On Boundaries: A Nonlinear View

NYPSI’s 1027th Scientific Program Meeting

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.

Robert Galatzer-Levy, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago and a Faculty Member of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, where he is a training, supervising and child and adolescent supervising analyst. He is the author of seven books and 140 papers and books chapters on topics ranging from clinical psychoanalysis to forensic psychiatry to nonlinear systems theory and psychoanalysis. His most recent book Nonlinear Psychoanalysis: Notes from 40 years of Chaos and Complexity Theory was published in 2017 by Routledge.

Galatzer-Levy grew up in New York where he went to Bronx Science, NYU, and finally NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences starting at age 19. A little earlier he had started an analysis, which he reports enabled him to go to medical school “even though my mother wanted me to.” As with most analyses this one was incomplete and to this day he struggles between the pull of psychoanalysis and that of mathematics, a conflict that is partly resolved through his applications of nonlinear dynamics systems theory to psychoanalysis.

This evening he will talk about a central theme of psychoanalysis, boundaries, as seen through the lens of nonlinear dynamics and fractals.

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D. is Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is an editor at Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies In Gender and Sexuality, and of the IPA ejournal: Psychoanalysistoday.com.  And she co-edits the Book Series: Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, a series now with over 70 published volumes.  In 2009, along with Drs. Lewis Aron and Jeremy Safran, Dr. Harris established the Sandor Ferenczi Center at New School University.

Dr. Harris is a member of an NGO which the IPA developed to work with the UN and she has been doing education and development on the problem of human trafficking.  She has written on topics in gender and development, analytic subjectivity, and the analytic community in the shadow of the First World War.  Her current work is on analytic subjectivity, on intersectional models of gender and sexuality, and on ghosts.

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

1. identify the pervasive but implicit use of boundary concepts in clinical work and psychoanalytic conceptualizations.
2. make interventions based the fractal structure of boundaries, as opposed to interventions based solely on more traditional descriptions of boundaries.
3. describe methods for building useful boundaries as a result of integrated psychological development as opposed to imposing them on patients and institutions.