Short Courses
on psychoanalytic theory and topics in the psychosocial
Paraontological Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Clinical Examples
Er Linsker
Sessions:
Five Sundays, April 7-May 5, 1-2:30pm ET
Course Description:
We will come into contact with five living analysts—Alvarez, Grossmark, Markman, Eekhoff, Lombardi—who are considered part of an ontological turn in psychoanalysis (from understanding to being) but whose clinical examples sometimes show paraontological (Moten, Chandler) psychoanalysis being practiced, difference without separability (Ferreira da Silva) being lived together, subjectless being where the sensorial, the non-neurotic, the unrepresented refuse individuation. We will try to speak not about five analytic papers but from them, from our somatic, emotional experience reading aloud line by line their clinical examples, the way their writing enacts their clinic.
Er Linsker practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents, adults and couples in New York. They've published two books of poems, A Crisis Came Into Me and La Far, and are a contributing editor at Parapraxis, where their piece Post-Bionian Blur Theory appeared. A piece Paraontological Psychoanalysis is forthcoming in Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
FREUD’S CASE STUDIES
Dr. Hannah Zeavin
Sessions:
Saturdays, 3-4:30pm ET /12-1:30 PT. March 31-May 4
Course Description:
After more than 100 years, Freud’s case studies continue to excite us. A hysteric coughing, an obsessive who can’t get clean, a little boy terrified of horses—each of Freud’s cases was used to elaborate his supposed universal theories of the unconscious, and each offers a window onto the Father of psychoanalysis’ generation of his science. But each case study of course centers on a real life, acute and actual psychic turmoil. From Freud’s earliest work with the hysterics to his final full case study of the Wolf Man, we will study each of Freud’s case studies, and the most revealing scholarship on same.
Hannah Zeavin, PhD is a historian of psychoanalysis and an Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021) and Mother Media: Psychology, Technology, & The American Family (2025), both with MIT Press. Zeavin is now at work on her third book, All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance for Penguin Press. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, the co-director of the Psychosocial Foundation, and the Associate Editor of Psychoanalysis and History.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
ENVY (& Gratitude)
Dr. Lynne Zeavin
Sessions:
Saturdays, February 24, March 2, 9, 16, from 3pm to 4:30 PM EST / 12-130 PST
Course Description:
For Klein, envy is the angry feeling we have when another person in in possession of something we find desirable. This feeling is often accompanied by an impulse to take it away or spoil it. Contemporary Kleinian writers recognise envy as a painful affliction. We rarely envy what another person has—even though that is the experience. We envy their capacity—often the capacity to love. Klein thinks that envious impulses operate from the first dawning of an experience of separateness. She sees envy as a manifestation of primary destructiveness, to some extent constitutionally based, and certainly made worse by external realities.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
A SEXUAL DRIVE FOR POWER
Dr. Dominique Scarfone
Sessions:
Saturdays, Nov. 4, 11, 18 and 25, from 11 AM to 12:30 PM EST
Course Description:
Freud’s theory of the drives has often been put into question, considered by some of secondary importance if not altogether useless. In the four sessions of this short course we shall critically revisit the theory of drives with the help of Laplanche’s method of reading Freud. In so doing we shall also discuss the role of drive theory regarding the consistency of psychoanalysis as a discipline. Along the way, a reformulation of Freud’s concept of death drive will be offered, linking it to Laplanche’s “sexual death drive” and to another, less familiar, Freudian concept : the drive for power. This should shed new light both on clinical practice and on a number of aspects of the present world crisis.
Dominique Scarfone, M.D., is honorary professor at the Université de Montréal; member emeritus of the Montreal Psychoanalytic Society (French branch of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society), and honorary member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. He was for many years an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of numerous journal articles, books and book chapters in various languages. A new book bearing the title The Reality of the Message should be out in the coming months.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
PAST COURSES
MELANIE KLEIN & THE CONTEMPORARY KLEINIANS
Dr. Lynne Zeavin
Sessions:
Saturdays, October 7, 14, 21, 28, from 3pm to 4:30 PM EST
Course Description:
A four week course exploring the the work of Melanie Klein. Reading both her writing and secondary sources, the class will delve into the development of Klein’s ideas, and how her work with children led her to develop a novel theory about the role of the object in psychic structure and the internal world, and the archaic underpinnings of adult mental functioning. In this four weeks we will continue our study of the two positions, the paranoid schizoid and the depressive, and their related anxieties.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
READING THOMAS OGDEN:
From the Epistemological to the Ontological
Dr. Adam Rodríguez
Sessions:
9/6, 9/13, 9/20, 9/27, 10/4 – 5:30pm – 7:00pm (PDT)
Week One: On the Concept of the Autistic Contiguous Position
Week Two: The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Facts
Week Three: On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming
Week Four: This Art of Psychoanalysis
Week Five: Ontological Psychoanalysis or “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?”
Course Description:
In Thomas Ogden’s most recent book, Coming to Life in the Consulting Room, he turns his attention toward “a new sensibility, reflecting a shift in emphasis from what he calls ‘epistemological psychoanalysis’ (having to do with knowing and understanding) to ‘ontological psychoanalysis’ (having to do with being and becoming).” This course will introduce the work of Thomas Ogden, tracing the development from the epistemological to the ontological in his own work. We will review significant theoretical contributions on unconscious internal object relationships (including the concepts of the autistic-contiguous position and analytic third) as they progress to his thoughts on how we attempt to “more fully come into being as a person.”
Adam Rodríguez, PsyD (he/him) is a psychoanalytic psychologist in Portland, OR and faculty at Lewis & Clark College. He is editor and contributor to Know That You Are Worthy: Experiences From First-Generation College Graduates (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). Like Common spoke: I am music.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
FANON AS CLINICIAN
Dr. Lara Sheehi
Tuesday Evenings 8-10m EST
May 2, 9, 16, 30, and June 6/ 13
We are most accustomed to Frantz Fanon's work as central to Post-Colonial Studies and Comparative Literature, disciplines that have long recognized how his revolutionary theories were integral to liberation struggles and global cross-solidarity movements. With the publication of Alienation and Freedom (2018, Eds., Khalfa & Young) we were again reminded of the power and importance of Fanon the psychiatrist, the clinician, and the psychoanalyst. In this class, we will work against the "Fanonian renaissance" lore and together put Fanon's seminal theoretical work in conversation with his clinical papers in an attempt to disrupt the split between Fanon as revolutionary and Fanon as Clinician.
Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), the Chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride.
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Sea-Change in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Winnicott and Bion after the War
Dr. Peter Goldberg
SATURDAYS, APRIL 2023: 1/ 8 / 15/ 22/ 29
12-1:20 EST
Join for a course focused on a selection of Winnicott and Bion’s writings, which reflect a post-war change in the perception of psychical distress and suffering, and a corresponding paradigm shift in clinical psychoanalysis to take account of group phenomena, environmental factors, and intersubjectivity.
Peter Goldberg, Ph.D. is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, is Chair of Faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and on the faculty of the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He is the author, with Adam Blum and Michael Levin of Here I Am Alive (Columbia University Press, 2023).
Full fee: $450, Reduced fee: $250.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
Melanie Klein: A Theory of Mind
with Dr. Lynne Zeavin
March 18, 25, April 1, 8; 1 - 230 p. EST
Week One: "On Schizoid Mechanisms"
Week Two: "Mourning and its relation to Manic Depressive States"
Week Three:"Envy and Gratitude"
Week Four: Envy Continued and "On Loneliness"
This course will provide an introduction to the work of Melanie Klein by focussing on 3 major papers that give us a framework for discussing her theory of mind. We will review the status of the object and the drive, the positions, mourning and its impediments, and the potential of the depressive position.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a training and supervising analyst at the NYPSI. She teaches and supervises widely from within the contemporary Kleinian tradition. She is on the board of the Psychosocial Foundation and an associate editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is in full time private practice in New York City.
Full fee: $400, Reduced fee: $200.
Contact psychosocial.foundation@gmail.com for scholarship information.
Register here.
