SCIENTIFIC MEETING – The Empty Couch: Love and Mourning in Times of Confinement

Presenter: Rosine Jozef Perelberg, PhD

Saturday, February 26, 2022: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

TPS Scientific Meeting: Open to Members, Affiliates/Guests, TIP Candidates, and ATPPP Trainees Only

** Preregistration is required ** DISTANCE PARTICIPATION ONLY ** – This course will be conducted online. Email psychoanalyst@bellnet.ca to rsvp. Registration deadline is one week prior to the meeting.

This paper describes the psychoanalytic treatment of a woman patient during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the setting was profoundly disrupted and was transferred from in-person psychoanalysis to telephone sessions. Drawing on Bleger’s formulations on the construction of the analytic frame and on André Green’s on the function of the framing structure in the construction and elaboration of phantasy life, the case study shows how, in the absence of the physicality of the setting, the most primitive anxieties about the symbiotic relationship with the mother were expressed and contained in the transference and countertransference in the analysis. The author offers some considerations about the notion of “background of the uncanny”, derived from Yolanda Gampel, which draws attention to the challenges when both patient and analyst are inserted into the same traumatic wider context. It is suggested that the production of an art object by the patient during this period represents a step in the elaboration of the work of mourning and towards symbolization.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this presentation participants will be able to:

1. Consider the difficulties of working in time of Covid.
2. Be more aware of the relationship between the physicality of the setting and the analyst’s internal setting.
3. Learn about the function of the framing structure in the construction and elaboration of phantasy life (Andre Green).

Rosine Jozef Perelberg, PhD

Rosine Jozef Perelberg, PhD, is a Fellow, Training Analyst and President of the British Psychoanalytic Society, Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London, and Corresponding Member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society.

She was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she completed her BSc in Humanities and undertook an MSc in Social Anthropology before her PhD in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She has written and edited 12 books which include Time, Space and Phantasy; The Greening of Psychoanalysis (with Gregorio Kohon); Freud: A Modern reader; Murdered Father, Dead Father: Revisiting the Oedipus Complex and Sexuality, Excess and Representation all published by Routledge and the New Library of Psychoanalysis. Psychic Bisexuality has won the 2019 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize for Best Edited Book.