. He is a founding member of the Group Analytic Practice of Dallas and is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UTSW where he supervises residents' psychotherapy and serves as a consultant to the residents' groups at the Parkland Outpatient Clinic. The most interesting thing he has done recently is to co-lead a three day cycling group around the perimeter of the Berlin Wall prior to the Group Analytic Society International's triennial meeting. Each morning a social dreaming matrix was convened and each evening ended with a dialogue group focused around the physical and metaphorical walls that were represented by the various international participants.
  
  Readings
  
  Applebaum, A. (1972). On hearing, presenting and discussion scientific papers. Bulletin of The Menninger Clinic, 36, 546-550.
  
  Brix, D. (1994). The Dallas society for psychoanalytic psychology: A brief history. In R. C. Lane & M. Meisels (Eds.). A history of the division of psychoanalysis of the American Psychological association. (pp. 241-244). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  
  Poland, W. S. (2009) Problems of collegial learning in psychoanalysis: Narcissism and curiosity. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90, 249-262.
  
  Suggested Readings
  Akhtar, S. (2017). Open-mouthed and wide-eyed: Psychoanalytic reflections on curiosity. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 65, 265-304.
  
  Gabbard, G. O. (2016). (Second Edition). Boundaries and boundary violations in psychoanalysis. American Psychiatric Association Publishing: Washington, D.C.
  
  Morgan-Jones, R. (2010). The work group as an object of desire: The embodiment of protomental life. Organizational & Social Dynamics, 10, 79-98.
  
  Nitsun, M (2006). The group as an object of desire: Exploring sexuality in group therapy. Routledge: London.
  
  Sinsheimer, K. (2014). Silencing: When a community loses an analyst to ethical violations.
  In R. A. Deutsch (Ed.). Traumatic ruptures: Abandonment and betrayal in the analytic relationship. Routledge: New York and London.
  
  Wallace, E. (2014). Losing a training analyst for ethical violations: Short-term and long-term effects. In R. A. Deutsch (Ed.). Traumatic ruptures: Abandonment and betrayal in the analytic relationship. Routledge: New York and London.
  
  

  Readings are available on-line only to logged in members. You can download them here
• October 17, 2018 (Monthly Meeting)
  Title of Presentation: I Love You to Death: Putting Together the Pieces of Ambivalence
  
  Units of CE/CME offered: 1.5
  
  Presentation Summary: Why are Americans preoccupied with zombies and the notion of a zombie apocalypse? When this question was posed to Noam Chomsky in 2014, he referenced a cultural fear he claims goes back to the colonies. In Chomsky's argument the narrative switch taking place in popular American myths brings about certain transformations such that the oppressed become the oppressors. Defending Indians are thus transformed into 'merciless Indian savages', revolting slaves are transformed into secret planners intent on killing all the white men and raping all the white women, and Hispanic narco-traffickers are transformed into an organised group with a mission to come in and destroy American society. In turn, the figure of the zombie substitutes for the Indian (the slave, the Narco-trafficker, etc.) in white America's collective nightmare. As the representative of the realised colonial object, the zombie offers American audiences an opportunity to variously sublimate and/or displace what they find intolerable in the Other.
  
  In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud critically examines the moral dictate to "Love thy neighbour as thyself." Freud asserted that although people would prefer to view themselves as "gentle creatures who want to be loved" the truth they disavow is that they are also aggressive beings, such that that "their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him." Freud then said men are wolves; perhaps in today's world men are zombies.
  
  In our presentation, which is based on our forthcoming book (Routledge, 2019), we use clinical vignettes that exemplify symptomatic ways of relating to ambivalence about the neighbour and we show what psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy have to offer to this problematic. We also trace the lineage of zombie representations of the human condition on film so as to argue that they fulfil an essential function for the psyche and for society under neo-liberalism. This 'essential function' is none other than the opportunity for the stagings of the tensions of ambivalence and the experiences of hainamoration-a neologism Lacan coined which translates to "hateloving"-which we argue are increasingly foreclosed under neo-liberalism and take place alongside the injunction to love our neighbour. We argue, then, that many of today's clinical and cultural symptoms are the consequences of un-worked through (un-staged, unarticulated tensions), and unpermitted (prohibited) affects which we understand as refracted through the psychical operation of ambivalence.
  
  Presenter(s) Name(s): Stephanie Swales, Ph.D. and Carol Owens, Ph.D.
  Presenter bios: Stephanie Swales, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Dallas and has a private psychoanalytic practice in Dallas, Texas. She is the founder of the Dallas/Fort Worth area Lacan Study Group and is serving as the current president of the Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology. Her forthcoming book, co-authored with Carol Owens, on a Lacanian approach to ambivalence in the clinic and in contemporary times, will be published by Routledge in 2019. She is also the author of the book Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject and numerous shorter works in the area of psychoanalysis.
  
  Carol Owens, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in Dublin. She has lectured on psychoanalysis at Trinity College, Dublin City University, and Independent Colleges, Dublin. A registered practitioner member of the APPI (Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland) and of the ICP (Irish Council for Psychotherapy), she is also a chartered member of the PSI (Psychological Society of Ireland). She is the founder and convenor of the Dublin Lacan Study Group. She edited The Letter: Lacanian Perspectives on Psychoanalysis from 2004-2006, and the Annual Review of Critical Psychology on Jacques Lacan in 2009. She has published articles and book chapters on the theory and practice of Lacanian Psychoanalysis and its various engagements with critical psychology, critical management theory, film studies, philosophy and Queer theory. She co-organises the annual Irish Psychoanalytic film festival. Her co-edited book with Stephanie Farrelly Quinn Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Babies, Children, and Adolescents Further Notes on the Child was published by Karnac Books in 2017 and she has just finished work on a co-edited volume of essays for Routledge entitled Studying Lacan's Seminars IV and V: From lack to desire.
  
  Readings
  Freud, S. (1917/1957). Mourning and Melancholia. Standard Edition 14. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 237-258.
  
  Freud, S. (1930/1961). Civilization and its Discontents. Standard Edition 21. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 59-148.
  
  

  Readings are available on-line only to logged in members. You can download them here
• November 3, 2017 (FALL WORKSHOP)
  Title of Presentation: On the Value of the Lacanian Approach to Analytic Practice & Love in the Analytic Setting
  
  Units of CE/CME offered: 6
  
  Program (6 hours):
  Morning: On the Value of the Lacanian Approach to Analytic Practice (2 hours)
  Late-morning, early Afternoon: Lacan on Love in the Analytic Setting (2 hours)
  Afternoon: Case Presentation and Commentary (2 hours)
  
  Summary:
  In the course of the day, we will highlight similarities and differences between Lacan's approach to psychoanalytic technique and that of numerous contemporary analysts from non-Lacanian traditions. Whereas in Lacan's approach the unconscious remains fundamental, in other approaches the royal road to the unconscious no longer seems to involve dreams but rather to involve, first and foremost, the analyst's countertransference. With his reformulation of the unconscious as the "subject supposed to know" and his reconceptualization of the psychoanalytic setting, we will explore Lacan's innovations in technique with neurotics, including punctuation, oracular interpretation, scansion, the variable-length session, delayed use of the couch, and focus on non-meaning as opposed to understanding. We will discuss Lacanian critiques of certain aspects of the current reliance on projective identification, self-disclosure, "intuition," and the analyst's "reading" of the analysand's affective states and body language. The role of analysts as "giving what they do not have" as opposed to what they do have will be explored at length, and the difference between the two will be illustrated through examples from Freud's own practice.
  
  Presenter(s) Name(s): Bruce Fink, Ph.D.
  Presenter bio: Bruce Fink, Ph.D., is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor who trained in France with the psychoanalytic institute Jacques Lacan created shortly before his death, the Ecole de la Cause freudienne in Paris. He has translated several of Lacan's works into English-including Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Seminar XX: Encore, Seminar VI, Desire and its Interpretation, and Seminar VIII, Transference-and is the author of numerous books on Lacan, including The Lacanian Subject, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Lacan to the Letter, Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique, Against Understanding (2 volumes), and Lacan on Love. Most recently, he published A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice. A board member of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center, he has also penned several mysteries involving a character loosely based on Jacques Lacan: The Psychoanalytic Adventures of Inspector Canal, Death by Analysis, Odor di Murderer/Scent of a Killer, and The Purloined Love
  
  Readings:
  Fink, B. (2007). Listening and hearing. In Fundamentals of psychoanalytic technique: A Lacanian approach for practitioners, pp. 1-23. New York and London: Norton.
  
  Fink, B. (2014). Against understanding: Why understanding should not be viewed as an essential aim of psychoanalytic treatment. In Against understanding: Commentary and critique in a Lacanian key, pp. 5-26. New York and London: Routledge.

  Register and Pay Online Now

  
  

  Readings are available on-line only to logged in members. You can download them here
• January 16, 2019 (Monthly Meeting)
  Title of Presentation: Love and Desire in the Alexandria Quartet
  
  Units of CE/CME offered: 1.5
  
  Presentation Summary: Lawrence Durrell described his masterwork, The Alexandria Quartet, as "an investigation into modern love." Written between 1957-1960, The Quartet consists of four novels, the first three telling the same story from different perspectives, the last a sequel. Each successive novel explodes what we think we know in the previous one, forming a palimpsest in which meaning and metaphor gleam through and are altered by each narrative that follows. At the center of all four novels is the city of Alexandria, Egypt, exotic and polymorphously perverse, "living through" the characters and their actions. The language is famously lush, poetic and sensuous, and the plots labyrinthine. Durrell was well acquainted with Freud and influenced by Georg Groddeck, and in fact, once described The Quartet, as a bridge between Freud and Einstein. This presentation will attempt to apply a more modern Freudian perspective to The Quartet, with special emphasis on Durrell's take on love and desire, in keeping with year's topic.
  
  Presenter(s) Name(s): Marc Rathbun, Ph.D.
  
  Presenter bio: Marc Rathbun, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice specializing in adult psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. He also supervises psychology interns and psychiatric residents. Dr. Rathbun was an early president of DSPP.
  
  Readings
  
  Freud, S. (1910/1957). A special type of choice of object made by men. Standard Edition 11. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 163-176.
  
  Freud, S. (1912/1957). On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. Standard Edition 11. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 177-190.
  
  Suggested Reading for the adventurous: Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet (available for purchase from Amazon)

  Readings are available on-line only to logged in members. You can download them here
• February 20, 2019 (Monthly Meeting)
  Title of Presentation: Analytic Love, Revisited and Visited Again
  
  Units of CE/CME offered: 1.5
  
  Presentation Summary: Love in psychoanalysis is an oft-cited, rarely talked about phenomenon, that occurs between analyst and analysand, which, I would argue, is the most salient and powerful "technique" in psychoanalysis. But rarely is it defined in the literature, and often only looked at from the perspective of the patient to the therapist, akin to the baby toward the mother. In this discussion, I seek to begin to define love by looking at wisdom literature from a psychoanalytic perspective, particularly looking at how the analyst's love for and toward the analysand exists, even if in the background, throughout the entire psychoanalytic situation. Case examples of the various expressions of love will be given throughout.
  
  Presenter(s) Name(s): Scott Hickman, Psy.D.
  
  Presenter bio: Scott Hickman, PsyD, is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in private practice in Southlake, TX. He works with adults from a diverse background and with diverse, longstanding issues and struggles. He is a graduate of the Brookhaven Institute, where he is currently the curriculum chair and the incoming clinical director. He is past president of DSPP and continues to serve on its board.
  
  Readings
  
  Bach, S. (2016). "Analytic technique and analytic love." In, Chimeras and Other Writings. Astoria, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books.
  
  Fink, B. (2015). Love and/in psychoanalysis: A commentary on Lacan's reading of Plato's Symposium in Seminar VIII: Transference. Psychoanalytic Review, 102(1), 59-91.
  
  Shaw, D. (2003). On the therapeutic action of analytic love. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 39(2), 251-278.

  Readings are available on-line only to logged in members. You can download them here
• March 30, 2019 (Spring Workshop)
  Title of Presentation: Learning to Hear: History, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics
  
  Units of CE/CME offered: 6
  
  Presentation Summary: Suddenly single-sided deaf at the age of 66, hearing became very important to me. As a psychoanalyst, attentive listening, informed by Freud, Loewald, Kohut, relationalists and intersubjectivists, had been my basic practice always, but now I realized how much had always gone missing. Newly attentive to voices silenced by trauma, culture, discrimination and persecution, I wanted to hear more than the best listening practices had taught me. Not only did I hear the missing ones attuning me to ghosts of those dead from violence in Europe, and become more attentive to hearing backwards (Nachtraglichkeit). Even more, here at home the voices of indigenous peoples whose land I pretend to own began to claim their place. First I noticed the aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Zealand, before I could catch North Americans in voices like that of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Daniel Paul. The enslaved people who created the country I have always taken for granted, known to me in childhood only in caricatures and stereotypes, now speak to me of my barely conscious but pervasive white privilege. Hearing the silenced will clearly require the rest of my life.
  
  This workshop will address, without completeness, many questions. How did all these voices become silenced? What prevents them from emerging now, both in individuals and in culture? What responsibility does psychoanalysis, and other humanistic psychotherapy, hold for the silencing, and for hearing and responding? How can our accumulated clinical wisdom shake off sectarian disputes and address itself to the task of hearing what we do not want to hear? If the gift of the psychoanalytic tradition to the world is to provide an invitation to such hearing, what attitudes does such a gift require cultivating among us? How does the ethical turn relate to daily clinical work?
  
  Presenter(s) Name(s): Donna Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D.
  
  Presenter bio: Educated in philosophy, clinical psychology and psychoanalysis, Donna Orange, PhD, PsyD teaches at NYU Postdoc (New York) and at IPSS (Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York); and in private study groups. Recent books are Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies (2010), and The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011), Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians: The Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis (2016), and Climate Justice, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2017). Her next project concerns hearing the voices of those silenced by history, by culture, by ourselves.
  
  Readings
  Orange, D. (2011). The suffering stranger: Attitudes for everyday clinical understanding and responding. In The suffering stranger: Hermeneutics for everyday clinical practice. New York and London: Routledge.
  
  Orange, D. (2016). My other's keeper: Resources for the ethical turn in psychoanalysis. Plenary address at the AAGT/EAGT Conference, The Aesthetic of Otherness, Taormina, Italy.
  
  Orange, D. (October 12, 2017, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM). Full Day Pre-Conference Workshop on "Climate Justice and Psychotherapeutics." 2017 Conference of Psychology and The Other, Cambridge, MA. Register and Pay Online Now
  

  Readings are available on-line only to logged in members. You can download them here

  The Spring Workshop will be held in the normal monthly Workshop location at 12700 Preston Rd in Dallas
• April 17, 2019 (Monthly Meeting)
  Title of Presentation: The role of desire in mindfulness and psychodynamic psychotherapy practices
  
  Units of CE/CME offered: 1.5
  
  Presentation Summary: This presentation explores the role of desire in contemporary mindfulness training (in the historical and cultural context of Theravada Buddhism) and the one- and two-person psychologies of current psychoanalytic psychotherapy practices. In Buddhism, desire, and giving up desire, are central to the Buddhist notion of salvation. Mindfulness is one of the methods of achieving this aim. In psychoanalytic theory, desire and its impact upon the mind is considered a central motivating factor shaping both thoughts and behavior. The question of whether desire is within the subject (self) or within the object (other), is examined. The presentation reviews and reflects upon Buddhist and psychoanalytic theories of desire in the context of one-person and two-person psychologies and considers their impact upon contemporary mindfulness training and psychotherapy practice.
  
  Presenter(s) Name(s): H.M. "Monty" Evans, Jr., Ph.D.
  
  Presenter bio: Dr. Monty Evans graduated from the University of North Texas in 1984 with A Ph.D. in clinical health psychology and completed his dissertation on mindfulness. He later entered psychoanalytic training through the Dallas Psychoanalytic Center and became a psychoanalyst in 2006. He is currently an Associate Professor at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He was formerly director of clinical training, associate program director, internship director and coordinator for the adult out-patient training clinic. Since 1995, he has developed numerous mindfulness programs and is currently developing a mindfulness for depression program for a study involving pre- and post- treatment biomarkers.
  
  Readings
  
  Bell, L. (2009). Mindful psychotherapy. Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 11: 126-144.
  
  

  Readings are available on-line only to logged in members. You can download them here
• May 18, 2019 (May Diversity Workshop)
  The May Diversity Workshop begins at 9am and continues through 12pm on May 18th (Saturday)

  Title of Presentation: Lacan, Death, and the Mythic Structure of Race
  
  Units of CE/CME offered: 3
  
  Presentation Summary: The tripartite structure of the oedipal complex has been central to Freudian understandings of the psychoanalytic subject. In the early 1950's, however, Jacques Lacan introduces a revised reading of the structural relation between father, mother and child by presenting death as a fourth term that determines the subject's mythic relation to the self and others. By working through a rereading of the case of the Rat Man in his lecture "The Neurotic's Individual Myth," Lacan shows how obsessional neurosis reveals deeper layers of myth that may shape subjectivity even across generations. This workshop will focus on understanding the mythical psychic structures expressed in American race relations. It will investigate how myths about race position racialized individuals within oedipal relations of Eros and aggression that are fundamentally determined by deep psychic relations to the fourth term applied by Lacan to the oedipal dynamic, the factor of death that defines a fundamental relation to subjectivity and alterity. We will work through this reading of the mythic structure of race in America by first returning to Lacan's lecture and then advancing toward an investigation of race in fiction by the African American author Ralph Ellison.
  
  Presenter(s) Name(s): Sheldon George, Ph.D.
  
  Presenter bio: Sheldon George is Professor of English and director of the English graduate program at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. His scholarship centers most directly on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and applies cultural and literary theory to analyses of American and African-American literature and culture. His most recent publications include two coedited special issues of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society: one titled "Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Interventions into Culture and Politics" and the other called "African Americans and Inequality." His book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity was published in 2016 by Baylor University Press. He is currently coediting a collection of essays on narrative form and racial ethics in the literature of African American and black British women authors and a second collection on Lacan and Race.
  
  Readings
  
  Ellison, R. (1995). Chapter 2. In Invisible Man. New York: Random House, pp. 27-54.
  
  George, S. (2016). Chapter 4: The Oedipal Complex and the mythic structure of race Ellison's Juneteenth and Invisible Man. In Trauma and race: A Lacanian study of African American racial identity. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, pp. 99-134.
  
  Lacan, J. (1979). The Neurotic's Individual Myth. Psychoanal Q., 48:405-425.
  
  

  Readings are available on-line only to logged in members. You can download them here

WORKSHOP AND MONTHLY MEETING LOCATIONS

Monthly meetings will begin at 7pm. Drinks and snacks will be served from 7-7:30pm, and the presentation will be held from 7:30-9pm. The mini- monhtly meetings are free to members and students. Non-member professionals may attend for $10 per mini-workshop, payable on site. The fee includes CMEs, CEUs, drinks & snacks.