On Boundaries: A Nonlinear View

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

8:00 pm

Presenter: Robert Galatzer-Levy, M.D.

Discussant: Adrienne Harris, Ph.D.

Boundary concepts pervade psychoanalytic thought and practice from the “repression barrier,” to gender, to institutional expectations about professional behavior. Yet analytic discussion of boundaries often proceeds without a clear conceptual framework and on the basis of intuitive but ill-founded notions about them. In his paper, Galatzer-Levy shows how starting with Leonardo Da Vinci and continuing through the work of twentieth century mathematicians a rich and useful conceptualization of boundaries called fractal geometry has emerged. This conceptualization is directly applicable to psychoanalysis. The paper demonstrates how older, implicit conceptualizations have limited analytic thinking in this area and shows how fractal concepts provide important insight into the nature, development and management of boundaries. Application to clinical and institutional issues will be discussed.

2 CME/CE credits offered.

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