Waiting for Psychoanalysis

NYPSI’s 1038th Scientific Program Meeting:

“Waiting for Psychoanalysis”

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

8:00 – 10:00 pm

Panelists: Lisa Baraitser, Ph.D., Jocelyn Catty, Ph.D., Raluca Soreanu, Ph.D. and Laura Salisbury, Ph.D. (moderator)

‘Waiting for Psychoanalysis’ includes three researchers who form part of a 5-year research project on what it means to wait in and for healthcare to reflect on how psychoanalysis helps us to understand the difficulties and potentialities of waiting within contemporary lives that are increasingly experienced as frenetic, harried and time-starved, while also, paradoxically, impeded and stuck. Psychoanalysis is a practice that takes and uses time self-consciously, working and thinking through rhythms that run counter to the values of immediacy, productivity and efficiency that orientate many of our experiences of contemporary life. By committing to the long timeline of psychoanalysis, the patient is brought into contact with something different: a demand for patience, for suffering and endurance in which processes of mourning, or the emergence and working through of traumatic memory, cannot be sped up but must be endured through time and ameliorated through a practice of endurance on the part of both patient and analyst. This discussion will include academic researchers who also work clinically with patients in three different psychoanalytically-informed traditions to reflect on how psychoanalytic modes of care function through practices of waiting with – through the suspension of the everyday, the repetitions of the transference and processes of working through. They will discuss what this particular use of time might have to offer a social world in which, at one level, waiting seems increasingly devalued or intolerable, while at another the promises of a progressive future seem to be slipping from view – where all one can do it wait.

‘Waiting Times’ is a 5-year, interdisciplinary project funded by the Wellcome Trust working to explore the difficulties and potentialities of what it means to wait in and for healthcare.

2 CME/ CE credits offered. 

Dr. Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and a final year Candidate at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, where she maintains a practice alongside her academic post. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge) and a recent monograph, Enduring Time (Bloomsbury) that examines the relation between time and care in late liberalism. She is formerly co-editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and currently editor of Studies in the Maternal. She is the joint lead researcher, with Professor Laura Salisbury, of Waiting Times, a Wellcome Trust funded 5-year research project on the temporalities of healthcare. She has published widely on motherhood, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality, time and care.

Dr. Jocelyn Catty is a psychoanalytic Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist working in the UK’s National Health Service and is Research Lead for the child psychotherapy doctoral training at the Tavistock Centre. Formerly Senior Research Fellow in Mental Health at St. George’s, University of London, she ran a number of studies in social psychiatry including an international randomized controlled trial funded by the European Commission. She has published fifty academic papers in psychiatry, alongside a book on the representation of sexual violence in English literature in the early modern period. She has also recently edited a treatment manual for short-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for adolescents with severe depression for the Tavistock Clinic Series with Karnac.

Dr. Raluca Soreanu is Reader in Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, UK. She is a practicing psychoanalyst, affiliated to the Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro and of the Instituto de Estudos da Complexidade, Brazil. She is the author of Working-Through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018). She has published on psychoanalytic theory, psychosocial studies and the sociology of creativity.

Dr. Laura Salisbury is Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on modern and contemporary literature and on the relationship between literary modernism and neuroscientific conceptions of language. She is joint Principal Investigator on ‘Waiting Times’ (Wellcome Trust) and is also a Principal Investigator in Exeter’s Wellcome Trust Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health. As part of her work on ‘Waiting Times’, she is writing a cultural history of waiting in modernity.

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

1. approach the question of waiting from three different psychoanalytically-informed traditions
2. describe how psychoanalysis gives access to temporal experiences that work with and through the disturbances of lived time found in conditions such as depression, anxiety or trauma
3. explore how psychoanalytic practices of waiting with, as opposed to waiting for, have value in the contemporary moment

Psychologists