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Chaos and Transformation in Psychoanalysis: 'the Bet on Freedom' with Gabriela Goldstein, Ph.D. (Buenos Aires)

Release Date: 10/06/2024

Affects, Curiosity, and Corporal Punishment with Paul Holinger, MD, MPH (Chicago)

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“Now's the time to tell that wonderful story of the little boy. He was about two or three years old, and he went in the icebox to get some milk, and he managed to get this big carton and spill it all over the floor. Now, needless to say, there'd be a lot of parents that would react very negatively and frustrated - this mother happened to be a scientist. So she came in, she saw the bottle of milk, and what had happened. She went and got some paper towels, put them on the milk, and said, ‘Look at this. Look how the milk starts creeping up these fibers of the towel. Isn't that cool?’ And...

The 'Necessary Foreignness' of Psychoanalysis with Mariano Horenstein, PhD (Cordoba, Argentina)

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“In the analysis, the place where you face the experience of otherness, of foreignness, of the unconscious that goes through you, it doesn't appear as knowledge. Of course, in an analysis, you get a lot of knowledge, but it's not an important aspect of an analysis. I think that in the analysis, and that's the idea of using that word ‘transmission’ instead of ‘teaching’, what you receive is something that the analyst doesn't have. When you receive some knowledge from a teacher, you receive the knowledge the teacher has. When you transmit something, or when you receive something that...

Care of a Former Analysand with Dementia with Maxine Anderson, MD (Seattle, Washington)

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“I think that my analytic awareness of denial and projection and the concreteness of psychic reality when executive function wanes, that I could help the other caretakers to understand some of what was going on - to give them a way to understand that relieves their sense of frustration and uncertainty. I think that the analytic awareness of denial, of projection, that these things are not generally recognized by many caretakers, but it does reorient and make the caretaking function much more tolerable. It expands the understanding of what goes on in the waning personality. I also think that...

Before 'Ghosts' become 'Ancestors' with Shalini Masih, PhD (Worcestershire, UK)

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“All of this together shaped how I began to think about mind, not as something to be mastered, but as a landscape of the unspoken whether it was ghosts or griefs or desires that were hard to relinquish. I saw that the ghost was not always an ‘other’. It was often intimate, tied to lost ones, sometimes to unmet desires, to unbearable longings, but in some ways possession was an attempt to keep close what was slipping away. The ghost doesn't just haunt, it feels as if it wants something, and we just have to learn to develop ears to listen to what it wants.” Episode Description: We...

Candidates' Reflections on their Psychoanalytic Training with Himanshu Agrawal, MD (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“The theme that I found with IPSO [International Psychoanalytical Studies Organization] was that there was a common theme [in psychoanalytic training]. There was an initial phase full of terror and excitement, and then a middle phase of maybe some lethargy or apathy or disillusionment. In that middle phase, many candidates found IPSO, or IPSO found them, where they found refuge. They found solace. They found community, not just at their local institutes, but at this kind of world market. Many of the candidates talk about what a timely and wonderful experience it was to be seen, to be...

Reflections on Our Changing Field with Stefano Bolognini, MD (Bologna)

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“When we reconstruct [in a patient] a possible lacking object or role or function, we see that if the analyst himself has been able and the patient allowing him to be able to enter to a deep level the objective reality of the internal world of the patient, it can happen that some new function or position can be achieved. This is something that could be rare but it happens. This is one more reason for not blaming the length of some analytic treatments, because time is needed for entering that internal deep area where the analytic relation can create something new. Transformation...

Discovering the Process of One's Mind with Fred Busch, PhD (Chestnut Hill, Mass.)

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“The original papers that were written about the analyst’s unconscious being attuned to the patient's unconscious by Hyman and Racker, in both cases they talk about this phenomenon. But both of them utter a caution, which is that one always has to take into account one's own ‘mishegas’. Essentially, what they're saying is, the unconscious is pretty individualistic and we have our own things, and we have to consider that possibly it's our own difficulties, our own unconscious, that is playing a bigger role in our countertransference reaction to the patient's unconscious.”...

Religion, 'Allegorical Objects' and Levinas with David Black, PhD (London)

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“The idea of analytic neutrality, which was more or less a cliche truth when I was training back in the 1980s, is clearly getting at something very important, which is that we mustn't try to pre-conceive where the patient's development is going to take him or her. But that doesn't mean that the development is not in a direction. Aristotle famously said that the human being is a ‘zoon politikon’, a creature who belongs in a somewhat structured society. Healthy development is in that sort of direction as we become more integrated, as our ‘ghosts become more like ancestors’, to use that...

Childhood Memories: Their Impact on Mothers and Their 0–3-year-old Children with Ilene Lefcourt (New York)

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“There are very specific fears that people have that are specifically related to their own childhood, and I'd like to give an example. A mom with twins had a kidnapping fear. She was afraid every time she saw a car drive by her house that her twins would be kidnapped. Now this mother was herself adopted when she was a newborn, but her adoption did not become final until she was one year old. Her twins were approaching one year. I was struck by the anniversary of her fear of kidnapping, and when I asked her who she thought was driving the car that drove by her house, she blurted out, 'my...

Forbidden Intimacy: Marrying the 'Other' with Ashis Roy, PhD (Kolkata, India)

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“The amount of guilt and the sense of alienation that people feel when they fall in love with someone who is ‘outside’, and the struggle that they have to undergo to explain that choice which they fully don't understand themselves, is a very deep conflict that my work tries to capture. The title of my book is ‘Intimacy in Alienation’, and alienation is something that is really very pregnant in the identities of these individuals who feel like aliens to their own community because their community cannot imagine why are they seeing the other as something positive but not as how the...

More Episodes

"I think it is very interesting to open a debate and talk about this impact of the culture, this epoch, in the subjectivity and never losing the internal work within psychoanalysis, within our consulting room. So when I quote the Lacanian way of saying the ‘declination of the father's name’, I am talking about these times, this epoch, in which the reference and the subjectivity fails in respecting what we can call ‘the authority’. But ‘the authority’ means not authoritarian systems - it is the law, it is the possibility of symbolization, and it's the way of being free too, because without some limits you cannot be creative, you cannot be open to symbolization. We are talking about how the ‘other’ is working in this new social environment and how this evanescence of the father’s name is part of a situation that leaves open to the death drive."

Episode Description: We begin with recognizing the aspects of chaos that surround us in the real-world. Gabriela takes us from there into the chaos that often lives internally. She then addresses the clinical space which allows for its emergence through the dyad. She speaks of the evanescence of the father's name, authority vs authoritarianism, the 'halo of metaphors' and the nature of the analyst's 'open form' of clinical engagement. Gabriela describes analytic cure as "step by step, so that love and not revenge for pain predominate." She shares with us her early life involving her child analysis, her study of architecture and her now working as an analyst and a painter.

Linked Website: Gabriela Goldstein

Our Guest: Gabriela Goldstein, Ph.D. Past President of APA (2020-2023). Training analyst of Argentina Psychoanalytical Association (APA), and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and FEPAL. Doctor Ph.D in Psychology (Universidad del Salvador). Books include The Aesthetic Experience, Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, and Art in Psychoanalysis. Co-author, among others, of the APA book Dreams and Perception APA Editorial and the book Dear Candidate Fred Busch edit. She has won the Mom-Baranger prize for best monograph in Psychoanalysis with The Aesthetics of Memory, Freud at the Acropolis and won the A. Storni prize for conceptual contributions in Psychoanalysis with Transience, or the Time of Beauty. She has served on many IPA and APA committees including the IPA and Culture Committee since 2007.

In addition, Gabriela is both an architect and a painter. Since 1985 she has taken part in solo painting exhibitions in Argentina as well as collective exhibitions in museums, art galleries, and cultural centers in Italy, France and Germany. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.

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