Closed Meeting: The Portable Psychoanalytic Frame

Please note this meeting is closed to the public. Child candidates at NYPSI, Columbia and PANY are expected to attend.

Advanced Seminar in Child and Adolescent Analysis:

“The Portable Psychoanalytic Frame: Evenly suspended attention, Bick’s method of infant observation and its [unexpected] application by an observer in a daycare”

Thursday, March 18, 2021

8:00 – 10:00 pm (EST)

Please note this meeting will be held virtually on ZOOM. Registrants will receive ZOOM link.

Presenter: Talia Hatzor, Ph.D.

Dr. Hatzor will present Freud’s idea of evenly suspended attention, as applied through Bick’s method of infant observation, to demonstrate a technique crucial to the work of the parent-infant clinician. Cultivating an evenly suspended state of attention is shown to be an indispensable technique for the clinician’s mind at work, especially for the parent infant clinician, whose external setting is unpredictable and challenging. Without a fixed external setting, a portable frame is required: the internal setting established by combining psychoanalytic theory with this specific kind of free floating attention. This claim will be illustrated by an observer’s use of attentiveness in a daycare setting. The observer gathered the experience of a four-month-old infant in psychic peril. Lacking his caregiver’s attention, the infant was object-absent. The observer’s sensitive, absorbing stance was pivotal: not only to finding meaning and containing the primitive anxieties of an infant in trouble, but also—critically—to enabling the development of the infant’s sense of self by building a mental bridge to an unavailable caregiver, who could be reached and ultimately found a place in her mind for him.

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

Talia Hatzor, Ph.D. is a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, and a training psychoanalyst at the Contemporary Freudian Society in New York City. She has a special training and interest in infancy and early childhood, parent-infant psychotherapy, parenting, and play therapy. She works with children and adults in private practice. She co-directs the Parent Infant Psychotherapy (PIP) Training Program at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York, where she is also faculty. Her teaching includes training clinicians via Bick’s Infant Observation method. She is currently involved in the IPA Psychoanalysis in the Community initiative, chairing the subcommittee on Psychoanalysis in the Community in Education.