Jack Foehl - Seminar 1
Lived Depth: Exploring dimensionality and Thirdness in Clinical Process.
Participation available via Zoom Teleconferencing.
YOU WILL RECEIVE THE ZOOM LINK THE DAY BEFORE THE SEMINAR.
Please note: To preserve and respect both intellectual property rights and confidentiality, the seminar will not be recorded, nor is recording permitted.
Seminar Description:
Psychoanalysis has used the metaphor of depth from the very beginning. Freud (1913) noted that one cannot “deny the concept of a psychical dimension of depth…without denying the standpoint of psycho-analysis” (p. 275). Rather than using depth as a “vertical” metaphor referring to the hidden, remote or regressed, I use depth as a “horizonal” metaphor referring to the dimensionality of experience, to the ways in which all experience is structured in a figure-ground relationship. Dimensionality, first introduced by Meltzer and Bick, takes on new meaning when seen as depth, offering an embodied and lived experience of thirdness, where psychopathology is to be understood as various “disorders of thirdness” in the clinical setting and in our socio-political world.
Using clinical examples, I will suggest that psychoanalytic process is a field phenomenon, that rather than treat the patient, our attention is best focused on an expanding depth-of-field. The experience of depth presupposes our carnal subjectivity, the dimension of lived embodiment in space and time, where intersubjective experience is found in our fundamental intercorporeality. We will explore “thick description” of psychoanalytic process as a means of elucidating lived depth and its flattening in the clinical hour.
About the Speaker:
Jack Foehl is President of The Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute, where he is a Training and Supervising Analyst and is Supervisor and Faculty Member at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is Instructor at Harvard Medical School and is a Clinical Associate Professor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Jack is Joint Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and a past editorial board member of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Jack is author of numerous articles on contemporary perspectives in psychoanalytic theory of technique and new ways of thinking about psychoanalytic process. He is in private practice in Cambridge, MA, USA.