Pulsion Institute and Rose Hill Psychological Services Clinical Days

Pain and the Suffering Subject at the Intersection of Community, Psychoanalysis, and the Medical World. Keynote speaker: Judith Gurewich
About this Event

***This is a free, public event open to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, social workers, medical doctors, physical therapists, allied health professionals, students, candidates, and anyone interested understanding pain.
Program:

This clinical workshop aims to create links between the psychoanalytic and the medical, challenging the disciplinary split and common notion that somatic pain concerns only medical professionals. Our intervention aims to establish a framework for an interdisciplinary exploration of pain as a multifaceted experience belonging to each individual in their singularity.
Patients experiencing somatic pain and other chronic conditions who come to the clinic are generally distressed and frustrated by their pain. Often, they have already consulted medical doctors, physical therapists, and other providers who rely heavily on standardized diagnoses and treatments, which tend to obliterate the singularity of the unconscious. We often observe an overwhelmed medical discourse that bounces patients from one professional to the next, without considering referral to a psychoanalyst, as pain is viewed, at best, as a matter of pain management rather than as a symptom of a speaking subject.

These patients are often prescribed pain-management Medic*tion, which can open the route to substance use and other addictive coping mechanisms as ways of dealing with pain and existential angst.

Our psychoanalytic psychosomatic clinic approaches pain as an intimate matter for each subject living in a world of disrupted relations with others. It brings together considerations of psyche and soma, not as separate, but as interconnected, particularly for patients in whom the body comes to carry the burden of holding the psyche in an attempt to speak when words fail.

10:00 –10:20am

Opening Remarks by Vaia Tsolas

10-20-10:30

Tracy Simon on the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis project

10:30- 11am

Clinical presentation #1

11-11:30am

Neurology of Pain by Benjamin Morrison

11:30- Noon
Q&A

Noon- 1pm
Lunch

1:15-2pm

Judith Gurewich in Dialogue with young analysts on Creating Transference for Contemporary Patient and Pain

2-2:30pm
Clinical presentation #2

2:30-3pm
Clinical presentation #3

3-3:15pm
Coffee break

3:15- 4:30pm Discussion Panel: Listening to Pain Across Different Lenses

​•​ Benjamin Morrison (neurologist)

​•​ Anaba Gandini (psychodrama psychoanalyst)

​•​ Michael Civin (psychoanalyst; group work)

​•​ Vaia Tsolas (psychoanalyst; psychosomatics)

​•​ Judith Gurewich (psychoanalyst)

Moderators Ivy Zhang and Piyali Kundu-Veldhoven

4:30 – 6pm
Networking/Reception