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SCIENTIFIC MEETING – Women as Therapists, Patients and Protestors: A Bionian Perspective

SCIENTIFIC MEETING - Women as Therapists, Patients and Protestors: A Bionian Perspective

Presenter: Nahaleh Moshtagh, PhD

Wednesday October 25, 2023: 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm (no break)

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

** DISTANCE PARTICIPATION ONLY – Registration deadline is one week prior to the meeting. Please RSVP by email to info@torontopsychoanalysis.com. Preregistration is required.

There has been a women’s revolution going on in Iran since September 2022. During this time, women have been out on the streets facing arrests, imprisonment, rape, and death. Many of these women were, and continue to be, in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Many of their therapists have also been women who themselves have been out in the streets protesting while attempting to contain the trauma of their patients, even as they attempt to process their own. In this paper, I will use Bion’s concepts of beta elements, alpha function and container/contained, and Howard Levine’s formulation of representable and unrepresentable aspects of trauma, to understand the experience of women as protestors, patients, and therapists.

Learning Objectives:

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

  1. Understand the dynamics of women working as therapists in Iran.
  2. Understand the effect of individual and collective trauma on women in Iran.
  3. Be able to apply Bion’s theory to doing therapy under traumatic conditions.
  4. Be able to understand the meaning of Representable and Unrepresentable elements in clinical work.
Nahaleh Moshtagh, PhD

Nahaleh Moshtagh, PhD, is a Psychoanalyst and Clinical Psychologist, originally from Tehran, Iran. She is a Founder, and the Director, of HamAva Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Tehran. She is a graduate of Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and Iran University of Medical Sciences. Nahaleh Moshtagh, PhD., is an Associate Member of the Psychoanalytic Society of the William Alanson White Institute, and member of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. For her years of teaching psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Iran, she received the 2022 Edith Sabshin Teaching Award of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She is the translator of Sandler, Dare and Holder’s The Patient and The Analyst, of Adam Phillips’s Winnicott and of Darian Leader’s What is Madness? She has published papers in JAPA, Psychoanalytic Review, Modern Psychoanalysis, International Forum of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Discourse. Nahaleh Moshtagh, PhD., recently immigrated to Toronto and is now building her psychoanalytic and psychotherapy practice here.

This event is eligible for Section 1 CME credits (0.5 credits/hour). This event is an accredited group learning activity (section 1) as defined by the Maintenance of Certificate Program of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, approved by the Canadian Psychiatric Association (CPA). The specific opinions and content of this event are not necessarily those of the CPA, and are the responsibility of the organizer(s) alone. As per the Royal College standard, each presentation provides a minimum of 25% interactive learning.

For more information about and for registration in the tps&i Extension Programs, Scientific Meetings, Training Programs, Study and Supervision groups and Special Presentations, please visit our website: torontopsychoanalysis.com or email info@torontopsychoanalysis.com

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