IPTAR PRESENTS GIUSEPPE CIVITARESE, MD, PHD  FEAR OF CONTAGION—NEED FOR INFECTION IN THE TALES OF THE COVID-19 DISCUSSANT: JARED RUSSELL, PHD MODERATOR: MASHA MIMRAN, PHD SATURDAY, MAY 8, 2021 ON ZOOM  10:00 AM — 1:00 PM

Register Here: https://www.iptar.org/fearofcontagion/ General: $100 includes 3 CE Credits
IPTAR Members: $75 includes 3 CE Credits Candidates & Students: $25 includes 3 CE Credits IPTAR PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Brian Kloppenberg (Chair), Jeanne Even, Susan Finkelstein, Anna Fishzon, Lynne Herbst, Judy Ann Kaplan, Masha Mimran, Jamie Stevens, Yukari Yanagino

Giuseppe Civitarese will present his unique response to the historic Covid-19 pandemic, the first of its kind in the digital age. Civitarese will begin with the ways in which cyberspace offers possibilities of resilience that did not exist before, including novel ways for people to keep in touch and even work remotely. According to Civitarese, this very possibility given by technology also represents a risk. In the name of health, people have accepted restrictions on their spaces of freedom and violations of their privacy that technology itself has made available. The pandemic thus stages the same conflict between satisfaction of material needs and satisfaction of emotional needs that we see in individuals and that Bion and Winnicott described so effectively. When anxiety is no longer tolerable, splitting takes over. Spiritual and affective needs are unconsciously sacrificed to material needs. The pandemic can then be seen as the experiment conceived by a cruel God to study the nature of the processes that lead to alienation and, vice versa, those that favor subjectivation. For Civitarese, the dramatic and involving experience of the pandemic demands thinking in new ways about the factors that transform the ‘infection’, of which Hegel speaks, as permeability to the other and the intersubjective foundation of the ego, in the ‘contagion’ that alienates the subject. Indeed, the pandemic effectively thematizes the dialectic of identity/difference or self/other in terms of contagion/immunization. It teaches us what ‘social distancing’ can mean at a scale of magnitude not previously imagined. Precisely for this reason, Civitarese will take up the clinical risk of being naive with respect to the reality of trauma. Despite the terrible load of concreteness and suffering that charaterizes the current pandemic, as long as the theater of analysis stands, the massive presence of the ‘tales of Covid-19’ should be listened to (also) as fictional, namely as an unconscious communication in the here and now. In this way the analyst can focus on psychic reality and on the dialectic between the two kinds of ‘contagion’ that represent what truly is at stake in any encounter—mutual recognition.

Giuseppe Civitarese, MD, PhD, is a Training and Supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). He lives and is in private practice in Pavia, Italy. He is the past-editor of the Rivista di

Psicoanalisi, the official journal of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. He has published several books, which include: The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field, London, 2010; The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis, London, 2012; The Necessary Dream: New Theories and

Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis, London, 2014; Losing Your Head: Abjection, Aesthetic Conflict and Psychoanalytic Criticism, Lanham, MD 2015; The Analytic Field and its Transformations (with A. Ferro), London 2015; Truth and the Unconscious, London 2016; An Apocriphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, London

2019; A Short Introduction to Psychoanalysis (with A. Ferro), Rome 2018; Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis, London 2018; Vitalità e gioco in Psicoanalisi [Vitality and Play in Psychoanalysis] (with A. Ferro), Milan 2020; L’ora della nascita. Psicoanalisi del sublime e arte contemporanea

[The hour of Birth: Psychoanalysis of the Sublime and Contemporary Art], Milan 2020. He has also coedited L’ipocondria e il dubbio: L’approccio psicoanalitico [Hypochondria and Doubt: The Psychoanalytic Approach], Milano 2011; Le parole e i sogni [Words and Dreams], Rome 2015; The W. R. Bion Tradition: Lines of Development—Evolution of Theory and Practice over the Decades, London 2015; Advances in Psychoanalytic Field Theory: International Field Theory Association Round Table Discussion, London 2016. He has edited: Bion and Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Reading A Memoir of the Future, London 2018.

Jared Russell, PhD, is an analyst in private practice in New York City. A graduate of IPTAR, he is a Fellow of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and a faculty member and clinical supervisor at both IPTAR and NPAP. Having earned his PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research, he was professor of Philosophy and Cinema Studies at SUNY Purchase College from 2006 until 2015. He was formerly co-chair of IPTAR’s Faculty and Curriculum Committee (with Steven Ellman), and is currently co-chair of the Respecialization Program (with Ellen Marakowitz). He is Managing Editor of The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (University of Nebraska Press), and has contributed to several analytic publications, including American Imago, Psychoanalytic Psychology, and ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. He is the author of two books: Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics (Routledge, 2016), and Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction: Freud’s Psychic Apparatus (Routledge 2019), and he has contributed a chapter on Nietzsche, psychoanalysis and nihilism to the forthcoming volume, A Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (forthcoming, 2021). He is currently completing work on a book entitled, Sublimation and Superego: Psychoanalysis Between Two Deaths.

Masha Mimran is an Advanced Candidate in the Adult Program at IPTAR. Mimran began her career in academia, received her PhD from Princeton University in Comparative Literature in 2012 and until 2016 was teaching in the French Department at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her dissertation, “The Poetics of Pathology: Hysteria from Neurology to Psychology” investigates the cross-pollination between fictional and medical discourses of the diagnosis of hysteria during nineteenth century France. Her research and publications focuses on nineteenth century French prose, medical philosophy, the history of medicine, psychoanalysis, and film studies. She is also contributor to book reviews in the field of psychoanalysis for The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2019) and Psychoanalytic Psychology(2020). At IPTAR, Mimran is Co-President with Marissa Dennis Kantor of the Candidates Organization. As CO Co-President, Mimran works on collaborative projects between the Institute and the ICC, organizes a series entitled “Friday Night Papers,” serves as Candidate Representative on the Institute Board, the Faculty Curriculum Committee, is a member of the IPTAR Program Committee, the International Students Committee, and most recently, joined as member of the Program Committee for the Loewald Center. Mimran is also a member of the Fellowship Committee at APsaA.

Learning Objectives:

To understand in a psychoanalytic way the Covid-19 pandemic.

To develop this understanding in relation to particular analytic thinkers such as Bion and Winnicott as well as the philosophical contributions of Hegel.

To understand how to sustain an analytic attitude during the current pandemic.

Social Workers: The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers (#SW-0226).

Licensed Psychoanalysts: The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychoanalysts (#P-0011).

Licensed Creative Arts Therapists: The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed creative arts therapists (#CAT-0037).

Licensed Mental Health Counselors: The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors. (#MHC-0112).

(3) CE credits will be granted to participants who have registered, have documented evidence of attendance of the entire program and have completed the on-line evaluation form. Upon completion of the evaluation form a Certificate of Completion will be emailed to all participants who comply with these requirements.

Many thanks from the IPTAR Program Committee: Brian Kloppenberg (Chair), Jeanne Even, Susan Finkelstein, Anna Fishzon, Lynne Herbst, Judy Ann Kaplan, Masha Mimran, Jamie Stevens, Yukari Yanagino