WORK IN THE FIELD
Egon Schiele, “Young Tree”
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
EXCERPT: “Prologue: The Misogyny of Everyday Life” Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Volume 42, 2022
Put simply, misogyny is the hatred of women. And while most of the articles in this issue focus on the psychoanalytic, clinical and interior manifestations like all forms of group hatred, misogyny goes beyond the person and the personal. Both an outside and inside process, misogyny creates a Möbius loop. Predicated on and buttressed by social sanctions, enactments and institutions, it worms its way into the psychic life of men and women alike.Footnote 4 Within the individual, this form of hatred exists – like other “isms” – on conscious and unconscious levels and thereby maps out one route by which the dynamics of power insinuates itself from social to psychic life and from psychic to social life. It appears and expresses itself in a person’s feelings and fantasies, in relationships, actions, behavior and enactments. As such, it infiltrates not only interior space but also the social and political realms of everyday life, insistently functioning to keep women in a second-class position.
When misogyny is enacted, the actions and behaviors serve not merely to satisfy the destructive urges that spring from hatred, but also to sustain and police a larger patriarchal system. Misogyny manifests patriarchy’s spirit and undergirds and reinforces its culture and its institutions. Hatred toward women, then, loops back to infect a woman’s subjectivity with patriarchy’s lessons and effects.
Urgent, never-more-essential questions confront us: What does it mean to meet and how do we create a shelter for, not from, the storm? How do we continue to engage, not merely bear the storm, but invite it in and work with it in our practices and in our lives? My title, “Dare I Disturb the Universe?” is the central lament of an aging, modern man in the 1915 poem by the American/British poet, T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.” Our universe has been disturbed. Our work necessitates that we disturb and are disturbed, and then try to make meaning and transformations from those disturbances.
As a community, as a profession, and likely as citizens, we face a moment of profound change. This storm is ripe with opportunity and imperative to look at hatred, oppression, othering, and violence in our world, in our institutions, in ourselves. This disturbance invites us to examine how we work and grapple with what it means to be psychoanalysts, and how, to whom, and by whom we offer care. In so doing, we examine, again, what is to be human. It is a fascinating, terrifying time that may well yield understanding and aliveness, a terrible beauty.
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
List of Select Presentations
“It is Time”: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, WR Bion and the Aftermath of the Great War | 2024
Thomas Ogden's 'Talking-as-Dreaming | 2023
Haydée Faimberg's Method: 'Listening to Listening' | 2023
Melanie Klein’s Clinical Technique | 2022
Reading Bion’s Transformations | 2022
Hell is Other People: Discussion of J. Foehl’s ‘Lived Depth: Dimensionality and Thirdness in Psychoanalytic Process’ | 2022
‘Anarchy of the senses making sense’: The poetics of the analytic moment: Keats, Bion, and Negative Capability | 2021
O’ Online: Developmental transformations in a Bion reading group | 2021
No Bodies in the Room: What happens to the erotic transference? | 2021
Making Meaning: Psychoanalytic Thinking in an Inside-out, Upside-down World | 2020
Agency, the Complexities of Desire and #MeToo in HBO’s ‘The Tale’: A Conversation with Jennifer Fox, filmmaker | 2019
The Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond | 2019
Social Class: Intra- and Inter-Psychic Dimensions | 2017
Remote Psychoanalysis: Fantasy vs. Technology | 2017
Are You My Mother? A Psychoanalytic Search for the Maternal | 2015
Is There Enough Air in The House? w/ Carol Gilligan, James Gilligan, and Tina Packer | 2015
Women and Power/Women in Power: The Psychology of It All; Keynote Speaker: Berkshire Community College Women’s Month Symposium | 2002
“So few people think that it is important to be introduced to themselves, but the one partner the patient can never get rid of while that patient is alive is themselves.”