Scientific Meeting: The Musical Semiotics of Voice in Distance: Some Reflections on the Debate Over Tele-analysis

1. Buy your ticket at nypsi.org. PLEASE NOTE: Ticket Registration is NOT the same as ZOOM registration.
2. One day prior: Complete ZOOM registration for webinar which you will receive by email from Sharon Weller. This step involves entering your name and email address. If you do not complete this, you will NOT receive link to webinar. PLEASE CHECK ALL EMAIL FOLDERS IN CASE IT GOES INTO SPAM OR OTHER. YOU MUST COMPLETE BOTH NYPSI WEBSITE REGISTRATION AND ZOOM REGISTRATION.
3. Click on email from Lois Oppenheim (host) which contains ZOOM link  to “enter” the meeting.
4. Evaluation survey and CME/CE documentation will be emailed the day after the event.

The 1061st Scientific Program Meeting:

“The Musical Semiotics of Voice in Distance: Some Reflections on the Debate Over Tele-analysis”

(Note: Registration closes 12/9 at 4 PM.)

Saturday, December 10, 2022

10:00 am – 12:00 pm (EST)

Presenter: Siamak Movahedi, Ph.D.

Discussant:  Andrea Marzi, M.D., Ph.D.

This presentation regards debates over the “authenticity” of analysis by phone, Skype, or Zoom because of the absence of the bodies in the room. While attitudes toward tele-analysis have recently changed in the wake of COVID, the co-experiencing of two physical bodies in close physical proximity would appear to be necessary for conducting the “real” analysis. Far from simply questioning the importance of the in-person analysis, Dr. Movahedi will instead identify the voice, the musical semiotics of emotions, as a critical, if not the most vital, aspect of psychoanalysis as a “talking cure” and psychoanalysis as an art of listening. Insofar as the speaking is instituted in the body, the body is present through voice even in the virtual analytic room in tele-analysis. He will argue that the need for the presence of the material bodies in the session is one aspect of the analytic rituals that, along with the room, the couch, and other power objects, set the stage for the continuous projection of the identities of the analytic couple. The seductive nature of the analytic situation and the status differential are more salient in the analyst’s office turf than in the patient’s room in tele-analysis.

2 Contact Hours. 2 CME/CE credits offered. See details below.

Siamak Movahedi, Ph.D., FIPA is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston where he served as the Department Chair and the Graduate Program Director. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, a Professor of Psychoanalysis, and the Director of the Master’s and Doctoral Program in the Study of Psychoanalysis, Society, and Culture. He is a life member of the American Psychological Association and the Massachusetts Psychological Association. Dr. Movahedi is the founding Director of Persepolis Psychoanalytic (PersPsy) https://perpsychoanalytic.com, an online psychoanalytic institute in Iran. His over sixty papers and book chapters have appeared in major national and international psychoanalytic, psychological, and sociological journals including, American Sociological Review, American Psychologist, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, The Sigmund Freud Museum Symposia, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, etc. His general areas of interest and research are psychoanalysis and culture, language and philosophy of science, social psychiatry, and social psychology.

Andrea Marzi, M.D., Ph.D. is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (SPI, IPA, ApsaA) with a degree in Medical Ethics as well. He holds several positions in these fields in both Italian and international organizations. Dr. Marzi, who has served on the Editorial Board of the Italian Rivista di Psicoanalisi, has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge and worked in the Department of Forensic Psychopathology and been a Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Siena. He has published a great many scientific articles in national and international journals as well as several books, including Comparative Confidentiality in Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalysis, Identity and the Internet. Dr. Marzi presented at the “Meet the Author” session at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is a member of several international groups studying virtual psychoanalytic treatment and he has been a member of the IPA Task Force on Remote Analysis in Training.

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants should be able to:

1. describe how within the intersubjective field of psychoanalytic situation, what is evoking our responses is primarily at the sound rather than semantic level.
2. explain how visual or in-person mediation is not necessarily more “real” or more “genuine” than auditory or screen mediation, where concrete bodies are absent in tele-analysis.
3. describe how the `medium of transmission from one unconscious to the other, as Freud (1912) stipulates, is the voice that also includes the voice of silence.